6. To ask the Scottish Government whether it has received a final report from the Scottish local authorities remuneration committee. (S6O-03163)

The Scottish local authorities remuneration committee’s recommendations report was published on the Scottish Government website on 16 February this year.

Increasing the diversity of councillors is a priority that is shared by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the Scottish Government. Does the Minister agree that the recommendations in the report, including the suggestion that severance payments be introduced for councillors who lose office, would help to tackle existing barriers to recruitment and retention?

It is worth putting on the record that, many years ago, when I ceased being a councillor before becoming an MSP, I received a severance payment.

Being a councillor can involve a significant amount of important work in local communities, and the terms and conditions should reflect that. It is important that remuneration does not act as a barrier to encouraging a diverse range of people to stand for elected office. We want to encourage people from across our communities to stand to be councillors in their local areas. The Scottish local authorities remuneration committee report makes a number of recommendations that require appropriate deliberation, which the Scottish Government will take forward in partnership with COSLA.

The Scottish local authorities remuneration committee recommends that resettlement severance payments be introduced for councillors who lose office. That would be modelled on the system that is applied to MSPs and it would be in place for the next election cycle. Has the Minister been made aware of any costings for such an arrangement? If so, can he explain what data has been used to inform the costings and will he provide the chamber with that?

As I said in answer to

Mr Torrance, there are 22 recommendations in the report, and it is important that we look at those in partnership with our local government colleagues and then bring back proposals for deliberation. If there are any changes, I am pretty sure that the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee will take an interest in that. We will come back to Parliament in the usual way with any actions that we intend to take.

This is probably a good point to thank the members of SLARC for their hard work. They took a broad approach to the issue and I hope that we can all get behind that piece of work. It is important that we take that forward in partnership with our local government colleagues.