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Did you make any recommendations on the issue of time off for public duties, on a reciprocal sabbatical salary when people become a councillor or anything like that, or was that outwith the scope of your work?

Those were really helpful comments.

Did you find that councillors’ workloads have changed because of the multimember ward arrangements? Have workloads diminished? My experience is that members find themselves even busier than they used to be, because they have to be on their toes most of the time as they now have colleagues in the same ward. Did you have findings in that area?

Okay, thanks for that.

Steven Heddle, have you had any semblance of a discussion about that in your experience?

From your point of view, that is a step in the right direction. Many thanks for those answers.

Thank you very much for those answers.

Good morning and welcome to you and your colleagues, Angela.

I want to continue on the theme that Martin McElroy was talking about. Did you distinguish between councillors who work full time in another job and councillors who do not? What was the average number of hours for each? In my experience when I was a local councillor from 1992 to 2007, it was almost impossible to do the council job properly. I recall that I had 10 days a year—there was an issue about time off for public duties that was very much at the heart of that. I wonder how councillors who work full time in a job somewhere else can possibly squeeze in 29 hours a week to do their council duties. Did you get a strong message about that issue?

Good morning to our COSLA colleagues online. I want to ask your view on an issue that I should really have asked SLARC about earlier, which is the huge disparity between the salaries that senior council officials receive and those of senior elected members. There is quite a distance between the two. We know that there are several reasons for that, and there are different scales and so on, but is that an issue that has come up in conversation among the local elected members over the years? Senior elected members carry significant responsibilities when sometimes the officials who are under their direction can be earning three times as much as they are. Is that an issue that has cropped up in conversation at all over recent years?

It is year 1, so we hope that, wherever we can, we will be able to see a semblance of this stuff coming through. The committee will take a keen interest in the matter every year, as you have said, and I am particularly keen to hear what communities around Scotland think about how successful the programme has been.

Convener, I think that you have a supplementary question. Would you like to ask it now?

We heard concerns about the administrative burden relating to some of the climate and biodiversity requirements. Does the Government accept that? What can we do to mitigate that burden?