I remain curious why Scottish community councils’ online presences are, er, not as good as I think they could be. One possible reason is their lack of impact/importance to their residents, in terms of whether such bodies tax residents in order to deliver services. In short, unlike almost the lowest tiers of government/representation in almost all other EEA countries and the other UK nations, Scottish community councils have no taxation powers, not even indirectly. Unlike every other country/nation I’ve looked at, community councils do not deliver services. In short they are only representative.

Another possible reason is lack of demand, i.e. Scottish residents simply aren’t demanding that their community councils engage well online. That is, if they don’t impact our wallets and they do nothing for us, why would we care what they offer online? Some corroboration is offered by a study of small Spanish municipalities’ websites (Pontones-Rosa et al., 2023), in which only about half of the participants used their municipalities’ websites. This lack of demand was not related to the sizes of the municipalities, so it’s not simply ‘we only need to engage with 3 people and their dog, and we can do that in-person anyway’. However, provision of more/better e-services, transparency and engagement features tended to increase with population. So perhaps there is a nuanced effect of population-size on how hyperlocal governments behave online. Further research is needed, of course.

A further possible reason, perhaps related to lack of tax powers, is that Scottish community councils do not have the financial or human resources to engage online. For example, an Edinburgh community council pays me £50 per month to take minutes of monthly meetings and manage its website and email addresses. Despite this being well below minimum wage, it’s around 50% of the community council’s annual income. Most of my career has been IT-tinged and fortunately I do not need to work full-time. But what about community councils that don’t have people like me? The majority of community councils operate on only annual grants of around £1000^[1], so have to reply on whatever skills their members may have. Even though older people aren’t automatically ‘digital immigrants’, community council members tend to be near or past retirement age (Cruickshank et al., 2020), and so may not be willing or able to learn new skills.

It was also disappointing for me that the Spanish research was the only recent survey of EEA/UK hyperlocal representatives’ digital offerings I could find. Or maybe it’s an opportunity – perhaps I could get a grant to undertake such surveys across Europe, and delve into potential reasons for these hyperlocal bodies’ online behaviours.

My full findings about the EEA and UK nations are in this PDF.

Footnotes and references

^[1] A very small number derive income, e.g. in Ayrshire, Orkney and Kintyre, from wind-farms and similar.

Cruickshank, P., Hall, H., & Ryan, B. (2020). Information Literacy as a joint competence shaped by everyday life and workplace roles amongst Scottish community councillors. Information Research, 25(4 (supplement)), https://doi.org/10.47989/irisic2008

Pontones-Rosa, C., Perez-Morote, R., Nunez-Chicharro, M., & Alonso-Carrillo, I. (2023). E-government in Depopulated Rural Areas. An Approach to the Reality of Spanish Municipalities. Population Research and Policy Review, 42(4), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11113-023-09808-9