Edinburgh council elections: ex-minister aims to help council in dealings with government

Ex-MSP-turned-council-candidate Marco Biagi says he wants to use his experience as Minister for Local Government to help Edinburgh get good deals from Holyrood.

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After representing Edinburgh Central in the Scottish Parliament from 2011 to 2016, he is now standing in the May local elections as SNP candidate in Colinton/Fairmilehead, where the party missed out on a seat last time by just 13 votes.

"Like a lot of people I moved out from the city centre in search of more space and a garden and I’ve found myself living in a ward that doesn't have an SNP councillor so I wanted to step forward and try to represent the community I live in now,” he says.

Marco Biagi is standing in Colinton/Fairmilehead for the SNP.

"Colinton/Fairmilehead is a fantastic place - I'm enjoying the hills and a lot of the little tracks there are to run on.

“I want to be a community-based councillor and keep people informed of what the council is doing but also taking up some of their concerns.”

During his time in parliament, Mr Biagi spent 18 months as Minister for Local Government and, if he gets elected to the council and the SNP retain power, he will be an obvious choice for a key role in the administration.

He says: “I think I would want to spend a good period of time bedding into the ward and getting to know the processes of the council. It’s one thing to have been Minister for Local Government, it's another thing to have actually served on a council. There are some things you see as a minister across all 32 councils, but I think there’s a very different perspective being part of it.

“But after I’ve bedded in, if I can find a way to make my skills useful to the council and the people I represent I will definitely be doing that.”

And he believes his ministerial experience should benefit the council.

“When you look at some of the achievements of the council in the last few years they have been because they have been able to navigate Holyrood. The extra powers to tackle Airbnb spring to mind – that is something that required working with and being able to negotiate with the Scottish Government. Someone who knows their way around Holyrood would be a real asset to that process.

“We don't know what we're going to have to try and negotiate in the next few years but it's the constant experience of local government in Scotland that you do have to try and get things out of national government in order really to deliver for people in your area.”

Mr Biagi thinks the name Colinton/Fairmilehead can give a misleading impression of the ward. “These are both prosperous areas, but there is a core to the ward in Oxgangs, Firrhill and Colinton Mains that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves from the city council. By having a councillor who is in hopefully the administration party we can help to address that in the coming years.”

Although the top three candidates in the first round of counting in the ward at the last council elections in 2017 were Tory, SNP and Labour, the eventual result saw the SNP edged out by the second Tory candidate by just 13 votes.

“Thirteen votes in a ward of almost 20,000 voters is stunningly close,” says Mr Biagi. “Voters really have a choice between another Tory councillor or broadening their representation and having an SNP councillor as well.

“Thirteen extra SNP votes would have meant one Tory, one Labour, one SNP, which would have meant most people in the ward being represented by the party they had voted for, which is supposed to be the aim of proportional representation.”

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