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Although I said that I would come to Shona Morrison first, I will pick up this question with Steven Heddle because it is relevant to what he was talking about. SLARC has stated that the role of a councillor should continue to be fulfilled part time, but from what Steven Heddle said—and Shona Morrison said previously—is that the appropriate description for the role?

I will pick up another question about barriers. We touched on it earlier in the session, but I am interested to understand a bit more detail on the evidence that you found about pay being a significant barrier to potential candidates, particularly women, people with disabilities, lone parents and young people.

I think that you were concluding there, Gordon. Your mic was not on.

I will pick up the point about tracking councillors performing their duties. That is interesting because, if you measure activity, somebody might not be that active, but they might be good at connecting the dots, finding a way through and coming up with a solution. It might not take them as long or they might not need to attend to as many things in order to do that. It is a very difficult thing to measure, is it not? It is quite challenging to measure the time that people spend showing up, supporting the community and finding solutions for issues to do with equalities, community empowerment or whatever it might be.

That makes sense.

I will introduce a new topic of pay and severance, and I will bring in Miles Briggs to cover that.

Good morning and welcome to the 17th meeting in 2024 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. Please note that apologies have been received from Mark Griffin and Stephanie Callaghan. I welcome Colin Beattie, who is attending as a substitute for Stephanie. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their electronic devices are on silent and that all notifications are turned off during the meeting.

The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take item 3 in private. Do members agree?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you for that clarification. It is helpful to get that. As you say, we do not have an understanding of how that was defined for 2005 and it is good to get clear what the public purse should be funding.

I am trying to frame my question. Much of what is included in the sample role outlines would have been familiar to councillors 20 or 30 years ago. I am interested to understand what councillors are doing now that they were not doing before. You have covered this to some degree, but is there anything else that you think they were not doing at the time of the last review in 2011, but are doing now? You have touched on quite a lot of things.

Thank you very much. We will turn to questions. We will operate your mics. We will direct our questions to Shona Morrison, who can then bring in Steven Heddle or Brianna Fletcher—that is the simplest way to go about it.

I have a couple of questions to get us going. I am interested to hear COSLA’s views on the role profiles and the workload calculations that are included in the SLARC report. Do you have any thoughts about the change in the role of the councillor? A point that came up in the previous session is that it has become more complex over the past 10 years.

Steven, do you have anything else to add?

That is good news. It also points back to what you are underscoring here today about the data set that would tell us the make-up of Scotland’s councillors. If we had that, we could really build on it.

I have a final question around next steps, which have also already touch on a little. The recommendations of the previous SLARC review were published in March 2011. They were rejected by the then finance secretary, John Swinney MSP. How confident are you that the recommendations in the 2024 review will be accepted?