I HAVE to take issue with P Keightley from Glasgow in Tuesday’s National who thinks that Scotland’s councils are too big. This reader thinks that with 32 councils there are too few; there is a suggestion we should look to Norway with 422 councils?

The problem with this thinking is to do with the officers we’ll need to run these extra councils. Edinburgh, for example, has 17,000 staff for a population of 450,000. That’s roughly one bureaucrat for every 26 people. If we moved to more councils, that means more bureaucrats. These bureaucrats need paying – say £30,000 a pop. Every time you add a bureaucrat, you lose a schoolteacher, or two binmen. There is an innate tendency for council HQs to add staff, usually at the expense of frontline services, because corporate management teams like to grow. And these corporate managers are expensive – Andrew Field, chief executive at City of Edinburgh Council, gets paid £175,000 a year, more than the Prime Minister. So – more councils, more chief executives, less money for the coalface.

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My case is that we should be calling for the regional delivery of schools, roads and transport services. I argue that we should not have 32 unitary authority council education and transport departments, but nine regional shared service boards. Schools are largely autonomous – and regional transport departments make a lot more sense for joined-up thinking on roads networks across a wide area, with subsidised bus journeys not stopping at city council boundaries, for example.

The money saved by such a move would mean that existing city councils had a vast amount more to spend, as the number of bureaucrats would be lower due to economies of scale. Indeed, this was a model we followed until 1996, when the regions were disbanded by the Tory UK government; they thought them too left-wing. In those days we had proportionately more money to spend on school teachers and local services (delivered by the district councils) because the regions provided economies of scale. As soon as we moved to unitary authorities in 1996, costs mushroomed. For a while, back in 2018, I felt the SNP were listening, for after I had submitted a petition to parliament in 2016 calling for this (PE1606: Forcing Scottish councils to collaborate regionally to provide education and transport services) and gone round every hustings I could find, trying to bend the ear of SNP candidates, regional school boards appeared as an aspiration in the 2016 SNP manifesto.

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In November 2016, MSPs closed my petition, stating “there are current and forthcoming consultation opportunities that will allow the issues raised by the petitioner to be taken forward.”

Six years later nothing has changed. So much for parliamentary “consultation”. Readers can find full details on my website www.kidsnotsuits.com/fix-local-government-parliamentary-petition

I have used Scottish Government data to calculate that if the merger meant going back to local education authorities (LEAs) based on the old regional councils, ie pre-1996, it would save Scotland £500 million per annum. That’s just for schools – it doesn’t include roads. Think how much we could reduce classroom sizes if we did this. £500m would allow us to double the number of teachers; instead of classes of 30 pupils, we could half those classroom sizes to 15.

Result? Happier teachers, happier pupils. And our young people would benefit massively – growing into the kind of active citizens that P Keightley feels we currently lack. It’s not about having more bureaucrats, it’s about having brighter, more confident and more engaged citizens. And moving on from a school system that discourages that, which presently churns out so many who regard themselves as failures. It’s all about education, isn’t it?

Pete Gregson
Edinburgh