 Fel pan oedden nhw i'r cwm surprise ar y ddraglwyddor â Llywodraeth Llywodraeth yn cael ei weld. A ifynyddio'r ddweud yn cael ei ddweud o'r ddweud ar y ddweud iawn i gyfnod ar gyfer cyd-guandd. A cael eu gwasanaethon i'r ddweud am addangosol ynna i gyfnod i'r ddweud gan gweithio'r ddweud. Mae'r ystod yn cyfrifindig digital o'r cygyflwch arci. Mae arbennig fel ystod o'r ddweud ar y ddweud ac yn cyfrifindig digital o'r ddweud cwmŵr. Dyn nhw'r cymneudol ynghyddiad y cwmŵr yn ddrafodol ar fynd yn cyfleu llwyllt. Mae gennym hwnnw, a ullteidio ar gyfer y Cymru, meddygau'r cy返, a cymynoddol ar gyfer y cwmŵr i'r cyd-degad y byddiant y byddwnol i'r cyfrifysgau i'r cyfan. Felly, erbyn hyn ymgyrch yn eu ddwynggau amgyrchu cyfrifysgau yn chi'r cyd-degad, yna yn ymgyrch gyfrifysgau i'r cyfrifysgau I will add to acknowledge that they exist and that a tremendous amount of volunteering goes into that. We are joined on our first panel in the room by Brian Davies, who is the communications officer from the improvement service and Emma Swift, who is also communications officer from the improvement service and along with Dr Oliver Escobar, who is a senior lecturer in public policy at the University of Edinburgh. On-line, we are joined by Andrew Paterson, who is a policy and research officer from the Scottish Community Development Centre, and Jackie Weaver, who is the chief officer at Cheshire Association of Local Councils. We have a number of questions for you today. I am going to start with a question that is for everyone in general, but just to say a couple of things, one, you don't need to, for those in the room, you don't need to operate your mics. We'll do that for you. If you want to come in on something, just indicate to myself or Kath. Jackie and Andrew, if you want to come in, please put an R in the chat function. I would be interested to hear what you think the strengths are of community councils in Scotland and what role could they play in democratic renewal at a local level? What proportion of the Scottish population is covered by community councils and has this changed in recent years? Do you think that there is a sense that they are more prevalent in certain areas than others? Maybe I'll start with Oliver. OK. That's like three questions in one. Hello, everyone. Thanks. Well, on the strengths, Andrew is here as well, and Andrew and I, with Paul Nelly's work on a report on community councils, which I think has been referred to in the papers. We try to focus on the strengths because often community councils attract a lot of criticism, and sometimes it's unfair criticism because they are doing a lot of work with very little resource and very limited support. In terms of the strengths, obviously they are the closest tire of local democracy in Scotland. The community councils that work well are very tuned in into what happens into their communities, and they can be a very effective breach into all kinds of local institutions and between communities of place and local institutions. That goes from the council to other policy areas, health and social care, and so on. But the reality is that it is a patchy landscape, a very patchy and even landscape across the country, and that goes to the point on coverage. In theory, there are, I think, my colleagues from the improvement service will correct me, but I think it's around 1,200 community councils, but not all of them have members and not all of them, indeed many of them, do not have contested elections. So it is a very patchy picture, but the final point I'll make is that it's easy to focus on some of the weaknesses and limitations, and often people do that a lot. Community councils attract a lot of unfair criticism, so it's great that we're here to celebrate their 50 years and to realise that any institution that is put in the situation that community councils have been put in the last 50 years would struggle. So it's almost a miracle that they are still trying to do what they are trying to do. Thank you very much for that, Oliver. Anybody else got any reflections on the strengths of community councils, I think, in Scotland and what role they could play in the democratic renewal at local level? Maybe we'll focus on that, Emma. Yeah, I think in terms of strengths, you're right, it's very easy to focus on the troubles that they have. I mean, the strengths, one of the things that the improvement service does is we have a website where we try and celebrate some of the sort of great stories that come out of community councils, and I think one of the things that struck home to me was how what an important role they played during COVID, they were quite often sort of on the ground either providing resources or coordinating resources to help those in the community that were struggling, which shows that they have a role to play in resilience. There are also community councils in areas that were affected by flooding that have set up kind of community resources to help with that, so if there's power cuts, there's a place that people can go, and that's, as you say, done without the kind of resources that local authorities can get. In terms of democratic renewal, I think, as Oliver said, is the lowest tier of democracy, if you like, and I think if people are looking to kind of make that move into kind of becoming kind of a council or an MSP even, starting off as a community councillor is a good way to go, and I think that should be promoted more especially to young people as kind of almost a career path if you're interested in politics to get involved with your local community council at that lowest level. Thanks for that. Anybody else want to come in on this question? What Emma basically said, I want just to say that they are the most local tier of democracy and their strength, I guess, is that they are people who care about their community and want to make a difference. Thanks for that. Could I add just a very small thing, I know we have colleagues online waiting, but it's worth saying as well that community councils are non-partisan, so it's community politics and that is great, that is refreshing, it can unlock all kinds of possibilities, and in Scotland they are increasingly playing a very important role in other democratic innovations such as participatory budgeting, and I think we need to highlight that often they are behind a lot of really exciting developments in local renewal. Community development trusts is another area where they are increasingly contributing, and I'm sure we'll come on to that because that's one of the things we need to improve how these connections are made and how they are empowered to unlock a lot of potential out there through these kind of organisations and networks. Great, thanks very much. Andrew, you want to come in? Yes, it's briefly to say that they've got a quite unique role in the sense that, as Oliver has mentioned, they're a bridge between communities and public authorities, but also working with other local organisations, community organisations, but they have that distinction where they're open to other people attending and standing for election, and having quite a formal role, which is different to other community organisations, I think that's important. Yeah, thanks for pointing that out actually. Jackie, I've got a question for you. I would be interested to hear what you think the strengths are of the system in England, particularly as it compares to Scotland, and we could probably be here all day, maybe hearing about that, but if you could give us some highlights, that would be great. Apologies, just to please cut me off at any point. It's very interesting to listen to you talk about the strengths of your community council, because, of course, those are exactly the strengths of our Tanna party council. However, in England, we backed them up by giving them resources that we don't have, and I think it's very interesting to hear that they are valued in Scotland and yet, in some ways, they are also kept in line, so they have no autonomy. For me, what I've seen over my career of 25 years is that that has been an enormous change in England, whereas I would say that, 25 years ago, our town and parish councils were very much like your community councils, but they had tax-raising powers, but they didn't do very much with them at all. What we've seen is that our central government funding has reduced dramatically in England for our principal authorities. We see our town and parish councils stepping up and filling the gaps, and those very community-based things have actually made a huge difference. People think that the biggest issue for people might be highways, adult social care, hospitals, etc. Of course, those things are hugely important, but the things that really impact people's daily lives are what happens next door to you. That's more important to most people than anything else. That's where our town and parish councils really come into their own. It was mentioned about participatory budgeting. We've tinkered with that at the edges, but it doesn't go terribly far down here. It feels like paying lip service to something, but here, what we're tending to do is move away from that and move towards parish and town councils being the pump primers, but all sorts of community activities. One of the things that surprises me over and over again is how much can be achieved in a local community with very little money. When you look at a principal authority getting involved in it, the costs just grow exponentially. The infrastructure that follows that and the rules and regulations just means that everything that you try to do is expensive, but locally so much can be achieved with so little money. That's a really interesting point. I'm interested to go a little bit further. You said that, around 25 years ago, in England, parish councils actually started to use their tax-raising powers and have local levies. What kind of things did they bring about? What did they tax people on? Was there a resistance to that locally from people? It's really interesting. The assumption is that anybody trying to raise money by tax is going to be attacked. Nobody likes paying tax. One of the unique points about a town or parish council is that you can see that every penny that is raised is spent locally. We pay our taxes—we all do—and it seems to go into this black hole—I'm not talking about potholes, although that's also true—and it disappears. You're never really sure what happens to it, and you're always convinced that your neighbour is getting a better slice of the pie than you are. Whereas with a local tax from town or parish council, you can see exactly where it's spent. We've had a number of examples locally of what we still have to do in percentage terms, but where the percentage increase in tax has been as high as 75 per cent. You would say that everybody would be up in arms about that, but what the parish council did was say that, with the 75 per cent increase, that's what we're going to do. Do you support it? The other thing that we're able to do is borrow money so that we have a number of councils that take on large infrastructure projects. Clearly, if you're a parish council, maybe with 10,000 electors, you're not going to be able to raise £0.5 million just through your council tax without it being a serious impact on a household budget. We're able to borrow money and we're seeing an increase in the amount of money that our town and parish councils are borrowing in order to deliver serious infrastructure. Thanks very much for that. I think that that's really very useful and very interesting. I'm going to bring in Ivan McKee who's got some questions. Yeah, thanks very much, convener. Morning panel. It's interesting to hear Jackie talking about the change over that 25-year period south of the border. If you go back 24 years here, we had the Macintosh commission that raised a number of points and made the statement that Scotland today simply doesn't have a system of local government in the sense in which many other countries do. I suppose I'd be interested to get your perspective on that if things moved on in that time or are we still back with those challenges we had a quarter of a century ago. Just in that context, and I hate to throw your words back at you, Dr Esgabar, but I think you just said something very similar this morning that the presence and legitimacy of community councils is patching contested across the country, so you just took to get your reflections on on both of those points. Yeah, thank you. So they are related because the question of legitimacy, so there are two sides to this. On the one hand, elections as a mechanisms to choose community councils, I think it's a very imperfect mechanism. I'm not saying we do away with the elections, I do think there are other modes of selection that should be complementary, so I think reform in that area, I think there's a strong case for it. But legitimacy also goes alongside the extent to which a community council can make a difference in its community, therefore attracting attention, attracting support, and attracting a diversity of people from the community to then join the community council to then make a difference. So that's a virtuous circle, when you can make a difference and therefore by increasing your capacity to make a difference locally, you then increase your legitimacy to act and you increase the diversity of your community council because more people are attracted to it. At the moment, we're now in that virtuous circle, we're in a vicious circle, which is that community councils sometimes struggle to attract a diversity of people from their community to some extent because they don't have a lot of power to do the things they want to do. Those who have the right conditions tend to look at other mechanisms like setting up a community development trust or just looking for other, because we don't have those tax-raising powers or those watering powers. So if you really have a good idea for a project or to take over a community asset, which might be a revenue generating asset that could bring community wealth, and you want to take that initiative, you cannot do it under the existing arrangement of community council is legally. So you can see how the legitimacy critique, whether they are legitimate because they are not diverse enough or whether they are legitimate because they don't have enough contested elections, it's a very partial, there's some strength to that argument but it's not a fully persuasive argument because their legitimacy depends on having the capacity to act. So if we set them in a position when they cannot do things that people immediately see improving their lives, then it's really difficult to expect them to attract people and to become the kind of diverse, vibrant, dynamic space that makes things happen for their communities. So we need to break that vicious circle and there are ways of doing it and some of them have done it but across the board there's a lot that can be done to put them in a better place to do what they want to do and it's just trying to respond to the level of aspiration that there is, but also just to give them the support to fulfil the responsibilities they already have because at the moment they are having to fulfil their responsibilities with, you know, I think the last time I checked it was something like they usually get around 500 quid for some admin support. That might have changed, there are exceptions, at least some time ago it's Lodi and used to, it's Lodi and Council, used to give a bit more budget at other places as well, but you can see how it's just how can they fulfil even just the duties they have at the moment let alone the aspirations that they are trying to reflect as they try and bring in their communities to try and put forward a positive vision for their places. Okay, thanks. Anyone else want to comment on Emma? Yeah, just to say talking about what's changed, I mean the legislation back in 73 created community councils as unincorporated bodies which is why they can't do community asset transfers, it also actually excludes them from some funding applications, if you look in the conditions of funding applications sometimes we'll say you must be an incorporated body. I think what's changed recently is perhaps the community empowerment act has brought in some new elements which community councils can get involved in and has given them a little bit more locusts, things like local place plans which they can get involved in and create ideas about what they want in their local community with the idea that the local government then takes some of those ideas forward, but they're always kind of reliant on other people I think to take those ideas forward because of the restrictions that have been placed on them right from the start. Okay, okay, that's helpful, thanks. I don't know if anyone else wants to come in on any of us. Thank you. It was really just to pick up on Dr Escobar's point about support. One of the things that is absolutely essential for us to succeed as a movement, if you will, is that they have to be properly supported and we have 10,000 parish councils and we have an army of about seven and a half thousand clerks that manage those, but again, I think sometimes our principal authorities are anxious about what that means, you know, it's going to cost us a fortune to support them. In my own case, my organisation is repeated 40 times. It's repeated across the Shire counties basically, so we provide support, advice, guidance, help etc to about 240 parish councils in Cheshire and that costs our principal authorities £7,000 a year. We are talking peanuts, but actually what it delivers on the ground because of the way that we work is something really exceptional, so it doesn't succeed if you don't support it, but supporting it does not necessarily mean you'll bankrupt yourself. Yeah, and I just like to follow up on that and a point you made earlier, Jackie, about the different costs to deliver services if you're doing it at that parish level compared to the traditional route where you're doing it at a council level. I don't know if you can put any more colour on that, any more specifics or it may be you want to send in some more numerical examples of that later on, but really just like to understand the kind of quantum in some examples or any about that. I mean that there are so many examples, I mean a lot of our parishes but not exclusively are in rural areas and actually a lot of Scotland of course is rural, come from a fairly rural part of it myself and by definition that is difficult for our principal authorities to manage because it's not centralised, there aren't many and there's not a great head of population there, but then you have that enormous community spirit that's there where your grassverges don't get cut by the mechanism that cuts them in towns, it gets cut by local farmers, it gets cut by goodwill, and even if they do employ contractors they have personal relationships with those contractors and that they work for a fraction of the cost. Every time what we get a lot here at the moment is devolution of services, again because the principal authority is struggling for money and is offloading anything that isn't money generating, so when it hives off a village hall but it hives off a town hall even, again the running costs for that just fall through the floor because we're no longer looking at the kind of pay rates for example, we're easy to leverage in volunteer support, etc. Difficult to quantify but I think we get what I'm saying. Absolutely, I've seen examples of that in my own community, my own constituency where I say it was unviable when the council ran it but ran perfectly well when the local group took it over. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Ivan. Willie, you wanted to come in. Yeah, thanks very much, convener, and good morning everyone. I just wanted to get your thoughts on how you see the relationship between the community councils and the local authorities in Scotland. Perhaps share some reflections on the strengths and weaknesses that are in there. I know from the review and report in 2019 that support was mentioned, featured prominently, and Dr Esgabar mentioned it in your opening answers to one of the convener's questions. So could you give some reflections please on how you see the role and liaison between the two bodies in Scotland, and I'll hopefully come to Jackie for her perspective on how it works down south later on. Yeah, thanks. So I'm here, I mean I'm talking from that research but then, you know, we have been looking into community councils since 2010 and so I'm basing this as well on what I understand of the different relationships across different local authority areas and in most local authority areas within democratic services there is an officer that as part of a number of roles take on some kind of either coordination or communication with community councils. In some places that works better than in others, it does come down often to the person, which is not ideal. It's not ideal because you want consistency. It comes down to the person because in many local authorities there's a culture of misunderstanding community councils and in some cases there has been over time relationships that didn't work and there are many factors for that and you know, I don't want to dwell too much on it but in the places where it works well is because people are making a choice to have a positive relationship. They see the potential of a constructive relationship, how the community council, given that we have massive local authority areas as we spoke before in this committee, the largest in the developed world, you know, what in many other countries will be considered regional authorities rather than local authorities. Given that situation, community councils are uniquely placed to be actually closer to communities of place and in that context the local authority, local authorities often have to rely on community councils as a bridge to those communities. When you're in a situation where you have limited support because the support even through some clerk time is very limited and when you're in a situation where you are dependent on the local authority to do anything you might want to do, then that puts you in a difficult position when you're trying to offer some constructive challenge as well and to play your role as representing the voices of local people. So that means that in some places the relationships over time have gone in the wrong direction but we also see examples of places where it works really well and people connect. I gave the example earlier of participatory budgeting because just now and later on in the panel with community councillors you will probably hear about this but in the northeast as part of the Just Transition program there's a participatory budgeting program where three local authority areas, community councils, third sector interfaces are coming together to advance environmentally oriented and climate action oriented participatory budgeting and I think it's a great example of good relationships, good collaboration, built over time between community councils, local authorities and so on but I would say that that's happening despite the circumstances and arrangements and the lack of autonomy and independence that they have rather than because they are set to work well together and I think it's fair to say as well that some elected members at local level do not necessarily see community councils as something they need to engage with meaningfully. Some of them do, I've seen many elected local councillors that do but in many situations sometimes community councils are seeing as an impediment to things and it's a chicken and egg situation because or it's a contradictory situation because when community councils are saying something that a local authority likes then they will take the community engagement box and they will say hey the community council said it when the community council is saying something that the local authority doesn't like they will say the community council is unrepresentative, lacks diversity, lacks legitimacy and we're not going to listen to them and because they don't have that autonomy, their own assets, their own infrastructure, their own capacity to take on initiatives then that puts them in a situation when they can't go very far with challenge because then they depend on good relationships so you can see how this makes things a little bit complicated to make things happen. Okay, thank you for that Dr Esgabal. Brian, Emma, any contributions on the relationship? What needs to improve between the community councils and the community councils? At the improvement service we run the, we manage a network of what they call CCLOs, community council liaison officers and we're sort of in regular contact with them and as Oliver says you know that sometimes it isn't their main job to support community councils so that that's clearly an issue. What I would also say in terms of you mentioned the Clark system earlier on as Shetland have their own Clark system they've had them since the 1970s and that seems to work really well and it seems to be across the country people are thinking that's a luxury in Shetland you know so I think maybe that could be replicated as you know I think when Jackie was talking about in England I think Oliver was like oh that's a luxury you know to have all those clerks so okay thanks Brian any other views and before we come to Andrew I think you wanted to come in yeah to talk about support a little bit it's not maybe worth pointing out that from our wider learning at Scottish community development centre when we've been working on the participation request work that's part of the community empowerment act and what we tend to see is that if sort of fits with the picture that Oliver is saying where if a community council is raising a challenge something that they don't like then sometimes that really isn't just not a will to work with that from the local authority. What we maybe want to see more of is support for public bodies too to engage with community councils because sometimes there seems to be a kind of difficulty seeing the the kind of outcome approach that you can take where interests usually align people want to see the same things happen and just because something comes in the wording that might be complained or a challenge doesn't mean that at the end of the day there's a willingness to work together and for the same but for the same improved outcomes and I think that we need training across the board in that regard. Thanks Andrew Jackie. Could you offer a perspective on the relationship between the parish councils and the formal authorities, local authorities down south? Thank you. Yes, yes twofold. One the organisation I work for the Cheshire Association and local councils I've spoken before and said it's replicated throughout the country. We apart from providing support for our town and parish councils we also provide the mechanism for communication with town and parish councils so there will be occasions many occasions when the principal authority needs to go direct to a parish because the parish issue but when they are generally wanting to engage with parish councils then they do that through us and we're seen as a trusted and independent body and that as a mechanism works really well and then when you have all those challenging people from the community that want to talk about something local they just basically pass them on to us so that gets rid of a whole whole workload so that works really well. What tends to work less well is the relationship with our elected members so we have kind of like two schools it's not part of political two schools of of elected member from the principal authority one that is incredibly supportive and works really well with their town or parish council and usually a group of them that they have within their ward that's great that's when the relationship is really at its best. The other is where there's really a kind of competition if you will for voters I guess so that the we often see what we call dual-hatted members so that the principal authority member will also be a member of the parish council and it's kind of like there's a real lack of trust there's a real lack of working together in partnership it kind of feels like a power grab if that makes sense and that is incredibly difficult to work with so that in that instance that member that I'm envisaging is kind of like a block rather than seeing the parish council as being 10 people to share your workload with it's like 10 people that the member is competing with you know in order to you know to showcase themselves so you know if I could make one rule I'd probably make several but if I could make one it would be that we are not allowed to have dual-hatted members because we really should recognise each other's strengths and weaknesses we work together rather than kind of grab the jobs. Thanks very much Jackie that's very interesting one heart is better than two I suppose. That kind of discussion leads me to my second question about whether we feel that the community councils have got proper access to expertise and resources particularly in the planning process. I will remember my own experience in attending my local community council some years ago and they were basically bombarded with planning papers with little or no assistance to help them get through it has that changed? Is it pretty much the same as it was then and is that an area that we could improve on to get them direct access to expertise and resources to to play a full and proper part in the local planning process? Maybe Dr Escobar again would kick off with that one. Yeah I'll kick off but I'm sure the improvement service might have something to add here as well because it's how the work they do on offering training and so on. When we did the research which was research with community councillors in workshops and surveying all of that they noted a wide range of skills that they would appreciate more support developing and accessing expertise. The top thing that they put on the list is to develop more expertise on public engagement on community engagement so the ability to bring their communities together to then work out plans and priorities and take things forward but then help with planning. I mean community councils are a statutory body in the planning process. The amount of work that they undertake for their communities often goes unseen and underappreciated and in some places they might have ad hoc access to someone in the council who might help but that's not it's not systematic it's not across the board they just need to find their own way through a maze of things that they might have never seen so again that's another case of where they are not even I think enough supported to do the things they are supposed to do although I know that over the years there have been some training on planning on finance so there have been some training programs I'm not saying nothing has happened but I'm just saying I don't think it's systematic enough I don't think it's available to everyone and it's not just about having some training ideally what you want is them to have access to any local institutions local colleges for example any expertise that might be available in local businesses expertise available in the council and because they don't have that kind of convening power and that kind of status as a you know as community representatives that are well known and respected and all of that because of the position they are in then it's really difficult to mobilize that expertise and that capacity so it then is left to individual relationships so if you have a community council that has members who come from you know professional backgrounds what they might have the networks then you will be in a better position but that's really unfair to communities where perhaps some of that expertise might not be available so I think we need to get better at being systematic but also remembering that it's not just about expertise on planning expertise on finance we need to pay attention to the other side of all of this which is their own expertise in organizing and mobilizing their communities so that then local authorities and the NHS and other bodies that come knocking on the door of community councils can they know that community councils are putting in the right place to be a bridge to their communities and that takes a lot of community organizing and community development work and as I said previously in a session here in this committee the community learning and development workforce has been diminishing across the country in the last 10 years so community councils are affected by that as well and they should be supported not just on those hardcore skills of finance planning but also what sometimes are considered software skills but just as important of community engagement facilitation mediation skills community organizing and that could make a massive difference because if we do that then all the sudden a lot of the policies that we know need to be developed at very granular level across Scotland given the very centralized system of governance we have if all the sudden we had all that increased capacity so those through those 1200 community councils will be reaching far and deep into communities and mobilizing all kinds of capacity and energy to make things happen okay thank you dr Escobar Emma brian um yeah that's sort of one of the areas that the improvement service try to work on limited resources so what we tend to do is partner with organizations that already have materials that we can repurpose and share with community councils for example we work with the open university who have created a portal for community councillors which provides free training in things like about the some sort of community engagement skills are in there but also finance and digital we work with the scottish tech army who have created websites for some community councils and also provided some training on using devices to take video that kind of thing we created our own social media guide you know community engagement you know is is not going to get anywhere without good communication skills and social media is kind of the format to do that on but not everybody working with a community council is confident in using social media we've also run a series of webinars so we've brought in people like sustrans um and other organizations who can provide information and support direct community councils so it's about repurposing what's already out there with the limited resources that we have um i guess one of the biggest things that we've managed to do is with a company called geosphere um again that that's two relationships within the improvement service with the spatial hub which provides which sort of categorizes local data um and it's a a jack you may be familiar with their english version which is parish online which is a mapping software tool it's called community maps Scotland and it's basically allows community councils access to this free mapping tool and they can see their community area and all the data that's relevant to it very useful in creating local place plans but i know that some community councils have already used it to map like a new path network and they've got free access to that for a year so again it's all about kind of developing these relationships with organizations which already provide services to try and see if they can be repurposed for community councils because community councils themselves don't just have limited resources there's also limited resources when it comes to supporting them thanks very much for that Emma any other contributions on that access to jockey you coming in jockey thank you yes of course our national body the national association of local councils provides us with you know all the the policy documents support that we need all tailored to the to the sector what i did want to speak about was was specifically around planning i think it's really important that we i mean we provide planning training it's incredibly popular sell out every year because parish councils are just really interested in planning but it's important to remember that we are not the planning authority we don't need to create an army of new planners that's not their role and in many ways we can actually try to over professionalize them we want them to understand the system so they can contribute but ultimately their strengths is in being able to convey a local opinion and actually the local opinion might have nothing to do with a planning point it might be their their passion over something which isn't a planning consideration perhaps interestingly there was some work done about 10 years ago not exactly current but we didn't do it again afterwards with talford and reakin council where they actually devolved decision making to a parish council as a as a trial for for 12 months it was an unmitigated disaster so they provided you know planning support just like a planning committee would have so it operated like a planning committee and we've never repeated its sense so that's not what we're looking for and what i'm finding in in cheshire and i think it's replicated throughout the country is the focuses has moved from commentary on planning applications to actually taking a lead and looking at the development of neighbourhood plans now that has really taken off it was something that you know initially there was half a dozen of them now even the smallest councils are producing their own development plans which is about you know giving the community view about how they see development in their community and we're moving away from that reactive i don't like that planning application to actually if we're going to have planning we're going to have development in this community this is what we want so again the port is key but at the same time we're not trying to make a new army of planning officers thanks very much jackie i can't wait to read more about the disasters that befell talford and reakin parish councillor councillor thank you very much for your contributions everybody thanks thanks willy mark you wanted to come in thanks a minute this is an issue we've touched on already about essentially how community councils convey the views of the community to authorities whether that's you know national government local government health board or any other statutory authorities how how do they do the community engagement which allows them to genuinely convey the community's view rather than perhaps the the individual views of the members of the community council is that happening and how is that happening maybe come to dr escobar first yeah thanks that is definitely happening um because this goes back to this vicious circle i was mentioning earlier because what happens when when you have a space that doesn't have enough power to make things happen and it doesn't attract enough of a diversity of people to come into that space um there will always be a situation where there will be some really strong people who come into that space and sometimes might not really might think that their view is the view of their community and absolutely is happening and i think a lot of community councillors realize that that happens in many community councils um and it's very problematic because that's precisely what sometimes stops local authorities community planning partnerships third sector interfaces in other bodies from giving community councils the the hearing and the space and the collaboration that they should be building um but i think is so that happens but i don't think that's an excuse to um to not take them seriously because then we're perpetuating that cycle right because if they are not taken seriously then not enough people come into that space so then you don't have enough people that have that sense of representation and diversity of the community the best community councils i know see themselves as facilitators they see themselves as people who are there to try and understand what the community needs what the community aspires to and then convey that they are more like delegates rather than representatives and this is a little bit the original scene in the way community councils were set up you know they were set up almost like imitating elected local authority councils but with any of the powers right and what i mean by that is that this notion that you are a representative that you are elected and therefore a representative and your judgment should be trusted that doesn't really work in the case of community councils they should be more like delegates that constantly keep a link to their community and have channels to their community and have community engagement forums and have digital crowdsourcing platforms and have access to all kinds of ways of facilitating dialogue and deliberation in their communities that is not the case at the moment so even in the best community councils if they don't have capacity to engage their community and they find themselves making representations in committees partnerships etc they will be putting forward what they believe is the view of their community and sometimes they might not be able to back that that's the case because they haven't had the resource to do some proper community engagement so i think they are between a rock and a hard place they take up representation opportunities those who have capacity to do community engagement based on representation on proper community engagement but those who don't still need to make those representations and they are probably unreflective of their community and it connects to all those issues of capacity and support that we spoke about before and to me that's the core message here because it's been 50 years we need to celebrate the achievements later on i'm looking forward to the panel with community councillors because i'm sure they can share a lot of the successes but i think the time has come to either reform or rebuild we either reform them so that then we have one of the most decentralized systems of governance and you know as we should do we want to tackle the issues we want to tackle locally and nationally or we rebuild them we we just start the game if people don't want to reform them as they are and this is problematic and you know i've been making this case to ministers and MSPs for a long time no one seems to want to spend the political capital on this reform but this reform this is not just about community councils because community councils if you think carefully and you place them on a map in the connections they have to community planning partnerships to local governance to health and social care integration to third sector interfaces to the planning process you then realize that if you had highly functioning dynamic participative inclusive community councils you could unlock a lot of potential in those systems of local governance that at the moment don't work well so it's not a silver bullet but it's not that far from it if we bite the bullet and do that reform okay thank you anybody else on human engagement Emma yeah yeah coming on the back of those big ideas is quite intimidating um um yeah you'll probably hear from the panel later there are fantastic examples of community councils who really do engage with the community through whether it's through surveys or events that's how they kind of get the feedback um inevitably you are going to have very strong people people with very strong opinions coming on to community councils as well um but i think the one thing i've touched on previous as well is this local place plans idea where community councils can actually develop their own i you know their own plan for what they want to see in their community what we've heard from community councils though is that they're kind of their concern is that it's not going to be listened to by the local authority so the local authority also has a responsibility there to take on board if if the process has been followed right the community engagement has been done and a good local place plan has been produced by the community council or other community organisation then the local authority also has that responsibility to take that seriously and take those ideas forward okay thanks Emma Brian did you want to say part of the i think issue in terms of community engagement for community councils is that they need to get access to to digital tools and software so and i know you might hear from donald from west loading later on but they were trying to engage with the community using the the console participatory budgeting digital tool and use the community engagement aspect of that but i think it's it's an issue in terms of you know how they get access to software either via local authorities or you know using things that melt them they might not have licenses and things like that for them so i think that's an issue okay thanks jackie i put the same question to you do you have examples of how well or how badly community council or parish councils are engaging with that wider community what's the kind of best practice models you see of making sure that it's the the wider community's views that have been expressed i think my initial comment would be that i think there is a dual standard here that when we're talking about our local councils our time of parish councils engagement versus our principal authority engagement we're really expecting a lot more from our parishes than perhaps we get from our principal authorities in the first place so you know please please do bear that in mind i think there's lots of different examples i mean i think the most current one probably would be we're moving away from a way that our principal authorities previously had of giving out grants you know here's a pot and bunny bid for it um to um a crowdfunding model um and it's it's it's it's really helpful in in terms of of course it widens the pool of people who are who are giving money but perhaps more importantly it's a really good way of demonstrating community support for an idea so that when a town or parish council wants to do something that is you know perhaps an expensive project um you know the fact that you can see that there are you know a thousand people albeit albeit all giving a pound or two pounds you can see that there is really great you know community support for the idea that you're putting forward also i did mention before about the ability of a council to borrow money when a council wants to borrow money it does have to give um a physical evidence of community engagement on that it has to demonstrate that the community is supportive of it you know basically entering into a contract to borrow money so we see i mean i would like to say every council is perfect in its communications with its community of course they're not some are appalling but more and more we're seeing them using exactly as previous speakers have said using digital communication tools but also things like moving on from participatory budgeting to things like crowdfunding as a mechanism for one raising money but two also gauging how much community support you have for a particular project lots of really good examples out there okay thanks for that jacket and as well as talking about how community councils represent the the views of the wider community i'd also like to ask about how we make sure community councils themselves community councillors are representative of their communities how we increase the number of volunteers i mean i don't know how many community council elections have been contested over the last 10 20 years how do we increase that level of participation how do we make sure that you know the people with caring responsibilities people from marginalized communities how do we make sure that the community councillors themselves are as representative as we possibly can maybe come to Emma first yeah i mean in a lot of the same ways that councils at the scottish parliament tries to to sort of be more diverse it's engaging with the right organizations we already engage engage with youth organizations elect her including scotland looking at kind of getting them involved to to speak to sort of community council so that they give that some thought as you say the difficulty is that quite often there aren't contested elections so what you're left with is the people that come forward are the people who are the community council so it's about kind of planting that seed in the in the heads of the people in the community that they might want to step forward and do it people with caring responsibilities obviously that's an issue because you can have to give up quite a lot of your time to be a community councillor and that i guess comes back to that lack of support if you're expected to give up not just the time for the meetings but also for writing at minutes or dealing with admin and and sort of correspondence that's taking up quite a lot of your time so maybe that sort of support network might kind of change that in a positive way but i mean i think that it you can also there is also a mechanism with community councils where you can co-opt people onto the community council from even from outside the area so if you for example need someone to co-opt some young people you can there's quite an example of quite a few that have co-opted sort of 16 and 17 year olds onto the community council so they're not full community councillors but they attend the meetings and they see what goes on quite a lot of them also engage with pupil councils from like the local high school so they get them involved to sort of start that path i guess of getting young people interested in community democracy and what's happening in their local area so there's lots of ways that we can try and improve it in the same way that every sort of level of democracy wants to try and improve that diversity and representation we've been working on the project the last two or three years and quite a lot of the time we hear that you know there should there be a national day for elections for community councils to shine the light on it and sort of like you know give it a bit more prominence as well so another idea yeah thank you yeah this is this is a critical issue because again community councils should look like the communities they represent and should reflect the variety of views of the communities they are there to um to to serve and but the way they are set up it produces a self-selection bias right and this is not to take anything away from serving community councillors we should appreciate their time but they themselves have told us in in two research projects the one in the report that has been mentioned and another one we did as part of the cosla commission on strengthening local democracy community councillors themselves repeatedly say that they want their community councils to be more diverse and when we ask them whether community councils need to become more representative of the wider community only 22% disagreed with that and over 50% agreed with that to different levels of strength so they themselves recognize the issue but how can you attract people to a space where there is no certainty that is a space that is going to inspire action and make things happen right so a lot of the community councillors who are there are because they persevere and they have they can put in the time it takes a lot of effort and skill and time to be part of it and the reality is that only some people can afford that and that generates a particular self-selection bias and then there are a number of barriers to participation and we also map this as part of a study as well in what works in Scotland called hard to reach or easy to ignore which is about community engagement and the barriers to engage and it's some of the things that were mentioned before you know if you're a single parent if you're on a low income if you're a full-time caterer if you're a person with a disability if you if you have a number of circumstances and you're being asked to come into a role as a volunteer with no effort made to remove the barriers for you to participate then we cannot be surprised that this space is no more reflective of their communities right so I think we need an inclusion fund that should be available to community councils to remove barriers to participation so that people can then say look I need support with transport or I need support with childcare or I need support with care or whatever it might be if we're serious about community councils being representative of the diversity of their communities then we need to remove the barriers to participation if we do that them I think it will be in a fairer situation but to these miscommunity councils because they are not diverse when we don't give them the support to become diverse it's a bit unfair and that's and that's sometimes the critique that is made some of them have achieved this through co-option through all kinds of proactive measures with young people with with existing groups but that's not the case across the board and it has a lot to do with the infrastructure of support so I would love to see local authorities for example advocating for community councils to the Scottish government for example to set up and we have you know they have been successful training programs and programs through the improvement service and other organizations so we know what how it could be done now the question is to give them the the value the visibility the support knowing that is going to be a good return on investment because at the end of the day that that's really a key factor and we haven't mentioned that if we invest in this it's going to improve people's lives and it's going to improve the condition of many communities across the country that's got to be the bottom line so it's not just better democracy better representation it's also better capacity to make a difference to people's lives thanks we'd like to come in Andrew yeah I mean i was going to make a pretty similar point so I would just add to Oliver's point by saying that if you had representation in more diverse community councils that might still not be enough and what I mean by that is if they are there but they don't have the time to really take part and to participate fully then it's not and they're not fulfilling the role in the way that they would want to and to their potential so that support really needs to be there really fundamentally supporting people to have the time and resources to take part in these things fully thanks Andrew Jackie did you have any reflections on diversity of parish councils in England thank you yeah I think you have to look a little bit wider than the the council itself I think you know others have spoken eloquently about the barriers that are there and I totally concur with everything that's been said and I think one of the challenges of attracting people to you know to sit as a councillor is actually you're asking them to be interested in everything and very often people are in a more single issue you know that they feel passionate about the environment they feel passionate about planning and they feel passionate about finance and it's not that they are they are kind of really good around us so I'd ask you to look a little bit further than the actual seats on the council because many of our councils do in turn have working groups and committees and that's a really good way of including diversity but inviting people to come along and bring with them their passion and not requiring them to be passionate about being a councillor if that makes sense so that you know that you might well have a friends of group or you might have a you know community development committee and their function is perhaps to look after the assets you know maybe a playing field maybe a village hall or something like that where people are really behind that although they're not particularly interested in the wider work of the council so I think if we kind of look a little bit more behind the surface or beneath the surface you'd probably find more diversity there than you kind of see if you're only looking at election results okay thanks for that thanks Camilla thanks mark and now we're gonna go to questions from Marie McNair. Thank you convener and good morning panel I want to ask why there's no one umbrella organisation representing the interests of community councils nationally in Scotland and has there been any negative impact from winding up of the association of Scottish community councils so I'll just pop it out there to anyone who wants to answer it first. Before my time unfortunately the winding up of the national organisation why there isn't one that's a very good question to ask the improvement service was kind of brought on board to provide some of the services that that national body did so the the training the communications the networking but not the sort of the lobbying aspect of it which sort of lobbied for the interests of community councils so that I guess is the the part of the function that's missing what you do have across the country are you have sort of regional forums and I think you've got several of those represented at the next panel so they can provide sort of that that regional support but yeah as you say no national organisation there's not really been any kind of drive for it as far as I've seen sort of in recent years but I don't know maybe Brian would be able to add more he's slightly been on the project slightly longer than me so slightly longer no I think you know the the Scottish community councils project is the only sort of national support for community councils and from what we hear it seems to be well received and going well so I couldn't really comment on the association that and it's demise 10 years or so ago yeah I will comment on that I have been waiting for the opportunity for 11 years to be honest so I was and some people in this room where they're in 2012 in the last ever conference of the national association for community councils and it was it was it was a really difficult moment because I was giving a keynote to talk about a more participatory democracy the community empowerment agenda was coming down the line with the community empowerment act and on the other hand we were there about to disband the only body that was representing community councillors across the country and the reason of this on paper and what's on public record is because the Scottish government cut the funding in half that's that's my understanding and and the association just couldn't make it work there were other reasons they were internal issues but I don't have a first hand knowledge of that so I'm just going by the public record on this but the point here is that it's it's absolutely crucial to have that kind of body for a number of reasons and you're going to get a little bit of this in the panel with community councillors because joint forums and federations of committee councils are doing really important work if you think about it you know when you have such a disparous group of people across the country and trying to do so many different things and facing so many different challenges the opportunity to communicate and network is important but then the economies of scale for example if you are rolling out a new piece of software to engage your community or to crowdfund or to crowdsource you know if you do that individually committee council by community council it makes very little sense you need to do these things and aggregate at the moments and joint forums and federations do it but a national association could create economies of scale that would make things even more affordable could roll out all kinds of skills training expertise train the trainer opportunities some of the things that now the improvement service does but yeah the advocacy function is not there so community councils don't have a national voice in conversations like this for example or you know the community wealth building agenda the local governance review all these things and then on a more practical level there's also a question about a division of labor and what I mean by that is in a local authority area community councillors are invited to all kinds of committees all kinds of boards all kinds of partnership meetings all that kind of you know and I see what said earlier different people are interested in different things so if you are only inviting people from a local community council rather than a variety or or the capacity that you get across a joint forum or a federation then it's much harder to get people to sit in all those places so there's a division of labor argument as well to have a national association that provides an umbrella for federations of local associations and yeah I mean yeah we need we need to get the national association back and to get it right this time as well. Thanks for that. Anyone online want to come in? Jackie, you wanted to come in. Thank you yes of course we have our national association of local councils in Nalc and interestingly it's equivalent for our principal authorities is the LGA. The LGA does in fact receive central government funding to the tune of I think about seven million pounds a year. The national association of local councils costs the government nothing it's entirely self-funded by membership subscription from our member councils so our system is we have 40 county associations county associations collect a levy from the parish councils bought both the county association and the national body and passed that levy on to the national body and the national body then supports us as county associations in terms of giving legal advice in terms of lobbying central government etc so our role is supporting procedural training that kind of thing for our local councils and our engagement is with our principal authorities the national association in terms supports us and is the voice of the sector when it comes to central government to my mind both are essential but I would just make the point that they're also cheap because they don't cost you anything at all. Thanks for that Jackie. Andrew, do you want to come in or are you quite content? Just on Jackie's point it would seem to me that the funding of the local parish councils would appear to me and the powers that they have locally would be the mechanism by which the national association seems to be funded if it's coming up through the levy and so again if you're joining the pieces together in some way or another community councils need to have more powers and more resources if they're going to have that sort of national profile and more influence. Thank you. We're now going to move on to questions from Miles. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us today. I wanted to return to an issue that we've touched upon already with regard to participatory budgeting and how community councils are engaging in that process. I just wondered in terms of the community empowerment act, your views on how that's impacted what positives it's brought. Emma, you touched upon some of the asset transfers so I just wondered your views specifically on that and any potential reforms which could help empower community councils as well. There's aspects of the community empowerment act which apply to community councils and there's some that don't because of their unincorporated status. Obviously that makes it a little confusing I guess. It's a little muddy waters especially for community councillors who might not understand the legislation, the difference to it or might not have had that explained. One of the things that we're working on at the moment is an updated guidance document for community councillors which will hopefully be published in the autumn which is going to have more information about the community empowerment act and the aspects that apply to them and how they apply. So I think that's kind of been the positive in the last 50 years is that change. Participatory budgeting, you see it used in sort of different ways with community councils. Some community councils bid for participatory budgeting from other sources, others use participatory, participatory, participatory difficult words, say PV. I'll just say PV from now on. Others use PV to actually distribute funds that they've kind of collected from different sources so you get that kind of the very local community voting on which project they want to see funded which again goes back to your community engagement point, you're actually getting the local people to vote on which project in the area should be funded. So there's been sort of positive aspects from both ways. I'm sure you'll hear from the panel next about some of the ways that they've used participatory PV, especially up in Murray. But yeah, that's kind of interesting to see that community councils have used it from both sides in bidding for funding and distributing it as well. Brian or Oliver, do you have anything you've had on that? Yeah, so on PV, on participatory budgeting, the only thing I would add, I mean that's the case, community councils sometimes find themselves as developing proposals for PV, but sometimes they find themselves as organisers and I think many of them want to become organisers of PV. It's just that now we no longer have the community choices fund at national level, so now this is down to local authority areas and the progress on meeting the 1% commitment that the Scottish Government and COSLA agreed for PV, at least 1% should be allocated through PV and it's an even development across the country. If it was a more even development, I think community councils could play a stronger role and you will hear later in the panel how PV can really, in my view, PV has made some community councils really find their purpose because it helps them to connect with their communities and it helps them make things happen because people can see the effects of investing in the local area directly. Now on the community empowerment act, sadly the community empowerment act didn't do enough for community councils, did very little. I mean the only thing it did is to say that community councils are, you know, one of the bodies recognized for participation requests, that kind of thing, but it didn't, you know, despite many people including myself and many others arguing in the run-up for three years, advising on the bill saying we need to touch on community councils, we need to reform them, it's been a long time, they need support, they need help. In the end all of that dropped and it was a no go area, which is very frustrating because I just don't know why we cannot reform community councils. We know we have the support of community councillors, we know there will be support across the country because then people could see the things that they can accomplish. And then on assets, I think that this is one of the areas where things could really improve through reform. I think the community wealth building agenda is going to be the right place to discuss this because, and I don't think at the moment community councils are giving enough space in that agenda, to be honest, so at least not that I can see. I think there is, we need to understand better why is it that so many community councils feel that they cannot do what they want to do unless they set themselves up as a community development trust, which is not possible for all of them, why so much kind of energy and talent is going into projects that cannot be taken forward because they don't have powers. So I think a lot of that, to me, there is an opportunity in the community wealth building to kind of do the things that the Committee Empowerment Act didn't do. So I think it's a great opportunity. But again, these things need to go in tandem because often the counterargument is to say, well, but if community councils at the moment are not diverse enough, are not representative enough, are not, don't have enough capacity, how can we give them more? Well, these things need to go hand in hand. The reform needs to mean more support so that then they can take up these new opportunities. And we see where it works when they set up community anchor organisations, when they set up community development trusts, when they begin to become economic engines for their communities, not just serving the communities, not just doing some of the really important stuff like GALAS and smaller projects, but also regeneration at the economic level. And so that's the potential we're talking about here if we set them for purpose. Thank you. Does anyone online want to come in? Andrew. Yeah, to continue on that theme, the Community Empowerment Act, part three, the participation requests. Now, it's perhaps an underutilised part of the act and partly that's to do with us a lack of understanding about the potential that it has in terms of working collaboratively to improve things. But it's interesting to observe that community councils have been the main organisations who have been making them more than half of the participation requests made so far have been by community councils. And so the potentials there and community councils are engaging with this agenda. And I think that as well as the community wealth building legislation or what's coming with that, there's also the importance of the local governance review and making sure that that reinforces the role of community councils. Thank you. That leads me on nicely to that very question with regard to what else you'd want to be seen as part of that ongoing local governance review to help change legislation to strengthen the position of community councils. Or whether or not, I suppose, Oliver, you've suggested the whole local democracy system needs to be reformed to look at the role of community councils and empowering them. So is there anything else we've not had from the evidence today which you think we'd need to capture with our views on this as well? I'll give a couple of things. So I guess, I mean, there are a lot of ideas out there. Every time we talk to community councillors, as we did in 2014 for the COSLA Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy, as we did for the research later in 2019, community councillors are ready for reform and they have a lot of ideas. They don't necessarily agree, it was the best ways forward, but there is a level of consensus that reforms are needed. So I said earlier that we either reform or rebuild. I think rebuilding is a much more comprehensive and challenging task. I'm not saying that's not the way to go. If there's the appetite for radical reform and rethink, fine, and we can all learn from the experience with community councils. But if we want to do it in a more incremental way in terms of reform, I think we know how community councils could be changed, adjusted and supported to do what they are supposed to be doing and more. We now have a context in the local governance space given the wealth, again, of community development trusts, of community anchor organisations, of participatory budgeting processes, all kinds of democratic innovations that are flourishing at that level. Now we know that community councils could play a really important role if they have the support to do that. And to me, they are also in many ways the key to unlocking or to addressing some of the shortcomings of community planning, of health and social integration partnerships, and of many other local bodies like that. So every time we are looking at local governance in a holistic way as an ecology of practices and institutions, you will see that if we were to reform community councils and make them fit for purpose, a lot of other things could start to fall into place. So my main concluding point is to say, you know, surely time has come. We've got to do this. Some people might think, yeah, but do we spend time in this kind of reform? Is this really something people care about? Well, people care about having better places to live in, having better local services, improving their life condition, addressing things like the cost of living crisis. All of these things require a vibrant combination of local institutions that can make things happen. And community councils have to be part of that. They have been part of that in many places. We just need to learn and just really go for that reform. So I don't think the problem is not knowing what to do. I think the problem is how to do it. And this is where we need the political leadership and the political know-how to advance this reform. Thanks. Yeah, I think the only thing I want to add in the same way that we've talked about how important it is for community councils to engage with their communities on what they want. I think it's vital that the community councils are involved in that local governance review and are consulted. It's been a few years since that last research was done, so making sure that they're kind of involved in the process and that, in turn, they involve their communities. I mean, they're quite often the best way to reach those communities. So it's a great kind of tool that you've got there for talking about local governance review, and I think we just make sure you use it really. The democracy matters conversations last time round. I mean, it's been a wee while since those conversations, and a good example is West Lothian joint forum of community councils had an event at the Civic Centre in West Lothian and produced a blueprint for the future of community councils, and they're going to have an online national conference next month around that. So it just shows you the involvement that community councils can have in their democracy matters on their local governance review. Yeah, absolutely. And Andrew, you wanted to come in. Yeah, an important aspect for legislation going forward that has been missing from some of the empowerment legislation such as the Community Empowerment Act is that to reinforce any legislation with the support that's needed, the resources to go into local support for community organisations, including community councils, especially in disadvantaged areas, there needs to be capacity building available, and as Oliver pointed out earlier, with the CLD workforce being depleted in many areas, there's an inconsistency there that needs to be addressed in legislation. Thanks, and Jackie, would you like to come in again on anything? Thank you. I mean, I think for me, perhaps one of the things that I feel underpins everything that we're looking at is that independence, and that's something that I think is incredibly difficult to drive from a principal authority perspective because I think it's hugely important that the parish councils are, in fact, independent. We had one large council that was created just on the borders of Cheshire where the principal authority just paid lip service to it. It set up the council because there was local demand for it, but it was operated by principal authority officers and it failed three years later. It was basically an outreach of the principal authority so that they do need to be treated as grown-up partners rather than an extension or a community extension of the principal authority, that's from my point of view is hugely important. The other thing is when it comes to resourcing, again, the model that we have in England is far from perfect, but if you were asking me how I would change it, I haven't got a clue. It works reasonably well where we have a centralised support independent and, again, a stressed independence, a centralised independent support body for those town and parish councils. It costs the principal authority very little, our income largely comes from our members, which are the town and parish councils, and then national support as well, but throughout all of it is that confidence to make it independent. As a final comment, I would say that for me, certainly, I feel that in England the driver for the growth, if you like, of the town and parish councils sector was money or the lack of it. I would like to say it was because our principal authorities were all passionate about their town and parish councils, but ultimately the support for those town and parish councils was something that was simply pragmatic. The local authorities, having less and less money as each year went by, recognised that if they want to keep their electors happy, if they want to see things delivered locally, then the town and parish council model was a very effective and cheap way of delivering. Great, thank you very much for that, as a good note. I'm not going to cut end, we've kind of run out of time, but Oliver, I wanted to ask you, we don't have time for you to answer this necessarily, but I would be interested to hear if you have in writing anywhere the difference between your, if we were to take the radical route of rebuilding versus the more incremental route of reforming. Do you have that kind of, in a kind of comparative, simple kind of thing that you could send to us, we could read that, because I think that that would be an interesting thing, because we do have this opportunity with the local democracy bill and also community wealth building, and that might be something we would, help us to understand those two approaches. We heard in the New Deal for Local Government event that we held a few weeks ago from one voice that said we needed to take that incremental approach and another voice that said something needed to be broken, so I think you're sort of saying that almost here as well. Yeah, I don't have that exactly written as such, but there are elements of it in the report we wrote for the COSLA Commission in 2014, so I can share that. In terms of more radical or more moderate approaches to reforming community councils, but I think the local governance review, the evidence gathered through that already and through the democracy matters conversation, has this spectrum where in some of the things that came through, the assumption is we keep community councils, we just improve them and reform them, and there are other versions that were part of that body of evidence in the local governance review that say, well, we don't, we just start from scratch, and we did. I was part of the research group in the local governance review process, and we did. There was a study of models in seven or eight other countries, and that's available as well, to see other forms of local ties of democracy. So it's a bit scattered, but we can pull together something. I'm sure we can have some help from Greg and Spice as well on that, but thank you very much for that. I've got a host of other questions that we don't have time to go into now, but maybe I can pick them up in our round table that we're going to move into. So thank you so much for joining us today. I think that that was really useful. Jackie, it was fantastic to have your perspective from England. I think that that was really useful for us to hear it, and I'm now going to suspend business to allow setup for our round table. Thank you. Welcome back. Panel 2 will take the form of a round table discussion about community councils, and I'd like to extend many thanks to our panel for joining us. We're joined in the room by John Batchelor, who is the chair of Canvasland Community Council, Deborah Duke, who's the community council liaison officer at Murray Council, Alistair Kennedy, who's the chair of the joint community councils at Murray, Steve Kerr, who's the chair of the Edinburgh Association of Community Councils, Donald Stavart, who's the treasurer of the joint forum of community councils in West Lothian, and Barry Cathy, who is from the Royal Borough of Rutherglen Community Council, and then online, we're joined by Shane McLeod, who's the vice chair of the Association of Shetland Community Councils, Bill Pitt, who's the chair of the new Abelauer, Tyree, and Pennon Community Councils, and Yuret McCoslin, who is the treasurer of Tilly Cootry, Coles Notten, and Devonside Community Council. I welcome you all. For those of you who are online, you can let the clerks know if you'd like to come in on a question by typing an R in the chat function, and for those in the room, you don't need to operate your microphones. That will be done for you by a broadcast team. I'm going to begin the conversation this morning by inviting you all to very briefly introduce your cells, and I will start. We'll go around and then we'll catch the folks. Maybe we'll actually go around and get as far as Deborah. We'll go online and then we'll come back to you, Steve. So I'm Ariane Burgess. I'm an MSP for the Highlands and Islands. Yes, good morning. Thank you for the invitation. As I said, I'm John Bartler, chair of Cambersland Community Council in South Lanarkshire, where we've focused particularly on economic regeneration and environmental issues. We have done quite a lot of survey work, not just within our community but other local community councils, particularly addressing issues like relationship with local authorities that we can perhaps come to. Hello everyone, I'm Willie Coffey, MSP for Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley. I'm Barry Cathy, member of the Royal Community Council in South Lanarkshire. Good morning everybody, I'm Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian region. Good morning, I'm Remyck Meir, I'm a representative in the Clydebank and Magai constituency. Hi, I'm Deborah Duke, I'm a community council liaison officer at Murray, but I spent five years as a parish clerk in England, so I've got some experience with two systems. Do you want to introduce yourself? Hello, my name is Shane McLeod, I'm vice-chair of the association of community councils here in Shetland. I'm also vice-chair of the electric community council, which is one of the 18 community councils that serve here in Shetland. Thank you. Bill? Yes, hi, and thanks for inviting me to come on. My name is Bill Pitt and I'm the chairman of the new Abaddawar, high-ray and penning community council. Good morning, my name is Yurt McCoslin, I'm the treasurer of Telekutry Cognotton and Devonside community council, one of nine community councils in Corkman and Shatter. Great, good, and we'll come back into the room, Steve. Yep, Steve Kerr, I'm the chair of the Edinburgh Association of community councils, I chair my local community council at Kirsdorffan and many years ago I was part of the Macintosh commission, which looked at the reform of community councils. Good morning everybody, I'm Alasdair Kennedy, I chair Elgin community council and I also chair the joint community councils of Murray, which is the overarching body that we spoke about. Mark Griffin, MSP for the Central Scotland region. Donald Stavart, treasurer of the joint forum of community councils in West Lothian. I'm also a treasurer of Bathgate community councils where I live. Okay, thank you very much, we're not going to introduce the clerks, but they're here and they're really important. We heard so much about the importance of support and administration and this committee would not function without those people helping us to keep us on track and doing that work. I'm going to kick off with the same question that I asked in the first panel, which would be interesting to hear your reflections on the strengths of community councils and we've heard examples of the role that community councils in some areas in Scotland were able to take during the Covid pandemic and I think we heard from, I think it might have been Emma in the previous panel, that's a demonstration of an aspect of resilience, but also work being done during the cost of living crisis. And so, bridge to the here, what's happening in your local areas around that. So, if anyone, I'll just throw that out and just indicate if you want to come in. Thanks very much. I suppose quite a few things that I'm going to say are critical, so I'll perhaps start with some positives and focus particularly on the strengths. That's what we're going for in this one. In some senses, the lack of specificity about the strategy, responsibilities of community councils can be an advantage, because it provides the flexibility to respond in quite varied ways to issues that the community are interested in. In Camberslang, we identified through quite a lot of community and business survey work about 10 years ago that the big issue was regeneration of the town at a time when there were big cutbacks the town centre manager had gone. And so, we were able to develop a joint regeneration strategy, bring in substantial amounts of funding in the millions, piloted the first banking hub in Scotland, established a charitable trust to create a cycle park, were involved in asset transfer, some green space. And my colleagues will want me to mention a murals project, which is up for a Scottish design award. But also, during Covid, we ran a food hub. What was that down to? Essentially, it was down to the capacity of a fairly small group of about six or eight people who were very committed and were prepared to put in a substantial amount of time. Crucially, as Oliver said, they had in various ways networks, both professionally and within the community, but some of them knew how things worked, in other words, how things worked within local authorities, how to write grant applications, how to lobby Scottish Governments and other bodies, how to build partnerships. Crucially also, a lot of the work was built on community engagement, particularly through, as I said, through survey work. What has also been really, really important is that over the last few years, there has been a change in terms of the local authorities' engagement, which historically has been variable, shall we say. But with the new leadership and the creation of a community engagement unit in the local authority and the piloting of local involvement by Cambuslang Rutherglen areas in the community planning partnership process, we're starting to see quite significant change still early days, in some respects, but that has been really, really important, that shift in what has sometimes perhaps even often been an adversarial relationship with the local authority. It's also been invaluable to draw on some of the groups that we heard from this morning in terms of the improvement trust and the Scottish Community Council's initiative and the SCDC in terms of guidance and advice. So, that's all positive, perhaps comes to the downside. That was fantastic, great. Thank you very much. That's the kind of things that we want to hear, tremendous. Anybody else want to come in, Steve? It goes to some of the conversation that took place earlier on about diversity and involving members of the community being representative. The Scottish Government's matrix for placemaking, in which the City Council and Edinburgh have used on at least three occasions that I know of, including with my own community council in Crestorfen, and using this matrix to test those services, those elements in the environment that members of the community feel particularly attached to or important, those things that they feel are deficient. Working with the City Council, we were able to use that matrix and the advantage, the spin-off advantage, I think, for me was that we reached out to members of the community who were keen to be active and just needed to be encouraged to know a bit about the community council, what it did, actually started playing into seeing if they could give us some of their time. It was good for the council as well, because they actually then were able to, in my area, were able to focus on those things that people were seeing as issues and those things that were valued and needed to be protected. I think that that, as a planning tool, is tremendously helpful and actually helps with diversity inclusion. For my community council, we were able to use the co-opting facility to bring people on to the community council, who came along to workshops, who came along, who expressed interest in online and being involved, and that meant that there was a change in the gender ethnicity and the age demographic of the community council going forward. That was invaluable in terms of making sure that we looked representative for the community that we were representing. Thanks very much for that. That is an example of a useful tool that the Scottish Government has, is matrix replace making. Anybody else? Donald? Talking about what happened during Covid, in West Lothian there was a real mix of approaches, because quite a few organisations already set up in terms of providing food to people, disadvantaged people. The local council put together a food network, which covered most of West Lothian. Quite a few community councils were involved in providing food and distributing food. A lot of local emergency committees, volunteers sprung up as well, and community councils were feeding them with information from local authority, et cetera. There was a real matrix support there, and community councils were involved in lots of different ways. Our forum principally dealt with spreading information through all the myriad of Facebook pages that we have on West Lothian, so that it was getting out to the community as well. That was tremendous. Alistair, have you got anything about strength from the Murray perspective? One of the strengths of the joint community councils is particularly for myself. I am very active in the community, I am involved in lots of other things, and one of the strengths is drawing people and organisations together. We have found over the years that it is a great forum for exchanging information, and it is also a great forum for lobbying. I remember a few years ago there was a particular problem with one of the roads, and because all the community councils came together and lobbied to have it changed, we got it changed, so there is strength in a collective, in my view. I was just going to say about resilience groups. Building on the work that community councils did during Covid, Murray and Aberdeenshire area was particularly bad hit in storms in the last few years, so community resilience groups have been quite important to get the communication from the ground level up towards emergency planning and to the emergency response parts of Murray and Grampian area. It has basically been set up through community councils. The community resilience group will be a subgroup of a community council, but that has then had wider membership, so a lot of the members on a community resilience group are not community councillors. They are interested in that particular area, so, as you said, increasing the diversity, getting that knowledge of people who have particular skills or knowledge but do not necessarily want to be involved in the full community council business. That has been quite useful, and they have drawn down a lot of funding from the SSESEN resilience communities thing. That has been supported by Murray council through the community support unit, which I am part of that team, rather than being in democratic services. How community councils are supported in Scotland is sort of done differently in every local authority as well, so that's quite interesting. Thanks very much for that. Anybody online want to come in on the perspective of strengths? No, nothing to add. No strengths, gosh. That's all right. I'm going to weave my next two questions together, and I think we've started to touch on them a little bit, but I would be interested to hear on your views around the support that you receive from local authorities, where you are, are the good relationships, and also your views on the community council liaison officer, but also your views on national support. Is there enough training, grants from the Scottish Government, support from the improvement service, and also your thoughts around the Scottish community council website and the knowledge hub? A couple of things are working with the local authorities, but also that national support. We've got some people in the room who you'll be commenting on, but I'm sure all food feedback is constructive, isn't it? It all helps us to develop in a good way. Anyone want to pick that up? Alistair. I need to be very careful here, because my CCLO is sitting across from me. Deborah works very hard, but she's only part-time, and she struggles to do the work that she needs to do, so there is a problem. I don't know if it's replicated across the whole of Scotland or not, but there's certainly a problem with support. We spoke about the relationship with the local authority. I've been at this for about 20 years, and the relationship with the local authority in our area has changed radically over that 20 years and has improved greatly. There are still areas where it could be improved yet, but overall it's become much more positive, so I think that's probably a positive on both sides. Is there anything specific that you've seen that's changed, that's brought about that positive change in relationship? A few iterations ago, the local development plan, we were given something like, I forget, three weeks or something to comment on a document of that size, so we just said, well no, you really need to stop and think again, so to be fair to the team that did the stop, and they're now held up as one of the best at engagement in the Murray Council, so they're really heeded what was needed, and they're kind of heard that as an exemplar in another area. So I think community councils maybe have a role in that respect as well, just to say, hold on, you need to listen to us and be quite forceful about it. Great, thanks very much. Just before we move on, yes, I live in Murray and I've had that tremendous experience on the already very early engagement on this next local development plan, I think it's been really tremendous. Bill, you wanted to come in. Yes, thank you. You know, we look at this, a relationship with Aberdeenshire Council and particularly our area, particular area of Troop and Banff and Bucking, and that the relationship I think with the local council is very, very important. I mean, we don't, as a community council, work within a vacuum. We work very closely with Aberdeenshire Council, and I think it's one that it's a two-way straight. We need the council as much as possible, and we appreciate and respect their assistance, you know, whether it's individual departments within the council and so forth, but I think it's a relationship with community councils that Aberdeenshire Council and local authorities need community councils. We're the eyes and the ears for the local authority, and I think it's very important for community councils to work with the local authority in identifying particular funds that might be available to identify solutions that we can work together on, so I really, I feel that working closely with local authority is the most important thing that we can do, because I think they have the expertise, the points in certain directions that we might need some guidance on, so, and then another thing that we see evolving with our community council, and I'm sure other community councils, is the responsibility of community councils seems beginning larger, and particularly in regards to assets and asset transfers with the local authorities and the budget constraints that they're under, but in the same way, they hold lots of property, and these properties are slowly but surely being liquidated, and, you know, these properties don't go away. What happens to these properties? Well, these properties are within our communities, and our communities don't want to see redundant properties from local authorities lay a waste, so we're seeing a growth in asset transfer, and which is a challenge for community councils, because now we have an opportunity to receive this asset, which is fine, but what do we do with this asset, and how do we continue to utilize this asset in a big way, in an important way, in a beneficial way to the community, so that's a big responsibility that we're seeing, and so it's a challenge and also a strength, but in doing those transfers and looking at those, it's again cherishing the relationship that you can build with the council because I think they want to see those assets used in a positive way, but how do we as a community council fund and make those assets positive again, so that would be just two things that I wanted to present. Thanks very much, Bill. I'm going to go to Shane online and then we'll come to John in the room. Thank you very much there. Up here in Shetland, as I said, I'm part of one of 18 local community councils, and each one of us has a great representation with our main council area. As a community council, we always get core funding each year, which is given to our disposal, and we work with different community groups around our different areas to fund different projects that they have. Also, the responsibilities that were given here in Shetland, in our local areas, such as the Lyric community council that I sit on, we have the ability to look at planning applications and various licensing applications as well. The main council gives us the representation to go ahead and look after our own little areas, and they can trust us to go ahead and do that. Trust, I believe, is a big part of the community council and also working with the main council as well, which is something that's very much needed. Thanks very much for that. John, then Steve, then Ewert and then Donald. Thank you. I mentioned earlier that we've done a survey of the 34 community councils in South Lanarkshire, and I'm not speaking on behalf of them, but just to draw out some of the key points from that work. I think that there are three key issues in terms of particularly the relationship with the local authority. One was in terms of culture and mindset. To take a negative example, in the past, a typical approach to something, say, to a draft local development plan was to put it out online for consultation and ask for responses, which is incredibly challenging given the complexity of something like a local development plan. I know in other areas the local authority went out systematically and met with community councils and other groups. A more positive example response to the issue that was raised this morning about the complexity of planning. Here, this may partly come out from the conclusions of our survey report, was that the local authority took the initiative to pilot some new guidance with our community council? How is it that you, as a community council, respond to planning applications? What are the questions that you ask? What are the issues that you struggle with? What toolkit would be helpful from that? A new toolkit was developed to support community councils, and it was revised in response to feedback. That was a really positive way of addressing the issue that came up this morning. A second issue, and this has been mentioned frequently in terms of its capacity, and I think what we find, we lack, is some really quite simple things in some respects. One is maybe an annual training day or training session for new community council members, which I know exists in some areas, a chance for them to meet others. A second is a portal, a one-stop for advice, although that is available at national level, but doing it regionally or at local authority level would be helpful. Another aspect is forum or fora to share experience and collaborate, and it is really interesting to hear from some colleagues here that that exists. The final issue is a course that of resources and particularly community engagement. It was perhaps something of a gender paradox, and it was interesting what you were saying, Steve, about when we put out surveys and consultations, we find that the majority of people are responding in women, sometimes like two thirds, one third. When it comes to membership or interest in membership of the community council, it is the reverse, although at the moment we are reasonably gender balanced, but we have quite a higher attrition rate, particularly, and this is not unique to community councils, of issues with caring responsibilities, getting in the way and taking understandably priority. I absolutely agree with all of us points about looking at how funding could remove certain barriers, and somebody asked earlier about, or mentioned, asked earlier, what is the administrative grant that community councils get? In our case it is £500. I think Portobello did some research a few years ago where they looked at the funding for community councils, and there was quite significant rural urban divide that, on a per capita basis, Highland, the islands, Dumfries, Galloway, were better resourced on a per capita basis than the urban community councils in the central belt. That's very interesting. Steve? Yes, thanks. Just picking up on John's point, during the work of the Macintosh commission, we went to every council area in Scotland and met with community councils en masse in each of the areas, and it was quite telling the difference in appreciation from the local authorities with regard to community councils in rural areas than there was in urban areas. There was quite a marked difference in the way that they engaged in the appreciation level, I think, possibly for community councils in rural areas, so I would endorse what John is and others have said. Using an example, City of Edinburgh Council, there was an audit Scotland report that was done a little while ago, which looked at their community engagement and how effective that was. The report was highly critical, and as a result of that, we started a dialogue with senior city council officers that were designated to work with us on a reform agenda. That reform agenda has been on-going. We have talked about pushing back the election date—I think that we will probably talk about elections potentially—to allow for changes to where there is the possibility to extend role and responsibility for community councils. Having that as a compelling element to going out to the local and looking to recruit for community councillors after the next community council elections. The report that the audit Scotland conducted was critical not only of the structures that have been put in place, but of the structures that have been strengthened, and the council has been going through a change to accommodate that. Fundamentally, we have a limited category of powers being consulted on planning and licensing. Effectively, that has not been happening properly across the city. I am very much somebody who believes in reform and rebuilding, and we will probably come on to that later on as well. I definitely think that there are some fundamental changes that need to be made for community councils to flourish and to be the organisations that we want them to be. Thanks very much, Steve. Then we are going to go to Uart online and then Donald in the room. I think that, as a community council, we are reasonably successful in terms of community consultation. We are very lucky that we have only five and a half thousand people in a relatively small area. We already have a place plan ahead of schedule, and we have a good record in terms of modern technology and the use of the survey monkey and stuff. It is not my field of expertise, but we use those modern tools and we can speak to the community fairly quickly. Where we do—I am going to throw the wobbly in the councils parade, perhaps—it is all very well for the Scottish Government or any Government to come up with community empowerment legislation, community asset register and participation requests. However, our experience has been uniformly negative. We were mentioned earlier about underutilised participation requests, for instance. We put two in, both of which were handled lamentably and demonstrated a consistent or a category refusal to engage. That is our position at the moment in respect of that. The only other thing that I would like to mention is that, in terms of the fitness for purpose of community councils, if we do not manage the change, it will not necessarily stay there. It will not happen anyway. That is what has been happening here. We have nine community councils, as I mentioned, six of whom have now got development trusts in place because the council has been moving away from the operation of community centres largely. I can see the next move, which involves taking traditional activities of community councils such as running galas and community events. That is now moving into the development trust control. What will happen over time remains to be seen because this is all recent activity. We will have a situation in which a lot of that type of stuff will move to development trusts, leaving the traditional community councils only with the statutory stuff. Will that be enough to encourage people to allow the community to populate the two elements? Again, time will tell. I was reassured in the early stages of the development control idealisation that it would not make any difference until we had the community council elections and two of the community councils could not get enough members. Whether that is to do with populating two different agencies or with the same people or not, it may be that some form of a hybrid community arrangement is called for that. It allows for all of this type of activity to keep legitimacy in terms of the election process and to allow the local community activity to carry on. I have questions on working with the local authorities and or for reflections on the support that you get on national level. Donald, do you want to come in on that? Yes, thank you. We exist as a forum because Westland Council encouraged us as community councils to discuss it and responded to our request from one community council. It made it as easy as possible to give us all the facilities to come together. Once we had come together and decided that we wanted a joint forum in community councils, they set about recognising us and passed the report through council. We were invited to send representatives to all their scrutiny and policy development committees. We were also invited to send a rep to our community planning partnership, which is what we do and we still do to this day. They also invited us into the view of the community council scheme. We were part and part of the working party that reviewed it recently. It was only about 18 months ago before the elections took place last year. We have a very good relationship with them and the chief exec sets out two formal meetings a year with the joint forum to talk through issues that are relevant to both parties. At Disney Stop, despite having good relations with the council and the councillors, we still offer constructive criticism. For instance, we are never terribly pleased with their consultation processes for issues in West Lothian. We always argue that it should be much more local rather than West Lothian wide. We get towns like Bathgate that are not happy with a 20-mile-an-hour regime, and buildings like Catlison that are desperate for a 20-mile-an-hour regime, but we had a West Lothian consultation. We make sure that our voice is heard on that. We are very much in favour of that. They encouraged us to think about the future and I am hoping that we can come on to looking at the future because in West Lothian, we have some ideas about that. One of the things that has been a big influence recently has been the access to town centre funds, because many community councils in West Lothian spotted this and went, open the window, let's get in there and take what we can. Most community councils have had three rounds of town centre funds and a lot of us have done stuff with it, which has been useful and well received locally. That transformed us because we are organisations that exist on a few hundred pounds. The forum exists on a thousand pounds a year. The smallest community councils in West Lothian get 250. With Bathgate, where I come from, we are the biggest community council, our entire budget is £1,700. We spend £1,400 on a secretary. That is one of the reasons why we have kept active and become very active is that that administration is done for us by a person who takes very little for it. That is where we are in terms of support. We exist because the council wanted to bring it forward. They thought that it would be a good thing to have a much more joint representative body. We have responded accordingly. We have also formed forums for specific subjects such as transport and environment and police and planning. We will find people on community councils who are very interested in transport, but nobody else in that community council is too bothered about that. We can find kindred spirits in West Lothian's VR forums and raise big important issues on those subjects. That sounds a very constructive approach to have those specialist groups. I am heartened to hear that West Lothian encouraged the formation of the forum and resourced it to some extent. That is interesting, isn't it? The town centre funds is one of the things that I notice. There are often pockets of money around, but it is having somebody who notices that we can access that. I want to mention the improvement service, which has been very helpful for us. It has been our unofficial advisers for the past year and a half. We had such a good relationship with them that we put in a bid for an IT system called Consul, which you may have heard of. Basically, quite a lot of councils are using it. We wanted to use the system to get ideas from the communities that we represent and to be able to get those communities to determine whether they were supported ideas through a voting forum, etc. We need a new football pitch. We should have one here. What does everybody think about it? Everybody at YouTube supports it. We put in a bid to invest in communities fund. We helped by West Lothian Council, who gave us a lot of technical advice on it. I think that it was because West Lothian wanted us to have access to Consul, but not their particular Betty Consul in case he got messed up. Unfortunately, it was not successful, but that was the sort of help and support that we have had from the improvement service on those issues. That is very good to hear. I just want to check, Barry. Do you want to come in? I think that it is important that we have a bond with the council because it gives that trust to people who come to the meetings as normal residents and have a voice to say what they think in their community. The councils that attend are always helpful, giving advice and a mission from their officials to us on the community council. Moving things forward, if there is an issue that we can deal with with the council on our meetings, that is great. It gives us a chance to people who might think that two councils are something that is just not known, but people come along and know that they are there. They come across their opinions to say that there is no need to be fixed here and there. People think that two councils are only small groups that meet up and do nothing for the community to sit and talk. In reality, it is worth doing behind the scenes to improve the communities that we are living in. It is important to give that a bond between the council and ourselves to give that trust to the community and people who have come along. See the end and go on the ins and outs of what we do for the communities. It is vital that others will think that more mill councillors in the area should attend the meetings as well to see if there are certain words. People might come from one area to another to see the council, but I assure you that they are not there. It is important to give that message across so that no matter who is there or who is not there, you are concerned to be voiced and taken upon by the council. It is important that it is more wider and spread to people who have come wrong from anywhere in the rough area. See how it works. I think that that is really important. I thought that all councillors had to go to community council meetings. Certainly the ones that I know in my region do. I am going to move on and bring in Ivan. I am mindful of time. I feel that we could do with many more hours than we do because we are all sharing already such rich things. I also want to say that we do not necessarily assume that we will get on to the thing that you want to bring in. If you have the mic, say it then. A colleague might have a question that you might already answer, but that is fine. We know about that kind of thing. Ivan. The area that I wanted to touch on and get your perspective on was round about community councils' relationship and working with other community groups, third sector groups in your area. Development trusts in New York have already mentioned that, perhaps not in the most positive way, so I would be interested to explore that and understand that a wee bit further, anchor organisations such as housing associations, etc., that make up the tapestry and ecosystem of organisations that are working together locally to further the community. I do not know if anyone wants to start off on that. I cannot speak about development trusts, but I can speak about some of the groups that JCC and Murray have set up. We have set up a few subgroups. We have at the moment a safer travel group with another one on road safety. We have got quite a few of these. I also set up a community participatory budgeting group some years ago. It has been really successful. In fact, I think that Dr Esgibar touched on it this morning. We have now done seven exercises, learning about each time, and each time being very successful. We have just started a new one where we have got half a million quid to disseminate. Having that overarching body allows, I suppose—what is the word I am looking for? It spreads the work and spreads the effort. Something that was touched on this morning was that people have full-time jobs a lot of the time. They get all this stuff thrown at them in a community council. How many hours can you really spend if you have got a full-time job on these things? Some of these rural community councils have probably got six or seven members. I just think that is ludicrous. How much work can six or seven people do at part time? Whereas in Elgin, we are a bit luckier, we have got up to 18 members. We have set up a committee system, and that spreads the work quite substantially. To expect six or seven people to do what is expected of them in the time that is allowed, I just think that it is unfair on people. I am going to bring in your online, and then Steve, did you indicate? I have gone along with what has just been said, having put the new bus timetables up this morning and going this afternoon to plant up the barrels in the town centre. There are a lot of circles on people who do not see, but all I wanted to do was just to clarify any negativity that may have come across in respect of the development trust model because what I am seeing here is that we do not have a development trust model until we could try, but what I am seeing here in other areas in the county is that it is largely entirely positive that the community centres are being taken over by development trusts and operated, at least as well, or perhaps they would probably argue better than had been done before. So I am quite impressed with what is going on, and this change may be something that we should welcome and organise. In community councils in Edinburgh we have an opportunity, and I chair the North West Locality Community Planning Partnership. There is an opportunity to be involved in strategic decisions that are made for that part of the city, and there is different planning partnerships across the city. I also chair the Western Neighbourhood Network, and the principal role that we have is the administration of community grant funding. So we can identify community grant opportunities, organisations, individuals who have projects that are merititious and they are benefiting the community, something like £40,000 for the Western Neighbourhood Network to be administered annually. I think that in terms of engagement in all of those fora, the third sector, we work collaboratively with the representatives, so there is definitely good work in relations with other voluntary sector organisations. I would agree that in terms of time it is challenging. I also represent the Edinburgh Association of Community Councils on the partnership board. Those meetings are held during the day. I have to get time to go in and attend those meetings, but that is an opportunity for community councils to be represented at the most strategic level across the city, so it is important that we are there. Some of that, I will be honest, is challenging. Since I have got the mic and you were suggesting that I should put on record my strong feelings, I feel passionately that we talked about reform and rebuild, having been involved in Macintosh commission's work, the recommendations that were approved by COSLA and the Scottish Parliament. The subsequent years have not actually made significant change to community councils, and many of the recommendations that were made have not actually been implemented. I do believe that we need to go back to the drawing board quite frankly. I think that we need to go back to the 73 act, free up some of those opportunities that are the restrictions that were placed on community councils in the act. I think that the things that are important are any change or reform for community councils needs to be with compulsion. Relying on local authorities across Scotland to implement change and reform individually is optimistic, so I think that there needs to be some sort of elements of compulsion in terms of the reform for community councils, if we are going to reform community councils. I think that the changes need to be compelling. Community councils struggle for membership often. Yes, people are self-selecting often times, but if you did not have those individuals, a lot of community councils would really struggle quite honestly to do what they do. In terms of diversity and inclusion, making sure that we are reaching out and representative of the communities, you need to have a compelling offer. Quite frankly, I do not think that we really have that at the moment. I think that that needs to be improved on, but I think that we need to go back to the source material. I think that we need to look at the 73 act and make those changes. It does not need to be a new bill being introduced. I think that the Secretary of Legislation could cover that. If we are not going to change things in our 50th year, I am somebody who builds in reform where we build. If it is not something that is generally appreciated or desired, then maybe we are actually at rebuild and looking at that. Can I just ask you on that one before I bring others in on the reform and rebuild piece? Something that has been coming in my mind is what Emma talked about in the previous panel that community councils are unincorporated and that causes some difficulties. Do you think that we need to move to incorporated? My understanding is that possibly some of the reason we have ended up with development trusts is because community councils did not have some of those powers and those abilities. Absolutely. It goes to my colleague's point about community asset transfer. We can be involved locally. We could be involved in agitating for a community asset transfer for a community centre, which we did and we represented at the community council, but we cannot actually be physically involved in that. That is an inhibitor, quite honestly. That would be something that is appreciated by the community. We could be at the forefront of that. We have a co-ordinating role, but it is not, I do not think, as widely appreciated as it might be. I should have said about association of community councils. Association of community councils having a body. I cannot think of any body that exists in statute in Scotland that does not have a national body that can engage with its peer group. We are unique in that. When the Macintosh commission was doing its work, I specifically referenced the association of community councils in its report and I also endorsed the idea of having associations for areas that would feed into that, such as the AACC and West Lodian. That patchwork needs attention. Dr Esbar took most of my best lines, quite frankly, so I do not want to go over what he said, but I am completely in accord with his oppressive of where we sit with community councils. That was really helpful. We are going to move to John, Deborah and Bill online. Thanks. I will answer your question first, Chair, on relations with other community bodies. We find that it tends to be bilateral and issue-specific, but the establishment of a Camslang-Rutherglen community planning partnership group to feed into the board we found has been really helpful because it has brought together housing associations, development trusts and others, and also the key services. That has been really good for knowledge sharing, but also in terms of practical steps forward. At the last one we had last week, the issue of vaping, problems with vaping products came up. Initially, in terms of the environmental problem, but then it led into discussion of the health issues, recycling problems, and that, in turn, brought a number of practical ideas that we could take forward. I would agree with Steve about compulsion in terms of the direction of local authorities, but there might also be other ways of highlighting good practice. When Donald was talking about West Lothian, I thought, this is amazing. Some of the outreach and the consultative approach, I think that recognising what local authorities are doing well in this area would be really, really helpful. I'm just taking the advantage of your offer, Chair. I don't know to what extent other people, other community councils are having a problem with insurance cover, but we've just found that our local authorities have withdrawn insurance cover for anything other than having meetings, pretty much, and coffee mornings. We've got a group of cleaning up Camperslang with about 600 members. For some, we're finding litter picking isn't covered. Camperslang in bloom is not covered, and this is a big issue going backwards and forwards. Unfortunately, we've got a couple of insurance experts on our community council, but I don't know if that's a universal problem, but perhaps you can get back to me afterwards if you don't want to hold on. Well, it's fine. I think that that's the kind of thing that, what are the barriers and blocks to communities being able to actually, community councils, actually doing things. That becomes a kind of a absurd thing if you can't have your litter pick and have your beautiful blooms. I know we have forests in bloom in Murray and it's an incredible asset to the community, so thanks for throwing that into the conversation. Deborah, you wanted to come in. It was just saying about working with other community groups. You'll find that a lot of community councillors are on other community groups as well, so there is essentially good relationships because they can feed in from the groups that they already sit on, but that equally then spreads themselves quite thinly. They have a lot of time, which is used up on a lot of the work. You mentioned about Emma talking about being an unincorporated group. Parish councils in England are actually a local authority in statute, so that makes a big difference. They are recognised as a local authority, and that's how they have their tax-raising powers. Jackie Weaver had mentioned about 25 years ago that Parish councils started taking on really using their tax-raising powers to then take part in their communities and do more work, but a big thing that really changed, I think, in England was the professionalisation of parish clerks. They've always had to employ a parish clerk and a responsible finance officer to work with them, but it's now an actual professional job. It's got its own parish clerks of their own organisation, their own union, the Society for Local Councils clerks, and they've got their own qualification, so the certificate in local council administration. When I started working as a parish clerk, they needed me to do that qualification because they needed a qualified parish clerk to then be able to get more powers under the localism Act 2011. If I hadn't got that qualification, they couldn't do certain things. Having that professional person supporting parish councils as well as having the county association and the national associations is, I think, fundamental, and it really does help with the governance. A big thing I want to support the community councils in Murray is having strong governance behind them, so they've got good governance documents, they've got good working practices, but community councils are elected and they volunteer their time and trying to make it clear that they've got to do a lot of training, they've got to do a lot of work to clerk a meeting properly, to do the administration behind it, and it feels quite unfair trying to make the community councillors do that work, but they really do need those governance and practices behind them to strengthen them. Then, as Alistair said, I work 20 hours a week. I've got 17 established community councils, but I could have 20. I'm just firefighting as well. I can't put that support in place to really support them going forwards. Emma delivered a brilliant session to the North East Alliance of Community Council Liaison Officers last year for social media training, and I haven't had time to deliver that to then Murray councils. It was a train-the-trainer session, but I haven't then passed that training on. Everyone's quite stretched, everyone hasn't got enough time or resources, but I think if community councils had more resources with them that they could employ a secretary that really would strengthen their ability to carry out the work that they need to do. Thanks for that. There's something else about clerking teams being the kind of institutional not memory of things and documenting and making sure that things get represented. This needs to be considered, that kind of thing, absolutely. I think Donald, you wanted to come in and then we'll move on to questions from Willie. Just answering the question about working with other organisations. Exactly the same, you find that community councillors are involved with other organisations, and other organisations where people are too busy to come anywhere near the community council still have good relationships with us. In Bathgate, for instance, we got to the situation where we decided with local elected members that we needed a wider organisation where everybody was represented to coordinate and keep people abreast of what was going on, because people were applying for funds here and everywhere. We formed, along with the councillors, Bathgate together. We've now got 40 organisations coming together on a monthly basis at the moment. I think it's too much, but never mind. It's monthly, and it's everything from friends of the parks groups to the local business improvement district, to the churches, to the local bands, to some of the shopkeepers, etc. Coming together and thrashing through where do we want to see Bathgate go in the future. We think it's going to be a good basis of putting together some sort of place plan for Bathgate. Incidentally, place plans is a good idea, and encouraging community councillors to do it is a good idea. It just was unfortunate that there's no money associated with it, so we're doing our best to try and do it on a shoestring. In terms of responding to some of the things that Steve said about getting your aura in, as you said, when I don't think he used those phrases. In Westlothian, we got excited when Democracy Matters was on the go in 2019, and we had a big conference of all community councillors in Westlothian. We were talking to the local authority at the time who were making submissions to the joint cause of the Scottish Government initiatives. They were quite clear that they thought that community councillors didn't want to invent any new local body, so community councils might be something that could be reinvented or reformed, but they wouldn't come across with any ideas, because they wanted to move at the same pace as everybody else in Scotland. We set about having a discussion, and we came up with what we saw as a blueprint for the community councillor of the future. That was endorsed by all the community councillors. We formed a blueprint. I think I've circulated it. I hope that members of the committee will be able to get it from the clerk afterwards. We put a proposal forward for plans. We put a proposal forward for resources and powers. We described how we thought community councillors could be more representative and democratic, taking advantage of this reform process, and we also spoke about what we'd need to take this blueprint to life. One of the things we wanted to do then was have a Scottish conference, but of course Covid came along and destroyed everything. We are now resurrecting our blueprint, and we are inviting all community councillors in Scotland to a conference, an online conference, because we are admin grants that we couldn't afford to travel to an online conference on 10 June in the morning. We're putting that idea forward, but looking for other ideas from people we don't think ours is the only idea. We also, in our invite, asked people what they thought about having a Scottish forum at community councils. The overwhelming 90 per cent response at the moment is yes, and people have been suggesting topics that we could discuss at Scottish level. I think that that will be one of the outcomes of the conference, is that we end up trying to organise a Scottish forum. That sounds fantastic. Sorry, Willie. I kind of set you up, but I skipped over Bill. Bill, do you want to come in? Yes, thank you. I just, in listening to some of the other community councillors speak about budgets and that sort of thing, I kind of looked at it as being a return on investment and what community councils are paid, whether it be admin grants or what are the vehicles that they're paid to operate. You look at those numbers and you look at, I heard earlier in the previous panel, there's something in the neighbourhood of 1200 different community councils in Scotland. If you look at a budget at admin grants that are received by these community councils, from the local authority, perhaps you're looking on the high end, maybe of a thousand pounds. You're looking at 1,200,000 pounds of public money that is used to fund community councils throughout all of Scotland. How little bit of money that is, but how much Scotland gains and communities gain in this very, very small investment. Clearly, if there is a look at either more powers or more, whatever it might be, the future may bring to community councils, you can imagine what serious funding, with serious funding to community councils, what that return on investment might be. That's just one thing I wanted to kind of bring forward. A gentleman earlier mentioned about a community council receiving 250 pounds a year. In the scheme of things and what the Scottish Government spends and the UK Government spends 250 pounds a year is really a travesting. What that particular community council gives back is I don't know how many fold over, but I just wanted to bring that point up. I guess the other point I wanted to make was it's in relation to return on investment and how these community councils can operate fiscally going forward with these asset transfers and other responsibilities that have evolved with community councils. The workload that's increased is how can we, with a 1,000 pound year grants, how can we really operate effectively when we can't? So we have to look at alternative methods, alternative sources of funding. I think that would be very helpful to community councils that there can be some avenue, some vehicle that can be accessed. I know there's a lot of different funds out there for a lot of different things, but maybe if there's a particular fund that can be developed, whether it be sourced from wind turbine farms that are being built offshore, but that these community councils would have access based on particular projects that they want to build or develop, they would have access to that particular funding. The overall funding to community councils could still relatively remain low, but if we had this bank out there, this bank that we could go to and access investment funds for our communities, I think that would be something that I would like to bring to the table for consideration for MSPs today. Thanks very much for that, Bill. Actually, that's something that I have been wondering about. Do community councils need the right to invest? Do you have the right to invest or would you need that power? Well, regarding me, I'm not sure what, I don't know if that's in our remit to invest or how that actually works. I think it's probably all community councils work a little bit differently. That's what I've noticed today is there's no to saying similar community councils in the way that the obligations that they have and trying to source funds and so forth, but I think the challenge is, we can't operate with a thousand pound budget. We really can't, but we can operate with access to specific funding that, again, not a land bank per se, but a bank of some sort, lack for a better word bank, that we could go to. If the project is identified as being being viable and good for the community, then that particular community council is awarded that particular amount of funds. It's just something I wanted to throw out as a possibility. You can just imagine, again, with 1,200,000 pounds, what Scotland gets for that. Can you imagine if there was more funding available, what Scotland would get in return? I think we hear that point loud and clear. I think what I'm picking up is maybe some kind of community fund coming out of Scotland that's a potential thing. Willie, over to you. Thanks very much, convener. I think I'll probably just ask one question given the time we have remaining, convener, and it's really about how the community councils reach out to the whole community to get their views. Now, I'm conscious I've got Cambuslang and Rutherglen on either end of me here, so I've got to be careful what I say, but some of the critical voices that come out of the local governance review described community councils as unrepresentative, ineffective, reactive, self-interested and clicky. Now, we've heard the exact opposite of that today from the engagement that you guys are actually having with your communities and some of the IT and social media reach-outs were pretty impressive, but I wonder if I could just ask for a couple of views on how you improve and better your engagement with the local community, particularly to reach out to younger people and perhaps minority communities as well. I'd value just one or two contributions on that subject, if I may, convener. Steve, I see your hands up first. Yeah, so just to go on your last point first, in terms of young people, one of the things that we did with the community grant that we had was to ring fence money that young people could decide what they wanted to do in their area, so this neighbourhood network grant funding opportunity. We allocated £5,000 that was a project that they could submit, they could manage, but it was entirely, it was, it was hands-off basically, they met as a group and decided what priority was in their area. So finding a way to engage young people and to actually find what is, and you can have a perception about what is important to the, to young people and I think that that's, it's been an edifying experience and I think that local councillor found it particularly robust in the exchanges about what young people were hoping for in the area, so that was, that worked, that worked particularly well. In terms of reaching out to the community more generally, I think that you tend to, and it was something that Jackie Weaver, I think, said just at the end of her presentation, was that it tends to be people coming because they've got particular issues. So in the west of Edinburgh, for instance, it's about transport, it's about mobility, it's about house building and so forth and you get people coming forward in that way, so it tends to be episodic. I think that if I was being honest about the things that people really care about, we had things like cycleways, the mobility plan particularly in the city across Edinburgh is something that excites views either for or against and the community council has a role in terms of managing that and making sure people have the opportunity to express their views and community councils in the west have got to involve in that. So I think that it's recognising the importance of the particular issues that matter to the community and harnessing some of that enthusiasm and you get people coming forward to engage them. A few other people want to come in on this, so we'll go with Alistair and John, and just before we go, so time has been an issue, but you've answered actually a lot of the questions that we had, so I think what we'll do is we'll just go around on this engagement piece, but then I'll give a little bit of time at the end to just see if there's anything else that we really must hear, so Alistair. Well, as far as young people are concerned, engaging with the youngsters, we accessed 150,000 from the investment in communities fund two years ago and we gave 50,000 to the youngsters to run their own exercise and they were absolutely brilliant. I hope to achieve the same this time around and I'm hoping that we can, as a community council, we can then tap into that group of youngsters and twist their arms, I suppose, so that we can maybe get some of the youngsters onto their different community councils, so I'm hoping that that will be successful. The only trouble with youngsters, of course, is that they disappear to college or university, so you only have them there for a short period of time. They're like a breath of fresh air, you know, because they have a completely different perspective on things than we do. Planning, for example, is one, so I'm hoping that we can achieve something through this PB exercise. Sounds like a really tremendous thing because you're actually giving them the ability to have the agency to actually do something, so yep. Evetting the applications at first and they can back off holiday to do it. Brilliant, that's amazing. Brilliant, that's really excellent. Okay, we're going to go to John and then Barry and then... Yeah, quite some years ago we invited some people from the local youth centre to come along to a meeting. I think it was probably the most boring event experience in their lives, which is not surprising given some of the issues that we're discussing. But seriously, what we've done over the last few years is firstly engage with the local youth family learning services group, Universal Connections, to invite those on a community development degree course at Glasgow University to be involved in specific projects, which so it's like an internship for them where we've needed some work done, some community engagement or some analysis or some other project work. We've invited, we have a paid post for a minute secretary and for the last seven years that's always been a younger person or a young person which has been quite successful, but in general that our experience has been that involving younger people in specific projects has been most successful, particularly environmental projects. And we've had some schools partnerships which have been really good. Great, thank you very much. And Barry, you wanted to come in and then Shane online. I think it's important to young people because it gives them experience of how it works in the community councils, get them on involved in their community, bring them back to the community, like get involved in litter-picking projects, community events, things like that. I think else as well. If there is, like a shortage is maybe 18 or over, there is school, work into politics, community meetings, so it works, get experience and learn all about it. So I think it's important to young people involved because on my community council some only similar certain age over 30 or so. So this is young people 18 to 25 or 30 as well. So give us some experience of getting in the community. I also see some like how it involves the community, how it works, what's involved. You know, say, like our voice here in the community of young people because at the moment there's not much for them to get involved in in a way like not only voice of concerns, so if they come to meetings on their aspect, their voices are heard from their end, they can learn experience, bring some as well to the meetings, like things they know we don't know, all we know about, then bring experiences off to meetings and let training and stuff as well off how to get involved, how to become a community councillor when the time comes. Things over 18 to get elected, so it's good to get that done because it gives them, as I say, a voice and gives them an image where they can become better people in the community. People know, young people at the moment are just, you know, to cause trouble and stuff, but reality young people at the moment are more experienced than women. So giving them a chance to bring back to the community, people will see that they're all wanting to learn, wanting to engage in the community. We can become better people and improve the community as well, so it gives that aspect of, you know, bringing that, the bond as well with like young people, generations mixing as well, so it's good to see that. Yeah, I think that's a really important piece isn't it, the multi-generational relationships. Shane? Very similar tack to what Barry and John was saying that here in Shetland we had a drive through the community council that we invited a lot of young people and young organisations along to meetings and we also tapped into the member of the Scottish Youth Parliament who was a great help to us and over the course of two or three months where we had young people coming in expressing their own opinions and views on how, as a community council, there was a bit of a divide between the community council members themselves plus the younger generation. We have now, through the open project, a project that I'm a mentor with here in Shetland along with other community council members, there's a group of the younger generation that have now begun to set up their own board and what that entails is that they shall be getting their own committee and board up and running and they'll be specifically engaging with their own youth group and other members of the younger generation here in Shetland and liaison with the local community councils and the higher council in expressing their views on what could be done better and what things can be altered around Shetland to make it more supposed and environmentally friendly for everybody to get all the groups together and working together a lot better at the moment. That sounds great. It's an interesting thing. I have been racking my own mind around how to get young people engaged and I think there's a couple of things I'd be interested to hear but also I'm just going to open up because we're going to move to close and see if you don't have to necessarily respond to what I'm saying but there might be other things that you want to hear but one thought I had was around collaboration with the Duke of Edinburgh initiative because I think there's there's if people are going through Duke of Edinburgh I think there's a community aspect there but also I've been wondering about the whole idea and I know this would be a big thing that might go to the rebuilding aspect of maybe the whole of Scotland is the whole idea of universal basic income and that if there was because I think one of the things we've talked about is the amount of time that people have to put in to really be able to do this and I think I was thinking if the diversity of people actually had some kind of fundamental financial support then they would be able to participate much more in actually what we really need to be doing which is helping Scotland PLC do its thing and provide for our communities and along with that I've also been thinking about we've talked about improvement service does all this training once you're in a community council but I just wonder if we need to be at a high school level teaching young people around facilitation skills decision making proposal making how to kind of go into that space of tension where you're with people you don't agree with but to move through that process rather than getting stuck in that adversarial piece I feel like if we had that with teenagers learning those kinds of skills so skills that are my senses that school at the moment still tends to teach just to the job I mean not totally limited to that but just the job but if we taught to the community to be a member of community in civil society then you'd be great for your job but you would also have those underpinnings for for actually being part of the community so that's something that I've been racking my thoughts with but maybe you think about different things than I do because you're actually in those in those experiences so if anyone wants just to come in briefly Deborah handshot up there and then Steve one of the areas that was spoken about a lot earlier is planning support for community councils and it's not just how to respond or responding to you know very simple applications I think most of them are quite okay with that but it's the bigger applications the ones that have lots of technical details in space side community council last year in quick succession had some really big applications for new multings new biomass digesters and new woodlands and the capacity of them to read those documents and understand them so that they could then respond in the right way was was pretty much beyond them and you know it's not the community councils worked very hard and put in responses but they really needed some technical support on that and there wasn't necessarily the place to go which leads me on to like a national organisation I'm a massive fan of networking and I really think it does help with your workload it does actually reduce your workload to some extent if you're sharing ideas you're sharing documents if someone else has produced a document can you have a copy of it and then just tweak it to suit you it just makes it so much easier and then you can just keep talking to each other and the last thing you said about at school I used to be in a district council in democratic services and we did carry out local democracy week events at schools every October but again it's the time and resources and you know that would be brilliant I'd love to be able to go into schools and you know help show what community councils can do and talk about elections and things but I don't know who's got capacity really to do that but I like that idea of teaching to the community that yeah that would be fabulous thanks yeah great I think that's a really critical point around the technical support for planning as well Steve you wanted to come in yeah and I'll be very brief I promise it's a great believer international examples and it's part of the day job I cover in North America and the United States it's part of my role 2008 I was in an abama campaign office in Virginia and it was chocker with young people high school students who were manning phones and I assumed that it was because of the enthusiasm around the abama campaign at that time in 2008 but it was they were basically phoning people to get them to engage in voting voting reform or voting intent and it was part of graduating high school and this community engagement role was part of their they got credit for taking part in these types of activities and that was where that was the reason principle reason why they were there and it struck me that there was something to be said for actually having an element of high school curriculum which actually talks about to community engagement and about civic role quite frankly and maybe there's something in that that we could adopt anyway promise to beauty yeah I think that's a really great point um anything else that needs final words I think we've got everything donald just a quickie on the on the on the question about youth we recently the head teacher for a local bathgate academy is part and parcel of a big bathgate together group and she persuaded some of her senior pupils to come along and talk to us and give us some feedback of what they thought in the town and they had us right between the eyes basically they said there's nothing in bathgate for us nothing we go to limingston and it's expensive and you know it's not terribly friendly etc so it's nothing in bathgate and we we were really upset about this we've managed to get a local theatre who have carved out space for a youth cafe our local galley committee precession committee i've had discos for youths and we put a proposal to the three head teachers because our our kids are spread out amongst three different schools about a youth community council for the senior level they all come back said it was a great idea where people's were interested in just the wrong time in a year because we're studying for their exams so we're we're resurrecting it for the starting the next year and we're going to try to put together a youth council and if we're working in bathgate we're going to try and spread it across westlily but we really didn't have a clue what was going on with the with the youth who were very disaffected with their town that sounds tremendous did i hear somebody saying something Barry did you want to come in just thinking to say before the people at the moment there's a kind of gap in between directions but if you're involved in the community councils more often they can come they can learn and that way we know the experiences they've got from learning in school and also as well said by the youth council as well i think they're all more youth councils so that people encourage them to hang off their streets as well come into learning come out to the community and also people where we have politics they can come in learn about the councils how they work structure and then go from there maybe provide training as well to young people and from school onwards and see how that goes so maybe something like training for council worker councils or and that kind of aspect yeah so learning on the job in a way isn't it yeah that's great and john you wanted to come in yeah it's just a final point if that's okay yep just standing back i just wanted to personally encourage the committee in terms of going for significant reform because there is a real democratic deficit in my day job i work on regional local development across europe and we have virtually the poorest community development community empowerment and representation structures for that in in europe in terms of the absence of a community level of of influence we have towns of 10 20 50 000 people without any form of self-government that that should be a source of embarrassment to us as a sort of modern democratic european nation so i would really encourage the the committee in its work to think to think radically thank you very thank you very much for that encouragement and i yeah we do have this opportunity don't we with the local democracy bill coming forward and so i'm going to bring it to a close i clearly we could go on and discuss more i do want to say thank you for at least one of you mentioning community planning partnerships because we've just finished a piece of work which will be bring our report forward and obviously community councils play a role in that as well or should play a role more maybe than they do but thank you so much for joining us this morning this afternoon it is now i think it's been really useful and i'll just have i'll say happy birthday to all the community councils in scotland so we agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next items of the agenda in private so as that was the last public item for today and i'll close the public part of the meeting