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Statutory provisions
10. Details of statutory provisions are given in Annex A. The relevant provisions in the Act are already law; those included in the Order came into force on 1 December 2005.
11. Section 1 of the Act places the Scottish Ministers under a duty to establish RTPs by Order and that Order must provide as to the constitution and membership of each partnership. Section 1 provides that the Order shall secure that:
- each constituent council shall appoint between 1 and 5 councillor members;
- any one RTP can never have more than 20 councillor members; and
- each RTP is required to have a certain number of other members: these will be appointed in the first instance by the Scottish Ministers and after the 2007 local government elections by the RTP itself.
12. Members appointed by councils will be serving elected members of the council nominating them. Unless their membership is otherwise ended, they would continue to serve until the first meeting of the council after a local government election. At that point they could be reappointed by their council or replaced. If a councillor member is defeated in a council election, or stands down prior to a council election, then they would continue nevertheless to be a member of the RTP until their replacement was appointed - this ensures continuity during the electoral period.
13. Substitutes may be appointed by the council and must be members of the same council. Substitutes do not need to be 'tied' to individual members - a councillor member who could not be present at more than one meeting could be replaced by different substitutes at different meetings; those councils with more than one member might find it helpful to have a small 'pool' of substitutes who would be able to keep abreast of RTP business. However, if two councillor members from the same council were absent from the same meeting then one substitute could not do the job of both - two substitutes would be required.
14. Councils may prefer, for reasons of continuity, for each substitute to shadow one councillor member. Sometimes this will be a necessity, due to the political balance of the council's representation. This approach is permitted under the terms of the Order.
15. Councils would be able to replace their representative at any time - see paragraph 24 (notice periods etc may be agreed with RTPs for orderly and efficient administration). However, under the terms of the Order, reasons must be given to the RTP. If this is purely an administrative change then the reasons will be fairly straightforward.
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