A radically revamped Highland Council will begin to take shape this week in the wake of multimillion-pound budget cuts and hundreds of redundancies.
The proposed “redesign” will match fresh priorities and ambitions to the drastically reduced level of overall funding in line with the authority’s progression to more local decision-making.
SNP parliamentarian Dave Thompson welcomed the proposals but said now was the time for a “radical overhaul” of the local governance structure to break up the authority into smaller councils.
Council leader Margaret Davidson said that “nothing is off the table” in terms of what practical changes could be made and that the redesign would involve “going back to basics”.
There has been a debate among councillors for several years about breaking up the authority into smaller areas.
Highland Council oversees an area of 10,225sq miles – which represents 11.4% of Great Britain and is 20% larger than Wales.
The proposals will be considered in the wake of the authority having to slash £50million – about 10% – from its previous total budget in order to balance its books in 2016-17.
A report by council chief executive Steve Barron will go to Thursday’s full council meeting in Inverness and councillors will be asked to agree to “refocus, recalibrate our objectives and redesign our services”.
Yesterday, council leader Margaret Davidson said: “We absolutely need to redesign the Highland Council just now and we need to get on with it as fast as possible.
“We need to be clear that it is elected member-led and officers advising and need to look at costs and seek some objectivity through external advice.
“Nothing is off the table and we will be looking at what services people want and what we need to do to deliver them and we will be going back to basics as part of that.
“We might need to move services around the Highlands and not centralise things in Inverness as much as we have done. Obviously the cost of doing these things is a caveat.”
Mr Thompson, who is MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, has previously called for a new local authority to cover Skye, Lochalsh and Lochaber.
He said: “I believe that simply tinkering with restructuring in Highland Council is not going to deliver any decision-making to various parts of the Highlands.
“What we need is a radical overhaul of governance structures so that we end up with very small but powerful local councils across the Highlands, ranging in population from 10,000 up to 50,000 in Inverness.
“These small councils would deal with all local issues, from environmental to housing and some planning.
“The council would still need a strategic level of governance for strategic planning in infrastructure and development – but this could cover from Moray to Argyll, similar to Highlands and Islands Enterprise.
“A problem we have just now is we can’t get people to sit on community councils, but if people could sit on a small local council with real money and real power, with the ability to improve lives of their own people, I think you would get a lot more local political engagement.”
Mr Barron will work closely with a cross-party group of councillors who will be focussed on seeking “the views of communities and the council’s staff, partners and stakeholders”.
The work is expected to start immediately with a gestation period of nine months, reporting its decisions to a full council meeting in mid-December.
The revamp, billed as “a key investment,” will incur a one-off cost to the council of £175,000 for the use of three full-time staff.
In his report to councillors, Mr Barron states: “The council is strongly supportive of an agenda of localism in which these priorities and resource decisions will, in the future, be made more locally, with the collaboration of partners and with the anticipation of communities.”