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Could you update us on the position at the end of August?

I should probably have asked Ian Bruce this question, but I will pose it to you. Do we know what proportion of complaints that were deemed not to be relevant came from councillors who had not undergone training on the code of conduct?

Thank you. We will.

It certainly does.

Do you spend a lot of your time basically dismissing complaints that do not fall within the scope of the code? Could you give us a flavour of the amount of work that you do in simply dismissing things that are not relevant?

Lorna Johnston, I want to ask you a bit more about potential emerging trends in the complaints process. Ian Bruce talked earlier about social media being one area where we are seeing a rise in complaints, and that their nature is more personal, with, for example, personal attacks and councillor-on-councillor complaints. Will you expand on that for the committee and explain what the emerging trends are in the whole complaints process or in the complaints domain?

I turn to training. Is training on the code of conduct for councils mandatory, or is it optional and they can choose not to participate in any such training?

Thank you for your opening remarks, Ian. My question is in the same area. Why do so many councillors complain about one another? When might you expect to see the fruits of the guidance being embraced and adopted by our local authority councillors? Will you also say a bit about whether awareness of conduct issues rather than performance issues, as you described, is a mandatory part of councillor training? Will you give us a little flavour of that to widen the discussion a bit?

You will be aware that the committee recently agreed to support the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee’s recommendations on councillor pay. Might there be an opportunity to take that further to include more mandatory elements in the councillor training regime, particularly on this issue? Could we put more into that mandatory bag of training for local authority councillors in return for that salary uplift, should it be awarded?

Thank you for that—it is much appreciated.

I understand that the data that informs the implementation update report, which came out in August, goes up to the end of 2023, and that the report does not include the data from January 2024 to August 2024. Is there any reason why the data for that section of the current year was not included? We want the information to be as up to date and current as possible.