Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2020
We do not have the same level of local representation that there is in the rest of the EU.
Everybody has focused on proportionality, which I totally agree with. Another issue is the capacity of councillors to represent people in what can be incredibly large wards—that is clearly an issue in island and remote and rural communities. There is also the issue of whether we could have more councillors in our communities, rather than just focusing on the number of wards in terms of proportionality. Bringing those two issues together might be another way to look at them. It was interesting to hear reservations from Bill Kidd and colleagues in the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, because they paralleled the reservations that came up in the Local Government and Communities Committee when we looked at the issue.
Finally, I will talk about representation. Alongside the bill, we have talked about encouraging young people to vote. There is a broader issue to do with encouraging everybody to vote. The numbers participating in local government elections are very low in comparison with the numbers participating in either Scottish Parliament or UK elections. There is a need to encourage people to get involved in local elections and local government. When we look at the sizes of wards and the numbers of people standing in wards, we should be thinking about participation and encouraging people to get involved. When we look at the parity of representation between women and men in Scotland, we see that only 30.5 per cent of local government representatives are women. We should be looking to improve that—it is not good enough.
Let us get the details of the bill right and use the opportunity of having the debate on the bill to encourage greater numbers of young people to vote and to think about how we encourage young people and people from underrepresented groups to become candidates and, potentially, elected representatives. The bill is an opportunity. Although it cannot do everything, I ask the minister to think about—