We all know things aren’t going well for councils in Scotland and that they’re about to get worse with the bin strikes, but the question is how did we get here? Having just had a couple of interesting close-up experiences of councils, I’d like to make a few suggestions.

My first experience was the meeting in Glasgow this week of the Merchant City and Trongate Community Council at which people who live in the area raised the issues bothering them and representatives from the city council and the police explained what they were trying to do about it. Anyone who lives in the centre of Glasgow will know what came up: crime, litter, graffiti, drugs, homelessness.

A couple of things stood out. The first was the admission from the city council that they’ve effectively given up on the graffiti. The council representative said they used to send teams down to the Clyde to remove it from the walls there, but that they’ve now simply re-designated part of the riverside as a “graffiti art zone” and stopped cleaning it up. The council rep also admitted why they’ve done this: it’s not an artistic decision, they just don’t have the resources to keep up.

The other thing that stood out was the drug problem in the centre of the city. We know the council’s been doing some good stuff on this, including the needle bin in Old Wynd and the safe consumption unit on Hunter Street. But as with the issue of graffiti, the meeting was left in no doubt that there’s a lack of resources to tackle the problem it causes for residents (there are only two beat police officers in the area for example). I suppose one way of putting it would be that the council can’t cope.

I got a similar story when I was up in Inverness recently speaking to people about Highland Council, which has just come at the bottom of a council performance table. The table, which was compiled by The Times, compared councils on a range of factors, including recycling and waste, roads, crime, pupils doing well in exams, and so on, and Highland was the council that came out worst.

When I told people in Inverness this fact, no one – literally no one – was surprised. I spoke to two septuagenarian sisters for example, Sandra Wylie and May Hayden, who’ve lived in the Highlands all their lives, and when I asked them to tell me what was good about their council, they gave me a blank look. “I can’t think of anything the council’s doing right,” said Mrs Hayden. “I really can’t.”

The two top issues for the sisters were schools and crime. They pointed out how, contrary to popular belief, many of the schools in the Highlands are overcrowded; they also told me the struggle they’d had getting help when a friend of theirs was burgled. Mrs Hayden’s verdict was blunt, as the verdict of Scottish septuagenarians often can be: it’s all gone to hell.

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I got similar reactions from the other people I spoke to. Richard Montague owns a gift shop in the city and told me crime and anti-social behaviour is a big problem in Inverness but that often there are no police around at all and it’s hard to get help when you need it. He’s also in the process of shutting his shop down and moving online partly because the council has ignored the pleas of businesses not to pedestrianise large parts of the city centre.

Some of the other stuff that came up was very familiar indeed, like potholes. One guy told me how a local driver had hit a pothole and wrote “f*** sake” with an arrow on the road pointing at the hole but that Highland Council cleaned up the “f**k sake” and didn’t fix the pothole. Another man said he’d just came back from Ireland where the roads were in great condition and wondered why the Highlands was so bad in comparison.

A few themes emerge from all of this, the first of which is communication. The sisters told me how hard it was to get in touch with anyone about the burglary and shop owner Richard also said the communication from the council was poor. At the Merchant City meeting as well, quite a few of the people who spoke complained about Glasgow council failing to tell them about decisions being made in their community. This is something councils could improve at no great cost.

(Image: Trongate)

Obviously, I don’t want to be unrealistic about the problems councils face. Highland is dealing with a huge geographical area which makes things trickier; there’s also a lot of hidden poverty in the Highlands which councils with smaller, wealthier populations don’t have to face to the same extent. Similarly, poverty makes things harder for Glasgow council than it does for the suburban councils.

But there’s one problem every council faces, which is the funding gap (currently £585m), and we know the root causes: the Scottish Government has cut council budgets, it’s ringfenced the money it gives for its own priorities, and it’s insisted on a council tax freeze. Basically, councils are in a poor way – it’s all gone to hell, as Mrs Hayden put it – and it’s only going to change when the government stops turning the screws and loosens the taps. The leader of Edinburgh Council says the bin strikes will lead to a stinking summer and they’ll only be averted if the government provides more money. And he’s right isn’t he?