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COSLA asked for SLARC to be set up and the Scottish Government agreed, because we recognise that there is a remuneration issue. I do not recognise the council tax issue having delivered something different in terms of the recommendations. The recommendations are positive and have been largely accepted by the Scottish Government, so I do not see what the council tax issue has changed. I do not think that it would have changed any of the recommendations and the report that popped out at the end of that piece of work. It is as it would have been whether or not there was a council tax freeze, in my opinion.

As for the funding of the recommendations, at no point has the Scottish Government said, in SLARC or anywhere else, that the Scottish Government would pay for the remuneration of councillors, for the very reason that it never has. It has never been something that Scottish Government has paid for; it has always been paid for by local authorities themselves out of the settlement.

The same issue arose in 2011, when the Scottish Government made the position clear that any uplift and change to remuneration would have to be funded by local government. At that point there was no agreement, so nothing changed. At this point there could be agreement, but Pam Gosal, as an Opposition spokesperson, will understand the importance of moving this forward cross-party. If the local government leadership groups and COSLA, which are multiparty, all agree that this is a priority for the local government settlement—when we are negotiating we get into a lot of detail around the local government settlement—that for me is a signal that there is cross-party support for it.

The regulations will require cross-party support in this place. We need to all be on the same page if this is to go forward and money is to be found because, bluntly, I will not fund this in the face of opposition from other parties—I just will not. My challenge is this: if this is a priority, let us take it forward cross-party. I think that it is a good report—regardless of whether the council tax freeze happened or not—and it has a lot of merit, but we need to agree on a cross-party basis.

Local authorities pay councillors. There has never been the precedent of the Scottish Government funding salaries or salary uplifts for councillors and there was certainly never any indication during the SLARC discussions from us that that would be the case. What has emerged since SLARC’s work is a call from COSLA and council leaders that funding is needed beyond what local authorities have in their budgets. That would be a new way of doing things and it is, for the same reasons, an issue that got in the way of progress being made back in 2011.

The difficulty is that it would not be a universally popular move. Therefore, if it is the right thing to do, it needs very much to be done on a cross-party basis. That is the point that I was making, because such a change would step outwith the norm of how payment of councillors is done at what is a difficult time—a time when finances are tight in local government and the Scottish Government—and the suggestion has already garnered negative media portrayals. It is something that needs to be handled carefully.

However, I absolutely recognise what SLARC is saying and what members around the table have said about the barriers. Looking towards 2027, remuneration is clearly one barrier. It is not the only one, but it is a barrier. If we were collectively to decide that the recommendation is a priority, I would imagine that it would be seen by all concerned as a priority part of the budget process.

One would have to follow the other.

The Scottish Government has never said or given any intimation that there would be a change in the assumption of how that is paid for, given that that suggestion has never been the case. Nothing was said that in any way changed the situation to give that impression.

That is a bit of a stretch, is it not? That was a very specific thing 20 years ago. The assumption has always been that local government funds the remuneration of its elected members. You can see why, because it is quite a contentious area. It is something that you could flip to say that, in the normal course of events, councils probably would not welcome Scottish Government interference in remuneration of councillors. However, we are talking about a significant change to remuneration, so I recognise the challenge. I think that it needs to be a shared responsibility.

It is not something that would come along very often. It is a reset that would need to stand the test of time, and it would need to be part of a wider package and presentation to try to encourage—on the points that Pam Gosal was making—more people to come into local government. There is an opportunity, with a line of sight to three years away to 2027, to do a number of things that could encourage more people. Remuneration is part of that, but it is not the only thing.

The recommendation requires further consideration. One of the fundamental questions is whether it would apply to existing councillors or only to those elected from 2027. Those who stood previously stood without that being an expectation. I do not want that to be taken the wrong way because it is not about the principle. However, it is a fundamental question. Would it apply retrospectively or would it be forward looking from 2027?

That is important because the cost is significant and goes beyond what we have talked about in terms of remuneration. It would have to be carefully thought through. In the push to attract a wider group of people coming into local government from 2027 onwards, it might be quite an attractive part of the package. There could be a basket of things. However, the recommendation needs to be discussed further because the cost goes up significantly from the remuneration costs that we have discussed.

This is the territory that we get into in the budget negotiations as part of the local government settlement. It is a good question. For me, the position of ordinary councillors is a priority because that would be the main thing that anyone thinking about going into local government would look at. It would be a number of years before they would become a senior councillor, unless there were exceptional circumstances. In most cases people come in and serve as an ordinary councillor—or a back-bench councillor or however you want to describe it. That is a priority.

I guess that what you are alluding to is whether there is a split around who funds what. Is there some compromise? These are all the things that I would quite welcome getting into with local government in order to find a pragmatic way forward. I hope that we can find that way forward because everybody accepts that there is a genuine issue. It is about whether we are willing to collectively grasp the moment and agree that we need to do something about it collectively.

I will bring in Fiona Campbell on that specific point in a second. I do not think that anybody failed to notice what I had to bring to Parliament two weeks ago. In the context of the in-year position this year, the idea of trying to backdate something in-year this year would just be impossible, or incredibly difficult. Going back to the optics that you mentioned earlier, I do not think that that would be at all sustainable. The focus for me is what we can do from April 2025 onwards. Fiona, could you address the point about uprating?

We should remember that that was also the pre-election period. There would have been issues around Scottish Government officials’ involvement in a number of forums because of the pre-election guidance and so on. That potentially had a disruptive effect.

Let me be absolutely clear: I do not think that the decision on council tax had any bearing on the report that emerged from SLARC. I think that it would have been exactly the same report, with the same recommendations, if the Scottish Government had not frozen council tax. I think that it is a good report. The question, though, for everybody now is how the recommendations are funded going forward. I think that we can get into a positive space about that, but it will need to be done on a cross-party basis.

That last point is key. We know that there are barriers to women and people from a minority ethnic background. A number of groups are underrepresented among local government elected members, and that should be a concern to us all and something that we should collectively want to address. Remuneration is part of it, but so is the need for flexibility and—I guess something that we are all very aware of—the fact that abuse in public life is hard and puts people off. It puts people off coming in to serve in any elected forum. We need to address all those things. The special interest group that is being worked on through COSLA is important, because it will help to address some of these issues.

On the point about central spending and who pays, we are all facing these issues. Given what I laid out to Parliament about the in-year position, the position of the Scottish Government is no different. We are under severe financial constraint.

How do we take this forward? There are various mechanisms within the local government settlement that this could be accommodated within, but I go back to my previous point, which is that it would need to be done cross-party. All the represented groups in COSLA would need to make it clear to me as part of the budget process that this was a collective priority that they wanted to see funded.

There are various mechanisms to do that. We could top slice an element of the local government settlement for it, but you can understand that it would not be universally popular to do this. You can already see some of the media commentary about it. If we are going to take it forward, we need to do so collectively. Given that local government is multiparty and that we have a collective interest in taking it forward, we need to try to do this in a way that takes the politics out of it.

I am very happy to discuss with COSLA and the local government leaders what that looks like. Do I think that we can get there? Yes, I think that we can, but it will require everybody to step forward to say that this is an opportunity for us to lay the ground for 2027 by making being a councillor a more attractive proposition. It cannot just be the Scottish Government’s responsibility to do that. I am very keen to have those discussions and I have written to the presidential team offering to take this forward as part of the budget negotiations.