Devolved legislation for Scottish Local Authorities

2.4.2 Devolved legislation for Scottish Local Authorities

In 2002 the Scottish Executive produced Renewing Local Democracy: The Next Steps (Scottish Executive, 2002) which stressed the importance of the role of councils for delivering services and setting local priorities. A major change to local democracy was the introduction of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) for local elections in 2007. This saw the introduction of multi-member wards comprising three or four councillors and an electoral system that required voters to rank their choice of candidates in order of preference. This change to the voting system locally was driven by the Liberal Democrat party and is regarded as being Labour’s major concession to them to allow the formation of the coalition (Bennie, 2006). The primary data collection for this thesis was mostly conducted prior to the 2007 election and the widely documented problems with the vote for the Scottish Parliament elections which occurred on the same day and have been attributed in part to poor ballot design (Carmen et al., 2008). However, the topic was mentioned by several interviewees and some indicated that preparations were underway for the shift in working practices and there was some uncertainty as to the impact of multi member wards on local governance and participatory mechanisms.

This will be discussed further in the analysis of the case study data in Chapter 6.

The issue of local authority financing is a contentious area. McConnell (2006) found that power over local authority financing was effectively transferred from the Scottish Office to the new institutions of Scottish government. There are strict rules on local authority spending and limitations are put on the raising of council tax and the Scottish Government has the power to cap increases in council tax. There have been accusations that some policies such as free personal care for the elderly have increased the costs to local authorities which have not been coupled with an increase in funding from the Executive/Government. This is relevant for the study of eParticipation in Scotland because greater financial pressures may either have a positive impact on eParticipation because (as will be outlined in the next chapter), eParticipation initiatives are sometimes argued to be cheaper to run than offline participatory mechanisms or it could have a negative impact because local authorities

may be focussing scare resources on implementing statutory requirements which do not include eParticipation.

Devolution has also seen a shift in the relationship between government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) which was established in 1975 and represents 31 of the 32 Scottish local authorities. Prior to devolution COSLA was seen as a force for empowering local authorities in Scotland to represent their interests at the national level. In the post devolution period COSLA sought to influence the development of policy as an ‘insider’ in the new parliament which led to tensions with some local authorities feeling that they had ‘sold out’ (McConnell, 2004). COSLA has not always been supportive of the Executive, however, in particular in its opposition to PR for local government elections (McConnell, 2004). COSLA is an important actor in Scottish politics and have made contributions to the development of participatory initiatives. For example, in 1998 COSLA produced a report entitled Focusing on Citizens: A Guide to Approaches and Methods which encouraged local authorities to develop new ways of engaging and involving the public. The report includes electronic participation strategies describing the advantages as being that:

This form of participation may be particularly appealing to people who are already used to using new technology but have not had much involvement in democratic practice. It also has potential among people living a long distance away from centres of population, who are housebound or who have other difficulties participating in standard democratic processes. (COSLA, 1998, p.

79)

The Local Government in Scotland Act (2003) is a key piece of legislation for understanding the development of participatory initiatives in Scotland and gives local authorities the primary responsibility for the economic and social well being of their area and individuals within it. This can be interpreted as a desire to devolve power to the local authority level. However, there are limitations to these powers as they cannot interfere with statutory responsibilities or the work of other bodies (McConnell, 2006).

Further, some national rules and initiatives remain such as The Ethical Standards in Public Life etc Scotland Act (2000) which sets out national rules for the conduct of councillors (Keating et al., 2003). The Local Government Scotland Act 2003 put upon local authorities a statutory obligation to engage in community planning activities and also a statutory duty to demonstrate Best Value which replaced the Compulsory Competitive Tendering policy in 1997 (McConnell, 2004).

A significant development in post-devolution Scotland has been the drive for community planning; a core element of the Local Government Scotland Act 2003 which has required all 32 local authorities to work in partnership with other agencies and the community to integrate and coordinate public services (McAteer and Bennett). The Community Planning Task Force was set up in 2001 to facilitate the development of community planning in Scotland and give advice and guidance to local authorities (Community Planning Taskforce, 2003a). The Task Force directly contributed to the development of community planning and through documents such as Effective Community Engagement, Community Planning Advice Note 5 (Community Planning Taskforce, 2004), Community Planning Good Practice (2002) and Working and Learning Together to Build Stronger Communities (Community Planning Taskforce, 2003b) have provided suggestions and strategies for the effective development of community planning in Scotland.

Other projects initiated by the Scottish Executive have included The Renewing Local Democracy project which was a two year eParticipation project funded by the Scottish Executive from February 2004 to January 2006. One of the initiatives investigated how ICTs can support Community Councils and involved developing eParticipation mechanisms for Community Councils (Whyte et al., 2006). Whyte et al. (2006) conducted an evaluation of the project and found that:

The project demonstrates that web based tools enable and encourage more people to have their say in local democracy than has previously been the case…It is therefore recommended that local and national government supports community councils to develop web tools to inform and interact with the public.

There is a significant public appetite for the opportunities to influence local decision-making that such tools support. They are regarded as a convenient opportunity to have views considered, provided those views are responded to.

(Whyte et al., 2006, p. 6)

Whyte et al. recommended that local authorities should take a lead role in disseminating eParticipation tools.

While the Local Government Scotland Act 2003 puts great emphasis on public participation as a means of improving service delivery it does not give specific guidance on the challenges that need to be overcome in order to achieve this (Orr and McAteer, 2004). There were further guidelines published including a Participation

Handbook (Scottish Parliament, 2004) and Consultation Good Practice Guidance (Scottish Executive, 2004) however as indicated previously in the chapter there remains concerns about a lack of effective measurement and analysis of participatory initiatives (Albert and Passmore, 2008).

When the SNP administration was elected in 2007 there was a Concordat signed between the (newly rebranded) Scottish Government and local authorities. As part of the Concordat package, all 32 local authorities agreed a Single Outcome Agreement (SOA) with the Scottish Government in June 2008, setting out what they will achieve through the services they deliver.

A number of public sector organisations are statutory partners in Community Planning. These include the local authority, health board, fire, police, enterprise agency and transport partnership. In addition to the statutory partners, Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) typically involve other public, voluntary, community and private sector partners. (Improvement Service website, 2009)

The SOAs are based on the national outcomes and indicators and, under a common framework, local outcomes to take account of local priorities. The SOAs cover all local government services in each local authority area as well as a significant range of the responsibilities of CPPs where local authorities have a significant role to play (Improvement Service, 2009).