DREW HENDRY: New councillors will have an important job to do

All the votes have been counted, electing your councillors to serve you and your community over the coming years.

Naturally, I was delighted to see the SNP group emerge as the largest on the Highland Council. That said, as your MP, I congratulate everyone who was elected. Regardless of party colour or none, I wish all of them well in their duties of looking after our growing communities.

Being a councillor is an important and often challenging job. None more so than in these difficult times. I am sure your local councillors will work collaboratively to do what they can to improve local services. I hope they will find a common cause in helping families and individuals through an increasingly painful cost of living and energy price crisis.

They will also have a crucial role in ensuring plans for local development and services are ambitious and well thought out.

In this regard, readers will be pleased to know that work on the Inverness 2035 Vision is going well. It is excellent to have Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Highland Council and key stakeholders working together to achieve this ambition.

I’ve already extended an invitation to all of your newly-elected representatives to become part of this journey. Together with you and your community, we can make this a family-friendly city with green spaces, green travel – and a place where the people who live here are an active part of the development of our city.

Before we move on from the council election, I want to thank Highland Council staff, emergency service personnel, and everyone who worked to ensure the election process was successful. They did an exemplary job, and it was great to see that the counting process was streamed live, sharing the democratic process with thousands of viewers.

Finally, as the remnants of election posters still adorn some lampposts, I wanted to reflect on the use of these signs. After all, we can’t have a greener future without making some changes, including our elections. I have been a long-term supporter of political posters being used on lampposts during elections; I felt they injected more awareness and local colour into proceedings. It is, however, difficult to continue to justify that the plastic and waste are worth the benefit. Many other local authorities do not allow the use of posters, and I do wonder if the time has come for our council to follow suit.

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