Seòmar agus comataidhean

Thanks very much, convener. I do not want to take up too much time before we move to questions, but I do want to say a few words to begin with.

First, I thank Angela Leitch, the convener of SLARC, and all the members of that committee for the time that they have given to and their work on the issue of councillor remuneration and the report that they have produced. I am also grateful to COSLA officers who supported the committee in its work.

I also put on record my thanks to all serving and former councillors for their work. Councillors are key to our democratic system and play a valuable part in local decision making. We all know that it is not an easy role, and I am grateful to those who have chosen to stand in the past or are considering standing in the future.

SLARC was reconvened by the Scottish Government at COSLA’s request to undertake an independent review of remuneration and local authority bandings, with a key focus on whether levels of remuneration reflected the responsibilities of modern-day councillors and were not barriers to elected office. The Scottish Government’s response to SLARC’s recommendation report was published on 5 July. In that, I indicated that I was happy to accept the majority of the pay and structural change recommendations and would make regulations early in 2025 to implement them.

A key factor with regard to the timing for implementing the recommendations was that the initial report was not published until February 2024, which, of course, was after the Scottish Government and individual local authorities had agreed and set their budgets. Therefore, it was not possible to consider the cost implications and take them into account when making spending decisions this financial year.

Convener, I need to be up front about costs. The Scottish Government does not and has never provided funding specifically to meet the costs of councillor salaries; that has always been a matter for local authorities. Councillor salaries and associated expenses are paid from each authority’s annual allocation, as agreed under the local government settlement. However, I have indicated to the COSLA presidential team that I am happy to consider the cost of implementing the recommendations as part of the discussions on next year’s budget and settlement. I am sure we will talk more about that during the session.

As for the shared recommendations for the Scottish Government and COSLA—for example, on promoting the role of councillors in the severance resettlement payment—I have accepted most of them, either in part or in principle. I am happy for my officials to work with COSLA to give them further consideration.

As I have said, councillors play a key role in Scotland’s democratic system. Pay is only one barrier to individuals standing for election, and we need to look beyond it to review and remove other barriers to office. The COSLA barriers to elected office special interest group will, I think, be critical in this area, and I know that it is moving at pace on the matter. After all, councils, too, have a role to play by, for example, looking at the timing of meetings and reviewing any administrative barriers that might, albeit unintentionally, impact on participation. I look forward to seeing the outputs from that group and have asked my officials to support that work, where it is appropriate for them to do so.

I will end there, convener, but I will briefly repeat my thanks to SLARC for its work and to past and serving councillors for their contributions.

It would be difficult for any local authority. Essentially, Parliament could agree to regulations only if we have the money in place, so I guess that what comes first is agreement around funding. There would have to be agreement around that before the regulations. Would the regulations come in the new year?

I think that councils are instinctively against ring fencing.

It would then be a question of what mechanism to use as part of the local government settlement. Would the money be top sliced? Such things are all details that would need to be discussed, but there are ways of doing it, if political agreement can be reached.

That refers to what Fiona Campbell said earlier about the uplift mechanism and making sure that there is no detriment from the uplift being a year later. There would, going forward, be a mechanism to make sure that remuneration would keep pace with inflation and so on, and it would take into account that the change was being implemented a year later.

There might be, but I do not think that that was particularly looked at as part of developing the SLARC recommendations. It might be an issue that is more for the special interest group. I think that the mechanism of uprating will help to avoid councillor pay falling behind again and our being back here in 10 years.

Are wider reforms needed in local government? Well—how long have you got? We could sit here all day and discuss what they might be. SLARC was set up for a very specific reason and its remit was, understandably, quite tight, so it probably did not venture into some of the wider reform issues about the number of councillors and their roles and responsibilities. That is a whole other discussion. Is it one that might have merit in the future? Maybe, but we have in front of us, here and now, the situation that we need to focus on resolving.

As ever with detailed reports with a number of recommendations, some with far-reaching implications—and not just on a cost basis—the recommendations had to be properly looked at, analysed and responded to, and that was done. If we had rushed out a response without looking at the detail and the implications, we might well have been equally criticised.

To be frank, I suspect that, if we had had the report and if we had ensured that our response landed around the time of the pay review and the publication of the pay policy, that might have led to some unwelcome scene setting for what has become a series of quite difficult local government pay negotiations. Given that context, I am not sure that there would have been a great or perfect time for this to have been published, as comparisons were always going to be made between the uplift proposed in the report and what might be proposed for local government staff. To be honest, I just do not think that you can avoid that, and I therefore do not think that it would have mattered when things were published. That comparison was always going to be made.

The important thing is what we do now, and there is room and scope for agreement to move this forward. The history of looking at councillor remuneration is a troubled one; the first attempt back in 2011, I think, did not really get very far. What will be important—and I want to be really clear about this—is cross-party support, not just at local government level but in here, too. After all, regulations will require support if changes are to be made. If this is to be a priority, it must be taken forward on a cross-party basis. Indeed, that is the only way in which it will be taken forward.

There is maybe a wider issue. I would focus not on pay in particular, because you are probably on a bit of a hiding to nothing, to be honest, but on the role of councillors, the wide variety of work that they do, their responsibilities, the fact that many of them are trying to juggle other jobs at the same time and so on. There is something in there about us elevating the role of councillors and the work of local government and explaining what councillors do, why it is important and the need to have a wider variety of people stepping forward. That could be part of trying to encourage more people to think about standing for local government in the run-up to 2027. In the old days, becoming a councillor used to be seen almost as a voluntary thing that only those, such as those and retired people would ever enter into. We have moved on from that and more women and younger people are involved, but the numbers are still low compared with other spheres of government.

There is a perception issue and, potentially, there are practical barriers. When the special interest group reports on those wider barriers, there may be something for us to do collectively—the committee might also have a role to play—to look at ways of putting some of that information out there, to start a bit of awareness raising around the role of councillors and the importance of the work that they do. I would certainly be up for that.

On your first point, I have to be honest and say that what was said in the earlier session was the first time that I had heard that there was any breakdown of anything. That is just not my understanding at all. I was not at the meetings, to be fair—I have to be clear about that—but I do not get the sense that there was any difference or any changes to the report or the outcomes, which would have happened whether or not folk were attending all the meetings. I think that the report is the report and that it would have been the report no matter what. It is a good report. It is very clear in its recommendations and I think that SLARC has done a good job.

As you have alluded to, we then come to the question: what now? As Fiona Campbell said, the regulations will set the level of salary and, clearly, how that is funded has to be agreed in advance. Otherwise we would be passing regulations when folk have not agreed how that will be funded, and that is just not the order to do things in.

We have to get into sorting the how, and that has to be a compromise that is discussed through the budget process. I have said that I am open to that discussion and we should look at the art of the possible. I will have a requirement from the Government’s perspective that this is a collective decision and a collective priority.

I am certainly not dismissing that. I am saying that the lack of records means that there is no evidence of what the parental involvement was or was not. I am saying that the legislation underpinning the setting up of the redress scheme was for children who had been removed from parents through social work legislation, where there was no contact and parental responsibility had been entirely removed.

My predecessor made an apology prior to the redress scheme being established and it was made to all survivors in all settings, and I absolutely want to reiterate it fully. On the point about the evidential requirements for Redress Scotland, Scotland’s redress scheme is more broadly drawn than any other redress scheme anywhere in the world at the moment. Most of the redress schemes that have been established are far more tightly drawn than the one in Scotland. However, evidence is required for an application to be brought in front of Redress Scotland, so there have to be records showing where someone—