Irvine Community Council has asked North Ayrshire Council to carry out and publish human rights impact assessments before any decision to cut or withdraw local services, following the Scottish Human Rights Commission’s report on the South of Scotland.
The Commission’s findings describe what many in Irvine already know: when libraries, outdoor provision and community facilities are reduced, the people who lose most are those with the least alternative. The report frames access to these services as a matter of rights, not discretionary spending, and the community council agrees.
Each February the council’s budget options float the same candidates for cuts, apparently to test the public reaction. We have asked that this stops being the way decisions are made. Before any option reaches the budget, residents should be able to see the assessment of who it affects and how.
The council has told the Irvine Times that “all items included within the budget consultation are subject to Equality and Children’s Rights Impact Assessments screening and assessment to ensure impacts are considered as part of the decision-making process.”
Those assessments are narrower than the human rights assessment the Commission calls for, but they are a start. If they exist, the next step is simple: publish them alongside each budget option, in a form residents can read without a law degree. An assessment that sits in a file until someone submits a Freedom of Information request is not informing the public debate. If residents have to use FOI to find out how a proposal affects them, the problem is not only accountability but transparency.
We have also raised two related concerns.
Community asset transfer should not be used to pass responsibility for frontline services onto volunteers. Where a community takes on a building, that should be because it adds something, not because the council has stepped away from it.
Community wealth building should bring value into Irvine. It should not become a label for replacing council services with third-sector provision that depends on grant funding renewed a year at a time.
The community council will continue to press for these assessments to be published, and will report back to residents on the council’s response.