Friday election round-up

After some last minute clarifications I can now start putting up the feedback that I have received from Election Candidates onto the blog; so as they say, 'Watch this space'.


I will leave you with a brain teaser.  


How many hours could a councillor work in a week?  


How much time could he or she spend with any individual constituent if everyone came forward with an issue?


I did some rough calculations, very rough calculations (I have to do something to try to get back to sleep when i lie awake in the wee small hours). 


Let us say that on weekdays a councillor could be on the go from 08.30am until 10.30pm given all the surgeries, meetings (Council, Community Council, Other Community and interest groups, Ward etc. ) and preparation for those meetings getting to grips with the technicalities  There will be letter writing and responding to letters, emails and phone calls and visiting people.  And then of course there is the driving, especially for those with huge distances to cover.  That makes around 14 hours a day, giving a 70 hour week.  Perhaps he or she may spend some of their weekend mornings working, say  5 hours on each of those weekend days, that is another 10 hours giving a potential for an 80 hour week.  


For the sake of keeping the sums simple, we'll say that they keep this up for 40 weeks  per annum which then multiplies up to 3200 hours a year of potential work time per councillor.


The population of Highland is in excess of 200k - about 219K last figures I saw.  


There will be 80 councillors so that may mean around 2500 adult constituents per councillor.   Simple division results in less than 1.5 hours per constituent per annum.  


Of course not everyone is going to want to see their councillor on a personal and unique issue and not all the time will be available to spend with individual constituents anyway given the number of meetings, meeting preparation and driving.  Also several people may have the same issue.


What it all adds up to for candidates is the potential for a very busy and potentially stressful life.  That does not make for a very large hourly rate.


What would you expect of a councillors working week?


[I have not mentioned MSPs / MPs and MEPs here but I would imagine their number of constituents per head is far higher.  I wonder how democracy is served by this with so little real time to spend on people's concerns]