By John Crawford

NOBODY under the age of 50 will remember life in the Scottish county councils and burghs that disappeared this month in 1975 when they were reorganised into nine new regional councils, fifty-three district councils and three unitary councils, ending decades (in some case centuries) of continuous delivery of local municipal services.

We’d had small burghs (less than 20,000 population), large burghs (more than 20,000), counties, and four counties of cities (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen): all with their own traditions of public service and accountability to the electorate.

Local press reporters were regular attendees at full council meetings where committee decisions would be re-visited and where appropriate, amended. Roll-call votes (where the views of dissenting councillors were recorded in the minutes) were common and from time to time the council’s chief officers might also insist on their professional advice being recorded if they felt it had been ignored: all providing a paper trail if things went belly-up.

In the small burghs, the senior staff rarely exceeded four: the town clerk (for all the legal and administrative work); the town chamberlain (for the financial work and collecting rates); the housing factor (responsible for council houses and collecting rents); and the burgh surveyor (for everything else: roads, sewers, waste management, building control, street lighting, public health, parks, leisure, cemeteries and in some cases, coastal protection).

The salaries paid were such that usually only the town clerk could afford to live in a bought house, the other officials having applied for their job because it came with a council house provided. With several hundred other small burghs in Scotland, there was a healthy turnover of all these senior staff and if one fell out with their employers, they simply moved on. Councillors weren’t paid anything apart from out-of-pocket expenses.

At ground level, the small burgh model offered a lot of advantages. Refuse collection crews were in the habit of reporting choked sewers, potholes etc to their boss, the burgh foreman who’d immediately send out a squad to do repairs. If they found anybody putting out builders’ waste, they’d report it and the foreman would get the clerk of works out to check if the householder had been issued with a building warrant.

It was common practice to set up ad hoc joint committees (compromising councillors from all the councils participating) for larger projects such as new leisure centres, playing fields, etc.

Critics will point out however (and with some justification) that this model of local government severely limited the opportunities for economies of scale that the ensuing regional and district councils were able to enjoy, but in those days, everybody knew not only who their councillor was, but where they lived and if any of the latter ignored representations from their constituents, they ran the risk of being turfed out at the next election.

Have we made any progress since then?

John Crawford trained in the Burgh Surveyor’s Office in Saltcoats from 1968-1972