Chamber and committees

Thank you very much, convener, and good morning. I am pleased to be here today to present the electoral arrangements regulations for the six council areas that contain inhabited islands.

The regulations give effect to the proposals submitted to me by Boundaries Scotland, and I have a legal duty to lay them before Parliament. The Scottish Elections (Reform) Act 2020 removed ministerial discretion to reject or modify the commission’s proposals. Instead, the decision to implement Boundaries Scotland’s proposals rests entirely with Parliament.

It is vital for local democracy and local service delivery that councils are as representative as possible of the communities that they serve, and regular reviews of council wards and councillor numbers are necessary to ensure that they reflect changes in population. Those reviews have been held under the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018, which offers additional flexibility to Boundaries Scotland to create wards that elect one or two councillors in areas that contain inhabited islands, as well as the two, three, four or five councillor wards permitted elsewhere in Scotland.

I am aware of the opposition of Highland Council and Argyll and Bute Council to some aspects of the proposals and that their representatives have asked the committee not to recommend approval of the instruments.

There will, of course, be differing opinions on the final recommendations, but I am pleased to hear that, in almost every case, the consultation process was meaningful and that elected members and communities, for the most part, felt that their voices had been heard. I am confident that Boundaries Scotland has discharged its duties competently and professionally, and there would need to be very strong reasons for rejecting its recommendations.

I hope that those comments were helpful. I am of course happy to answer any questions that members might have.

The first point is to recognise that the idea of parity of electorates is not uniquely Scottish. Boundaries Scotland made that point to the committee. It is a well-established international principle in design of electoral areas. Given its international standing, I am not surprised that that principle has been a consistent part of the statutory framework that has supported Boundaries Scotland since its conception in 1973 as the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland. In essence, the arrangements flow from application of that principle.

However, of course, that principle is not applied in an absolute sense; provision is nowhere near identical in individual wards. There is an attempt to get as close as possible to parity, as I would describe it, but in some circumstances that cannot be achieved, because of geographical factors—for example, population sparsity—or factors that might prevail when we take into account the essential element of connections between communities, which is the other principle under which Boundaries Scotland operates.

Parity is an understandable characteristic of our electoral arrangements, but I do not think that it can be deployed on an absolute basis, because of variation in communities.

The issues are related, because one of the fundamental considerations that statute requires Boundaries Scotland to adhere to is the question of electoral parity between different localities. Of course, the other principal pillar of the framework required by statute is locality itself, which Boundaries Scotland has to take due account of. On the question of parity with regard to the population composition of wards, the more sparsely populated an area, the greater the amount of land and degree of rurality that will have to be considered as part of the settlements.

Frankly, there is no easy answer to this. I suspect that the challenges of representing a large geographical area are different nowadays; as someone who represents a large rural area, I have found that a different approach has had to be taken in light of the pandemic. In my 23 years of representing the communities that I represent, I had never had a single videoconference with a constituent. I am now doing that every week of the year, and it has suddenly dawned on me that it is more convenient for many of my constituents to have that conversation with me remotely instead of our having to travel endless distances to see each other. There are ways round that particular challenge.

On your very significant question about the repopulation of sparsely populated areas, that is a policy objective in its own right that carries merit, and it should be reflected in Parliament’s decisions about the composition of wards where the volume of population merits such an approach in applying the statutory principle of parity among wards.

That an interesting question. I am struck by the fact that there are mainland areas that, in many respects, have some of the same characteristics that islands have. The Rannoch area in highland Perthshire, which I represent, is essentially an island on the mainland. There is one route into the Rannoch area, and one route out. At the other end, there is obviously a way out, but it is a long walk that is not for the faint hearted. The route in is not dissimilar to one that would be used to access an island. There are similarities that perhaps need to be reflected on, and it is within the Parliament’s scope to ensure that the statute reflects that important point.

With regard to the nature of the statutory framework in which Boundaries Scotland operates, I come back to the point that I made in my first answer. There are two pillars to the analysis that Boundaries Scotland undertakes: the question of parity and the question of locality. I know that Boundaries Scotland attaches significant importance to maintaining the cohesion that one would ordinarily think should be in place when it comes to the nature of localities.

Boundaries Scotland will have explained to the committee the specifics of its consultation process. The committee has also heard testimony from a range of representatives from local authorities and communities, who have expressed their satisfaction at the nature of the engagement process. I am therefore confident that Boundaries Scotland has, notwithstanding the challenges of Covid, been able to undertake effective consultation.

I have been quite struck by my experience over the past 18 months. Until the election, I had the great privilege of policy responsibility for nurturing the Gaelic language. I held a number of extensive stakeholder discussions about the Gaelic language, which included representatives from, in the main, the remote and rural areas of Scotland. I have two observations about that.

First, connectivity was actually pretty good. I was very pleased with it, and we had good conversations. Secondly, through engaging in digital dialogue I encountered more people and was able to interact more conveniently with them than would have been the case had I gone on the road. Nothing would have brought me more joy than to go and sit in community halls in the Western Isles or north-west Sutherland to conduct face-to-face public meetings, but I would probably have interacted with fewer people if I had done that. Instead, while I sat at home in Perthshire I had on the line countless representatives who were able to interact directly with me, and for longer because I did not have to think about travel time and all the rest of it.

It is swings and roundabouts, but I am certainly satisfied that Boundaries Scotland has done nothing but undertake an effective consultation process.

I recognise the importance of the issues that Elena Whitham raises, but I come back to the point that I made to Mark Griffin. Ministers have been taken out of the statutory process, so it is important that I act in a fashion that accepts that decision.

There is no easy answer to any of those questions. To highlight the challenge in such issues, I go back to the question that Paul McLennan put to me on the situation in Arran. Arran seems to be quite pleased about having an island-only representative who can fight the corner for Arran locally, within North Ayrshire Council and with other public bodies, whereas the community in Islay takes a different view. I can sit here and argue the merits of both cases. There can be different approaches and perspectives.

On the situation in Highland Council, I go back to my exchange with the convener at the outset about some of the issues in relation to Highland. There is a duty on local authorities, as there is on the Government, to make necessary and appropriate policy interventions that meet the needs of localities. It should never come down just to what is said on a locality’s behalf by a local elected member for that locality. It is a question of how Highland Council can reach all of Highland and do the right thing by all of Highland, rather than only doing the right thing by a particular locality because its voice is strong enough. That is not representative democracy and that is not how we listen to communities or respond to the agendas about which they are concerned.

I will not give a specific view on the merits of individual proposals, but those are the general sentiments of which public authorities need to be mindful when they are coming to their conclusions.

I think that that is a pragmatic proposal by Boundaries Scotland. Since we formed the Government in 2007, I have chaired the convention of the Highlands and Islands, which includes North Ayrshire Council as Arran and Cumbrae are part of the territory covered by Highlands and Islands Enterprise. The importance of viewing Arran as a distinctive entity was a point successfully advanced by North Ayrshire Council within the convention of the Highlands and Islands and a variety of other policy fora.

That approach acknowledges that that community is affected by a very specific set of issues around the delivery of public services—I refer back to the valid questions that the convener raised with me. Fundamentally, those are about the delivery on Arran, the maximisation of the connections between public services and the important connections between that community and access to public services on the mainland.

The approach proposed by Boundaries Scotland reflects, I think, the nature of that island community. It recognises its distinctiveness and the fact that so much of life is interlinked on that island and, frankly, has very little to do with what is happening on the mainland. Crucially, it provides a role for a representative of that island to advocate for the connections between the island of Arran and the mainland. That is an example of where Boundaries Scotland has looked carefully at the distinctive circumstances and come up with what is—as Mr McLennan fairly puts to me—a unique proposition.

There are different ways of looking at the question. Fundamentally, it is the duty of the whole of Highland Council to think about those issues, as it is the duty of the Scottish Government to think about the issues and take policy decisions that support the repopulation of those areas.

I am not certain that the composition of the council and the policy decisions that are taken necessarily lead to questions being asked about the availability of public services in particular localities. Given the strategic importance of the repopulation issue, it is for Highland Council, NHS Highland, the Government and various other public bodies to take those decisions in a way that advances such questions, rather than seeing repopulation as being driven by the nature of or the arrangements for electoral representation in a locality. It would reflect pretty badly on any public authority if it was not taking the steps that could be taken to support repopulation, if that was a policy objective.

As I think the committee has heard from Boundaries Scotland, the questions with which Boundaries Scotland has to wrestle are driven by internationally strong practices around the nature and configuration of electoral wards. Boundaries Scotland needs to apply those considerations principally around the question of electoral parity with an understanding of the geographical entity and community that they are addressing and considering.

It is important that, as Boundaries Scotland undertakes that work, it engages substantively with local communities. I am satisfied that Boundaries Scotland has done that to good effect. Its ability to do that with regard to the Highland Council provisions might have been enhanced, had there been greater co-operation with Highland Council. However, in the other local authority areas, as the committee has heard for itself, there has been feedback from communities about the value of the dialogue that was facilitated by the approaches that were taken. It is important that Boundaries Scotland listens carefully to the feedback from island communities and recognises their distinctive characteristics. In the case of a number of proposals, communities are very satisfied with the arrangements that have been proposed.

Island impact assessments are part of the statutory framework, so an organisation must consider whether, in its judgment, the nature of the approach that it takes satisfies the statutory requirement. It is therefore for Boundaries Scotland to come to a conclusion on that question.

The work that Boundaries Scotland undertook on the issue inevitably required it to wrestle with the question of islands impact assessments, as we have heard. In all its undertakings it considered the implications for representation and for engaging and involving members of the community. I am satisfied that Boundaries Scotland was able to pursue that framework in its work. Of course, advice that it would seek from the Government on the question would be given within the context of the statutory framework.