CRISIS TALKS BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND COUNCIL LEADERS OVER PROPOSED REFORMS

Negotiations which take place over reform of local government could be critical in everything from the housing emergency to the state of the High Street, to the running of schools and care services,  your council tax bill and even your bin collections.

Leaders of the 32 councils in Scotland, including Labour’s Martin Rooney in West Dunbartonshire and the SNP’s Jim Flynn in Argyll and Bute, which includes Helensburgh and Lomond, have called for the Scottish government to “rethink” their proposals for the reforms.

Ministers have proposed replacing existing councils with six to 10 large regional authorities and more than a hundred smaller local bodies.

Following a meeting of the councils, umbrella body Cosla said a change of structure alone is not the answer.

It has now set out its own vision for reform – with more powers being devolved to a local level and a review of funding arrangements, including council tax.

COSLA president Shona Morrison acknowledged public services did need to change but said the Scottish government’s proposals and approach to engagement “need a rethink”.

The Scottish government has made “public service reform” a key goal in this new term of parliament.

Plans for a wholesale redrawing of local government weren’t mentioned in the SNP manifesto, but after councils asked what ministers actually wanted, a vision was swiftly drawn up.

The new political map of Scotland would include six to ten large regional authorities, in charge of key services like education, bin collection, economic development and major planning decisions.

There would also be 120 to 160 smaller community authorities which would deal with local issues, such as licensing and town centre improvements, which is the biggest issue of all in West Dunbartonshire.

Separate arrangements would be put in place for island communities.

Every bit as ambitious as the vision itself was the timescale proposed, with the government aiming to secure a broad agreement about a way forward in just three months.

Cosla says this should not just be a conversation about the structure of local government, but the outcomes it provides for communities.

Their proposals on governance arrangements look quite different to the Scottish Government’s one, though.

COSLA said plans should start with the 32 existing councils, building in better “regional collaboration and shared capacity”.

Previous tinkering involving a proposed merger of the Roads Departments of West Dunbartonshire and Inverclyde Councils fell at the first hurdle and failed to go through.

There have been discussions too about the parliamentary constituencies in these two areas being merged, but again they came to nothing.

They said that would involve services being joined up across wider areas “without automatically assuming a new regional authority is needed”.

There could be “voluntary consolidation of councils” where that is supported locally, but only “subject to democratic agreement”.

West Dunbartonshire Council has ongoing trouble with democracy in that they have imposed a ban on The Dumbarton Democrat from speaking to their so-called communications department.

COSLA – the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities – also said it was “unclear what the proposal for 130+ community authorities will add”.

They are instead pushing for a “whole-system” review of where powers lie – right across Holyrood, the NHS, national agencies and public bodies as well as councils – to get them as close to communities as possible.

That part is not a million miles away from John Swinney’s vision, which involves cutting the number of health boards on the mainland to two and merging a clutch of public sector bodies and agencies.

But it underlines the scale of the task involved – it is nothing less than a total rewiring of how Scotland is run.

It has happened before in the 1970s when Strathclyde Region was the premier local authority in this area, and the district councils were scrapped.

When you talk to people in local government (when and if they allow you to talk to them), what tends to come across is that their most pressing concern is not about structure – it is about finance.

We are approaching the traditional season of bickering over the money local government gets to deliver services in the Holyrood budget.

Cosla wants “funding guarantees” to be a core part of talks from the outset – including council tax reform.

The SNP has famously been talking about scrapping the council tax since 2003, but tends to talk about changes as a longer-term project.

Last summer it said reforms “will not be possible this decade” because the complex process of thrashing out an agreement about revaluing properties would require an electoral mandate in 2031.

Council tax isn’t the end of the story on funding, though, as we have seen with innovations like proposed visitor levies, which are bitterly opposed in Helensburgh and Loch Lomondside, the main tourism areas..

The “roadmap” for fiscal devolution just announced for councils in England raises some interesting possibilities too.

Chancellor John Healey has proposed assigning some income tax revenues directly to local authorities – an idea we know the SNP like, because they included it in their 2016 election manifesto.

Andy Burnham talks about Scotland as “one of the most centralized nations in Europe” – so could his devolution talks with John Swinney result in more powers being pushed down to a local level, beyond Holyrood?

Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth, left, is due to attend the meeting too and may end up playing a key role given she is also the finance secretary who will be setting the government’s budget plans out at the start of December.

Cosla says reform plans “cannot be separated” from the upcoming budget, which is looking perilously tight.

The Scottish government’s own medium-term financial strategy projects a £4.8bn shortfall between spending plans and expected income by 2029-30.

Is there realistically going to be a bumper payout for councils, at a pivotal moment for these talks? Yet another row over funding would create little goodwill for reform negotiations.

The same is true of public sector pay plans – there is precious little wriggle room left in the three-year envelope agreed two years ago.

Unless extra cash is found from somewhere, there could well be a scrap with unions over pay deals – the same unions which will have a say in these local reform plans.

There are also council elections looming next May, which has many of the current crop of councillors praying they will survive the ballot box test.

Ministers insist those can go ahead because the new system could keep existing ward boundaries, meaning the 1,226 Councillors elected in May could simply shift to the new authorities, sitting on both the regional and community authorities.

That raises a whole series of questions, though.

A region spanning Glasgow and the surrounding area could end up with more than 350 Councillors.

Meanwhile, some community authorities could end up with just two or three Councillors on them, representing either tiny pockets of cities or large swathes of more rural areas.

Given turnout at council elections is frequently poor – a by-election in Aberdeen over the summer saw just 13.3% of people bother – voters will need a clear idea in their heads of exactly what the choice on offer is.

Now that both central and local government has outlined a vision, we can start to get an idea of whether there is a way forward.

The notion of it being settled in a matter of months can probably be put to bed already – this is the sort of process that will take years, if it gets off the ground at all.

As we’ve just seen with the question of Councillors and wards, there are dozens of issues to be worked through, from council property holdings to debts to pensions, before we even get to carving up the many responsibilities of local government.

There may well be red lines among those responsibilities too – the government has openly talked about shifting social care responsibility to health boards, which councils will be loath to relinquish.

Talking of social care, reform legislation would need to be passed at Holyrood, and consensus built to avoid a repeat of the collapse of the National Care Service.

That was an ambitious project which was bogged down by a lack of a clear vision from government and any agreement with local government and unions – surely a cautionary tale.

There is a will on all sides for something to be done to reform public services – to get them running as efficiently as possible, both for the benefit of communities and to balance the books.

Ministers attempted to inject a bit of urgency with the tight timescale for initial consultation.

But there is no escaping that this is a vast and complicated enterprise – combined with the redrawing of health boards, it would be the biggest thing Holyrood has ever done in one go.

The concern is that all of this focus on reform creates uncertainty in the short term, which means other endeavors grind to a halt.

Councils have plenty to get on with – from national projects like reform of compulsory purchase rules to things like local development plans, which sound boring but are critical in whether things like new housing developments can go ahead.

So the negotiations which take place over the coming weeks could be critical in everything from the housing emergency to the state of the high street, to the running of local schools and care services, and to your local tax bill and your bin collections.

Top of page: Council home care workers in West Dunbartonshire during a protest outside the headquarters in Church Street, Dumbarton.