Mr. Aebhric McGibney:

Businesses do not normally come along and set out how the political structure should be. There is a democracy. It is unusual that we present a view on something in this way, but we are doing so in this instance because we have identified that the members of the citizens' assembly have said that there is a deficit in terms of their lived experience and, from our perspective, businesses are saying the same thing.

Many other questions were raised by the citizens’ assembly, for example with regard to full-time councillors. That is something we would not normally comment on but we can say that if we had fewer councillors, but they were fully paid with more time and resources, there might be a future in that. As a business group, we are running an event with members in the next two weeks to get companies to think about supporting their staff if they run in local elections. It is a challenge sometimes. People have to think about how they will keep their jobs, etc. We would like to ensure that as a business group we support local democracy. We very much want to emphasise this. We will send the committee on the details. We want companies to think that they are part of this and that their employees may well have a valuable role to play. We are reminding businesses that as well as supporting the local community in a volunteering sense, actual public service is something very important that we value.