Community Councils in Scotland were created in the 1970s. More than 50 years later, the legal description of what they are for can still be traced back to the same legislation.

But while the statutory purpose may look familiar, the reality of being a Community Councillor today is almost unrecognisable from what it was for many Councils even a decade ago.

And there is a very important question that needs to be asked.

At what point did we start expecting unpaid volunteers to operate with the knowledge, governance, administrative systems and legal awareness of a small public body, without giving them anything like the resources of one?

Community Councils were created under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, with the first schemes being established from 1975 onwards.

Their fundamental purpose was straightforward. A Community Council was there to ascertain, coordinate and express the views of the community it represented to the local authority and other public authorities, and to take action in the interests of that community where appropriate.

That basic purpose remains today.

The problem is that the world in which Community Councils are expected to fulfil that purpose has changed enormously.

For many Community Councils, the traditional role was intensely local.

Meetings might take place six, eight or perhaps ten times a year. There was comparatively little communication between Councillors between meetings. A meeting might last an hour or two, the minutes would be prepared, correspondence dealt with, and the Council would discuss what was happening in the village or villages it represented.

There would be:

• Local road issues
• A planning application for a house extension
• Perhaps a new house
• A footpath
• A village hall
• A local amenity
• A litter problem
• A community event
• A concern raised by a resident

It was, in many respects, uber-local commentary and representation.

And that was the point.

Community Councillors were local people giving their time to their local community.

Fast forward to 2026.

That description no longer comes close to describing the job.

Today, a Community Councillor can find themselves expected to understand, assess and comment upon matters involving:

• Major wind farm developments
• Solar developments
• Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS
• Electricity substations
• Overhead transmission lines
• Underground electricity infrastructure
• Grid connections
• Section 36 electricity applications
• Section 37 overhead line applications
• Environmental Impact Assessments
• Cumulative environmental impacts
• Peatland and deep peat
• Carbon emissions and carbon calculations
• Protected species
• Birds and bats
• Otters and other protected wildlife
• Biodiversity
• Woodland and forestry
• Archaeology and cultural heritage
• Landscape and visual impact assessments
• Noise
• Hydrology and drainage
• Watercourses
• Flooding
• Geology
• Access tracks
• Construction traffic
• Abnormal loads
• Road capacity
• Traffic management
• Road closures
• Public transport impacts
• Tourism impacts
• Economic impacts
• Community benefit
• Land use
• Planning policy
• National Planning Framework 4
• Local Development Plans
• Local Place Plans
• Short-term lets
• Licensing
• Telecommunications
• Housing
• Infrastructure
• Construction compounds
• Temporary works
• Environmental mitigation
• Decommissioning
• The cumulative effect of multiple developments across an area

That is before the Community Council's own internal governance is considered.

The modern Community Councillor can also find themselves dealing with:

• Data protection
• UK GDPR
• Privacy notices
• Data retention
• Information security
• Secure email
• Handling personal information
• Accidental disclosure
• Complaints
• Conflicts of interest
• Declarations of interest
• Codes of conduct
• Standing orders
• Constitutions
• Meeting procedures
• Public participation
• Recording meetings
• Publication of minutes
• Social media
• Digital communications
• Accessibility
• Equality
• Insurance
• Liability
• Financial controls
• Grant applications
• Community engagement
• Developer engagement
• Correspondence with public bodies
• Responding to residents
• Maintaining websites
• Managing community information
• Dealing with the consequences when something goes wrong

This is not an exaggeration.

The governance expectations placed upon Community Councils today include matters such as complaints, data retention, digital communications, equality, planning, insurance and liability, licensing and recording meetings.

That list alone tells us something.

The administrative and governance expectations placed upon a Community Council today are vastly greater than the traditional image of a few local people meeting in the village hall.

Planning is perhaps the clearest example.

Community Councils are part of the planning and licensing consultation system, giving local communities a formal route into decisions affecting their areas.

But planning itself has become vastly more complicated.

It is no longer necessarily a question of looking at a drawing of a proposed house and deciding whether it fits into the village.

In the Scottish Highlands, the growth of renewable energy and electricity infrastructure has transformed the scale and complexity of what can arrive on a Community Council agenda.

A Community Council may now have to consider a wind farm proposal, its Environmental Impact Assessment, landscape and visual effects, biodiversity, peat, hydrology, archaeology, access arrangements, construction traffic, cumulative effects and associated grid infrastructure.

As a Statutory Consultee a Community Council is expected to formulate an accurate mesaured repsonse on behapf of their community. 

That takes time.

Real time.

The proposed Carn Fearna Wind Farm provides a particularly stark local example.

The Section 36 application, reference ECU00004851, proposes a major wind energy development together with associated infrastructure.

The application material ran to more than 3,000 pages.

That does not mean a Community Councillor is literally expected to sit down and read every page from cover to cover. It does, however, illustrate the sheer volume and technical complexity of the material that can now sit behind a single consultation.

For a Community Council to respond effectively, Councillors may need to identify which parts of that material are relevant to their community, understand the issues being raised, check the evidence, consider planning policy and decide what matters should be brought forward in their formal response.

In most instances your Community Councillor is not a professional planning officer.

They are not an environmental consultant.

They are not an ecologist.

They are not a landscape architect.

They are not a hydrologist.

They are not a traffic engineer.

They are not an archaeologist.

They are not a lawyer.

Yet, if they are to fulfil their role properly, they may need to understand enough about all of those disciplines to identify issues, ask sensible questions, check the evidence and represent the interests of their community.

And Carn Fearna does not exist in isolation.

Across parts of the Highlands, Community Councils are simultaneously encountering proposals for wind farms, grid connections, substations, BESS and associated infrastructure.

The individual projects are technically complex enough.

The cumulative picture can be more complicated still.

A Community Council may therefore need to understand not only one application, but how several existing and proposed developments interact with one another.

That is a very different job from commenting on whether somebody's extension is appropriate for the street.

One of the major changes in the planning environment is the importance of cumulative impact.

A development can no longer always be considered sensibly in isolation.

A Community Council may need to consider one proposed development alongside another wind farm, an existing wind farm, a proposed BESS, a new substation, transmission infrastructure, construction traffic and other projects in the surrounding area.

The individual application might look acceptable in isolation.

The cumulative picture may be very different.

This requires Community Councillors to understand planning policy, environmental assessment methodology and the relationship between multiple projects.

It also requires something which takes time: research.

The planning framework itself has changed.

The Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 introduced Local Place Plans, giving communities a formal mechanism to set out proposals for the development and use of land.

That represents a significant shift.

The Community Council is no longer simply being asked:

"What do you think about this application?"

The modern planning environment increasingly asks communities to consider:

"What do you want your place to look like in the future, and how does that fit within the national and local planning framework?"

That requires considerably more knowledge.

There is another enormous part of the modern Community Councillor's workload which is rarely acknowledged.

Chasing people who are already being paid to do the job.

This can consume an extraordinary amount of voluntary time.

A Community Council raises an issue with the relevant public body.

Nothing happens.

An email is sent.

Nothing happens.

Another email is sent.

Perhaps there is a reply.

The matter is passed to somebody else.

Another email is required.

Another meeting comes around.

The issue is raised again.

Another commitment is made.

And then the Community Council has to chase again.

It becomes a cycle.

And every time it happens, it consumes the time of people who are doing this voluntarily.

There is a fundamental difference between representing a community and effectively becoming an unpaid caseworker, complaints handler and escalation service for problems which sit within the responsibilities of publicly funded organisations.

Take something as basic as road markings.

The issue of white lining in Garve and Gorstan was being raised as far back as 2018.

It did not simply disappear from the agenda because nothing happened.

It continued to be raised at Community Council meetings.

Emails continued to be sent.

The issue continued to be chased.

And this continued year after year.

Eventually, in June 2026, the white lining was finally done.

From 2018 to 2026.

Eight years.

Think about the volunteer time represented by that.

It is not one email.

It is not one agenda item.

It is every meeting where somebody has to remember to ask about it.

Every set of minutes where it is recorded.

Every email sent to find out what is happening.

Every response that needs to be followed up.

Every time a Community Councillor has to remind somebody that the matter is still outstanding.

And when nothing happens, the issue comes around again.

That is voluntary time being consumed by an issue which, in itself, should not require years of Community Council intervention.

Achnasheen provides another example of how these problems can perpetuate themselves.

The former Achnasheen Village Hall, which is the former railway station building, is no longer operating as the village hall. The public toilet associated with the building also closed in 2024.

Yet information can continue to appear online suggesting that facilities are open, while physical signs at each end of the village can still indicate that a public toilet is available.

The result is entirely predictable.

Visitors reasonably rely on the information and signage they encounter.

When they then discover that the facility is closed, some will look for somewhere else to go.

That has led to weely instances of dirty toileting around the village.

Residents then experience the consequences.

They contact their Community Council.

The Community Council contacts Highland Council.

The Community Council asks for the information to be corrected, the signage to be dealt with and the underlying problem to be addressed.

If nothing happens, the Community Council has to chase again.

And again.

And again.

Meanwhile, residents quite reasonably continue to contact the Community Council because, from their perspective, the Community Council is the local body they know and trust.

So the cycle starts again.

Problem → resident contacts Community Council → Community Council contacts the responsible body → no action or no response → Community Council chases → problem remains → resident contacts Community Council again.

This is not an isolated administrative inconvenience.

It is a drain on the finite resource that a Community Councillor has: their own time.

This is something that needs to be said plainly.

When somebody employed by a public body fails to respond to an issue and a Community Councillor has to send three, four, five or more emails before anything tangible happens, those emails are not cost-free.

They may be cost-free to the organisation receiving them.

They may take only a few minutes to read.

But they take time to write, follow up, record and monitor.

And that time is being donated by somebody who is not being paid.

Every unnecessary chase takes time away from something else.

• Time that could have been spent scrutinising a planning application
• Time that could have been spent reading an Environmental Impact Assessment
• Time that could have been spent dealing with a resident's genuine concern
• Time that could have been spent on community engagement
• Time that could have been spent preparing for a meeting
• Or, quite simply, time that could have been spent with their family or doing something else in their own life

Community Councillors are volunteers.

The people they are chasing are generally not!

There is nothing unreasonable about a Community Council asking a public body to do its job.

What is unreasonable is the assumption that the Community Council's volunteers have an unlimited capacity to keep asking until somebody eventually does.

When a volunteer has to repeatedly remind a paid employee that an issue remains outstanding, that volunteer's time is being taken for granted.

And when this happens repeatedly across roads, signage, public toilets, planning, environmental issues, transport, infrastructure and local services, it becomes a significant part of the Community Council workload.

It is a workload which rarely appears in any formal calculation of how much time a Community Councillor actually gives to their community.

But it is real.

And it can be enormous.

This is perhaps the biggest misconception about Community Councils.

The public sees the meeting.

They do not necessarily see the hours beforehand.

A single agenda item can involve:

• Reading hundreds of pages of documents
• Checking planning policies
• Looking at maps
• Reading environmental reports
• Checking previous decisions
• Examining consultation responses
• Researching legislation
• Checking information from public bodies
• Corresponding with developers
• Speaking to residents
• Checking technical information
• Writing a response
• Circulating information to other Councillors
• Discussing the issue between meetings
• Formally agreeing a position
• Attending meetings organised by other orgainsations
• Attending training sessions needed to upskill ourselves

And that is one agenda item.

Multiply that across several major developments and consultations and the workload quickly becomes enormous.

There is another aspect of being a Community Councillor which is rarely discussed, but which can be particularly demoralising.

The work we do can be taken by other people and organisations and presented as though it were their own.

A Community Council can spend hours researching an issue, checking information, reading documents, contacting organisations, gathering local evidence and putting together a carefully considered response.

That work is then sitting there.

It is useful.

It has value.

And sometimes somebody else simply picks it up.

The wording is reused.

The research is repeated without acknowledgement.

The conclusions appear somewhere else.

The work is incorporated into another submission, article, presentation or communication.

And the people who actually did the work can disappear from the story altogether.

This is particularly galling when the original work has taken many hours of unpaid research and preparation.

Community Councillors are not simply expressing an opinion. Increasingly, they are producing substantive work.

• Researching planning applications
• Analysing technical documents
• Comparing policies
• Checking information against primary sources
• Researching environmental issues
• Gathering evidence from residents
• Preparing detailed consultation responses
• Writing briefings
• Producing community information
• Identifying errors and omissions in published information
• Following issues through multiple organisations

That work is undertaken because the Community Council has a responsibility to represent its community.

It is not undertaken so that somebody else can later present the resulting work as their own achievement.

There is a wider point here too.

If an unpaid volunteer spends ten, twenty or thirty hours researching a complex issue and produces something useful, that represents a real contribution of time and expertise.

Volunteer does not mean valueless.

Nor does it mean that the intellectual effort, research or work product somehow belongs to whoever happens to discover it afterwards.

Community Councils are increasingly producing work that would once have been undertaken by paid staff, professional consultants or specialist organisations.

At the very least, that contribution deserves recognition.

Because there is something particularly dispiriting about spending hours trying to make sure that your community is properly represented, only to see the substance of that work subsequently appear elsewhere without acknowledgement.

It is yet another example of how the modern Community Councillor's contribution can be far greater than the simple attendance at a meeting that many people imagine the role to involve.

The meeting is increasingly just the visible tip of the iceberg.

Community Councils are voluntary bodies.

But they are governed bodies.

The Highland Scheme of Establishment provides the framework for how Community Councils operate, including their constitutions, standing orders and Code of Conduct.

The governance framework now sits alongside a growing collection of practical guidance covering complaints, data retention, digital communication, equality, planning, insurance and liability, licensing and recording meetings.

Then there is data protection.

Community Councils process personal information.

Today that means operating within the framework of UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

A modern Community Council therefore has to think about:

• Lawful processing
• Privacy information
• Retention
• Security
• Disclosure
• Data breaches
• Individual rights

We are not lawyers neither do we have lawyers!

We are not data protection specialists.

We are unpaid volunteers.

Yet we are expected to get it right.

And if we get it wrong, the fact that we are volunteers does not make the law disappear.

There is another difference which is easy to underestimate. 

A Community Council's communications are no longer confined to meetings, minutes, public notices and perhaps a local newsletter.

Today there may be:

• A website
• A Facebook page
• An email account
• Online consultation forms
• Digital documents
• Video meetings
• Recorded meetings

That creates opportunity.

But it also creates responsibility.

A careless email can disclose personal information.

A social media post can create a governance issue.

A recording can contain personal information.

An attachment can be sent to the wrong person.

A website can contain information that should no longer be published.

A Community Council therefore has to think about its digital footprint in a way that would have been difficult to imagine when the original Community Council model was created.

The transformation is especially obvious in rural Highland areas.

The scale of proposed renewable energy and electricity infrastructure means that Community Councillors increasingly have to educate themselves on an entirely new vocabulary.

• Wind farms
• BESS
• Substations
• Grid connections
• 132kV
• 275kV
• 400kV
• Overhead lines
• Underground cables
• Construction compounds
• Borrow pits
• Access tracks
• Abnormal loads
• Peat
• Carbon
• Biodiversity
• Cumulative impact
• Environmental Impact Assessment
• Section 36
• Section 37
• Energy Consents Unit
• Transmission infrastructure

These are not subjects that most people volunteer for when they put their name forward to become a Community Councillor.

Yet they can quickly become subjects on which they are expected to form an informed community view.

The Carn Fearna application demonstrates the scale of that change. The associated application material encompasses extensive technical and environmental documentation, and the volume of information involved in one major proposal can run into thousands of pages.

The Community Council is expected to engage meaningfully with that process.

And it is doing so alongside everything else.

This is the part that is often forgotten.

Community Councillors do not stop being Community Councillors because a major wind farm arrives.

• The pothole is still there
• The speeding concern is still there
• The blocked drain is still there
• The planning application for the house is still there
• The work on community safety and resilience is still there
• The footpath problem is still there
• The concern raised by an elderly resident is still there
• The local event still needs support
• The community still needs information
• Several major consultations may be running simultaneously

So the modern Community Councillor is effectively doing two jobs.

There is the traditional community representative role.

And there is an increasingly demanding statutory consultation, scrutiny and governance role.

Both are unpaid.

The irony is that the original statutory purpose of Community Councils remains remarkably relevant.

We are still there to ascertain, coordinate and express the views of our communities.

That has not changed.

What has changed is the complexity of the issues about which we are expected to ascertain, coordinate and express those views.

The very fact that Highland Council has recently reviewed its Scheme of Establishment is itself recognition that the framework in which Community Councils operate needs to be kept under review.

The environment in which Community Councils operate is changing.

• The legislation changes
• The planning system changes
• Technology changes
• The way communities communicate changes
• The scale of development changes
• The expectations placed upon Councillors change

And yet the people expected to deliver all of this remain, fundamentally, local volunteers.

There is a difficult question here which deserves a serious national conversation.

Are we still treating Community Councillors as local volunteers while increasingly expecting them to behave like a professional statutory scrutiny body?

There is nothing wrong with expecting Community Councillors to act responsibly.

There is nothing wrong with expecting good governance.

There is nothing wrong with expecting Councillors to understand their responsibilities.

There is nothing wrong with expecting proper data protection.

There is nothing wrong with expecting informed responses to major planning applications.

Indeed, communities deserve all of those things.

But responsibility has to come with realistic support.

If society wants Community Councils to provide meaningful scrutiny of multimillion-pound infrastructure projects, environmental assessments running into thousands of pages and complex planning and regulatory processes, then we need to acknowledge what is actually being asked of the people sitting around that table.

They are unpaid volunteers.

• They are giving up hours, and hours, and hours
• They are reading documents in their own time
• They are researching subjects they may never previously have encountered
• They are learning planning policy
• They are learning environmental terminology
• They are learning data protection
• They are learning governance
• They are writing policies
• They are managing correspondence
• They are communicating with public authorities
• They are responding to their communities
• They are doing all of this because they care about where they live

There is a danger in continually increasing expectations without addressing capacity.

The more complicated the role becomes, the smaller the pool of people who can realistically take it on.

Someone who works full-time may struggle to read hundreds or thousands of pages of planning documents.

Someone with caring responsibilities may not be able to attend repeated evening meetings.

Someone without a background in planning, environmental science, law or governance may reasonably look at the modern workload and decide:

"I simply don't have the time or knowledge to take this on."

That is a serious problem.

Because Community Councils are supposed to be representative of their communities.

We should not end up with only people who happen to have professional backgrounds in planning, law, environmental consultancy or public administration being able to participate effectively.

Community Councils need ordinary local people.

That is their strength.

It is the expectation.

• The expectation that a Community Council can scrutinise
• The expectation that it can govern
• The expectation that it can comply
• The expectation that it can communicate
• The expectation that it can understand increasingly technical proposals
• The expectation that it can protect personal data
• The expectation that it can respond quickly
• The expectation that it can represent the community accurately
• The expectation that it can engage constructively with developers, councils, government agencies and statutory bodies

And all of that sits on top of the original expectation:

Be the voice of your community.

That is a very different job from the one many people would have recognised a generation ago.

Community Councillors are volunteers.

Absolutely.

But that does not mean the role is simple.

It does not mean the work is casual.

It does not mean the decisions are inconsequential.

And it certainly does not mean that the legal and governance responsibilities somehow disappear because nobody is paid.

If anything, the opposite is true.

The modern Community Councillor is carrying an increasingly sophisticated public responsibility on a voluntary basis.

We need to recognise that.

• We need better training
• We need accessible specialist guidance
• We need practical help with governance, data protection and increasingly complex administrative requirements
• We need realistic expectations about what volunteers can achieve
• Where Community Councils are being asked to scrutinise developments of enormous technical and financial complexity, we need to ask whether it is reasonable to expect a group of unpaid local residents to do so entirely from their own time and resources

Because the Community Council of 2026 is not the Community Council of 1976.

The meetings may still take place around a table.

The minutes may still be written.

The Councillors may still be volunteers.

But the work load has changed. It has changed enormously. 

In 2018, Highland Council reported that since the 2015 full Community Council elections there had already been 76 interim elections, affecting nearly half of Highland's 154 Community Councils. It also estimated that around 400 Community Councillor positions were unfilled.

By the Council's 2024/25 review, the problem was still very much present. Highland Council reported that since the November 2019 full elections there had been an average of 25 Community Councils every year where membership had fallen below the required level and an interim election was therefore required.

The figures continue into 2026.

On 20 August 2026, Highland Council published its latest Notice of Community Council Interim Election. It lists 20 Community Council areas requiring the current interim election process, with a combined 125 vacancies.

The 20 Community Council areas are:

• Ardersier & Petty
• Balintore and Hilton
• Berriedale and Dunbeath
• Cradlehall and Westhill
• Cromdale & Advie
• Dores & Essich
• Fort Augustus & Glenmoriston
• Garve and District
• Glenfinnan
• Hilton, Milton and Castle Heather
• Inverness West
• Kinlochleven
• Knockbain
• Kyleakin & Kylerhea
• Latheron, Lybster and Clyth
• Nether Lochaber
• South Knoydart
• Strathdearn
• Strathnairn
• Uig

Across those 20 Community Councils, the number of vacancies ranges from four to ten, with 125 places requiring to be filled.

Highland Council's notice lists five vacancies for Garve and District. However, come 31 August 2026, the actual number of vacancies will be six.

Nominations opened on 20 August and close on 7 September 2026. Where a contested election is required, the ballot will take place on 8 October 2026.

These are not figures produced by campaigners or people arguing that Community Councils are struggling. They are Highland Council's own figures, published over successive years in its own reports and election notices.

And while these figures cannot be treated as a count of unique Community Councils that have fallen into abeyance, because the same Community Council can require an interim election more than once, they demonstrate something that is impossible to ignore: the difficulty of maintaining viable Community Councils is persistent, widespread and ongoing.

Currently GDCC does all of this on an annual grant of £445.20p