I LOVE elections. It’s a bit sad, I know, and perhaps a bit difficult for the average person to understand. But everyone has their thing. Some people are cat enthusiasts. Others get a kick out of going to caravan exhibitions. I like elections.

Part of the reason I like them is that I have no skin in the game. It isn’t hugely relevant to me which person or party comes out on top. I’m not out delivering leaflets (boring) or knocking on doors begging for votes (even worse). I’m not a player in the game. I am an observer of the game.

However, the game I least like observing is the five-yearly elections to Scotland’s local authorities. It’s a shame. Local elections should be much more important than they are, because local authorities are responsible for most of the things which affect people in their day-to-day lives.

When you leave the house today, you may find your bin is uncollected. That’s annoying. It affects your life in a small but exasperating way. And it’s the responsibility of your local authority. Indyref2 is not likely to affect your life in the same way, today.

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When you walk to the bus stop, you may trip on a poorly maintained piece of pavement. That might be more than annoying; it might be pretty sore. It may ruin your day. The debate about gender recognition is highly unlikely to impact you today.

Transport. Planning. The local economy. And, of course, education. All the responsibility of your local authority, and all more likely to have a direct impact on you and your family than most of what will be heard today in the debating chambers of Holyrood and Westminster.

It is illogical, therefore, that you are significantly less likely to know the name of your local councillor than you are to know the name of your MSP or MP.

And it is illogical, therefore, that next Thursday only two-in-three of those of you who regularly troop to the polling station for a Holyrood or Westminster election will do the same for the local authority election which is taking place.

We all have an interest in finding a solution to this. There are, in my book, two sides to that coin. The first is the councillors, and the second is the council.

A good local councillor can make a real, tangible difference to the people around them. And, let us be clear, there will be very many high quality local councillors amongst the 1,219 who will be elected on Thursday. However, the decision to attempt to become a councillor is not a particularly easy one.

There is a financial barrier – councillors are paid less than £19,000 per year, which means that, for most of the high-quality individuals we might want to see represent us, it is not a viable full-time job.

However, therein lies what appears to be an intractable problem – representative body CoSLA estimates that councillors, on average, work on council business for nearly 40 hours per week, yet only two-in-five have a second job.

The result of this apparent Gordian Knot is visible in town halls all over the country – councillors are too often either old, rich, retired people, or young political activists who are supplementing the income they receive as a political staffer and enhancing their internal credentials as they wait for an opportunity to be elected as an MSP or MP.

These are real barriers, but they are barriers we can remove if we have the will to do so. The most instinctively obvious way to do this is to increase the remuneration for a councillor, and indeed I have, on this page, previously called for a doubling of their salary.

However, without appearing overly contradictory, there is more than one way to skin a cat. And, if we are seeking an outcome where our councillors are more representative of us, perhaps we need to change the other statistics that form the Gordian Knot. Perhaps we need to expect and encourage fewer hours to be worked by councillors, and symbiotically to proactively encourage councillors to have other employment.

We live in the era of the so-called slash generation, where people possess multiple professional identities rather than choosing a career at the age of 17 and doing nothing else for 50 years.

Reader, who would you rather have represent you? Someone who’s a nurse for a day or two, works in a cafe for a day or two, and does councillor work for a day or two, or a professional political activist who’s serving time while they wait for the ‘big’ job at Holyrood. I know who I’d vote for.

There is a second side to the coin – the local authorities. In the longer term, local authorities would deliver more for local people if they have more power, including extensive power and responsibility over raising tax. Nevertheless, we cannot very well expect to hand more power to local authorities until they show the willingness and ability to fully use the ones they have.

Education is, perhaps, the best example, not least because it is becoming ever clearer that our education system is increasingly diminishing in quality. Now, it is true that much of the strategic delivery of our schooling is centralised at Scottish government level, but local authorities are responsible for delivery on the ground and there is much that they could do to improve outcomes.

Headteachers are employees of the local authority: they could be unleashed to make the decisions which best suit their school without feeling as though they have to defer to the council. A clustering or pairing system could be created, whereby a good headteacher, at a good school, is given responsibility to fix a failing school with a failing headteacher.

Local authorities could bend the Curriculum for Excellence to make sure it delivers excellence rather than delivering mediocrity, as its implementation currently does. They could enforce more physical education time and more teaching time, by building up some courage to take on the trade unions.

And they could act independently of party political interests, rather than deferring to the strategies and protocols set by their national leaders. It is no accident that the local authorities which are most active in their local communities and local economies are those in the Highlands and Islands, who are largely independent of national party political influence.

Elections matter. Voting matters. It is deeply regrettable that local government does not matter more.

• Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters and Zero Matters