Like other contributors to this series, I too struggled with finding other issues to consider outwith the referendum. It’s difficult, and possibly undesirable given it’s significance, to avoid it when assessing the week’s politics in Scotland; so I too will buckle to the pressure and mention it, but hopefully from a different angle to previous contributors.
The future of Local Democracy
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Whilst doing my usual morning trawl of the BBC Website over the first of many caffeine hits, I noticed that the Commission for Strengthening Local Democracy has published its interim report.
This Commission, established by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) to consider the future of local democracy, whatever the outcome of the referendum, has flown quietly below the media radar until now. However, the findings in the interim report makes for interesting reading, and most certainly gives key stakeholders from both referendum campaigns something to think about.
So what has the Commission found so far? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it suggests that the majority of people have lost confidence in their ability to have a say about decisions in their local area. In addition, it notes a pattern and tendency towards “centralisation” in the Scottish political landscape.
What is to be done you might ask? The Commission recommends a significant culture shift from what it perceives to be a “top down” to a “bottom up” decision making structure. According to the Commission, this entails significant devolution of responsibilities, including fiscal empowerment, from national government to local government.
The Scottish Youth Parliament submitted written evidence to the Commission and was also invited to give oral evidence. To inform this evidence, we consulted over 200 young people through a survey and a number of focus groups to seek their views on their experiences of local democracy.
The findings from this exercise were interesting on two fronts: firstly, a significant majority of young people who were asked believed that there should be more structured engagement with young people in their area through local youth forums; and, secondly, that local decision makers should work much more pro-actively with these structures.
What is striking about these findings, is that the young people raised concerns about issues already within the remit of local, and indeed national, decision makers; the importance of “meaningful engagement.” It is an issue of agency, rather than structure; young people need to feel that decision makers are actually listening to them rather than making tokenistic gestures of engagement.
The Scottish Youth Parliament’s work on the forthcoming referendum centres primarily on engaging young people in the debate in an impartial manner. Our primary concern is that young people have the information and confidence to make their own informed decision.
As part of this work, we are actively encouraging all those involved to meaningfully engage with young people. This involves speaking to young people on their terms, answering their question simply and concisely and presenting their arguments in a positive manner.
Young voters consistently represent the lowest turnout of any age category for many decades now; we need a new approach. It’s not because “young people don’t care about politics”, far from it.
We know through our work that if you meaningfully engage with young people, they are extremely passionate and active citizens, keen to have their say in decisions that affect their lives. Perhaps they fail to see how the traditional party politics is relevant to that?
The referendum presents an important opportunity, and there is a lot at stake. If we get it right, we have the opportunity to inspire a generation of young, engaged, voting citizens.
Gareth Brown
Public Affairs Co-ordinator, Scottish Youth Parliament