Your Community Council

There will be no Leith Links Community Council meeting in July, although work will still be going on behind the scenes, and this page will provide updates.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Do you like the stickers we had made for the Proclaimers concerts? We gave them out to people coming in, and it turned out to be a really good way to welcome people to Leith Links and to start a conversation.

Meanwhile, here is some background.

What actually is the Community Council?

Leith Links Community Council, like all Community Councils, is a voluntary organisation set up by statute by the Local Authority, that is City of Edinburgh Council, and run by local residents to act on behalf of its area. Community Councils are the most local tier of elected representation and as such can /should play an important role in local democracy (although in practice they do not really have much power…)

Community Councils are basically groups of people who care about their community and want to make their area a better place to live. Their main role is to engage with the locall community, to share information to ensure that the local community is informed about things going on locally that will affect them, and to listen to members of the local community and try to represent their views and wishes to the City Council, to ensure that communities ‘have a voice’. The Community Council also has a statutory role in responding to Planning and Licensing applications in the area. CCs are non political.

The role of Community Councils is explained more fully on the Improvement Service website, here.

You can see more about CCs in Edinburgh here on the Council website

How can I find out more about what the Leith Links Community Council does?

You can use this website to explore areas of our work, and we are also on Facebook (/LeithLinksCC) and Twitter (@LeithLinks_CC) You are very welcome to attend meetings, which are held on the last Monday of every month (except July and December).

You don’t have to be a member of the Community Council to come along to meetings. The meetings are held in public (whether online or in person) and anyone who lives in the area is welcome to attend and can be given a chance to speak.

How is the Community Council funded?

The Community Council gets an annual grant from the City Council which is to cover things like hire of meeting venue, payment of a Minutes Secretary, stationery, payment of website domain name & hosting charges, Zoom subscription, payment of essential Third Party insurances, Data Protection fees, and things like getting leaflets printed. Our grant for 2023 was £737. You’ll be able to work out that that doesn’t go very far at all, indeed only barely covers these essential costs (and that explains why we simply do not have the money to make donations or grants to other community organisations, sadly.).

If you want to see the finances of LLCC, these are presented each year at the AGM, and subsequently can be found in the AGM Minutes and the Annual Report. These can be viewed on this website, on the Our Library page

How many people make up Leith Links Community Council?

The number of members of any Community Council is determined by the population of their designated area. Currently Leith Links has 12 places. This is based on 2011 Census figures (Leith Links’ head count is probably very out of date now as so many new flats have been built in the area since 2011, and more to come).

We had 12 members in 2019, but over the period, some members have resigned and some new members have been coopted; we currently have 10. So there are spaces right now; if anyone is interested, please do get in touch.

There are also places for extra members who represent established community groups. We currently have members representing two such groups  – Leith Festival, and Leith Rotary (but this position was recently vacated as former rep. just retired). Would your local group be interested in this? Do get in touch.

Who can be a Community Councillor? 

To be a member of a Community Council, you have to live within the Community Council area, and you have to be on the Electoral Register (although there could be special ‘Youth Member’ arrangements for someone who is not yet old enough to vote but will be soon, if they are keen to join). You are expected to attend as many of the monthly meetings as possible, though obviously nobody can make every single one, and to contribute to ongoing activities.

Members of the Community Council are elected every four years. Often local people are unaware of these elections, but our aim for the next election in 2024 is to try and attract as many people as possible to put themselves forward to become members, and for as many people in the local community as possible to vote, so that the process is as open and democratic as possible.