 Welcome to the fifth meeting of the local government housing and planning committee in session 6. I just want to note that we have had apologies from committee member Mark Griffin, who is unable to be with us this morning. Given today's subject matter, can I invite members to declare their interests? Thank you very much, convener. I would like to declare the interests that I am still a Serven councillor in East Ayrshire. I would like to declare the interests that I am a councillor in North Lanarkshire. In the case of item 3, I would like to declare an interest that I am a Hanson Islands MSP. Our first item this morning is consideration of whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Items 4 and 5 will be an opportunity for members to reflect on the evidence that they have heard earlier in the meeting. Do members agree to take items 4 and 5 in private? Agenda item 2 is an opportunity for the committee to take further evidence to inform our thinking on what our key priorities should be this session, with a particular focus on local government and communities. The session will also be an opportunity to raise issues to inform the committee's pre-budget scrutiny. The committee will be taking evidence this week in a round table format, and I would like to begin by warmly welcoming David Allen, Deputy Director Scottish Community Development Centre, Paul Brady, Policy and Public Affairs Manager from Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, Kim Fellows, commissioning editor from local government information unit, Sarah Gadsden, chief executive of improvement service, Angus Hardy, director of Scottish Community Alliance and Paul O'Brien, chief executive from the association of Republic Service Excellence. Welcome to you all. Before I invite questions from members, can I ask that those participating in the session remotely press R in the blue jeans chat function if they wish to respond to a question? The blue jeans chat function should not be used to write responses on questions as this will not be recorded. R in the chat if you want to respond to a question. What we are going to do is different committee members are going to initiate different themes. Because we have quite a few people together on this panel, we do not have a sense that we would necessarily be able to ask you all to respond to all of the questions. We will be keeping an eye on the chat function to make sure that you can come in with a response. In some cases, committee members may direct questions to some of you. I hope that that is clear on how we are going to try to do this hybrid meeting. I would like to invite questions from members. I am going to kick off. I have an opening general question, which is exploring the theme of the pandemic and recovery. What do committee members see as the biggest challenges facing local government and communities over the next few years? What were the main lessons learned from the past 18 months? I think I will direct that already. I would love to hear from Kim Fellows and Sarah Gadsden. Good morning, everybody. I have spent some time since we last spoke as a committee talking to our members and reflecting on recovery from the pandemic. The key theme that I have been able to explain is to take a deep breath now, because the pandemic is not over. We are taking baby steps on the road to recovery. The members' reflection is that in areas where partnerships are strong before the pandemic, the partnerships are even stronger now. That is something that, as we return to some sort of normality, we want to stress that getting the winds out of those deepened and meaningful relationships is absolutely key. The reflection is that in areas where the NHS perhaps did not work so closely with councils, the relationships have deepened and widened, so they have much stronger relationships and the same with the voluntary sector that the relationships that exist have been enhanced and developed. Finally, of course, turning to individual communities and feeling that those communities are now more understanding of council processes and councils are more able to understand how communities can work more effectively together. Good morning, everyone. Just in terms of our perspective on some of the challenges that are facing local government as a result of the pandemic, all the evidence is demonstrating that the pandemic has exacerbated inequality of outcomes for too many people. We think that it will be really important that the focus of local government will be on a fair, just and inclusive recovery, seeking to ensure that those who are already experiencing poor outcomes are not left behind in the rush to get back to normal. Within that, local flexibility will be critical with councils being able to prioritise and use their resources in different ways to meet different needs and circumstances. I suppose that another challenge will be in relation to digital. There was clearly a lot of significant progress made by local authorities during the pandemic to move services online. What will be important going forward is that we do not lose that pace of change that was made but, equally, we are mindful of the potential risk of digital exclusion for those who cannot engage with digital methods. A third key challenge for local government will be to look at the learning that we have achieved through the pandemic in terms of the way that we have been able to change services, deliver services differently, the way in which communities have been involved, the way in which staff have been empowered, the way in which more risks have been taken, and to look at how we can learn from that experience to redesign and reconfigure services. We think that there is evidence that the pace, agility and effectiveness of the response at the local level has been enabled by the removal of bureaucracy and there have been conditions created for empowerment. Building on what Kim said, we also believe that partnership working has been critical to response, particularly in relation to developing and implementing new services and programmes of support. Within that, we think that community planning partnerships have played a key role. Finally, we think that relationships between local authorities and communities have been vital and there have been numerous examples across the country of communities delivering critical services and targeted support to those who need it most, whether they will surge in volunteering and it will be key that we do not lose the momentum of that moving forward. I invite Paul O'Brien, who is followed by David Allen, to comment. You are on mute, Paul. Is that better? Yes, thank you. Thank you. Sorry, it is just to build on some of the points that we already made about lessons and challenges. For me, what has really happened is that the Covid has really sped up the pace of some of those big public policy crises that we knew we were building there. There is already mentioned the digitalisation, the pace of change on that. There is the care economy, there is climate obviously, which is going to dominate public policy for the next couple of decades. The housing crisis still sits there as well, which will be intermixed with our response in relation to retrofit, etc. However, lots of longer-term challenges that were already there and, of course, have not touched on financing skills. I am assuming that there will be other questions on finance later. It struck me even reading some of the notes from the programme for government just about the lessons about the importance of local government to public health, I want to stress that point. When we went into lockdown, a lot of the front-line services and local government stepped forward to meet the challenges of the public health emergency that was created, and yet those same non-statutory parks, leisure services have been so hammered by austerity and reductions in finances over the years were so independent on income generation, which fell through the floor during lockdown, etc. There are some huge systemic issues around a bit of finance here. I will leave the skills shortages question, because I am assuming that we may come back to that as well. Thank you. David, you are also on mute. Oh no, there we go. Just to build on previous responses as well. The important thing about building on finance response is the development of a relationship between community sector groups and public sector partners. We clearly saw the leading role of communities in response to the pandemic, and that was greatly enhanced when they were facilitated or enabled to do that by local authorities and other partners. We need to build on that, not just in terms of responding to the crisis such as the pandemic, but also in terms of longer-term mental health regeneration. That is really important to emphasise that. I made a couple of points about risk and trust. The fact that public sector bodies and funders placed their trust in community responses beginning in the pandemic used a huge impact in terms of those community organisations being seen to be delivering valuable services. They also take leading roles in moving their communities forward and on the back of the pandemic as well, so I think that that is just to emphasise that from our point of view. I invite Paul Bradley on the question, and we will continue to explore the theme. Eleanor has a couple of questions as well, so you can come in on that after that. I guess that from the point of view, the challenge is that the pandemic has really exacerbated and shown a light on the issues for the voluntary sector that already existed in a similar way to that of local authorities. Emergency funding and support has been a lifeline during the pandemic, but we now get to the end or to this stage of the pandemic. We need to look back at the issues that have been with the sector for a long time, such as sustainable funding, and ensuring that there is an implementation of policy that is relating to third sector engagement in partnerships at a local level and at a national level. I can come on to that a little bit later. Just building on the partnerships point, there have been some fantastic examples of partnerships between local government, national government and the voluntary sector, whether that is through getting digital devices and services and skills out to people in communities, through Connecting Scotland, through delivery of food and medicine and shopping. However, as many universal experiences are as well, I think that that is really important to recognise. Most of the people that we talk to about relationships that they have with local government and national government say that it is down to individual relationships and the people that they work with. That has expanded over the course of the pandemic and it has grown, and it has been people from different organisations, different sectors putting together towards same outcomes, and that is where polish at work has re-worked best. Angus has put an R in the chat as well. Come on in on this, Angus, and then we will go over to Eleanor with some more questions in this area. Good morning, convener and members of the committee. I want to emphasise very quickly that much has been made of the community's bonds and a feed of reaction to the pandemic. In many respects, I guess, it was ahead of the local authority response. We have seen a whole new level of activity and voluntary action right across the country. What we were hearing as we were beginning to come through that first phase, certainly from ministers, was that we must find a way to capture that and not allow it just to anticipate and fall back and allow us to fall back into the old ways of working. While that was said and there was a lot of enthusiasm for that, we want to keep our focus on that and not allow it to slip away, to slip off the agenda. We just wanted to make that point that there is a danger that we lose that. Thank you for that, Eleanor. Would you like to come in? Thank you very much, convener, and welcome everybody this morning to our committee meeting. Recently, in its submission to the Finance and Public Administration Committee, COSLA argued that this is not the time to switch from crisis management as a crisis response mode will be required for several years to come. I would just like to explore that with yourself. What do you think about the assertion that this crisis mode response is here to stay for a little while? I would like to start with Paul O'Brien from Apsi. Anybody else who wants to comment, please put an R in the chat. My view is that there will be a period of time now where we need to recover in terms of place-based services and the look of communities, but we have lots of public policy crises to get on math here and the clocks ticking on the climate and ecological emergency. I do not think that we can hold back completely here whilst we are trying to have a recovery, but we need to ensure that where services are going to have taken a hammering in terms of the financial element of it as well, that we make sure that they are fit for purpose moving forward, bringing back very much to those community services to get them up and running fully again. At the same time, we need to make sure that we have an eye on the longer-term issues, such as climate, digitalisation and the care economy, so that we are not standing still on those matters. Is that an allergy to Elena about your riding a bike while you are repairing a bike and designing the next version of it all at the once? It is very much that. I just wanted to respond to a point that was made a moment ago. I just want to say that my view is that local government is very much at the forefront of the response to the public health emergency straight away. Local government fed people, they cared for people, they engaged in public protection through making sure that refuse was collected and things like that right at the very start of that to ensure that those services were well. They stepped forward when everybody else stepped back and unfortunately they even had to bury people in significant numbers. I wanted to say that it was local government that was very much at the front line of that response. Sorry for rambling about that, Elena, but hopefully I have given some thoughts to that. I would like to invite Kim Fellows to thank you very much for letting me come in. I don't quite know the phrasing that COSLA used, but I would say that local government always had crises to manage. Be it flooding, so in Aberdeensia when I was flooding a couple of years ago it was Aberdeensia council who stepped forward and made people safe in homes, who did the necessary work and who are still repairing bridges some two years later. The crises will be a crisis mode. I cannot sit here and not say that, of course, climate, inequality, housing, they are all crises but they all are at the door of local government. I think that there is never a time to make changes, but I think that I hate to use a cliché, a perfect storm of the things that, Elena, you know have faced in local government, budget pressures, 10 years of budget pressures, staffing pressures, staff, bin lorry drivers to be banal about it or give a practical example. Bin drivers are being poached by supermarkets. Basic services are being affected. Those are the services that, when we spoke before, I talked about livability services. If councils cannot deliver livability services in the middle of a pandemic and are facing financial austerity, that is extreme. There is a tsunami of what I would call unmet need. Members are telling us that simple things you might think are housing repairs. They are way behind the huge unmet need of housing repairs in housing stock, and there is a huge unmet need of mental health services, of sexual health services, of services that we know are provided by local government, but do the public know the pressure those services are under from staffing, from budget, and from the public health emergency. Thank you, Kim. I will name a few people who have put their R in the chat to speak next. David, followed by Paul Bradley and then Sarah. Depends on what we mean by crisis. I think that, as Kim has already said, there are on-going crises that are longer-term for our communities, particularly those facing the most extreme disadvantages and the most extreme inequalities. By being able to respond to a pandemic, it gives us a load of learning to take into how we deal with the longer-term crisis that is facing our communities. That is something that we really need to learn from, as Angus mentioned. If we do not learn from that and do things differently, and I would support a sustainable community in the long term, then we are just going to be back-facing this next time a big crisis emerges as well. We really need to learn from that, but there are better, more clever ways of working between and with our communities to take forward responses to those long-term issues, as well as the major short-term emergency responses. Thank you. Paul Bradley, followed by Sarah. Thank you. I just want to build on Kim's point about the fact that there always goes to be that we are in a situation of crisis, and I think that voluntary organisations will feel like that too, constantly firefighting, constantly trying to replace funding, constantly trying to deliver services within those restrictions on budgets and tightening purse streams within the public sector. Those are issues that are faced by the voluntary sector, as we have local government, too. I think that there is a need to focus on the wider issues and the challenges that existed before the pandemic, and to make sure that we are not using the pandemic as a way to put off decision making and put off focus on key areas where voluntary organisations need decisions, voluntary organisations need funding. There will be organisations that will have received funding over the past few years, and early stages of the pandemic would have seen that funding rolled on. That has been really important in terms of keeping them afloat and going and delivering services to people most in need. At the time of applying for those funding pots, circumstances would have been very different. Actually, what voluntary organisations need is funding that is available to them to deal with the circumstances that they need to contend with just now in terms of delivering services. I think that that is really important. There are also voluntary organisations that are still waiting for decisions on funding applications that have been made over two years ago, particularly in relation to the Children and Families Fund. Again, when those applications were written, the circumstances would have been very different, but they are still waiting for decisions to be made on those funding applications. We need to focus on recognising that the pandemic is still on go and recognising that we are still in that period of crisis, even though it was different to what it was at the start. However, we need to focus on the long-term issues in terms of sustaining the boundaries set for local government and other actors. The point that I just wanted to make was to draw on evidence from the local government benchmarking framework. The report that we published pre-COVID concluded that funding for councils was not increasing at a sufficient pace to keep up with demands. We particularly highlighted the additional impact on demand from increasing levels of poverty. Given all the evidence that is pointing towards inequalities exacerbating as a result of the pandemic, we believe and anticipate that, in this year's data, we will continue to see additional impacts on demand from other increasing levels of poverty. We absolutely recognise the argument about crisis management. I just wanted to respond slightly to Paul's point. I do not want to give the impression that I am bashing local authorities. Everyone is well aware of the pressures that councils are under, but I think that the elephant in the room is a more general point. It concerns the quality of relationships that exist across all levels of governance in Scotland, but specifically between local and national government. It seems to me that that relationship has worsened a lot in recent years. The reason why it is so crucial is that it is at the community level where the impact of all that is felt most acutely. The plethora of local organisations all too often get caught in the crossfire. In a sense, communities become the unwitting casualties of all that. Many of you will remember the Concordat that was published in 2007. It was a signed agreement between the Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and it proposed—this was the wording—that a partnership of equals in the governance of Scotland. I thought that that sounded great, but when I was listening to this committee a couple of weeks ago when the council at Everson was speaking, I just couldn't help thinking how far we've strayed from the sentiments of the Concordat. This is not about pointing the finger of blame, but it seems to me that there is far too much of that these days. The blame culture just ends up pushing everyone into entrenched positions. I should say at this point that I am no great cheerleader for our local authorities principally because I have always thought that they are too big to have any genuine connection to communities and, at the same time, too small and under-resource to be properly strategic in what they do. For me, their scale has always been problematic, and it just puts them somewhere between a rock and a hard place and just serves to highlight the fact that we have this missing tier of democracy in Scotland—a tier that needs to be much closer to the people and just a little bit more like all those systems of local democracy that function in just about every other country in the western world. Is this the perennially strained relationship between local and national government? I think that it impacts on just about everything. In that sense, I guess, it's the thing that underpins all the evidence that I would want to give to the committee. Thank you for that, Angus. We're going to move on in terms of themes just because of time. I think that we could spend a whole day with all of you and really learn a lot, but we don't have a day—we had 90 minutes. Before we go to our next theme, I'm going to tell you what our themes are, so you have a bit of a sense of what's coming. We're going to move on to a theme around budgets and funding. That will be followed by community empowerment and local democracy. Then we'll go on to a theme on community wealth building, followed by a theme around outcomes and benchmarking that is connected to the Christie report. Theme 6 will be climate and emergency in green recovery, and the final theme that we want to touch on is councillor demographics. Just so you can see where we want to go in this journey, we have quite a lot of areas to cover. Picking back up on theme 2, I'm going to ask Megan to introduce that, so that it's around budgets and funding. Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel. As the convener said, we're moving on now to budgets and funding. I know that that has been touched upon slightly already by your contributions. The question that I have relates to the real-term reduction in local government budgets and whether that has impacted councils' abilities to deliver services and meet the needs of their communities over the past eight years. Oh, sorry if I could start with Kim, please. Thank you very much. I cannot sit here and say that they haven't had an impact. Of course, having austerity will have had an impact on services. I'd like to perhaps use an example, and I think that staffing issue is a good lens to look through finance. We know and Sarah and the improvement service with their benchmarking. I'm sure that Sarah will talk through the fiscal impacts. She has the data, but we talked before about the impact on the livability services, so the various sources that feel close to communities that, as Angus said, communities feel the disbenefit of the hard-to-reach or, as I coined it, the hard-to-listen communities and people feel the disbenefit of the lack of investment. However, if you are sitting in a council chamber and you have to make difficult decisions, there is no doubt that ten years of austerity has had an impact. Seeing it through the lens of parks and leisure services is a good way of seeing that issue. I'll take one, in particular, of the alias, the arms length organisations, because that is a useful way of looking at the issue. We know that for alias. Our membership is concerned that the alias are now running at huge deficits because, as Paul touched on, alias have lost income. It is 18 months going into almost two years now of having pressure on services and road repairs. People often forget that theatres and leisure services are community places. They are in the heart of community, and you might think that the gym is shut, but it is not. It is a fact that the gym facilities are used by everybody in the community, and they are also used for exercise referral, rehabilitation after strokes, and, furthermore, theatres, gyms and community halls are places where communities meet, where community planning partnerships meet, where mums and toddlers, and all sorts of things that might seem trivial, but they are around the leisure services. Using alias as an example is a useful way of saying that they are now in budget deficit and how will those services recover and what does that mean to community? As a sustainable funding, it is vitally important going forward. I agree with everything that Kim has said. I would have almost replicated much of that, but the point that I want to make is that, if you look at the last 10 years of the impact of austerity, if you look at the actual figures at a UK level, we are talking about local governments' percentage of gross domestic product dropping to its lowest point in over 70 years—I think that it was 1948 at the last time that it was this low. That has undoubtedly had a severe impact on local government collectively, but when you consider the sort of graffa doom scenarios that Elena Olaf, when I say that, because she has heard me talking about it in the past, the increase in demand for social care at the same time as austerity is cut, that has created huge pressure for lots of the services that Kim was just talking about. We are beyond the point now where we have a minimum sustainable level of funding for local government for much of those front-line services. We need an injection of cash soon and we need a longer-term sustainable settlement for local government. I thought that it would just be helpful to share with the committee some extracts from our local government benchmarking framework report from 2019-20 that Kim referenced and in which we concluded that despite significant and on-going funding pressures, the long-term trends in the LGBTF data reveal that local government has continued to do well in sustaining performance. However, some signs of strain are beginning to emerge. We noted that in 2019-20 councils were operating in a more challenging context than when the LGBTF began in 2010-11. Total revenue funding for councils has fallen by 7.2 per cent in real terms and by 5.4 per cent since 2013-14. We concluded that recent uplifts in funding have been insufficient to offset the major reduction in funding experience over the past 10 years. A couple of other points to highlight. We have concluded through our analysis that funding for councils is not increasing at a sufficient pace to keep up with demands. Our analysis of services has shown that, through legislation and Scottish Government policy, expenditure within social care and education continues to be sustained and enhanced. As those areas account for over 70 per cent of the benchmarked expenditure within the LGBTF, it has a disproportionate effect on other council services that are not subject to the same legislative or policy requirements, so they are increasingly in scope to their disproportionate share of current and future savings. As some examples, just to give you a sense of what that means, since 2010-11, there has been a 26 per cent reduction in culture and leisure spending, 26 per cent reduction in planning spending, 26 per cent reduction in corporate support service spending, 24 per cent reduction in load spending and 28 per cent reduction in trading standards in environmental health spending. I just wanted to raise with the committee the challenges that local authorities face and how often those are passed on to voluntary organisations. voluntary organisations in Scotland receive about £2 billion of income from the public sector and £1 billion of that is from local government and £500 million is from the Scottish Government approximately. That shows the scale of the issues in terms of the issues that are faced by local authorities and are also faced by and passed on to the voluntary sector. The challenge that I have seen because of austerity and cuts to public sector budgets has been definitely a shift towards tendering of services, rather than grant funding, to a competitive marketplace in which it is pitching voluntary organisations against each other to touch to drive down the cost of services. That is an issue that has come up across a whole range of areas and a whole range of localities across Scotland. That is something that we know as a challenge for voluntary organisations. I spoke to one organisation recently that set up a fantastic programme with local authority funding and support. When new staff came in, they decided to put the new service out to tender and put it out to tender at half the cost that it cost to deliver before. The organisation could not bid for that contract because it was not willing to devalue services that it offered. To give you an example of the need to find cuts and save money has an impact on the voluntary sector as well, but it also has an impact in other ways. It is very hard for organisations to track core costs from local government, national government and even funders to. Core costs are dead costs. They are things that really matter to the sustainability of an organisation, whether it is HR support, IT support or salaries for the twin projects when they run out and when new projects start. That is a really important aspect. I have also spoken to organisations recently that have had an inflationary uplift, but up to 13 years since funding from local government, another organisation has not seen an inflationary uplift for six years, so that is a major problem too. I can go into more detail on other issues that organisations face. I think that it is another area that is really important to voluntary organisations in addition to the long-term sustainable multi-year funding, which we will hear time and time again from us at SCVO, is the need for funding to be unrestricted as well. To give voluntary organisations the power, trust and the choice to make decisions on how to best spend that money, local authorities and national government have invested in them to deliver. I think that building on the pandemic and what we have seen there in terms of trusting relationships, flexibility and trusting sets to get money out of doors for places where it is needed most, there has been a real positive thing that we have seen, particularly with Scottish Government working to co-design funding models. It is something that has been really successful in terms of obviously it is not perfect but it has been really good during the pandemic in many regards, but that is something that we need to continue to see. Thank you, Paul. I do not think that there are any more questions on that one. I am going to move on to theme 3, which is exploring community empowerment and local democracy. One of the key findings of the previous local government committee was that people want to have more say and influence over how service and amenities are provided in their local areas and that community empowerment goes hand in hand with community wellbeing. Dave Watson, formerly of Unison Scotland, argued that the governance of public services in Scotland is one of the most centralised in Europe. I am curious to hear from some of you what specific mechanisms and policies should we be including in the upcoming local democracy bill, which would start to devolve some control to communities. I would love to start with Kim, followed by Sarah and then Paul O'Brien. That is a very big question. That is difficult on a Tuesday morning. I would say that we know from our work that this is a question being asked around the world. If I give New Zealand as an example, New Zealand, with their wellbeing economy and their public service reform, are facing just the same issues. How do we best empower community deliver? I would like to go back to something that Angus said. The parity of esteem, I was encouraged, I worked in Scottish Government at the time when the Concordat was released, that we would have mutual respect. I am struck this morning that the respect is national government to local government, local government back and all the community planning partners, including the voluntary sector. If Scotland, our country here, is going to tackle these fundamental systemic issues, it is that we have parity of esteem across the system. Only when all partners get sustainable funding, without sustainable funding for local government with multi-year settlement, can the voluntary sector not get that. Without freedom to make choices at a local level in local government, the voluntary sector cannot get that. If the Scottish Government and the way we work together is the most centralised and the most ring-fence funding, it is very difficult to get that. Part of it is, are we going to be serious and look back at Christie and say 10 years since the Commission? Are we going to seriously, as a country, try and have the mutual respect and work together to tackle these big issues? Of course, I would say that we can do the good things like participatory budgeting, such as citizens' juries. Community planning and community empowerment are all there. We do not need any more legislation, but we need the willingness of everybody to work together to tackle the issues that we really need to tackle. Sitting here, the things that keep me up at night are the net zero and climate emergency. It is inequality. I am always struck that we have this fantastic information and data, such as the local government benchmarking framework. We have the national performance framework that the Scottish Government has set up. Are we going to use those measures as a can opener to open that can of worms and say, are we seriously going to reform public services in Scotland and deliver them for the people of Scotland? Thank you, Kim. Sarah Gadsden, Paul O'Brien and David Angus both want to come in as well. Thanks very much, convener. I concur with what Kim has said in relation to funding being a challenge in the current one-year funding settlements for local authorities and then for voluntary and third sector organisations. I agree that the levers have already been in place in community empowerment. We have the Community Empowerment Act in place. There are requirements for community planning partnerships to work with communities to deliver local outcomes improvement plans, to deliver locality plans, to target areas that are experiencing the most significant inequalities. I think that the levers are there. For me, a key element within that is the role of community planning. Many years ago, probably before the Community Empowerment Act around the time, there were some national community planning conferences that were led by the Scottish Government. There was real momentum behind the role that community planning could play. We certainly sit on a national community planning improvement board that is chaired by the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives. It has all the statutory community planning partners that are represented on the board, along with the Scottish Government and the third sector. Through work that we have been doing over the past 18 months, we have found that community planning partnerships in the main have provided the key vehicle for multi-agency working at a local level. They signify the importance of a place-based response to meet the needs and requirements in any given locality. For me, there is something in there about the current profile of community planning and the role that it plays and the way in which communities are engaged in the community planning process. We have completed our study, our 2030 commission study. The message that came out from the sector and beyond was about the decades essentialisation of power that takes power away from local government and a lot of concern about that. As others have said, there is a need for respect and equality for each other's spheres of governance. I genuinely think that there is a huge need to empower local democracy, respect local democracy and democratic accountability if we want to engage with communities. Communities have got to feel that it is meaningful to engage with councils and local elected members. I feel that our work backed us up in our 2030 commission, that there is a need for legislation, that there is a need for a constitutional enshrinement of local government's role, powers and resources, and that there is a need to change the thinking that takes place and start with a principle of local by default. David Allan, Ben Angus and Paul Bradley Hi, I just want to pick up on the theme about local governance. We have had a local governance review going on for some time now. It seems to have grown to a bit of a halt. Recently, I think that picking up on what Angus was saying earlier on and what the other contributors have just been saying, there is a real need to get something in place, which is far closer to the people in terms of local decision making and supporting that approach to local, really local democracy. There is a need to do that very urgently. We have got national moves towards participatory budgeting across all local authorities. That is not going to really bed in unless we have much more consistent change in terms of decision making. With participatory budgeting, we are trying to fit a participatory democracy model into a representative democracy structure, and unless real kind of attention is paid to that, we are going to be a bit messy. The other thing that I just want to pick up on is community planning. Our experience and feedback from the groups and organisations that we work with in our programmes is that community planning, the implementation of the duties within part 2 of the community empowerment act, has not really bedded in us as yet. I think that it is much more patchy than we would have hoped for by this stage. We would recommend that there has been a review of part 3 and part 5 of the empowerment act, whether it is worthwhile to introduce the committee empowerment act. To pick up on that, the duties can contribute to the overview or response of how well community planning is working in terms of developing those collaborative responses at local level. Thank you. Angus and Paul Bradley. Just to pick up on Dave's point about the local governance review, whether it is stalled or whether it is just that the most recent elections came along and was a natural break, our hope is that it picks up momentum again and moves forward. The first phase of the governance review, certainly in terms of the national conversation that we had around democracy matters, unequivocally demonstrated that there is a real appetite amongst communities for more control over decisions, over resource allocation, and that impact on their lives. I hope that the second phase of the review begins to explore how we can manifest new democratic innovations, for want of a better word, that would allow that to happen. I think that that is almost taking community empowerment on to the next 2.0 community empowerment. I do not think that it has to be reorganisation as we have known it in the past, 20-odd years ago, since the last one. There needs to be something—I think that the democracy bill that you refer to needs to give voice to the new structures, the new processes that give communities autonomous control over the decisions and the resources that come into their communities. One other point, which I think that we will have to underlie all of that, and it is something that we really saw or demonstrated during the Covid response, which is trust. The Government—possibly because of the urgency of the situation—just said, right, we are going to put money out there into communities and we are just going to trust and take it on with it. What happened was really good things happened. It was not prescribed from the centre. It was trusting communities and local authorities to work together to find new partnerships just to get on with it. I think that if we could build on that spirit of trust and empowering, devolving responsibility, good things would happen. I think that we need to hold on to that, capture it in some way, frame it and not let it dissipate as time goes on. There is a natural instinct to fall back, particularly as we move into more and more difficult times, to fall back on to known ways of working. We just need to really be up for trying new, fresh ways of working. Thank you, Angus, and lastly, Paul Bradley. Thank you. As the national membership organisation for voluntary sector, we are not directly involved in the community empowerment agenda and there are many other organisations around this table that are best placed for that. I did just want to draw the committee's attention to it could be commonly known, but it is stuff that has come out recently through our randomised interviews with organisations of all shapes and sizes across the voluntary sector in Scotland, and that is the key challenge being the implementation of policy in relation to the role of the third sector in partnerships. The vast majority of the organisations that we have spoken to have said that the policies are there. Regardless of the area, wherever area it is, the policies are there in many places for the voluntary sector to be playing a more active role in partnership. There is a real disconnect between what is said in policy and what happens on the ground. That is really important. The committee could play a really important role over the course of the next few years, ensuring that any areas that fall within the remit of this committee are considered in terms of our voluntary sector playing a key role in practice as it should be or as it is written in policy. That is really important. I just wanted to flag a few areas of work that are on-going at the moment, so that a national-level SCDO, COSLA, Scottish Government and the Third Sector Interface Network are working on a strengthening collaboration programme to try to build links and partnerships and look at new funding models for the voluntary sector. We had our first independently facilitated session at the end of August and there will be more coming out about that shortly, but also there are things happening at a local level to build those relationships and partnership working in trust. You will see in Glasgow that there is the third sector review, better relationships and better outcomes, but we are also hearing from other areas that there is more openness and more willingness for organisations through using TSI's first interfaces example as a conduit for more engagement with their local authorities as well. Where that good practice is happening, that needs to be spoken about and tried to be shared across the country. Okay, thank you all for sharing your views around that. Staying with the same theme somewhat, I would like to bring Miles Briggs in for a sort of supplementary question on the national care service. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. I have a I suppose two-pronged question I wanted to ask and it was with regards to your views on the integration agenda, integration of health and social care, how you believe that's worked or not worked, and secondly, with regard to concerns that have been expressed to the committee around the proposed national care service and what actual impact do you think that will have on the very topic that we're talking about in terms of empowering our local councils and our democracies? I'll maybe start with Angus and then, if you want to put an hour in the chat, we can hopefully bring others in. Thanks. Thank you for that. I should say that I am not an expert or knowledgeable about social care provision and the integration of health and social care is not my field, but I do think that the way in which the announcement of the consultation on the national care service caught everyone by surprise within COSLA reflects what I was saying earlier about the rather strained, dysfunctional relationship between national and local government. If there was parity of esteem, those would be conversations that would be going on naturally evolving because there's a spirit of partnership there, and that doesn't seem to be the case. It worries me that that's just an example of how, moving forward into areas of the local governance view, how are we going to make that work without some kind of fundamental reset in this relationship between national and local government? I listened to the COSLA president's reactions at the committee a few weeks ago, and I don't know how we're going to make that work. I really don't. That's not a very positive response, so I'm afraid. Thanks. It relates to the previous point about public funds. I think that it's important when you're spending public money that it's accountable, that it's open to scrutiny, etc. I would be supportive of a concept of local public accounts committees that scrutinised all public funding at the local level and that was overseen by the democratically elected people from that area. I think that getting on to Miles's question is the same thing. Angus has covered that there. The way that announcement took place was not good. That's why we've also called for a new 2030 commission report. Several recommendations that come out of the Public Accounts Committee is one of them, but there needs to be a national committee where anything that's going to affect the sector significantly needs to be discussed properly between national government and local government on the basis that there's a recognition that both have responsibility for those areas and both have an equal stake on the policy decisions being successful. Integration has to take place in some form or other. I don't think that we can shy away from that. I think that it's ridiculous that we're in a situation where we're going to throw lots of money, lots of more money. We're doing it for generations at cure whilst prevention, which is all those front-line public health services that we've been speaking about all day today have been starved of funding. All those things that contribute to local physical health and mental wellbeing have been starved of funding. We're going to potentially continue to do that whilst pouring money into cure. We talk about taking costs out of upstream by tackling things through prevention not cure. We always say that it's the best and best to save scheme that any chancellor or finance convener could make, but then we continue to do the same things over and over again. I'd like to take the question from a different viewpoint. We now know that the consultation is out in the public domain, but I would ask you, the committee and your fellow committees, to publicise it and encourage everybody in partnership to respond to the consultation. We've put out a brief thing about that right now. However, I'd like to reflect on—I thought that it was quite sad what Angus said—that we are at the stage in Scotland that we didn't talk to each other before that was launched. However, that's done. What I would like to do is reflect on what we have learnt from centralisation of police, of fire services and what we have learnt from the integrated joint boards. That was a consultation, a legislation and now an enactment. It's important that, before we take the steps for the national care service, we reflect on what we've learnt to date. However, no one around this table can pretend that it's not a very challenging issue. There are not easy answers on the health and social care offer, however, it is important to look not only in Scotland but to look to the UK and look at some of the examples in Germany, in New Zealand and Australia of how they are approaching this issue. We're going to move on to our fourth theme, which is community wealth building. I'd like to ask Elena Whitham to open that discussion. The Scottish Government intends to introduce a community wealth building bill during this Parliament to enable more local communities and people to own, have a stake in, access and benefit from the wealth that our economy generates. There are a couple of things that I want to explore with the panel today. What more could the Scottish Government do to encourage councils to deliver strong return on investment for their local economies, for example, through reforms to procurement? What, if anything, have you, yourself and your organisations had any input in developing community wealth building approaches? I'd like to start, please, with Paul O'Brien, because I'm very aware of Apsi's new municipalism—hard to say that word—report. Perhaps I'll go to Angus to speak about how we can ensure communities can play their full role in this. Paul, first, please. Thank you. I struggle with that myself. I don't struggle with the concepts, I struggle with the wording and new municipalism. However, I think that this is a really, really important approach that's been adopted, community wealth building. I think that there's lots of good practice being built up by local Government across the world, across the UK, across Scotland, on embedding in their procurement processes things about local skills, building local apprenticeships, local supply chains, ensuring that they are encouraged and helped to contribute to the supply of services and goods within an area. At the same time, that obviously keeps the public pound within those local economies as much as it's possible. We've done work on that for the last 20 years or whatever, and thinking a lot around how that public pound circulates within the local economy again and again and again. The workforces that exist within local communities are very much within those local communities, and their spend as well also contributes heavily to that. One other thing that I would say, Elena, is that you said that it's about local government and councils. I don't think that it's just about them. It's most successful. People have looked at Preston quite a lot over the years as one of the forerunners on this in the UK. Where they managed to really make a significant difference was by joining up the anchor institutions within the area, the council, the university, the college, the housing association, the police and so on, and maximising that spend within Preston and within the wider subregion. The figures are quite incredible about the number of jobs that that created and the increased additional spend within that community rather than going 400 miles at the profits from it going 400 miles a bit or worse off shore. I think that that is a really important piece of work and policy. I see community wealth building as a two-sided coin. On the one hand, we have to change the procurement practices. That seems to me something that we already should be doing. It seems to me more about the culture of procurement rather than the legislation. I understand that procurement and other sorts of best value considerations. However, we already have the tools at our disposal to invest the budgets of the anchor institutions that Paul just recited into the local economy. The flip side of that coin is that we have to develop the social economy, the social and community enterprises and co-operatives of all sorts, and the SME community as well, so that they can engage with that procurement exercise. I think that that is something that happened in the past. Perhaps we need to invest in capacity building around that so that they can take advantage of the opportunities that are perhaps coming down the line. Colleagues went on a study tour to Italy recently, and they looked at how small SMEs and co-operatives do not see such a massive distinction, but they work in collaboration. They build consortia so that they are of a scale to be able to access the kind of contracts that those anchor institutions make. There needs to be a significant investment into the capacity building on the demand side of community wealth building that we have not necessarily looked at yet. There are a lot of people with a lot of knowledge working on that, so I am confident that that potentially is going to be a fantastic thing for building local strong economic resilience, which is something that we need to do. Thank you, Angus. I will keep it short, because I think that you have heard enough from me. I propose community wealth building. I work in Australia and we have experience from Sydney about the work that they are doing, so mine is just an offer that we can share some of that learning. I am quite sure that there is a real value in joining up local economic development. The approach is really encouraging. It is a role of not only social enterprises and community enterprises, but Angus said that SMEs joined up an approach to local economic development, again emphasising the localism approach that is to be encouraged and supported. The more we can do that, the more we can collaborate in that fashion and join that fashion the better. Sarah Boyan is a precursor to the work on community wealth building. We did some work several years ago to produce an economic footprint report for each local authority, which set out recommendations on how they could better use their economic muscle, the procurement muscle and their assets. There was a national learning report produced, so I would be happy to share learning from that, if it would be helpful. That is great. Let us move on to theme 5, which is focusing on outcomes, benchmarking and the Christy report. I invite our colleague Willie Coffey, who is going to be joining us virtually. Willie, would you like to lead on the theme? Thank you very much, convener. Good morning to everyone. We have touched on some of the issues in the theme about partnerships and outcomes in the relationship with the third sector, but I would like to develop it a little bit more and perhaps start with Paul Bradley. Is this the time, at this particular time during this pandemic, to reset and re-establish the relationship between the third sector and the formal sector? Do you think that they have the sense that they are always in the outside looking in? My experience as an MSP and also a local councillor for many years was that we always turn to the third sector in times of need, particularly at this time in times of emergency. The danger is that we revert back to the same old relationship where they are chasing their tail and looking for funding year on year. Is it time now to get serious about this and to try to re-adjust or reset that particular relationship and get the most out of the relationship that we can? That is Paul Bradley. That was muted. Absolutely. The two key streams to SCV's policy work right now, which are priorities, are around long-term, multi-year, flexible funding and strengthening collaboration and relationships, and building on the good stuff that has happened in the pandemic. Speaking to organisations, organisations in the sector will have various different types of relationships with local government, national government, some will have relationships because of their funding, others will have relationships in terms of trying to influence policy. Most of the organisations that we speak to do that. Their principal relationship is often with the local authority at a local level, but there are also many organisations that do not have relationships with the public sector, and that might be because they are simply hyper-local and they are focused on service delivery on the ground. It can also be very difficult for small organisations to build relationships and to have the resources and capacity to do that. We hear often that operational relationships with link offices and funding officers within local authorities in government can be really positive, but they can sometimes struggle with more strategic relationships. That role of the sector in terms of co-design and delivery is often put to us that, is it really a partnership, or are we just part of the supply chain, are we just another delivery agent? Back to my point, I raised about the implementation gap with policy around the third sector's role in partnership. There is a lot of great policy around it that says that the third sector needs to be a clear and obvious partner, but that is not happening necessarily on the ground. That is a really important observation to keep in mind. I think that what voluntary organisations want from their relationships is trusting relationships where they are able to decide on how money is spent to deliver on best outcomes, but they also want engagement with local authorities and funders who understand the outcomes that they are trying to deliver and really want to invest in those outcomes. I think that often the challenge can be where there is that lack of understanding and recognition of the different approaches and the different outcomes that perhaps voluntary organisations are trying to deliver. That is really important. Relationships and funding are the two crucial issues that we see at SCBO, and they are interlinked clearly. I can see Paul O'Brien and Kim asking to make a contribution, convener. That is great. Paul wants to come in and then we will pick up Kim. It is just a little bit on benchmarking more generally on data, the use of data. We have performed networks that we have done in the year 22 of that collection now. We have collected across something like 185 authorities across the UK, across all the front line services. We look at cost, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, etc. It is important to understand that on your benchmark, it is not just looking at cost, it is looking about those wider issues as well and how they all interrelate to each other and thinking about that. Over the past year, we have also focused very much on the impact of Covid as well, and we have the impact of Covid on many of those front line services as well. We have a lot of data available of that. I forgot to mention one thing earlier, but we have established in Scotland now a Covid recovery and renewal group for local authorities, the 32 local authorities in Scotland, so that might help to contribute information back to you as well as we hopefully recover from the pandemic. I would like to reflect on how we might go forward on the issue of benchmarking, because it is clear that we have the national performance framework, the local government benchmarking framework, which Sarah Can talk about much more knowledgeably, the local outcome agreement. We are also many people in the UK-wide playing with indicators, so the UK prosperity index, the Glasgow central population health have by local authorities, public health data. I would question for the committee, is there a chance for Scotland to look at some place and community indicators that are both qualitative and quantitative, so that we can explore a little bit more about what we have been discussing this morning, and how it feels at a local level. We have immense amounts of data, but it would be very much supplemented by having things that allow us politicians and people who work in the sector to look at what it feels like at a police-based level. The committee is aware that we deliver the local government benchmarking framework on behalf of Solace. We now have 10 years' worth of data, but linking to Kim's point about place-based indicators would probably be helpful to flag up that we have developed a community planning outcomes profile tool that enables local authorities and partners in communities to go in and see if the lives of people in their community are improving. We have identified a set of core measures on life outcomes, including early years' older people, safer and stronger communities, health and wellbeing, engagement with local communities, and we have developed a consistent basis for measuring outcomes and inequalities of outcome in areas. You can break the analysis down by local authority area, and then within local authority area you can break it down by communities. It also enables some benchmarking and comparative analysis to be undertaken by similar communities within different local authority areas in terms of how they are performing against outcomes. It is about that can opener. It helps to facilitate discussions between colleagues in different local authority areas about progress that they are making towards achieving improvements in outcomes and how they are doing that. It is just to flag up that that is a resource that is there that might also be helpful for the committee. Thank you very much. That is good to know that that exists. I will also—Angus would like to speak to you. It was just to pick up on Kim's point about whether it is possible to develop community-based indicators. I just wondered whether that was a point at which, given that the reforms to the planning system that came through the 2018 bill was to link the planning system much more into community planning, local place plans—whether they are ever envisaged to be a device that might embody that—there is a whole set of questions around local place plans, which I might not have time to consider at this point. That is there enshrined in legislation and perhaps they could begin to be fleshed out and have real meaning, because there is a concern that local place plans might just be one of those quite whimsical ideas that have no place in the system and do not make their mark. If I could just, while I am on, take advantage of being on and go back into the last conversation. I was just picking up something that Paul Ryan said. He mentioned local by default—it was a kind of aspiration that he thought about what he proposed—and I was just reflect when he said that. I remember that there was a report called local by default, which actually reflects the situation that we are having about community wealth building. It really gives a lie to the whole thing about the procurement of economies of scale and big contracts that deliver good quality services. This is a very detailed forensic analysis of the value that you get if you actually procure locally in small-scale contracts. It is really worth having a look at, and if I am allowed to, I can even put in the link into the comments box that I was told by technical people that I was not supposed to put anything else in. Others we are. Thank you, Angus. David Allan? A little bit of what Sarah was saying and Kim as well. I think that the work of being laid off by Audit Scotland on community empowerment principles and looking at how we benchmark and how we measure community participation across public sector and within community planning is really, really important. That has been working progress over the last couple of years, which we have contributed to among others. It is important that when we are looking at benchmarking and measuring progress, we do not miss out on community participation and the involvement of communities in local processes and decision making processes. We should hopefully follow up on that and make sure that that is embedded within any kind of measurement or analysis of progress at local level. Thank you, David. It is important at this time that we start to be tracking indicators of what is happening for communities. We are going to move on in theme to the climate emergency and the green recovery, which is why I am saying that it is important to be tracking those indicators. I think that it is also why it is really important to shift power to a much more local level, because I do think that we are going to be looking at adaptation and communities are going to be best placed to do that work, to know what they need, to know what local procurement needs, to know what they need to put in place for resilience as things start to change rapidly at much more micro-climate levels. I would love to bring in my colleague Paul McClellan with some questions about introducing the theme. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. I think that it has been touched on this morning obviously around the climate emergency and the convener just mentioned that. It is what a green recovery looks like for communities across Scotland in the role of local government in helping Scotland meet its net zero targets. One example is that I recently met the existing homes alliance and one of the things that they were encouraging local government to do was work with the Scottish Government to deliver not-for-profit delivery vehicles to deliver retrofit and generate affordable energy. We were in this committee a few weeks ago and we heard the cost of retrofitting in Scotland would be £33 billion. There are obviously challenges, but there are massive opportunities as well for local authorities and for social enterprises, which has been mentioned before. Can I ask Paul O'Brien just to kick off with that one, if it is possible? Paul, are you on mute? Yes, that is me off mute now, thank you. I am just talking about local government role and climate change. Just to be very blunt about it, I do not think that we will reach net zero targets without significant investment. I do not think that we will reach net zero targets without everyone recognising that national government has a role. Local government is a hugely important role and local government has got to work with the wider sectors at play at the local level and with the wider community in order to help with people adopt behaviours that help us to tackle the climate and ecological emergency. I will add that on again. I think that that is important to remember also, but looking at the six-carbon budget from the climate change committee and what that set out for local government, the key contributions that local government could achieve in the drive towards net zero. We are talking about buildings, transport, waste, electricity generation and land use. There is so much that I could talk for an hour on that, but I am not going to bore you because you will know that stuff anyway. However, the big-ticket things such as retrofit of housing will take a huge amount of funding to achieve, but we need to crack on. We need to crack on now with a lot of those things. Local authorities have set targets like 2030 and 2035 for net zero declarations. We will not meet them without funding. We launched a report at Westminster last week on sports and leisure facilities, the public sports and leisure facilities. District councils in England, for example, 40 per cent of their footprint comes from those local leisure facilities. Those leisure facilities are over 60 per cent of them are dilapidated and outdated. The likes of Exeter council has just built a passive house leisure facility, a wet and dry leisure facility. It was costly, but the more we do things like that, the more the price will drop on those approaches. However, we need a huge investment programme and we need it to happen now. The comprehensive spending review, the COP26, the local government settlements this year, if we do not have a real focus on climate, then we will struggle to meet those net zero targets. It is probably to Paul Bradley that the point that Paul made was talking about local authorities' role in this, but it is really important that the convener touches us about local communities and how we build capacity and confidence within local communities to deliver lots of these changes. I suppose that the question to Paul is, do you feel that there is enough capacity and understanding to build that capacity within the voluntary sector and scale it up to deliver the change that is working with local government and, obviously, national government? The SCBO, we have defined our role within this to be focused on the role that voluntary organisations play specifically in their carp and footprint and how they can work with local government and others to deliver on those changes. It is a conversation about the voluntary sector, for example, and it is a conversation that we have only just really started. I think that it links to what Paul Bradley is saying about the fact that we are behind where we should be on these issues, and that is all that I can probably bring to the floor at this time. I am more than happy to follow up with the committee in writing once I have spoken to my colleague who is leading on this work. We have a few other people who want to come in on this very important topic, so we are going to go with Kim, David, Alan and Angus Hardy. Thanks very much. A little bit like Paul and Brian, I could talk about this topic for a long time, but we have examples that we can share with the committee. We have a new piece coming out tomorrow on how councillors can lead on adaptation, but my reflection is that it is absolutely critical that, in a way, this is a proof of principle that community partnerships can work. It is all the actors in a community who need to be funded and empowered to deliver on from passive house leisure centres through to retrofitting. We know that it is going to be difficult and challenging, but we have no choice. I think that this is a point in time that we can share. We have a very big report on what is happening around the world on these issues coming into the public domain next month, so we can share that. We have touched on it a couple of times. It is about capturing and sharing, learning and taking these beacons. How have people done this? How have they delivered it? What can we learn from it and what can we build on it? I cannot say often enough that this is not about a homeopathic dose. This is not about a billion small flowers blooming. This is about serious investment in making the things happen that will make a difference. We do not have time to do it in small doses. That acts as well. The clear need to drive up is the engagement around climate change and climate challenge. The real example is that the people who are most affected by climate change, or those who are least engaged with addressing or even understanding the scale of the issue, so it is a real just transitions challenge for us as well. The more we can do about that, the better. It is one way forward to begin to tackle that, but I agree with Kim that big systemic changes are the real drivers for that, but we need to bring people with us and we need to have people engaged with that the whole way along the line. I agree with what everyone has been saying. At all levels, we need the big levers, transport, agriculture, housing and massive investment to make that happen, but we also need to think about how to effect the system change right across society. That needs to come from the bottom up and, in the past, what we have done as we have gone was to try and test ways of creating a challenge fund for communities to bid into so that we have the climate challenge fund. That, for 10 years, delivered a lot of good projects into communities, but they burned brightly while funding was there. What really transpired was very little lasting legacy, so we need to change our approach in that respect. The Government, to give it credit, has recognised that. We are now moving to a new model of building resilience and capacity at the local level that is, hopefully, more sustainable through climate action hubs. We are just beginning to work through what that means. We need to be built—this needs to happen at all sorts of levels. It is not just reducing carbon at the local level, it is like we need to build food resilience, we need to build energy resilience, we need to change the way in which our energy system, which is very centralised, we need to have a much more localised energy system where demand and supply are matched at the local level. That will work like a huge investment, but, as Kim said, we have to move fast and move now. I do not think that anyone is in disagreement with that. I want to say that we are going to go over a little bit. We have one more theme to explore, but I am going to indulge and come in with a bit of a supplementary on the climate emergency piece. We, as a committee, have been talking about how we work with other committees. I have started engaging in a conversation—this is question directed to Paul O'Brien and maybe one other person, if you want to come in on this—which is the idea that the Government is going to be—we are going to be having to review the agricultural support payments. Someone in a conversation that I have been having has pointed out that local government could play a role in that. What about if we took 5 per cent of the farm support payment budget directed that towards local government for what? For things like being able to fund farmers' markets or the idea of glass houses where we could start growing at quite a scale locally. I am curious to hear from Paul O'Brien initially. If one other person wants to come in with another view or supporting that view, that would be great. What do you think of the idea of agricultural support payments going to local government? I would be supportive of that concept and I think that that might also help with the idea of local sourcing. There are many good authorities that have been working on sustainable sourcing of food and supplies for a long time, but it might fast-track that and speed that up. If local government had further responsibility in that area, the finances and resources would encourage and develop that local supply chain and make sure that it is invested at that local level fairly and equitably to nurture those local suppliers. Angus, do you want to come in? I would really support that too. I do not know whether the committee is going to continue its work around reviewing the progress around community apartment legislation, but section nine of the act was around allotments. I know that a lot of local authorities have probably struggled to meet the requirements of the act in reducing waiting lists and making land available for local growing. That might be one avenue to easing the financial pressures in local authorities. Every local authority is now required to develop a food-growing strategy. I do not know whether I know that Edinburgh is doing one because of the meeting about it this week, but I do not know whether it is happening, but it might be interesting for the committee to consider just having a look at that and by that to keep the pressure on. Thank you very much. We will move on to our final theme, which is around council demographic smiles. With the council elections rapidly approaching, we wanted to ask a specific question really with regard to what can be done to improve council demographics. In terms of encouraging more women, younger people and people from ethnic minorities to put themselves forward and get involved in local government, one of the issues that has been raised with us is about renumeration for councillors. I just wanted to get the panel's views on, given your experience, what you think would encourage more people to consider putting themselves forward. Can I maybe start with Kim, because I know that you have had previous comments on that. Thank you very much. We have done a lot of work with the Fawcet Society on councils, and we have got some evidence that we can submit to you. I was thinking about this. We had a specific question that might interest you, what some of the people who lost their seats in English councils at the recent local government election felt that there was no support for them afterwards. There is no pension support either. Not only is it difficult in the run-up to being a councillor, you have the pressure of being a councillor and there are renumeration questions, but there is also no support after. If you have younger people for whom it is part of this crazy pain in career path that people have, if they can answer that process with their support, that also stops people from submitting, but we can submit more detail to the committee. I do not want to dwell too much on the remuneration question, and they say that, in terms of the role and responsibilities that councillors have, they are paid far too little for it, and there is a need for a further review of that. It is worse in England, but Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland need a further review of that, and people need to be valued for doing what is a very important role in society at a local level. I would rather say a little bit more about the equality side of it and our 2030 commission, which I think that you have received a copy of the report. One of our recommendations was to put in place a duty on local government to ensure that by 2030 they were truly representative of the local communities where they are based and to report progress on that annually, against that to show that they were moving in the right direction towards that in terms of equality in all ways. Without that sort of direct action, progress is going to be really slow. I think that Kim has quoted at the Fawcet Society. We took lots of evidence from groups like the Fawcet Society, but I think that I have seen a report recently that talks about equal pay being achieved in 2077 based on the current speed of progress. I think that we need to take direct action to speed things up, and we certainly recommended that equality duty and progress towards that by 2030. Thank you very much for that, Paul. That brings us to the end of our questions. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I think that it has been a very helpful conversation, a bit tricky in the virtual space, but I think that we managed pretty well. We really appreciate your contributions giving evidence to us this morning, and that will help us going forward with our work. I am going to briefly suspend this meeting while we move on to the next item. Agenda item 3 is an opportunity for the committee to take further evidence to inform its consideration of regulations giving effect to recommendations of Boundary Scotland in relation to six local authority areas. The committee will hear this week from Boundary Scotland on its recommendations. I would like to begin by warmly welcoming Ronnie Hines, chair of Boundary Scotland, Elsa Henderson, deputy chair of Boundary Scotland and Colin Wilson, review manager for the Scottish Boundary Commission secretariat at Boundary Scotland. Before we get into it, I want to acknowledge the good work that you have done on making these recommendations. It was good to read about it and to see the criteria that you have taken. I was very aware that you are a fairly small unit of people, and you did a good job. What has come up is that there is a criteria that you had to work with, and that seems to have raised different responses depending on which local authority we have been talking to. That is what we are going to get into this morning. I would like to invite the first question from Eleanor Whitton. Welcome this morning to Boundary Scotland representatives. There were recommendations contained within the report that looks to north-west Sunderland and west Ross to have fewer councillors. I would like to explore why that recommendation was given given the size of the areas, and what impact it might have on the de-population trends that we have seen over the past few decades, and whether that might be exacerbated by that. I will direct it to Ronnie as the chair, perhaps. We have rehearsed some division of responsibilities between us, so I will try to ask questions to who I think is the best place to answer them from our side. I can start with this one, and I will ask Colin to come in and supplement what I say. Basically, what I would say is that our responsibility is to look at the council area as a whole. Of necessity, if we are doing a review and there have been population and electorate shifts since the last one, the likely result of that will be that in some area, one ward or a number of wards, the number may go up or it may go down, and in other areas the reverse would be true. The northern part of the Highlands is an area where the population is increasing more slowly than the population for Highlands as a whole, particularly around the Inverness area, and our work has to reflect that in the numbers of councillors that we come up with and the proposals that we make for the specific wards. When we first looked at this, we considered taking the numbers of councillors in Caithness and Sutherland from the current 14 to 11, but we listened to the responses that we received, not only from the councillors in that area, but also from the public. We recognised that that was too dramatic a change, so the proposals that are now being recommended contain 13, which is a reduction of one counciller in that area. To put that in perspective, the other side of it would be that in the Inverness to Greater, there is an increase in one. That puts it into some kind of perspective. On what impact it has, the council will have spoken to you about that in a better place than we are to make those arguments, but we have to put the councillors where the electorate is and not the reverse. That is the explanation for why things came out the way that they did, but Colin May want to amplify that. I would just like to mention, quickly, Wester Ross. As Ronnie said, we are looking at the whole council area and part of the redesign that affected Wester Ross. In Wester Ross, there are currently about 10,000 electors, and with our boundary change at Strath Peffer, that has lost about 2,500. About a quarter of the electorate has transferred out of the existing Wester Ross ward. In fact, if you look at the numbers, electoral parity, which is the main thing that we look at, is slightly improved in that Wester Ross ward. Did that get cut off? Okay, thank you for that. Great, thank you. I would like to bring in Willie Coffey with the second question. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the panel. My question was about the island impact assessments issue relating to Sky and Arran, and the query about why that was not carried out. According to the Island of Scotland Act, they must be carried out, but they were not carried out. It was just to get your view on that, Ronnie, about why that particular activity was not carried out in relation to the proposals for Sky and Arran. Thank you, Willie. Colin could add a bit more flavour to my initial response, but we took advice on that question from the Scottish Government, among others. The advice that we received was that, because the work that we are doing is carried out under the auspices of the Island Act, the whole point of it is to try to recognise the specific characteristics of island communities that it was unnecessary for us to do a separate island assessment. We set that reasoning in our reports and on our website. We do not think that we would have added anything to the work that we did, and we followed the advice that we were given in that regard. I have got nothing further to add. Ronnie mentioned all the points that I was going to mention there, so I have nothing to add. Okay, so whatever may have been carried out by way of an island impact assessment had basically already been done, I think, is what you are saying. Is that correct? When we were asking ourselves what kind of war boundaries we wanted for Sky or Arran, then we did have options. Just to give a bit of detail on Sky to use that as an illustration, one of the things that we considered and that we did not propose was that, in order to get better electoral parity in Sky, we could have had a ward that was not just Sky but also part of the mainland, and so we thought about that. In coming to the conclusion that we did not want to do that, in my view, what we were doing was, in essence, a form of island impact assessment, because our reasoning was that we wanted to respect the separation, if you like, of the island as a distinct entity. We have done that with all the major islands that are part of the review, so that is what I mean by saying that an impact assessment is in the intrinsic part of our work. Thank you for that response. I wonder if I could ask a more general question to you, Ronnie, about the geographical size that some of the wards are and will become. I use Arran just to illustrate it a little. North Ayrshire is happy with the proposal for Arran and us to be said there, but when you look at it, it is a single member ward that is the proposal covering 167 square miles. Just across the water on the mainland, the Solcoats Davidson ward has five councillors covering 15 square miles. Why is there no consideration about the extent to the geographical area that a councillor has to get round to carry out their duties? It seems to be a huge discrepancy there, so I would be obliged for some of your comments on that, please. I can start, but Ailsa is probably our resident expert on matters like this, so I would offer a couple of thoughts. One would be that the size of the area is a part of our thinking, because one of the main criteria that we use in our methodology is measures of population sparsity. The two things are correlated. Clearly, if you have a big area and a small population, that is where sparsity comes in. We consider, quite carefully, the question of size, but more specifically to the heart of what you are asking about how the councillor actually does their work. We are thoughtful about that. Obviously, technology makes a big difference these days. We are doing that right now, but we carried out a bit of research a few years ago now to look at the make-up of the councillor's workload and to try to inform our thinking about those matters. One of the surprising, slightly counterintuitive results was that it is a relatively low proportion of time that is spent by councillors in terms of travel within the ward or the wider council area. We thought that it would be a higher, but it was relatively low. We spend much more of the time, which does not surprise me as a former local council chief executive in the business of the council. I am not saying that it is not important that you have to cover big distances, but it is not as important as perhaps we might think, and I also can probably add something in terms of the question about size, if you like. For me, it is helpful to think about why the wards are in certain places, particularly large. One reason why we have large wards at times is partly because we have fewer councillors per voter in Scotland. We have parts of the country where there are higher proportions of people who are living in small settlements, and we also have an electoral system for local government that requires multi-member wards. When we add all of those three things together, fewer councillors to go around population in smaller settlements and the need to have multi-member wards, if you are adding in together those multi-member wards, then by definition almost you do end up with the capacity to have large wards in those areas, large geographic wards in those areas where there are smaller portions of the population. It is important to note that this is not particularly unusual in Europe. I know that there was a comment last week that these are the largest wards in Europe, but they are not. There are electoral systems in Norway and in Sweden where the entire local authority is a single ward. We have islands, for example, which is 26,000 kilometres squared, but we have wards in Norway and in Sweden—single wards that are 20,000 kilometres squared. There are wards that are 74,000 kilometres squared. That is what we tend to see in rural areas. That is on a spectrum, and we are not really on the extreme end of the spectrum in Scotland. They have got multiple members, though. The ward in Arran is a single member ward, and the whole principle that we thought we had embraced was multi-member wards. Why is not there, for example, two members for Arran? Because there is not an electoral geography to justify the two member wards if we are keeping to the ratio within the council area. We went out and we asked—I mean, I am kind of straying into a different topic now, and I will hand it back to Ronnie very quickly. We were really pleased to have the flexibility provided by the Islands Act and the flexibility provided to have larger wards up to five members in the mainland. When we began the consultation process with councils, we went out and tried to make the most of that flexibility. We asked the councils what it was that they preferred. Some of them preferred island-only wards that were a smaller number of councillors and other areas preferred different things. We very much tried to tailor it to what we were hearing from the council in our iterative consultation process and what we were hearing from members of the public. Different parts of different parts of different local authorities had different preferences for what they wanted, so we tried to meet those demands where we could. I would like to explore a little bit the concerns that were raised by Margaret Davidson from Highland Council about the splitting of the award of Airdin Loch Ness, which is now being split. Highland Council holds a view that the communities around Loch Ness form a community and feel a connection because of their relationship to that place. Now, with the new proposals, they would be split and would be disruptive. I would like to hear your thoughts on that. I can start to be elected. Collin will probably have more detail in terms of the consultation process in that particular area, but it is worth pointing out to begin with that the existing ward was only created at our last reviews. It has been around for five years, and therefore it is not like some of the wards in the northern part of Highland where we were very attentive to the comments that were made about history and tradition. It does not really have that aspect, so that is one point to make about that particular ward. The other is that, although we did get responses in that ward, as we did in most in Highland and other areas, there was not a voluminous response in our eyes in favour of the status quo. There were voices on both sides of the argument, and against that, what we were looking at in particular was, first of all, the benefit of the changing ward in terms of the Inverness area. We are trying to look at that as a whole. Collin could maybe add a bit to that, but one of the requirements on our work is to find easily identifiable boundaries. I genuinely think that the middle of Loch Ness is a pretty easy identifiable boundary. It is a mixture of considerations, as it always is, breaches adjustment in these matters, but those were the factors that came into our consideration for that particular ward. Public consultation, we had overall about 280 responses for comments for the airport. There were only 24 responses, so there was not a strong feeling in the number of responses opposing the proposals. The boundary has been amended to create a more easily identifiable boundary. The part of Inverness is now more of an Inverness ward. The existing ward included a small part of Inverness and the more rural Loch Ness area. We got some comments. The main issues were too many councillors. Some were looking for a two-member ward, local ties being broken, and there were also suggestions to amend the boundary by Fort Augustus, which we did amend at the end of the review. It is a process of calculating total and ward councillor allocations. It is a little bit more explanation about that. I know that the boundary Scotland used data on similar councils, and I know that you look at the SIMD and, of course, that is an income, employment, education, health and so on. I suppose that it is on that practice a little bit more explanation about whether that is the appropriate basis to compare councils and what is the thinking behind that. Obviously, that determines council numbers as well. I will just start a little bit more chatting on that a little bit. I suppose that it might be more the criteria and the thinking around about how you arrived at that. Ilsa is far more expert than I am, but I could offer just a couple of preliminary thoughts while Ilsa gathers hers. We revised our methodology quite fundamentally before the last set of reviews and brought in the SIMD data. Part of the thinking behind that, which is relevant to some of the discussion this morning, was that we felt that, higher than that, the only criterion that we were working with was to do with population sparsity and density. While that is very important, the everyday reality of electing and being represented by councillors involves a whole lot of other social and economic factors. We felt that that was missing from the discussion. We brought that into what is now a combined and fairly complex methodology that tries to reflect those different realities. It is not just about how easy it is to manage the geography, whether that is in a city or a rural area. It is also about the nature of the work that councillors are confronted with. We felt that that was relevant to a decision about how to come up with councillor numbers as part of our overall world design work. That is the general background that, as I say, Ailsa is able to articulate that better than I am sure. Thanks for that. It is nice to be able to chat about it and explain what we were thinking at the time, but also what effect those changes have. When we began the fifth reviews, we had consultation evidence from the reaction to the fourth reviews that people were broadly supportive of categorising councils. That was also reflected in the evidence last week, but they wanted to see a reduction in the number of categories—we had seven before—and they wanted a reduction in the range of ratios of electors to councils. They wanted it to be a narrower range and more equal across Scotland as a whole. At the same time, we were aware not just that we were counting things twice, as Ronnie was explaining, but that the Scottish Government had started using different methods to categorise councils. We made two changes. We had a measure that looked at the settlement size that people were living in. It used to be the proportion of the electorate living in settlements of 10,000 people or less. We brought that down to 3,000 people or less, because we thought the focus should be on smaller settlements that were more sensitive to rural geographies. The second thing that we did was to use the SIMD data, which includes income, crime and housing, but it also includes how we access Government services. Given that we are supposed to devise those boundaries with an eye to effective and convenient local government, we also wanted to include something that directly targeted the extent to which it uses certain services and how it accesses those services. It includes travel time to different services by private car but also by public transportation. We used those two things as two different axes to categorise the councils. We ended up with five categories that have councils in the more rural, more deprived, more rural, less deprived and so on. There are different cut points across those axes. Having categorised those councils, we sat down and tried to sort out what ratios could we use that are more equal across Scotland as a whole and that deliver us roughly the same number of councillors. We were not under any guidance to radically change the system of local Government in Scotland, so we tried to end up roughly about the same place, certainly not stuck to a very specific number. We then calculated the numbers that gave us a certain number of councillors. We took into account the minimum and maximum size of councils, so minimum of 18. The maximum was 80. We lifted that to 85 because Glasgow was predicted as needing about 165 councillors, so we raised the maximum a little bit. We imposed a 10 per cent cap-on change to minimise disruption for councillors. We used those council numbers as a guide. I am so excited about methodology—that is why I keep talking about it—but we used those numbers as a guide and if we were able to get a better ward design by moving the numbers around and increasing councillor numbers, if we felt that we had a better ward design, we went with the higher numbers. We were not high bound by a mathematical formula that gave us a number and we refused to deviate from it. The other last thing to say is that the inclusion of deprivation actually does not bounce the numbers around very much. If you had used the old criteria that we used, the two things that we looked at, we roughly would have ended up in the same place in terms of councillor numbers. There are 17 councils that would have had exactly the same numbers if we had used the old methodology. That includes all six of the council areas that we reviewed under the Islands Act. Thank you for that very extensive answer. Thank you, Elsa. You are getting me excited about methodology, too. I want to come in on a supplementary. The work that you did was carried out primarily before Covid. I am aware that, in Highland, we have had the news—I do not know the numbers specifically—but the news that a lot of people are choosing to—now that we can work remotely, people are choosing to move to the Highlands. I wonder if that is something that we should be being aware of that the population is going to change. That is a great question. In terms of Covid, one thing that is worth mentioning is that we have power under the legislation to carry out interim reviews. In essence, what that is designed to provide for is that, if there are unusual fluctuations in population or because of that electorate, we can carry out an interim review that looks at only part of a council area, including down to a particular ward. In terms of how we feel that we are resilient against the effect of Covid on the factors that influence our work, that is the kind of power that we tend to turn to. There is probably a good example in the Highland area in the form of Colin and Ardacea, because the view that we came to in relation to the projections for the increase in population there, which were quite dramatic because of developments that you will know far more about than I do, but when we looked at the numbers over the past few years, the trajectory on which that population was increasing did not match the forecast that would have led to a significant increased population electorate for council numbers. We decided that perhaps Covid might have had something to do with that, even while the work was in progress and development being stalled or whatever it would be. We decided that the safer thing to do is to leave it as it is, and that is definitely a candidate for an interim review if it turns out that the projections from the council about the increase in population in that area are actually borne out. In fact, we are not prevented from doing something about that in the short term. Okay, thank you, and I'm going to invite Megan to pick up a couple of themes. Thank you, convener. If I could start with the benefits of having a similar voter to councillor ratio across all wards, and it's to ask the question, would having variations in the councillor to voter ratio impact on the effective and convenient local government, and I know that we've touched on the size and scale of wards, but that is more in terms of the benefits that it would have on communities. Sure, maybe Ilson I can do a little header on this one too, so from me just to kick off. I think the thrust of the question is how much importance should be attached to parity alongside the other considerations. In my own view, and the view of the commission, is that parity is paramount and it's for a reason. It's not a numbers game, which is sometimes the way that it's dismissed by people. It's about electoral fairness, and we think that that is absolutely fundamental. The legislation is intended to create a result as near as it can do, where every vote counts for the same within a given council area, and I just think that that's a principle that needs to be enshrined and respected. We try to do that, but we're not enslaved by it, and that's why we're able to make, I think, good use of the other discussions that we have, and we've mentioned some of those, the main one being special geographic circumstances, and you can see from our proposals, for example, in the Highland Order, the Argyll and Bute area, that we are prepared to tolerate quite significant variations from parity in order to respect other factors, including community identity and the specific characteristics of islands. The fact that parity holds everything together, if you like, doesn't mean that it restricts it only being a numbers game, and we think that it's important. There's one other quick observation from me. If you took at phase value what the Highland Council has asked for, which would be different ratios within a council area, as a way of demonstrating that parity is not to be on the end all, but if you did that, then the result of that would be that in the Highland area, four most northern wards with some of the most parsley-populated communities would have 37 councillors if they had the same ratios as the islands, which is one of the things that Highland Council has asked for in those reviews. That seems to me to demonstrate that parity really does matter, because in a council with 74 members it doesn't make a lot of sense, or half of them, to be coming from the most parsley-populated area of population and electorate. It's not an abstract and theoretical thing, it's really quite practical. We are very careful about getting anywhere close to a position where one area might feel genuine when we are underrepresented compared to another when we use our discretion under special geographic circumstances, but we do use it. I think that it's worth pointing out that the legislation requires the number of electors to councillors to be as nearly as they may be the same. The legislation requires us not just to pay attention to parity, which is elsewhere in the schedule six rules, but it begins with the notion that electoral parity is a fundamental feature of how we distribute councillors and how we design wards. That's not just a quirk of the legislation in Scotland, that's a fundamental principle of electoral fairness in free and fair electoral democracies. The European Commission for Democracy through law, which was set up in 1990, has about 60 to 62 members, and the UK is a member of that. It was set up in 1990. In 2002, they outlined what they felt was best practice in terms of designing electoral wards. They said that three things were important—the equality of the vote, the impartiality of the decisions, and specifically the role of a committee where the role of parties is limited. You can't have the people who are going to be elected by those certain rules, setting the boundaries by which they'll be elected. It has to be one step removed from that. On the issue of equality of the vote, they were really clear. It should be 10 per cent and never over 15 per cent, except in particular very specific circumstances. One was in a demographically weak area where they had to have a single member but they didn't have a large population. It would be akin to the protected constituencies in Westminster elections such as Western Isles. Not pursuing electoral fairness and equality of the vote is known as malapportionment, and you can have passive and active versions. You can have active malapportionment if the boundaries from the very day they were drawn are not paying attention to the equality of the vote, or you can have passive malapportionment, which means that over time, if you don't make adjustments, certain areas come to be much more underrepresented or much more overrepresented. The last thing to say is that we use that 10 per cent as a guide. We deviate significantly from it when we think that special geographic circumstances warranted. The rule for Westminster constituencies is 5 per cent. When PACAC was doing a review of that, it had research that said that 8 per cent would do it. There is no need to even relax it to 10 per cent. It is a fairly common band that is used across the industrial democracies. Thank you, Elsa. Did you want to follow up with me? No, Elsa has covered the follow-up, so thank you very much. Thank you. We are going to move on to Miles. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. I want to return to some of the points that the convener has already raised with regard to the correspondence and evidence session that we had with Councillor Margaret Davidson, who told the committee that there was a good initial conversation between the Council and Boundaries Scotland. However, much of what the council relayed to the commission during the early conversations, she believes, was not taken on board when proposals were drawn up. We have already heard the concerns with regard to Sutherland, Westeros and Loch Ness communities, but I just wondered if you could outline to the committee how those concerns were taken on board, what community engagement took place and how you would respond to those concerns specifically expressed by Highland Council. Elsa can help with that, because she attended the initial meeting with the council. I think we probably have to focus on that a little bit in order to respond to your question well. I would emphasise that we took the same approach with Highlands as we did with the other three review meetings. You heard accounts from the other councils about how they welcomed the approach that we took there. I think that they characterised it as being open. We were clear about the legislation and our methodology, but we said that we were more than willing to be flexible about specifics on ward design and counsellor numbers. It was exactly the same approach that we took with Highlands as we did with the others, and it was the same commission that went to them. The difference is in the interaction with the Highland Council. We also said that, because we had the time to do this, to have a pre-review before we got into the formal statutory consultation, that we really wanted to hear the council's ideas, but, obviously, they had to be within the bounds of what we were capable of acting on. That approach was welcomed by the others, and they took advantage of it. You heard the examples, for example, on Gulbarwick, on Shetland, Stromness and Orkney, where our initial proposals did not find favour, but a dialogue with the council and others, which the council facilitated, was enough to enable us to see a different point of view and come to a different decision. That has been largely absent, I think, from the dealings that we had with Highland Council right from the first meeting. As I said, I did not attend that, and I also might want to give a bit of flavour of that to give you a different picture of the one that I think you got last week. I was at that first meeting in Inverness, where we outlined what had changed because the legislation required us to change or gave us the opportunity to change. It was very clear from that very first meeting that it was largely councillors who were present, rather than the administrative officers. They were annoyed with our proposals from 2017. They admitted, quite frankly, that they had lobbied the minister to reject them. They told us that they were annoyed that he had not rejected them. They also made clear that they welcomed an enhanced role for Parliament because it provided them with an opportunity to engage in lobbying once our proposals were out there. That did not occur to me at the time, but in retrospect, given what has happened, it appears that there were minds where it was made up before we had even begun. That is borne out by two things. We were repeatedly asked by Highland to do things that we were not allowed to do in the legislation. One was about, from the off, having completely different ratios within a council area, but not just specifically having a ratio that was set aside for the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland. That ratio was designed to facilitate a minimum council size of 18. It was not a ratio by virtue of being an island. It was a ratio that was deemed appropriate and necessary in order to end up with a minimum council size of 18. That is one thing that was clear. The other thing was that I also participated in meetings in Argyll and Bute. The council facilitated our engagement with different planning groups, with different community councils. During the pandemic, while we were all working at home, we were having online meetings with different community councils in Argyll and Bute. That facilitated access did not occur in the case of Highland. Those were really valuable for us, because they had allowed us to understand the trade-offs that people think they are working with and what side of the trade-off they come down on. We were very consistent in our approach. We were following the principles of flexibility and the time that we were given in order to engage in enhanced consultation, which we had not had when we were doing all 32 at once. We welcomed the opportunity to talk to people at a far slower pace, with far greater engagement. We were really disappointed that it did not happen with Highland. You touched upon your work during the pandemic, and every organisation has been impacted. We still are today having to be remote for this session. Do you think that your work on that has been constrained due to both time, as the Government has asked for that to be brought forward before next year's council elections, but also the impact that the pandemic has had on your work during this period to be able to find out communities' views and whether or not, during this period, communities have really been engaged in this sort of work? That is a really good question. I genuinely do not think so. None of us would wish the state of affairs upon ourselves, but I do not think that it has significantly impeded our work. We were still able to do some of the more difficult things of your life that Ailsa touched on in relation to community consultation through this medium. There are some benefits to doing that as well, which we are all becoming all too familiar with. I do not think that I could honestly say that it has made a major difference. As it happens, the period of those reviews straddles are before and during Covid. We all look back fondly to the earlier meetings where we were able to get around the table with people in areas such as Shetland. It did not impede us in Argyll and Bute, which has all sorts of geographical challenges, even if you can physically attend the meetings. I do not think so. When we reflect back on the way that we have been able to consult and the willingness, as Ailsa said, of councils to go out of their way to make it possible for us to do that in those difficult circumstances, I do not think that we could have done it any better, and I do not think that we lost an awful lot. I repeat Ailsa's comment that it was not available to us to find a way of getting around that kind of digital table, if you like, with communities or community councils in the greater Highland area. I am a Highlands and Islands MSP, and we are talking about five of the local authorities in the region. One of the big issues that is being brought up to me all the time is about repopulation and repeapling. I am concerned that, if we change the boundaries—I know that you have flexible restrictions around the criteria that you had to work with, which is what you have been talking about—I just wanted to raise the issue that if we start to, you know, certainly in Highland, move the representation towards Inverness and pull it away from the areas in which we are desperately trying to repopulate and get more people living there. I just want to hear your thoughts on that, if you can. I think that we can. Do you think that it is important to get the perspective on that? The net result of our recommendations in terms of councillor numbers for Highland is that it would reduce by one. I struggle to regard that as a significant impact on the effective and convenient local government to go from 74 to 73 councillors, so that would be my first point. I think that your question is more about the distribution in the area. Again, if you look at it in the four most northern wards, the net effect would be a reduction of one in the current number of councillors. By contrast in Inverness, the greater Inverness area, the net effect is an addition of one. Those numbers do not look excessive. To me, it is inherent in the very idea of a review and that there is going to be some change, but that is hardly a dramatic one. Maybe the most fundamental point is that we have to take to place representation where the population and the electorate is. There is no way that you can put councils in an area where there is not an electorate and expect that the electorate will somehow follow them if it is not going to work like that. It is the other way around. However, in terms of representation, the areas to the north are all four of them overrepresented compared to the rest of Highland. We are cognisant of the importance of making sure that there is no real problem with representation in very highly rural areas such as that and other parts of Highland. I will use that as an example to demonstrate that it is not about the councillor numbers. It is about the proportions, if you like, measured against parity. Against parity, there is significant overrepresentation and there will still be under our proposals and for that part of the council area. We think that that is perfectly right. We have given a lot of attention to Highland. I will give a little bit more attention to Argyllin butte. I have two more questions and I think that we are going to wrap it up. Argyllin butte is a specific issue, and you probably already touched on it, but I will ask the question. One of the proposed wards is Mul, Collin Tyree, I believe. The issue that was raised to me was a concern that—I think that it is going to be a three-member ward as the proposal—that probably because there is a higher population on Mul, you might end up with the councillors all being from Mul and that there is no actual direct ferry service, no way to get to Collin Tyree. You would have to come through Oben to get back out to those islands. So there is a concern around the issue—I think that the criteria was about a kind of linking between the wards. We are very aware of that too. The status quo is that there is a mainland island ward there at the moment, so there is that hybrid, and therefore the connectivity question is respected in that arrangement. I am looking at what we were empowered to do under the island's legislation. It would have been remiss of us, I think. We hadn't even considered the possibility of grouping islands together separate from the mainland. That seemed to be part of the main policy thrust of the legislation. In doing that, you have to weigh in the scales that set of considerations against the physical connectivity argument and that it is not an easy judgment to make. On balance, the view that we took about that grouping of islands and the one further to the south, on a guideline view, was that it was in keeping with the spirit of the legislation to try to recognise that identity by having a dedicated ward, if you like, for island communities. When we looked at the responses to the consultation, although there were views on either side, by and large, people were in favour of trying to do that. The connectivity argument matters, but it did not seem to be a beyond-end all for at least a significant number of the people who responded to it. That is definitely one of the things that we would want to keep an eye on going forward and obviously liais with the council to see if that is making a significant difference or not. I think that we heard last week that there is a historic identification with that connectivity where people seem to come from the islands and connect to Oben and that they actually like that. It is interesting that that did not necessarily come up when you were seeking views on it. I am going to move on to a closing question, which would be if Parliament were to reject one or more of the regulations, what would boundary Scotland do next? It is not entirely clear what we could do. What is clear is what we could not do, because there would not be time to carry out a full review of a whole council area ahead of the elections that are scheduled for next year now. That would mean that, for a given area, they would be going into those elections with the current form of representation that they have got through the previous reviews. For some of them, that might not be such a difficulty for Orkney. For example, it would not change anything at all, but it changes things quite significantly, particularly in Highland and also in Argyllun but, because the levels of disparity that we have there, I think that I am not serving the electorate very well. It would be a mistake to allow that to prevail for the forthcoming elections. The main thing is that we could not do anything in advance of those elections, and that would be the price of it. What happens after that is something that is new ground to all of us, convener. I am not entirely sure, but we, as a commission, stand ready to act on instruction from the minister, ultimately from the Parliament, about what has to happen in the aftermath of the reviews that we have just completed. I think that that is the end of our questions. I very much appreciate you coming along and sharing the work that you have been doing and getting us excited about methodology. We are going to take the next two items in private, so I am going to suspend the meeting. But thanks so much for being with us this morning.