Ardrishaig Community Council Update
Argyll and Bute Council · 28 August 2024
Back to Mid Argyll, Kintyre and the Islands Area Community Planning Group — 28 August 2024 and its agenda
Text extracted from the council's PDF. Layout and reading order may differ from the original.
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Ardrishaig Community Council Partner Update
Mid Argyll, Kintyre and the Islands Area Community Planning Group – 28/08/24
In relation to the MAKI meeting of 28 August and your requests for agenda items, Ardrishaig
Community Council ("ACC") would like to see some follow up from this item from the 1 May 2024
Minutes.
"Discussion took place around the struggles that community councils faced with attracting new
community councillors; ways in which community councils could work together to form caucus
arrangements; engagement with the Democracy Matters consultation; high workload of
community councillors; difficulties with the level of complex process and regulation around
community councils; support available for community councils; and the potential requirement for
additional visits to community councils to discuss their concerns."
As you will know, the planned community council forum was postponed due to the general election
and so there has been no opportunity to discuss it at that forum. However, ACC notes the
resignation of the Garelochhead CC and the comments made by former councillors about the
perceived lack of support from A&B Council and share the concern that more is being asked of
community councils with no corresponding increase in financial or human resources. For example,
ACC has been invited to submit a Community Place Plan by June 2025 which we are keen to do, but
no offer of assistance in achieving this was made. At the same time ACC needs to update its
Resilience/Emergency response plan. ACC also spent a lot of time this past winter dealing with a
response to the scoping report for the proposed High Brenfield Wind Farm and understands that
Low Carbon, the developer, is proposing to apply for planning permission later in the year. At the
same time, they have commenced discussions with interested parties around possible community
benefit if their application is successful which we need to actively engage in. ACC has also been
responding to the SEPA Flooding consultation and the Scottish government Flood Resilience
consultation, all of which link into the Place Plan initiative. The volume of work involved for
councillors, the majority of whom have day jobs and whose community council work is carried out in
their spare time, is very significant.
On top of this, through the Ardrishaig Gala Committee has been organising the Ardrishaig Gala week,
which is the largest community event of the year. As was the case last year, whilst we've found
individual council staff helpful, the lack of joined up approach at Council level, the fact that event
planning seems to be fragmented across different departments, and the fact that it hasn't felt like a
supported and collaborative process, has led to much frustration, which we understand to have
been shared by the organisers of the Lochgilphead Celtic and Pictish festival.
If the aim of decision makers is to empower local communities and community organisations, and
not be a mere "tick the box" exercise, there has to be more thought given to how to support
community organisations with meaningful resource allocation. It can't be enough to direct them to
webinars or printed materials, as the time taken to wade through these cuts significantly into the
time available to them to actually do what's asked of them. And perhaps one often overlooked
major headache is that, when external or expert resource is required, CCs don't have the funds to
engage professionals without first having to apply for and be successful at obtaining grants. The
timelines for submission of applications for grants and decisions as to grant allocations are generally
completely different from the deadlines for replying to consultations or, for example submitting
plans. So, where funding applications have to be made before a large scale community engagementPage 2
exercise can be undertaken so that work can commence on preparing plans or responses to planning applications etc, the mismatch in timing can cut the time available to pull responses or draft plans etc together significantly. We would suggest that the Council needs to be much more pro-active in offering concrete resource and advice, rather than merely acting as a signpost to printed materials, webinars etc. This might require a rethinking of working patterns for some staff who are in a community support capacity to recognise that meetings may need to be held outside normal working hours and that going out into communities and delivering assistance/providing expertise may best be performed within those communities and not from behind the council website. ACC wants to engage collaboratively on finding a way to work with council staff, other local community councils and organisations on these issues and we think that we are not alone in hoping that an approach can be developed that delivers more support to community councils in helping them serve their communities.