Review of Community Council Scheme

[seanie]

The Council have recently launched a consultation on the rules surrounding Community Councils. It's not on the face of it the most engaging of consultations, but some might find it of interest.

http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/info/820/co ... councils/3

[seanie]

The proposed changes to the scheme seem good, if fairly minor, but there's an oddity in the scheme relating to Portobello that hasn't been picked up upon.

There is clearly an impetus to strengthen local communities and broaden participation in the decisions that affect people, and clearly as the most local form of representation Community Councils could have a valuable role in that. Whether there are statutory changes in the forthcoming Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill remains to be seen, but one clear outcome from the Scottish Government’s Community Council Short-Life Working Group was that as part of strengthening the role and relevance of Community Councils, with hopefully more engagement, there was a desire for contested elections.

But, at least when it comes to Portobello, the scheme as it stands militates against meaningful, contested elections.

I had raised a concern with Council Officials about the balance between elected and nominated members, suggesting it would be better to do without nominated members entirely, not assign voting rights, or at least reduce their numbers relative to elected members; my hope being that it would incentivise standing for election and increase the likelihood of contested elections. However, what I didn’t realise at the time was that my concerns were more specific to Portobello than Edinburgh as a whole. Of the 46 Community Councils in Edinburgh, 44 are assigned at least twice as many elected members as nominated members. The only exceptions are Queensferry and District, with 9 elected and 6 nominated, and Portobello.

Portobello is the only Community Council in Edinburgh that is assigned equal numbers of elected and nominated members under the Scheme; 15 elected and 15 nominated.

An equal split of elected and nominated members greatly reduces the likelihood of meaningful contested elections, and undermines claims of democratic accountability; nominated members can secure a place more or less in perpetuity, especially when the same people sit on multiple groups, and could easily outnumber elected members.

Why Portobello alone should be in such a situation isn’t clear.

[Pal of Porty]

I think it is actually crystal clear. Jobs for the boys and designed by the inner cartel to keep a grip on things.

[seanie]

There's more.

I had always assumed that the size of Community Councils, in terms of members allowed under the scheme, was related to population; having looked more closely, that isn’t the case.

The 2011 statistics, give the population of Edinburgh as 495,360. With a total possible allocation of 881 Community Councillors across the city, that works out at an average of around one Community Councillor per 560 head of population. Whilst I fully expected there to be variation, I thought it would be interesting to compare neighbouring areas to Portobello regarding the levels of representation allocated. For simplicity’s sake I looked at multi-member wards first, with statistics easily available from http://www.sns.gov.uk . Luckily, whilst multi-member wards aren’t always an exact match with Community Council boundaries, there was a very close fit with the following.

Straightaway you can see very different levels of representation, with far more Community Councillors allocated per head of population in Portobello/Craigmillar than both the city average and neighbouring wards.

However it’s also possible to look more closely at the Portobello Community Council area itself, using the relevant Data Zones. Again the Data Zones aren’t an exact match, but they are very close to the relevant boundaries. Portobello is covered by 14 such Data Zones, with one slightly overlapping into Northfield/Willowbrae, and the 2011 population for those areas is 12,221, less than half the population of the ward as a whole.

So even though the population of Portobello is smaller, it gets up to 30 Community Council members compared to only 24 in Craigmillar. Also contrast it to Liberton/Gilmerton where, across the ward, the allocation is close to 1 per 800 of population; in Portobello the ratio is almost 1 to 400.

The mismatch is absurd. The allocation of members to Portobello Community Council is grossly inflated, and again reduces the likelihood of having elections that are actually contested. In fact one sure way to avoid contested elections would be to increase places so much they’d never likely be filled.

It’s difficult to see any justification for the differences with Portobello, both in terms of total members and ratio of elected to nominated members. To bring it in to line with Edinburgh as a whole the number would need to be reduced from 30 to 21, with 14 elected and 7 nominated members. Not only would that be a simple matter of fairness, it would make the desired goal of contested elections far more likely.

Since the scheme is to be amended, now is surely the time to rectify anomalies such as this.

[Porty]

This makes total sense, Sean.