Highland Council
www.highland.gov.uk

Highland Council scores 2/10.

Highland Council do not appear to hold an asset register in any structured way and the response we received to our enquiries in 2005 was casual and a bit chaotic. The limited range of assets noted (which appear to have been extracted from some kind of other information source) appeared to be examples only and not a full list. For example, in Tain, the Council noted that
"the lands held by the Common Good Trust (sic) is now a links park between the town and the shore". This entirely omits the very valuable Tain mussel fishery which is an asset of the Tain Common Good Fund.

A list of assets was provided for only 7 of the 13 burghs (and one of these - Invergordon - was noted as having no assets). No information was provided for,
  • Cromarty
  • Fort William
  • Grantown-on-Spey
  • Kingussie
  • Thurso
  • Wick
Turning to the Annual Accounts for 2005/06, they admit the existence of 8 Common Good Funds and none for,
  • Fort William
  • Grantown-on-Spey
  • Kingussie
  • Thurso
  • Wick
Only in Inverness is there any value ascribed to Fixed assets. In other words, the land assets notified to me in Dornoch, Nairn, Tain, Fortrose & Rosemarkie and Dingwall does not appear in the accounts.

The Inverness Common Good Fund outstrips the value of of the next largest by a factor of 10. It is worth £7.084 million, a full 80% of the value of all the Common Good Funds combined. This includes actively managed investment funds of over £6 million.

Highland Council needs to conduct an urgent review of Common Good assets in order to be in a position to properly report to the citizens of the former burghs what has happened to their inheritance.

Extract of Common Good Accounts from 2005/05 Accounts of Highland Council




2/10