Who can we make a participation request to?

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A guide to ‘public service authorities’ 

Participation requests can be made to a list of organisations in charge of public services, or ‘public service authorities’. 

Who’s on the list? 

You can make participation requests to the following public service authorities.  

  • Local authorities  

  • Health boards 

  • Colleges  

  • National Park authorities 

  • Police Scotland 

  • Scottish Enterprise 

  • Highlands and Islands Enterprise 

  • The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) 

  • The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service 

  • Nature Scot (previously known as Scottish Natural Heritage) 

  • Regional Transport Partnerships 

 

Who’s not on the list? 

Not all public bodies are included in the list of organisations you can make a participation request to. Some of the big ones that are missing include: 

  • The Scottish Government 

  • Certain public bodies which oversee ‘reserved’ matters such the Home Office and the Department of Work and Pensions. 

You can’t make a participation request to these bodies, and you’ll need to find some other way of influencing them. Find out about other options you might have in our setting the scene resource.

However, there are some organisations not on the list who participation requests are still directly relevant to. Two examples are: 

  • Integrated Joint Boards (IJBs), the public authority who oversees health and social care. 

  • Arms-Length External Organisations, which public bodies can set up to deliver some of their responsibilities. For instance, some local authorities have established independent charities to manage sport, leisure and culture services.  

 

A bit more on IJBs and ALEOs 

If you are interested in making a participation request in relation to health and social care, you should make it to either your local authority or health board and say in the form that you want the other to be brought in as well. 

If you wanted to make a participation request to improve a service delivered by one of these agencies, you would make it to the overall authority with the responsibility for this service, which should still be the local authority, who would then have the job of bringing the ALEO into the discussion. 

There are some similarities here to making a participation request to improve a bus service delivered by a private company. You can’t make the participation request to the company, but you can make it to the local authority who gave them the contract to run the service. 

 

Choosing who to make one to 

Before you go on, it’s worth checking that you’re approaching the right public body or, in other words, the body with responsibility for the public service you want improved. You may need to speak to the public body to make sure they are the right one to make the participation request to. In many cases, it will make sense to speak to the public body before making the request anyway and we say more about this in our approaching public bodies guide.

 

Links to more information