Highland (council area)
Highland (Scottish Gaelic: A' Ghàidhealtachd; pronounced [kɛːəlˠ̪t̪əxk]) is a council area in the Scottish Highlands and is the largest local government area in the United Kingdom. It shares borders with the council areas of Aberdeenshire, Argyll and Bute, Moray and Perth and Kinross. Their councils, and those of Angus and Stirling, also have areas of the Scottish Highlands within their administrative boundaries. The Highland area covers most of the mainland and inner-Hebridean parts of the former counties of Inverness-shire and Ross and Cromarty, all of Caithness, Nairnshire and Sutherland and small parts of Argyll and Moray.
Gaelic language
According to the 2011 UK census, there are nearly 12,000 Gaelic speakers in the Highland area.
Geography
In 1975, the area was created as a two-tier region, under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, with an elected council for the whole region and, in addition, elected councils for each of eight districts, Badenoch and Strathspey, Caithness, Inverness, Lochaber, Nairn, Ross and Cromarty, Skye and Lochalsh and Sutherland. The act also abolished county and burgh councils.
Politics of the Highland council area
The politics of the Highland council area in Scotland are evident in the deliberations and decisions of the Highland Council, in elections to the council, and in elections to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom (Westminster) and the Scottish Parliament (Holyrood). In the European Parliament the area is within the Scotland constituency, which covers all of the 32 council areas of Scotland.
Highland Council
The Highland Council (Comhairle na Gaidhealtachd in Gaelic) represents 22 wards, each electing three or four councillors by the single transferable vote system, which creates a form of proportional representation. The total number of councillors is 80, and the main meeting place and main offices are in Glenurquhart Road, Inverness.
Current administration
The most recent election of the council was on 3 May 2012, and resulted in a coalition administration formed by all three political parties on the council, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party. The Coalition had 45 councillors and the other 35 councillors were Independents.
Council area
A council area is one of the areas defined in Schedule 1 of the Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994 and is under the control of one of the local authorities in Scotland created by that Act.
Legislation
Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889
In Scotland, local government counties were created under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889. The 1889 legislation created county councils, turned each civil county (with one exception) into a contiguous area (without separate fragments) and adjusted boundaries where civil parishes straddled county boundaries, or had fragments in more than one county. The counties of Ross and Cromarty were merged to form Ross and Cromarty.[9]
Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973
Under the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, local government counties, cities and their subordinate councils (including burghs and parishes) were abolished and replaced by an upper tier of regions each of which contained a number of districts except for the Western Isles, Shetland Islands and Orkney Islands where each had a single-tier authority created which exercised all the powers elsewhere split across two levels of local government. Two of the three islands authorities - Orkney and Shetland - changed their legal nature but continued with boundaries identical to the earlier counties; the Western Isles area was previously split between Invernessshire and Ross and Cromarty.
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