Local Government and Communities Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Official Report 591KB pdf

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Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland’s Fifth Electoral Reviews

Good morning and welcome to the seventh meeting of the Local Government and Communities Committee in session 5. I remind everyone present to turn off mobile phones. Meeting papers are provided in digital format, so you may see members using tablets during the meeting. That is our general appeal at the start of every meeting—we promise that that is why you will see us looking at our phones and tablets.

No apologies have been received. Yet again, we have a full house—good stuff, MSPs.

Agenda item 1 was taken in private. Agenda item 2 is on the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland’s fifth electoral reviews. The committee will take evidence on the reviews and on the Scottish Government’s response to them. I welcome Professor Ailsa Henderson, commissioner, Isabel Drummond-Murray, secretary, and Laura Cregan from the commission’s secretariat.

I also welcome Iain Gray MSP, who has taken the time to come along this morning. Iain has some scrutiny questions that he would like to ask, and I intend to bring him in towards the end. We have a fairly tight hour for questions, so I intend to leave a bit of time at the end, no matter how furiously we are asking questions, to ensure that Iain gets a bit of time to ask the questions that he wants to ask.

Good morning, commissioner, and thank you very much for coming. I invite you to make any brief opening remarks that you may have. We will follow that with our questions.

Thank you for the invitation to be here today. The Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland’s responsibility is to make recommendations to Scottish ministers that comply with the statutory requirements placed upon us. The rules under which we work are set out in the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973. They require us to identify boundaries in

“the interests of effective and convenient local government”.

The rules require us to pay attention to electoral parity above all other things but, subject to that, we have regard to local ties, easily identifiable boundaries and special geographic circumstances.

The fifth reviews are the first time that councillor numbers and wards have been examined together since the third reviews almost 20 years ago. That is because the fourth reviews, which resulted in the introduction of multimember wards for the single transferable vote, did not revise councillor numbers. Given the changes in population across Scotland and within council areas, changed boundaries were inevitable.

Against that background, the commission considered it right to take a fundamental look at how best to conduct a full review of councillor numbers and wards, which included examining the methodology that we used. The commission had consulted previously, in 2011, on how councillor numbers might be determined, and the outcomes from that showed support for a consistent Scotland-wide methodology, a call for more equal representation across Scotland and a call for fewer categories of councils. It was suggested that we continue to use a measure of rurality, but also that we consider the use of deprivation.

We believe that the methodology that we have introduced is robust. We have reduced the number of categories from seven to five and we have changed the indicators that we use to better reflect the indicators that are currently in use by the Scottish Government. That includes the proportion of a council area’s population living in settlements of 3,000 or more, as well as the Scottish index of multiple deprivation, which is a basket of measures covering the socioeconomic and geographic circumstances in a council area.

We have also reduced the range of ratios of electors to councillors and made them more equal. We have amended the minimum and maximum council size: it used to run from 18 to 80, but it now runs from 18 to 85. To minimise disruption, we have also implemented a cap on the change in councillor numbers in any council area to 10 per cent.

It is a statutory requirement for us to consult local councils and the public. We have done so in two stages, the first of which was on councillor numbers and the second on ward design. There is no single correct way to determine how many councillors are needed for Scotland as a whole or for a particular council. If we have a statutory duty to consider electoral parity above all else, we believe that we have fulfilled our statutory responsibilities and that the final outcomes of the reviews deliver an improved electoral position. The reduced range of ratios means that there is less variation in the value of one vote across Scotland. We have lower levels of deviation from parity in the aggregate, which means that representation of the electorate is more evenly shared. Specifically, more wards are within 10 per cent of parity, which means that there is less variation in the value of each vote within a council area. Furthermore, fewer electors will be underrepresented by 10 per cent or more relative to the council average.

We have complied with the legislative requirements in letter and spirit. We have prioritised parity and consulted widely—indeed, we extended consultation periods when we were able to do so. We have been responsive to the 2011 consultation on methodology and to suggestions for boundaries and we have made significant changes to boundaries where we felt that the suggestions from councils and the public offered improvements. On outcomes, we believe that we have produced solutions that produce greater equality and less underrepresentation.

We are happy to take your questions and to follow them up in writing if that would be more useful.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, Professor Henderson. My question concerns the 10 per cent cap that you used for changes. How did you decide on 10 per cent as the magic number that would not cause disruption or that would cause the minimum of disruption?

The 10 per cent figure surfaces twice. It surfaces because we use the Venice commission guide on variation from parity of 10 per cent and there is a separate 10 per cent figure for the cap. We felt that, given the range of council areas, 10 per cent would get us to whole numbers a lot better. We were also following best practice in other commissions, were we not, Laura?

Yes. I believe that it is the practice in the Local Democracy and Boundary Commission for Wales.

It uses 10 per cent as well.

Do we have examples of where greater changes would have been needed? The figure feels a bit arbitrary but you said that it was best practice. How is it decided that 10 per cent is the right number?

We wanted to minimise disruption. The 2011 consultation suggested that there was public support for a consistent, Scotland-wide methodology. There was no overwhelming call for a significant increase in councillor numbers but there was also no overwhelming call for significant disruption to the number of councillors for each council area. Therefore, the 2011 consultation on methodology suggested that, if there was a chance for us to minimise disruption, we should probably take it. All the correspondence that we have had with Government officials and the minister suggested that that was the best way to go.

Ruth Maguire is obviously referring to North Ayrshire. The boundary commission proposals on numbers for North Ayrshire were better than the ones from North Ayrshire Council, which would have been widely disruptive in my constituency.

Your submission talks about parity. Ruth Maguire represents Cunninghame South, which will have 17 councillors under the new proposals, and I represent Cunninghame North, which will have 16. However, I have 56,000 electors and she has about 50,000, so I will have about 3,500 electors per councillor whereas Ruth will have slightly fewer than 3,000. How does that sit with the view that each vote in a local authority area should be in parity? I know that there is variation council by council but, if we are talking about parity, there should surely be the same number of councillors per head within a local authority. That is certainly not the case in North Ayrshire.

That is a good question. That is what we try to do. There are a number of ways of looking at the issue, one of which is to look at it on a Scotland-wide basis. People in different parts of Scotland live with very different ratios. The value of one vote in Edinburgh is that of about nine votes in the Western Isles.

It is the other way round.

Sorry—it is the other way round. There is variation in Scotland already, and some people would say that that is too much variation.

Looking within council areas, we try to stay as close to parity as possible. We use that 10 per cent best practice measure. We try as best we can to keep the ratio of electors to councillors the same within a council area, but we get variations. Sometimes that is because we try to draw the boundaries not strictly according to parity. Working within that 10 per cent, are there places where we can draw the boundary to capture local ties and are there places where we can draw the boundary so that it is easily identifiable? In addition, we are allowed to deviate from parity subject to special geographic considerations.

Although local ties might be broken by making a particular boundary, some boundaries in North Ayrshire make no sense at all. There is a wee community called Barrmill that is a 40-minute drive from West Kilbride, which is in the same ward.

Why does proportionality vary within local authority areas? For example, North Ayrshire has two three-member wards and six four-member wards. East Renfrewshire has 20 members, so I would have thought that it would have five four-member wards, but no—it has two four-member wards and four three-member wards. That makes a significant difference in elections, because in a three-member ward someone needs 25 per cent plus one to get elected, and in a four-member ward they need 20 per cent plus one. If you are talking about parity in a local authority area, surely all its wards should be three-member wards or four-member wards. I am not sure why we have that disparity in the number of councillors who represent a locality. It has a significant impact on representation.

Presumably that would be true across Scotland as a whole.

Yes.

We are given three-member wards and four-member wards to work with, and we work with them. In fact, we have noted instances where having two-member wards and five-member wards would have been helpful to us and enabled us to capture local ties and special geographic circumstances better.

You have to work with three-member wards and four-member wards, so why not make every ward in a local authority a four-member ward or a three-member ward? Why do you vary between threes and fours within a local authority area? Obviously that has an impact.

Sometimes we do it because there is already a mix of three-member wards and four-member wards and we are trying to minimise change, in terms of where the boundaries are. We are trying to keep them, where we can, if we need to—

Why would you have them that way in the first place?

Why did the fourth reviews come up with the results that they did?

Surely when the boundaries were set up, you would have wanted them to be much more straightforward, sensible and easily understandable by local people. The whole point is about parity. A vote in one part of a local authority should mean the same as a vote in another, and quite clearly it does not when you have differences in the number of voters per councillor and in ward sizes of three or four members, which limits things. For example, you could get four parties in a four-member ward, but you will only ever get three in a three-member ward. I am trying to ask why you cannot have parity within a local authority area, in terms of ward sizes and representation.

Thank you, Mr Gibson. We will give Professor Henderson a chance to put the boundary commission’s position to the committee.

Sure.

I certainly cannot comment on why the fourth reviews found the results that they did. Mathematically, we cannot always have just three-member wards or four-member wards. At times we feel that a mix of three-member wards and four-member wards makes sense, because we are trying to use easily identifiable boundaries and reflect community ties. When we create boundaries, we are trying to use the boundaries that are already there: the community council boundaries, for example, or the previous ward boundaries. Sometimes we look at the Scottish Parliament or Westminster Parliament constituency boundaries. We are trying to use other boundaries that are in place, so that we are not drawing a line that makes no sense in order to divide people into equal three or four-member chunks.

If we have had any public representation on the issue, it has been to say that we should be paying attention to such things. We should pay attention to local ties where we can. I am not sure that a bunch of exactly proportioned boxes that have the sufficient number of electors to have four councillors in an area is necessarily a solution that would have been well received in all cases.

10:15  

I will follow up on some of that. On the guidelines and criteria that you used, is there not an inherent contradiction between respecting local ties and boundaries and having an arithmetically pure formula that provides parity, which some might call conformity? I could cite my constituency as an example, but I will not. However, there can be less co-alignment between Scottish Parliament constituencies and ward boundaries, but it could be argued that the new wards better represent actual communities. There seems to be no black and white in relation to that, but a degree of latitude instead.

Can you say a bit more about the contradictions that you faced in coming to your decisions? I am trying to draw out whether it came down to a judgment. For example, you could have had five options in front of you, of which two or three might have been acceptable, but ultimately you had to opt for one. We are trying to get at the methodology that you used, and at whether you sometimes had not to bypass the methodology but just to accept that there was a compelling argument in some circumstances for ignoring parity and going for local ties and boundaries. To what extent did you have a conflict in trying to reach certain decisions?

Your point is absolutely right. The tension comes from the legislation, which says that we have to pay attention to electoral parity above all else. In a way, therefore, there is no tension because we have to pay attention to electoral parity and we can deviate from parity only if there are special geographic circumstances. The local ties aspect is not set up in the legislation, which says that we must have regard to parity, then we can pay attention to easily identifiable boundaries and drawing borders that will not break local ties.

You are right to say that in practice there is a tension between electoral parity and local ties. However, the legislation requires us to err on the side of parity. You are also right about the options, because we had multiple options for each council area. We consulted on ward design with councils in the first instance. Some councils wrote back to us to say that, although we had selected a particular option, they thought that another option better reflected local ties in the area. For example, we proposed an option in Dundee but the council told us that another option that we had looked at better reflected local community ties, so we changed to that version and went out to public consultation on it.

It is almost as if you knew what the next question was going to be, Professor Henderson. Elaine Smith wants to follow up on how you used some of the submissions that you received in evidence.

Thank you for joining us this morning, Professor Henderson. You talked in your opening statement about being responsive to the submissions that you received. You mentioned councils, and perhaps you can come to that aspect later. However, specifically, can you tell us about the extent to which submissions from the public impacted on your conclusions? Can you give us any examples of that?

Absolutely. Laura Cregan has the figures for the number of representations that were made by members of the public, other individuals and different bodies. About a quarter of the cases were on councillor numbers, and there were more cases on ward design. The changes that we made in response fell largely into two categories. The first was about people calling for their community to be within a single ward—for example, that was the case with Colinton in Edinburgh, Houston in Renfrewshire and Bridge of Allan. The people in those communities wanted their community to be represented in a single ward even if that meant that they would have fewer councillors than would otherwise be the case.

The second category was about electors in a community wanting to be paired with another community. For example, we made changes for Newcastleton, in Hawick, and for Nairn and Cawdor. We responded to public demand in making those changes.

It is worth noting that we got contradictory advice, in the sense that people in some communities expressed a desire to put all the communities in a single ward; other people told us that they did not want to be in a single ward but that they wanted their community divided, even if that meant that they were connected with other communities, as that would mean that they would have more councillors to keep an eye on the area. That was the case in the Hawick instance; it was also the case in Musselburgh.

We got representations arguing for completely the opposite thing: some people wanted to be together in a smaller ward, while some people wanted to be separated out in divided wards with more representation. We tried to do what we could and, if we found a way to make it work, we did.

Further to that, were the responses that you got from councils important? Were they timely? What information did they provide to assist you?

Absolutely. We had representations from councils on councillor numbers and ward design, and we made changes. I mentioned Dundee, but in the Scottish Borders we had an option on ward design that we put to Scottish Borders Council, and it said that it thought that it could do a better job. It took four days to draft a proposal, which it brought to us. The solution seemed to be a good one—we believed that the council’s design better reflected local ties, given its knowledge, so that is the version that we went out to public consultation on. Therefore, we have evidence of how we changed our proposals not just on councillor numbers but on ward design, following both the consultation with the councils and the consultation with the public.

You have talked a lot about councillor numbers, the consultation, ward design and whether communities are naturally kept together, but could you tell us a wee bit about the measures of deprivation that you used and how that impacted on your findings?

Sure. We used two measures to categorise councils. In the previous reviews, the two measures that were used to categorise councils were both measures of rurality. One was about population distribution and the other was about density. We felt that those two measures measured pretty much the same thing. In the consultation in 2011, although there was continued support for the notion of categorising councils, a call was made for us to think about the measures that we used.

We looked at other bodies that were creating categories of councils at the time. For example, we looked at how the Scottish local authorities remuneration committee banded councils. It used the Scottish index of multiple deprivation, which is perhaps unfortunately named, because it leads people to believe that it is a measure of poverty, but it is not. It is a basket of measures that captures not just people who are living on particular incomes or who are on incapacity or other forms of benefit, but the school enrolment population, the proportion of people who live in a particular zone who are in higher education and crime rates. Critically for us, it also looks at public access. It looks at journey times by car and by public transport to public services, schools, shops and other amenities.

Therefore, the SIMD is not a measure of poverty, as has often been assumed; it captures a range of socioeconomic and geographic circumstances in a local area. We believed that, because it was used frequently by the Scottish Government and—critically—had been used by another body that also banded councils, it was a useful measure to use.

I declare an interest as a serving member of Perth and Kinross Council.

We understand that the consultation process was quite lengthy because you wanted to engage with as many councils, organisations and community groups as you could. I think that that happened, given what you have said about the engagement on councillor numbers and ward design. So successful was the consultation that you decided to extend it in some areas. Were there areas in which the process was unsuccessful, from which you could learn lessons? Some council areas were much more engaged than others. Was that because people in those areas were much more active or took a greater interest in your work?

There seems to be quite a difference across the country in the extent to which people got involved. In some areas small meetings were held, but in others there were town halls full of people who wanted to make representations. How did you manage that process? How successful do you feel that you were in ensuring that you got the public consultation and engagement that you sought?

That is a great question. We will look how things have gone with the fifth reviews from the perspective of methodology and public consultation, so that we can write up what we think our best practice is and ensure that the people who conduct the next reviews will have something to work with.

On the public consultation, we tried as best we could to create a system where people were not disadvantaged in terms of participation if, for example, they were not online. We sent information out to information points and we did a survey of how frequently those pieces of information were displayed. It was a bit patchy, I have to say.

We also created an online portal that allowed people to comment on ward design. It is an incredible piece of work and we are using it again for the Boundary Commission for Scotland and the Westminster boundaries. The user can highlight an area, redraw a boundary and highlight points where they think that it might work better or worse. We have tried to use low-tech and high-tech methods to engage as much of the population as possible.

You are absolutely right—participation was not even across the council areas. We had more than 800 responses in some cases. However, there is not necessarily a relationship between the number of responses and the number of serious concerns.

We found that there was a lot of miscommunication, and I think that we have to reflect on how we communicate what the boundaries mean. We had people saying, “You can’t put the boundary there because it would mean that I had to send my children to a different school.” People said that changes would change their postcode, their house value and where they go for their messages. None of that is true.

We have a task to improve our communications so that we make clear what the consequences of certain boundaries are. We are going to look at that when we look back at the process.

Mr Simpson, is your question specifically on consultation? I want to ask another question about that, but if your question is also about that, I will bring you in first.

It is to do with a subject that has been covered. I want to come back in on deprivation.

I will bring you back in on that when we have finished exploring consultation.

On consultation, we could argue that the committee is performing a scrutiny role at the end point of the process. I am not saying that we should be a statutory consultee. We have been members of the committee for only few months, but the process started back in 2014, and the previous Local Government and Regeneration Committee would have had the option to scrutinise or work in partnership at the start of the process. Is there a back story that we should be aware of about representations from the previous committee or representations that the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland made to it?

Not while I have been a member, but that is only since October 2013.

Right, and the process started in 2014.

That was the formal start of the review process. The current commissioners were all appointed towards the end of 2013.

Okay. I will not dwell on the point, because there is as much of a responsibility for our predecessor committee if it sought to do a piece of work on the matter as there is for this committee, but I am conscious that we are scrutinising the end point of the process. In future, would it be worth while for whichever subject committee has the local government remit to scrutinise at the start of the process? Would that help public awareness and understanding?

Enhanced communication would certainly be very welcome.

Explaining the approach might be very helpful but, of course, we would remember our independence from political considerations. Those might be of interest to you, but they are not things that we would take account of. However, explaining our approach and having those discussions would always be helpful.

It is helpful that you mentioned the concept of political considerations. The committee’s role today is to examine the process and its robustness rather than necessarily to have any political considerations within that.

I will bring in Mr Simpson in a moment, but I want to give you one more opportunity to respond on consultation. We are scrutinising the process at its end point, after it has run for two years. Is there a role for a subject committee such as this one—not as part of a politicised process but as part of a political accountability and scrutiny process—to be in at the ground floor of scrutinising the commission’s remit and its initial approach? Given that there is strict independence, it might be helpful for any concerns that the committee has to be flagged up at the start of the process rather than our waiting until the end of the process and then saying, “Here’s what you should have done better.”

10:30  

I take Isabel Drummond-Murray’s point. We would not necessarily have been able to make changes, but the opportunity to explain what we were trying to do, emphasise the rules under which we work, discuss our methodology and explain the logic of our decision making would certainly have been helpful. We visited all 32 councils and we sometimes found that there was a bit of misunderstanding about what we were trying to do and what the measures were, even though we would explain that we were using a very particular measure. There were a number of misconceptions about what we were trying to do and what we were doing.

We might return to that. Your remit is set out clearly in statute, which states that the process is independent and must be allowed to take place. We can talk about where it is appropriate for politicians to make representations and about scrutiny and checks and balances in the system. That is no doubt an issue that the committee will have to wrestle with, so thank you for raising it.

Mr Simpson, I apologise for not bringing you in sooner.

No problem, convener.

I am not clear about where the deprivation measure came from. Was it your idea?

No, no—are you asking about deprivation, or about the SIMD in particular?

I am asking about the decision to use the deprivation measure in determining how many councillors should be in a particular council or ward.

Do you mean in terms of the categories? The 2011 consultation was on methodology, and I understand that the first discussion of deprivation surfaced then, in part because the two indicators that we had been using to categorise councils before then were measuring the same thing—they were both measures of rurality. The new approach was seen as a way of capturing not just rurality, which is relevant, but a council’s socioeconomic and other geographic circumstances.

Sorry. I am still confused about where the measure came from and why it was used.

Well, we need to categorise councils. We cannot have all councils with the same ratio of electors to councillors, because that would mean that we would have to radically change the size of the council in different areas. We would end up with tiny councils in the Western Isles and very large ones in—

You misunderstand. You used deprivation as a measure to decide numbers—

No, we used deprivation as a measure to categorise councils. I was explaining why we categorise councils to begin with—because some people would say, “Why bother?” We categorised councils, and in 2011 the consultation suggested that we think about deprivation and that we reduce the number of categories, because there were too many.

We reduced the number of categories from seven to five, and we used two measures to categorise councils, but those measures do not strictly determine councillor numbers; the ratios and the population in a local area determine the councillor numbers. The measures that we use to categorise the councils are SIMD data and the proportion of the population that lives in settlements of 3,000 people or fewer, so that we have councils that are in broadly similar circumstances. There are very urban ones that have higher levels of deprivation, and there are very rural ones that have lower levels of deprivation, for example, and there are different categories of councils, so those councils that have broadly similar characteristics share a ratio in terms of the number of electors to each councillor.

So a council in a particular category would get the same ratio—

Exactly—

So you have used it, because you categorised—

We used the measure to categorise the councils. We wanted to know what the impact of deprivation is, so we ran the methodology in a number of ways. For example, we said, “Let’s assume that we are using the old categories and old indicators of density and distribution and we are just updating the ratios”—we were always going to have to update the ratios, because the number of councillors had stayed the same but the population had increased. We calculated the numbers for the old approach and for our new way of categorising things, and we found that in 16 of the 32 councils the introduction of the new indicator—SIMD data—had no impact at all on councillor numbers; there would have been exactly the same number of councillors if we had used a new ratio but kept the old way of categorising things.

What proportion of the initial recommendations did you change as a result of feedback from councils?

At the first stage, it was seven—is that correct?

We changed councillor numbers when we started to consider the ward boundary implications of certain councillor numbers, so there was nothing set in stone as a result of the methodology per se. We made changes when we started to consider the distribution of communities and so on and saw that we would have to change councillor numbers in order to get a better result.

And that was in seven council areas.

So, you changed your recommendations as a result of feedback from seven councils.

No. When it came to ward design, we sometimes found that the numbers that we had proposed just did not work—they would result in wards that were a strange shape, or in left-over wards with too many people in them. We found that we sometimes had to increase the number of councillors by one.

You mentioned Dundee City Council. Did you accept its proposals?

We suggested one option and the council told us that it preferred our other option, so we adopted that one and went out to public consultation on it. We made a change on that proposal.

The public consultation also revealed concern that West Ferry would no longer be grouped with Broughty Ferry. However, the problem with multimember wards is that, if you have an area that is worth, say, six councillors, you cannot make that a single ward; you have to divide it. We had a four-member ward in Broughty Ferry and put the boundary over as far as we could, and we put the people of West Ferry in with the people in east Dundee. There was a call to make a change to our proposal, but we could not create a six-member or seven-member ward.

But you accepted the recommendation from the council.

Yes.

That leads to what the convener was asking about, because the minister rejected those final proposals. Some people could argue that that was political interference. What is your view of that?

The minister has the authority to accept, reject or modify proposals. It has never been done before, but it is within the minister’s authority, so I suppose that we cannot be surprised if someone uses the authority that they have.

With respect to the islands, we were not particularly concerned, because it was in the SNP’s manifesto that there would be an islands bill, so I suppose that we would perhaps have seen that coming.

With respect to what the convener was saying—

Mr Simpson, we agreed earlier that Mr Wightman was going to pursue the line of questioning that you are about to go down. We agreed that there would be a move from boundary commission recommendations to ministerial approval or otherwise. I will give you a degree of latitude, but other members are going to specifically raise that point in a structured fashion.

The final point that I will make might lead to Mr Wightman’s point, convener.

It will do, so make your point.

Could we have a system where the final check is not a political check but an independent check?

There are other ways of approving boundaries. With the administrative reviews that the Local Government Boundary Commission conducts, the minister also accepts, rejects or amends. However, with the Scottish Parliament boundaries, the minister has no power to direct the commission to make any changes. The same is true for Westminster boundaries, in relation to which there is an affirmative resolution procedure as opposed to a negative resolution procedure. What is distinct in this case is not only the ministerial role but the relative absence of a parliamentary role.

That is something that this committee will explore.

We should be careful in our use of language, because the relevant minister will give evidence to the committee in a few weeks’ time, and I think that any suggestions that political considerations might play a role in the process are best put to that minister. However, it is reasonable to put on the record the fact that the decision was made by someone acting as a Government minister rather than as a representative of a party. We can explore that with the minister when they give evidence. We have to consider whether the process that exists is appropriate, but that is the process that currently exists, and I know that Mr Wightman wishes to explore it further.

Mr Wightman, thank you for your patience.

Thank you, convener. The Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland is required to review the boundaries every eight to 12 years. We have been doing the process largely unchanged since 1889. Do you have a view on whether the public can still have confidence in the process, given that the final decision is in the hands of a politician and there is no parliamentary role in determining the final boundaries?

My second question, which is related, is about the timetable for your reviews and the knock-on consequences for the ministerial decision on that review. Concerns have been expressed that your reporting in May 2016 and the decision being made by the minister in September 2016 were a bit too close to the May 2017 elections, given the sometimes complex processes that political parties have to go through to select candidates, which can take a bit of time, given multimember wards and so on. Can any improvements be made to the timetable?

On public confidence, there is a number of things to point out, one of which is our independence. We work within the statutory framework that we are given and we follow it closely. From that perspective, I think that the public can absolutely have confidence in the reviews.

On whether the public can have confidence in the judgment of a Scottish minister, I assume that that question applies to any policy decision. I do not know why the situation would be any different for these ones.

You are absolutely right about timetable improvements. There is certainly no time for us to conduct another review in, say, Dundee, the Scottish Borders or Argyll and Bute in time for the 2017 elections. The position is not quite as much of a surprise because we put our ward design proposals out very early so, although we made some modifications, that gave political parties some idea of what the landscape would be like for the 2017 elections. However, I take your point that the timing could be earlier.

On my first question, I was not suggesting that the public might not have confidence in the boundary commission; I was questioning whether they can have confidence in the process as a whole. You make properly independent recommendations, but the final decision, which relates to people’s communities and where they live, is in the hands of an elected politician, while Parliament does not have a role in determining the final look of the boundaries. You might not have a view on that, because we have been doing that for more than 100 years, but I flag that up as a possible change, particularly in light of the comments that you made about the statutory framework for the Scottish Parliament and Westminster Parliament elections.

The issue could well be worth exploring, in part because the position of the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland is about to change. We used to deal only with the boundaries for local government elections, while the Boundary Commission for Scotland used to deal with the boundaries for Westminster and Holyrood but, following the Smith commission recommendations and the Scotland Act 2016, we will also look at the boundaries for Holyrood.

The process for approving those Holyrood recommendations will be very different. The minister will have no role in amending any boundaries that we propose, and there will be a parliamentary role. Therefore, there might well be a desire to at least make the process by which boundary commission decisions are approved the same regardless of whether we are looking at local government boundaries or Scottish Parliament boundaries. Which you choose is up to you.

Can we explore that a bit further? I will take Mr Gibson first and then I and Mr Simpson can perhaps explore the issue further. We will then go to Mr Gray, who would like to ask some questions.

I will ask a wee bit about flexibility, if that is okay. I talked about four-member or three-member wards in local authority areas. Another anomaly that has come up is that some communities feel completely detached from the other parts of their ward. For example, in my constituency, the Isle of Arran is 10 miles off the coast but is attached to Ardrossan, and neither community feels that that is a happy arrangement. Under the legislation, those communities have to fit into a three-member or four-member ward.

Should there be more flexibility in legislation so that there can be one-member, two-member or possibly five-member wards? Is there a role for that in such communities? Other communities around Scotland are in a similar situation.

10:45  

That is a good question. We made a point of noting in our discussions where we felt that being able to use only three or four-member wards perhaps prevented us from getting a better solution that balanced parity and local ties. We did not focus on single-member wards, because we were thinking within the framework of STV, or on all kinds of multimember wards; instead, we focused on instances where it might be more helpful to have, say, a two-member ward and a five-member ward. Specifically, we thought that such an approach might be helpful in not only Perth and Kinross but the Scottish Borders, the Western Isles, North Ayrshire and Argyll and Bute.

What happens in such situations is that there is a de facto single-member ward. If the councillor of whatever party it is—in the case that I highlighted, we are talking about three parties and an independent after the past four elections—resides on the island, they in effect represent it. The mainland council takes no interest, and vice versa. We have the situation that I have described in any case, and it would be better if it were otherwise.

On parity, I mentioned that there are 16 councillors in my constituency and 17 in Ruth Maguire’s, with 3,500 electors per councillor in mine and 3,000 per councillor in hers. You said that you are looking at only a 10 per cent change and that you do not want to be disruptive, but the fourth reviews was only the first to look at proportional representation and multimember wards. If the wards were not constructed appropriately, should we not go back to first principles instead of building on what might not have been done properly in the first place, to ensure parity, which is so important in the legislation? I do not really think that that has happened in my neck of the woods and I am sure that the situation must be the same in other parts of Scotland.

There is another tension with regard to finding an ideal solution—I do not think that there is one such solution—and avoiding disruption. Some councils have used the wards that were created in the fourth reviews as the basis for economic or regeneration committees in their areas and, if we were to draw the lines in radically different places from one review to the next, we could introduce disruption that local councils would not necessarily find helpful.

Because the legislation requires parity and a particular number of electors per councillor, we did not really look at proportionality in the way that Kenneth Gibson described. The legislation does not require us to do that. That comes back to the hierarchy of bits in schedule 6 to the 1973 act, which is all about parity. It does not define proportionality as something that we should look at.

The point that I am making is that there is no parity in my local authority area, because the weighting is towards the south of the area instead of going throughout it.

Can we leave that for a second, Mr Gibson? We are under tight time constraints. I and Mr Simpson, to whom I will give the opportunity to come back in, will both have to be brief.

I come back to the end point of the process, which is the ministerial decision on the boundary commission’s recommendations. There again seems to be a conflict, in that if a minister accepts every recommendation, that might be seen as rubber stamping, and if they do not, it might be seen as interference. A tension sits between those two compass points, if you like. Should there be another check and balance in the system given that, under statute, the current check and balance is ministerial approval of the process?

What if we were to move away from that process and change the rules and regulations? Do you have any views on how we should do that? I bear it in mind that some of the suggestions that have been made—we will explore them—might lead to even more politicians having a say about their local areas in a politicised fashion. How do we move away—if we should move away—from the current process in a way that depoliticises things and does not lead to even more conflicts?

I suppose that we are talking about two different issues: the ability to accept or reject recommendations and the ability to amend. There are 32 separate reviews so, in a way, the minister has 32 decisions to make.

The only tension for us is that we have created a methodology that offers a Scotland-wide approach and seeks to create a solution that works best not only within a council area but for Scotland as a whole. We have attempted to make representation more equal for Scotland as a whole. We have reduced the range of ratios that are used and we have attempted to reduce the deviation from parity that occurs within council areas. Because five of the recommendations were not accepted, some of those improvements will not be realised. The ratios are not as compressed as they would have been otherwise and the deviation from parity is not as small as it would have been otherwise.

There are challenges in remaining with the boundaries from the fourth reviews in the five areas where the recommendations were not accepted. For example, the Isle of Bute has just over 5,000 people and three councillors, while Maryfield in Dundee has three councillors and 12,000 electors. That kind of disparity would not occur had all 32 recommendations been accepted.

That does not really answer the question whether there should be a check and balance in the system in relation to the 32 recommendations that the boundary commission makes. The boundary commission will of course support all 32 of its recommendations, but there is a check and balance in the system, which is the ministerial decision on whether to accept those recommendations. If ministers had accepted the 32 recommendations every single time, the work of the boundary commission would have been perfect since its inception. It is an esteemed organisation, but no organisation always gets everything right. The issue is whether the check and balance should sit at ministerial level and whether you are content with that. If not, what would be an alternative that did not, in theory, politicise the process?

It is not for me to comment on what the approval process for our recommendations should be. I merely point out that our recommendations attempt to get the best solution for Scotland as a whole and, by going with old boundaries that use old data, there are certain costs.

I want to tease out whether you think that there should be a check and balance in the system.

That is probably for others to judge but, as Ailsa Henderson pointed out, if we were talking about changes to council area boundaries, there would be a negative resolution procedure in the Parliament, so that is a different system. It is probably not for us to consider and decide which approach is better or worse.

That is a strong point that we will definitely return to. I was just trying to tease out whether you had a position on it.

I apologise for not being as brief as I should have been. Mr Simpson is next and I promise Mr Gray that he will get in after that. Does Mr Simpson want to add anything?

Not really, because it is not fair to ask the witnesses’ opinion on the issue. However, we should explore it later.

Absolutely—we will do that. I apologise to Iain Gray.

Not at all.

You have about five minutes.

I have two questions that are about East Lothian, which I represent, although I will try to couch them in terms of the efficacy of the methodology. East Lothian is the fastest-growing county in Scotland. Over the past decade, its population has grown by 11 per cent and it is projected to grow by almost 25 per cent in the next 25 years. However, the commission’s recommendation reduces the number of councillors that we have to represent that population. That seems to fly in the face of all common sense and to reduce rather than enhance democratic accountability. Surely that is a failure of the process.

I do not think that it is a failure of the process. There are different ways to do it. One way is to work out the number of councillors on the basis of the council area’s population, but we cannot do that and end up with sufficient councillor numbers for each local authority area—they would be too small in certain cases and too large in others. If we used just population, Glasgow City Council would end up with 166 members.

We therefore categorise the councils and look at ones that face common circumstances. We considered what puts pressure on councillors, what helps them and what makes their workload harder or less hard. We kept a measure of rurality, because we understand that that makes a difference, and we adopted a measure that we think captures other pressures that councillors face in their workload. We used that to categorise the councils. We cannot look just at population, because we would end up with council sizes that are far away from the 18 to 85 limit with which we work.

Population growth in East Lothian is not marginal; it is the greatest in the whole of Scotland. I am not suggesting that our number of councillors should be increased, but I am asking why, in those circumstances, they should be reduced. That part of Scotland is not at the margins of population growth; it is the fastest-growing area in the country.

Ailsa Henderson’s point was that it was a Scotland-wide methodology that resulted in the proposals for councillor numbers in East Lothian.

I say with all due respect that the professor just said that there were 32 separate reviews.

There is a consistent methodology. Nobody has ever argued to us that there should not be a consistent Scotland-wide methodology. That is not what happens in England, and there are other approaches, but we have that consistent methodology.

What is the factor that has reduced democratic accountability in East Lothian? If the methodology is not based on population, which it manifestly is not, what is the consistent factor that has led to a reduction in our number of councillors?

The methodology is not based on population because it cannot be based on population alone. As I said, that would mean ending up with markedly different and unworkable council sizes that did not reflect the number of councils.

In creating the categories, we used two indicators. We used a measure of rurality and we used a measure that captures the socioeconomic and geographic circumstances of councils—the SIMD data. We take those two aspects together.

So the reduction is based on—

Categorising councils.

It is based on the SIMD categorisation—

No—not on its own.

It cannot be based on population or rurality, because we have a rurality factor and the population is growing.

It is not one factor on its own; it is both together. The decision is not based on population, although population still has a role, because that is where the ratios come in. If two councils that are in the same category have similar socioeconomic and geographic circumstances, but one is smaller than the other, the larger area will end up with more councillors.

I will ask just one other question. We have talked about ward design—with the number of councillors having been set. In East Lothian Council’s area, the ward design in three out of the seven wards drives a coach and horses through the historical community and geographical links that you have talked about. It cuts across school catchment boundaries and Scottish Parliament boundaries. The designs were not supported by the council, by community councils, by any of the political parties or by any other political representatives, including me. If three out of seven wards have little or no support for their design, is that not also a failure, surely, in the consultation process?

I do not know that we could say that the design has little or no support. We found that we had limited public engagement on ward design, even in areas where there was concern, such as West Ferry in Dundee, Colinton in Edinburgh and Houston. We did not get overwhelming support that suggested that the majority of electors in an area were engaged with and aware of the issue. We got expressions of concern but, fundamentally, the concern was not with the ward but with the existence of multimember wards. Sometimes, what people want is a single-member ward, but there is nothing that we can do about that.

In the examples that we are talking about—the wards in East Lothian—the issue is exactly about the relationship between villages and towns, for example. It is exactly about the relationship with other boundaries, such as school catchment areas and Scottish Parliament boundaries. That was the basis of the submissions that were made by the local authority and by me. Nonetheless, there has been no change.

I apologise to Mr Gray but, because of time constraints, we must make this the last comment. We will have to move on.

Of course, we made changes. In East Lothian, we increased the number of councillors from what the methodology suggested by one precisely to keep Tranent and Macmerry in a ward. In a way, Iain Gray is advocating no change. If we always had to stick with a council’s existing planning designations and school catchments, we would not have a role, because there would be nothing for us to look at in determining parity. We have described the process that we went through, but we moved away from the methodology to give East Lothian an extra councillor.

I know that Mr Gray will want to reply, but I am afraid that we do not have time. I thank our witnesses for what has been a really useful evidence session. I also thank Mr Gray for coming along to participate in the committee’s work. I suspend the meeting briefly before moving to the next agenda item.

11:00 Meeting suspended.  

11:04 On resuming—