“I want to bring local democracy back to Nairn, it should have been done a long time ago”, Nairn Provost supports dissolution of Highland Council

The Provost of Nairn wants to see the Highland Council dismantled in a bid to “bring local democracy back to Nairn”.

Laurie Fraser is backing a motion at this week’s full council meeting which calls on it to accept “offers made” by members of the Scottish Government to lead a review into what form of local government would best serve the Highlands.

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This could lead to the end of local authority in its current form.

Caithness councilor Andrew Jarvie submitted the motion supported by three group leaders as well as Councilor Fraser.

“Dismantle the Highland Council, I’ve had enough. I want to bring local democracy back to Nairn, it should have been done a long time ago,” the Nairn Provost said.

He was a district councilor before the reorganization of local government in 1996 saw the two-tier structure of regional and district councils abolished and replaced by 32 unitary authorities, including today’s Highland Council.

He believes that since then power has moved away from other regions and towards Inverness.

He said: “We’ve lost so much democracy, we’ve lost control of our budgets, it’s all done from Inverness and I’ve had enough.

“I used to sit on the district council, so I know how well the district council was run, everything was done locally: we had a six-week cycle of eight meetings and working groups which worked extremely well well and it was an extremely efficient service which we provided to the people of Nairn.

“And we would be much more effective going back to the days of district councils, we certainly need to take control of planning – that’s something we need to do at a local level. Inverness is knocking over all these houses and it’s not good for the local community, they’re walking all over us.

Cllr Fraser also disagrees with the idea that an authority the size of Highland Council provides valuable “economies of scale”.

“The Highland Council is not effective,” he said. “When they created this thing, about 30 years ago, they were only saving £3m.

“The reality is that money isn’t everything – you have to look at how your community is run.

“If we could set our own taxes, as we have done in the past with the district council, we could run a much better service – and Nairn, at the time, had one of the lowest council taxes of Scotland.

“My view now is that we should have a Nairn council again, and Inverness should have its own town council. We don’t want a situation where we’re just a suburb of Inverness – I don’t want to see that.

“You want stability in the community and you don’t get that with Highland Council.”

And he added: “We used to have 10 councilors and three regional council members and you could pay them with the money the four councilors get now. »

Councilor Jarvie – whose mother Barbara is also a Nairn and Cawdor councilor – said of his motion: “After almost eight years as a councillor, one thing is abundantly clear. The Highland Council covers far too large an area.

“Even the best and most efficient city council could not provide the range of services and meet the needs of such a diverse region. It’s an impossible challenge – saying it isn’t criticism, it’s the simple reality of what we all know and see. .

“The biggest problem is the structure, size and composition of the municipal area. It is impossible for a council to also focus on an area like Inverness, which continues to grow and attract investment, because this is the Far North where the population is in worrying decline.

“An area of ​​this size is an experiment which began in the 1990s with the reorganization of Scottish councils and ended all the old district councils, but nowhere has seen such radical change as in the Highlands .

“This is an outcome imposed on us by the government of the day, and after 30 years of trying, I think we’ve seen enough of it ourselves to be clear that it doesn’t work.”

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