At the Highland Council meeting on 15 May 2025 the “Review of the Highland Scheme of Establishment for Community Councils 2024/25 – Phase 1 Feedback” appeared on the agenda.
The most important item on the scheme for NRCC was the proposed forced merger of ‘NRCC’ and ‘Nairn West and Suburban CC’ to make one CC for the 10 000 plus residents of Nairn. The proposed CC would have been the biggest in the Highlands by far.
Neither NRCC nor NW&SCC were advised of this attempted nefarious act before THC had their ‘Special Meeting’ in December 2024 where the Council were presented with the Scheme Review. Many of our sister CCs, throughout the Highlands, submitted a comment that they were against this merger as being undemocratic and immoral.
NRCC and NW&SCC work closely together when any issues raised would have an effect on Nairn Town-wide, Tourism, Common Good matters and so forth but neither group were agreeable to the merger. CCs have no Authority over the Council nor over the local members but continuously suffer from those looking for someone to blame for the shortfalls Nairn suffers at the hands of the Highland Councils lack of funding for Nairn compared to smaller towns around the Highlands.
THC have “proposed not to proceed to phase 2 consultation” as there was “No clear support” or to put it another and probably a more correct way, they received many more comments against the proposal than were for the proposal.
Perhaps it is time for those who advocated a single CC for Nairn, including our own Provost, should now put their time and efforts, (especially that spent on facebook) in campaigning for the breakup of Highland Council. Nairn would have its own Council and be answerable to the People and not be governed by faceless officials in Inverness who are steadily building their own fiefdoms treating Nairn like their own latter day colony.
snps-kate-forbes-says-highland-council-should be split
highland-council-is-a-prime example of centralisation
one-size-fits-all-doesn-fit-work-call-for-highland-council to be broken up
Many Thanks to All the Community Councils in the Highlands that commented against the unwanted merger of NRCC & NW&SCC. It is good that CCs support each other in the face of THC beligerence or when poor planning or inferior developments threaten the well-being of a Community
Update from THC on the results of the the review on CC merger
“Not all questions were mandatory, did not require actual place of residency to be recorded and not every question was fully answered on all the submissions”.
“The total number of responses to the phase 1 Public consultation of the Community Council Scheme of Establishment across Highland was – 96, it is not possible to determine how many were residents from Nairnshire”.
“The total number of responses that indicated they wished to comment on the proposed boundary changes, Highland wide, was 75 and of those 38 indicated that they wished to comment on a change relating to a Nairnshire Community Council”.
“For the proposed merger of Nairn River and Nairn West & Suburban there were 35 responses that indicated that they wished to comment on the proposal, however, only 22 completed the comments question and of those 20 were against the proposal and 2 for the proposal”. – It is clear from this paragraph that the vast majority of those commenting on the Nairn CCs merger were against – a 10-1 ratio is a brilliant result for those who support two independent CCs in Nairn
“Given that the clear majority of those that did respond to the Boundary proposal were against it, it was agreed through the Report to Council not to proceed with the proposal in the 2nd phase of public consultation”.
Nairn River Community Council 