The Scottish Political System Since Devolution

This is the context in which the monitors began. The first monitor describes the McIntosh Report, commissioned to explore the relationship between the Scottish Parliament, Executive and local authorities as part of a wider review of the democratic role of local authorities. It provided an extensive set of recommendations in June 1999, including the argument that: the Scottish Parliament should set up a ‘covenant’ with local government and host a regular joint conference based on parity of esteem; the Executive should foster a similar degree of consultation; there should be legislation to give local authorities a power of general competence (to address the inflexibility of the ultra vires doctrine); ‘local government should always be considered in any review of other bodies delivering public services’; local government finance should be reformed to address issues of complexity and central control; there should be proportional representation (PR) for local elections; there should be a further review of political management within councils (which considers the scope for cabinet models in which leaders would be accountable to full councils or directly elected leaders of councils) to address the issue of party whipping and a lack of transparency; councillors should be drawn from a broader spectrum of society; and, community councils should be better resourced to help them engage more effectively with local authorities (November 1999: 17).
In other words, this is a mix of measures designed to affirm the value of local authorities, but the implicit sense is that the Scottish Executive is in charge and must use its new powers responsibly in partnership with local government. Yet, in the absence of a Scottish Executive commitment to address COSLA’s biggest concerns (such as local government finance—February 2000: 13), we may develop the impression of an unbalanced relationship masked by the ‘widespread rhetoric of partnerships’ (McGarvey, February 2001: 44). This image is reinforced by the Scottish Executive’s role in producing performance targets (73) that local authorities were obliged to try to meet (albeit within the context of a less punitive regime than we associate with the UK Government in England) (McGarvey, May 2002: 49–50).
The McIntosh Report set the early agenda for the monitors. In the absence of early guidelines it became clear very quickly that different Scottish Parliament committees dealt with local government differently, with some developing no links at all (February 2000: 13). Thus, it seemed imperative that the Scottish Parliament’s work with COSLA to produce a covenant was quick as well as substantive. Yet, instead, COSLA’s protocol and guidance from the Presiding Officer focused more on the role of councillors, MSPs, MPs and MEPs when dealing with constituency issues and the overlap of responsibilities which produced the need for some form of coordination (November 2000: 32; note that coordination between parties may be more important than between levels of government—Bradbury and Mitchell, 2007). In other words, the wider issue of coordinated meetings and parity of esteem was quickly forgotten. In any event, councils realised quickly that their main relationship would be with the Executive, not Parliament.