Your standing as a community councillor is a voluntary civic undertaking that will call for time, energy and imagination. The job will take you close to how this fast-growing city actually works. That itself is an eye-opener. It will hopefully deliver a positive outcome for your community and for you personally.

From the ‘Scheme for Community Councils 2025’ (the Scheme), here is the remit. ‘The general purpose of community councils is to act as voices for their local areas, articulating ... views ... on a wide range of issues of public concern’ to ward councillors, city council managers and other public agencies. (scheme-for-community-councils-effective-28-march-2025-pdf-version) Your council will have to draw up its priorities, ones that fit with your collective ability to deal with them. Your community council will need to be run in a ‘professional’, business-like, flexible manner. Work to catch your community’s attention. Anticipate the challenge of  bureaucracy and administration handed down to you by the Governance Division at City of Edinburgh Council.

Community councils have a statutory place in local government, one heralded as a key part of ‘local democracy’. Naturally, it is imperfect. Your conversations will centre on ‘public choice’, where hymn sheets vary. The interests of other parties may trump your own. There will be compromise and some frustration. However, if you work with purpose, hopefully your community council will find the capacity to become a valued agent of positive community change. You will get things in the neighbourhood ‘done for the better’. Recognised ‘local wins’ can be a game-changer. Nevertheless, it’s often the case that the local voice doesn’t carry, isn’t heard and isn’t listened to. You feel you ‘are not taken seriously’. It’s as well to be frank about this.

That is where you have to build your argument; push the point; fight your corner; make a noise; ‘go public’. Here is why. Community councils make up the third side of the ‘civic triangle’. On one side there are the ward councillors in City Chambers who mould the shape of the city, eager all to be ‘local champions’ of their communities, all prone to compromise by the competition of party politics. On the second side, you have the city council’s business managers at Waverley Gate. Their responsibility is to make the city function; here and now, with tight budgets and targets to meet, and in the future, by way of city design and planning, and streams of consultations carrying boxes to be ticked by community councils and city residents.

Here is the pinch point in the ‘local democracy’ setting (as well as in Scot Gov’s warm ‘Democracy Matters’ ambitions - Democracy Matters - Scottish Government consultations - Citizen Space)  If community councils don’t hold the civic triangle in place, the other two sides snap shut. Your neighbourhood is left mute, without a voice; your ‘place’ and ‘space’ are left behind. Ward councillors and city council managers can carry on in a cosy compact to settle their own priorities, without visible and effective community check and balance.

This is not ‘easy work’, then. There is the hint of better, though. The city council has committed to its ‘Community Empowerment and Engagement programme. EACC has a good relationship with the team behind it. Empowerment should follow from close all-round engagement. Engagement follows from commitment and goodwill on both sides. Commitment and goodwill, along with purpose and patience, are what you are asked to bring to your community council’s table at this time.

Choose your workload and your projects carefully. Co-opt specialist advice where you can. Lean with purpose on your ward councillors to promote your agenda. Use the EACC network to carry your voice louder and wider. Assign someone to it from your community council now. Share with other community councils what is working for you and what isn’t. Share with the EACC Board what you would like to see and how you might get it. Work together in a serious effort ‘to be taken seriously’. Good luck. Don’t collapse the civic triangle.

End/KR