 Shemriama. Welcome to the 19th meeting of the finance and public administration committee in 2020. We have received apologies from Michael Marra, which is the deputy convener, and can not attend today's meeting. That means that, as the oldest member of the committee, I will be convening the meeting for the first item of business. For the purposes of the committee, choosing a convener. I would like to put on record our thanks to Keith Brown for his work during the time on the committee Welcome back, Kenneth Gibson. The first item on our agenda is to choose a convener. The committee has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as convener of this committee. As such, I nominate Kenneth Gibson as convener of the committee. Do members agree to choose Kenneth Gibson as our convener? Yes. As there are no objections, I congratulate Kenneth on your appointment and give you the chair. I congratulate the committee for my appointment, particularly my colleagues Michael Marra and John Mason, who have convened the meetings in my absence. As I rejoin the committee, I wish to declare that I have no relevant interests. For our next agenda item, the committee will continue to inquire into the Scottish Commons Public Service Reform programme. Today, we hear from Sarah Waters, director of membership and resource COSLA, and Clare Llynsynedd, chief executive of South Lanarkshire Council, representing Solace Scotland. I welcome you both to the meeting. I intend to allow up to 75 minutes for this session. If witnesses would like to be brought into the discussion at any point, please indicate to clerks and then I will call you. We have no written submissions, so we will move straight to questions. First of all, before I ask any questions, I just want to say how impressed I was by the quality and the detail in the submission. It was an excellent piece of work. I have to be said that there was one very clear and overriding statement that I would suggest or from local government, which is that, and I quote from paragraph 9 of your summary of key points, local government requires fair and sustainable funding and greater empowerment. Those themes can run right through the document. One thing that I would say is that I found this frustrating with COSLA on a number of occasions, and that is that, although there is talk of fair and sustainable funding, and I think that everyone in the committee is very sympathetic to that, three members of the committee here today are former councillors, for example, and Douglas was a council leader. There is no detail as to what that really means—fair and sustainable funding, I feel. It would be good if that could be expanded on a wee bit, and then we will touch on that a wee bit more, and then we will go on to other points. Who wants to go first? Thank you, convener, for inviting us through to provide some evidence today. Fair and sustainable funding, to give a bit of illustration, and it is within the submission, if Scottish local government had shared the same fiscal fortunes as Scottish government over the period from 2013-14, we would have round about £1.289 billion more in our collective budgets. The origin of that audit Scotland did some work for us, looking at the comparative change real terms in our budgets, and the Scottish Government's budget over that period of time went up by 4.3 per cent in real terms. In real terms, the Scottish local government went down by 4.2 per cent. However, we asked them to do a little bit further work to identify the true impact on core budgets for the Scottish local government if they removed directed funding to deliver on a number of Scottish Government priorities. The real terms reduction in that period is 9.6 per cent. The swing, if you want, is 13.8 per cent of a difference in fiscal fortunes. We are not looking for more than anybody else, but we believe that the impact of that has meant a period, to be honest, 15 years now, since 2008, where we have delivered very significant efficiencies. In my own authorities case, that is well over £200 million worth of efficiencies in that period. However, the impact of that now is starting to appear in relation to the delivery of public services. It is no longer sustainable to continue to do what we deliver on behalf of our communities, but that is at a time when demand is at an all-time high. I will give you one example, which is in relation to homelessness. My authorities case load is 70 per cent greater than it was last year—70 per cent in terms of case loads. Homeless presentations are up in the recent period by about 10 per cent. There is tremendous pressure on the Scottish local government. A lot of people are looking to us to try to mitigate the cost of living crisis and to deal with a range of challenges. However, as I said, the fiscal position has been very difficult for us. The very final point, because I am sure that you will return to it, is the flexibilities that are afforded to local government in terms of how it uses the resources that are available to them. In the last year, from 2021 to 2023, we have seen that directed spend increase from 18 per cent to 23 per cent alone. I hope that that gives you a starting point for the discussion. I want to talk about budgetary stuff, because this is more about reform, but this is the core of a lot of what you have been saying throughout, so I will ask one or two questions on that. Before I say that in, the figures that you mentioned from paragraph 46, you talked about the increase in Scottish Government funding of 4.3 per cent of other areas over the same period. Is that the case if you were to take out the NHS, for example? The difficulty has been that, with an ageing and more frail population, that any Government of any colour would have—perhaps you can argue around the percentages here and there, but it would have put a disproportionate amount of additional funding where it is available into the NHS just because of it being demand-led. For example, a 25 per cent increase in any pre-pandemic cases over five years. We have seen a 50 per cent increase in radiographers and a doubling of the number of psychiatrists in the NHS and it is still not enough. Is that not the context in which we operate? It is not as if—the way that you can respond was as if we are all heading in the same direction at the same pace, but there are some areas of the Scottish Government where pressures are clearly absolutely in your face. You can argue about priorities and I think that that is crucial that we do, but that is really the kind of back picture, is it not, against an overall fully flat funding settlement over a number of years? So, convener, the intent is not to do a direct comparison with the NHS or undoubtedly have pressures, but the same language in relation to demand-led services applies to local government. The way that you characterise demographic change and changes in demand are things that we would recognise as well. Unfortunately, we would suggest that the fiscal fortunes that we have enjoyed since 2008 have not been in keeping with those particular pressures. I am very proud of the work that the Scottish local government does. I think that we innovate and have been extremely creative. We have not been able to survive the changes in those fiscal fortunes if we had not been that creative. I suppose that the point that I would make just now is that we are at a tipping point. In particular, when we have protected areas of services, there are relatively protected areas of services around things such as education, around adult social care, the impact on the other services, everything from roads, budgets through to environmental health, etc., that we saw the value of during the pandemic, and every other service area has been impacted and will continue to be impacted. It is difficult to see how, over the next couple of years, particularly with the inflationary context that we are all facing at the moment, we can ensure that those services are maintained. I am going to ask you a bit about those things as we move on. You keep saying this since 2008, interestingly, but, as I recall, the previous administration actually had a policy of top-slicing 3 per cent of local government funding year in, year out. That was actually going with their policy, so I think that you would have found this situation, regardless of who had been in administration. I am going to say that fair funding sounds good, but how much is fair funding? That is the issue. Given that the local government is as aware as the rest of us of the pressures of Scottish Government and the UK Government are under financially, how realistic is it to expect additional funding for local government over and above any average increase in settlement that may come to the Scottish Government over the next year? You are absolutely right. It is a term that COSLA has used for a number of years, and we talk about core funding and the directed funding. There is a lot of transparency and scrutiny of things such as ring-fenced funding, directed funding, but there is less transparency around the huge chunk of funding that sits in the general revenue grant that is distributed via the GAE formula. What we would like to get into in terms of the fiscal framework this year is getting into that and saying what do you need for a minimum service provision? As part of the fiscal framework work, we have been leading some work with directors of finance to get under the skin of that and say what are the key cost pressures, what are the key cost drivers in delivering services that people expect right from all the services that Clylon has mentioned, the education services, the social care services right through to the roads and the other range of services. We have called out the differences between those two tronches of funding, but we have not actually got into the detail and that is what we hope to do. There is also a fundamental flaw with things such as a financial memorandum that is written at a point in time, a pot of funding that is then lobbed into the settlement. COSLA calls quite rightly to get that put into the general revenue grant, which gives flexibility, but it is subject to demand and inflationary pressures and we do not revisit those amounts of funding. There have been a lot of talk recently about the early learning and childcare funding and whether or not that should be baselined. Again, just because there are perhaps fewer children and young people in the system, it does not mean that local government can just close nurseries or take provision out. Again, there are minimum standards that are required. You need a certain amount of properties to deliver early learning and childcare in rural areas. You need staff in terms of ratios and people that are working in that sector also need to be paid a fair wage. There is a lot of talk about sustainable rates. That is absolutely right, but to do that, you need to factor that into the overall envelope of funding that you have available. We need a very honest discussion with our Scottish Government colleagues about what is and is not affordable from the envelope of funding that is available. If there is no more funding available, we need to start talking about what we stop delivering, because local government, as Clylon said, has managed and managed, but things such as the local government benchmark and framework are starting to show cracks in some areas. It is really regrettable that some of the decisions that have had to be made are leading to reductions in satisfaction, etc., but that is the reality of the situation. Things are going to have to stop. We cannot continue to slammy-slice things anymore. We are hoping that, through the fiscal framework development, we can get a space for those very robust discussions. I think that that is a positive development. I hope that it will prove to be so. One of the things that the Scottish Government is doing is increasing benefits relative to south of border, such that, by 2020, it will be £1.4 billion. I have spoken to people in local government who have told me that some of that money would be better spent on the local government services that have helped to underpin work against poverty and to reduce poverty. If local government in Scotland has undertaken any cost-benefit analysis to look at where a pound has been spent in local government, for example, as against one of those measures in terms of benefits, there are indeed any other measures in the Scottish Government's spend that has been undertaken so that it can be clear about the value for money aspect of the work that local government does. I can maybe make a couple of remarks before Serer comes in on this. The value of local government services and the impact, if I can give you an example in child poverty, you will find that most authority or community planning partnerships, actually child poverty action plans, will generally have three strands. First of all, maximising the income for a particular household, secondly, trying to manage the cost of living, thirdly, trying to support people into sustained and valued employment. The first two are really helpful. They are critical supports for households in need, but in themselves they will not lift households out of poverty. The latter part, which is about skills development, employability support, about getting people into sustained employment, paying a decent living wage. Those are the routes out of debt, the routes out of poverty. When you see local government services—I will narrow it down, because your point is a broader point around that—you need to think about individual interventions that local government does because you cannot do a cost-benefit analysis on local government because of the breadth of things that we do. That type of thing about employability, those are the very budgets that are under pressure. Those are the very budgets, even with the no-one left behind supports and the flexibilities that were very welcomed in that expenditure. Those are the particular areas where we could intervene to help families. It is about giving families and households a hand up rather than a hand out. I am not, by any means, critical of the monies that have been routed into households through enhanced benefits. Those are extraordinarily welcome, but you have to question what is the long-term and sustainable aspect of that. Can you use some of that money over a longer term more strategically and help people out of poverty, as opposed to creating a dependency on an enhanced benefit rate? I would be happy to follow up on the point about pound spent in local government, because we have information, and I just do not have it to hand this morning. We have pulled heavily on research by the World Health Organization and the Health Foundation that looks at the importance of investing in the determinants of health, housing, employability support, transport and so on. If you look at things such as adult social care, I mean that there are very, very stark examples of the benefits and the cost benefits of keeping older people in their home, not allowing them to trip and slip and avoiding them going into A&E, £25,000, I think, for a hip fracture. You can do a lot of home care support for £25,000. I think that the other area, and Clylon was talking about getting people into work, take a step back from that and go into the classroom and think about the classroom support that is required, so pupils with ASM who require additional support needs, if we can get them the support that they need early in the classroom, and that is not necessarily teachers, that is potentially sometimes one-to-one to support that gets them on the road to achieving and attaining at school that then will give them a better chance in the employment market. So, I think that you can go a step back and allow councils the flexibility to provide that whole family support that some of which will be delivered directly in the classroom. Okay, thanks. The medium-term financial strategy in the Scottish Government's fiscal outlook says, and I quote, for individual public bodies to determine the target operating model for their workforces and to ensure workforce plans and projections are affordable in 23, 24 and over the medium term. Is that something that you consider to be realistic at this time? I think that for local government you will see a diagram in the submission that shows the local government reform agenda, which we clearly are demonstrating within the submission that we have been on this journey for quite some time. Now the public service reform agenda that is sitting with the Scottish Government, there is an overlap point that I think we are concerned about, that if public service reform happens over here and local government continues to reform, we need to consider—I think that the concerning thing for me in that statement is that each individual—and I think that we need to think about what are the services that are needed in individual places and how do those public service bodies interact with local government on the ground? I think that there is a danger of everybody plowing their own furrow and actually there are unintended consequences there of cutting services in one place that actually would have been really well delivered in partnership with local government on the ground, so I think that this comes down to thinking about community planning partnerships, how they can be more empowered to take the decisions and plan the services that they need, but then how the national bodies can actually enable that, because I think that there is a danger that if they reform in silos, then we miss the overlap that we need to get better services on the ground. One of the important parts of reform is digitalisation, and it is clear that there has to be co-operation between the Scottish Government and local government. I am a wee bit concerned about some of the comments that you have made in your submissions. For example, in paragraph 43, you say, my job is Scotland, my job is by cause, which is to streamline the recruitment process for councils and other public sector bodies, although the Scottish Government's agencies have opted not to use it. In paragraph 70, you talk about the digital strategy, both cause and the Scottish Government committed to developing and expanding digital boost as our primary programme of support for SMEs, despite the programme, so that it is budget-reduced by a quarter for 2022-23, and indications are that it is unlikely to be funded in 2023-24. Clearly, that collaboration perhaps is not working as well as it should. What are the reasons why, for example, the Scottish Government is not using my job Scotland, and what is the reason for the digital strategy support for SMEs not being continued, as it seems? If I could just come in on my job Scotland point, we believe in local government that my job Scotland is a world-class product. I am unsure as to the reasons why the Scottish Government and other agencies are not using that. I think that we have had discussions, but I think that as part of the reform agenda, we need to go further with those discussions. I think that sometimes the initial steps are difficult, so the Scottish Government and its agencies will have its own things that it is used to. It will have its own systems that it is all a bit painful at some point, but I think that the cost benefits of using things like my job Scotland are absolutely clear. We have got some really clear stats that show that it is much more cost effective to use this, and we are reaching 2.5 million people across Scotland. That is a huge percentage of the working-age population, so I think that we need to have those discussions again. It might have been that they were had at a point in time, and we need to go further. I think that the digital boost investment is disappointing. I think that we have had various discussions about that. It is a programme that I think that business has absolutely appreciated. Unfortunately, COSLA has had to make two staff redundant because of the funding not being continued for those posts. We will develop ways of delivering support for business. We will use digitisation to make sure that we are delivering those, but having those two dedicated posts did reap benefits for business, which we know, because we have evidence from business surveys on that. Thanks, convener. Maybe just to pick out another example. Sarah has mentioned that the authorities have gone on a digital-first journey where we have moved an awful lot of our services into digital platforms so that customers can interact with us at a time of their choosing, an allocation of their choosing, and do transact business. I would want to pick out as an exemplar the work around the CMIS system. CMIS, which evolved from the education computer support unit at Straclide, migrated every local authority on one at a time as their existing contracts expired. We now have a fully integrated system that covers all skills, all early learning establishments in Scotland. We do not lose children any longer because we have to create a record to delete a record and vice versa. The benefits around the development of the system are substantial. It is going through a further evolution in terms of its early learning module and secondary module. I said that I am not going to do comparisons sector to sector, but I am about to contradict myself. To give an example, in health there is such a plethora of systems that are used by GP practices, primary care settings, acute settings, etc. It is very difficult for somebody to walk in through the door at an A and E for the medical professional to then access records back at the person's practice. They do not know the chronologies, etc. If you go into an A and E and there is the referral back to your GP, they are sending letters, etc. There is a lot of manual transactions within health. The route that we have taken around CMIS is the exemplar. It does need more, right across the Scottish public sector, more of that type of thinking, more bold decision making and decisions that then migrate services on to a single platform. I give you the equivalent for our social care services. It is like walking up to a system with a charger for a different type of handset. You do not know where to plug in, because it does not fit. I could not even give you the figure for the number of different systems that GP practices in Scotland currently operate. It cannot be without the witter of man to think about how do we get a single system and how do we migrate over time. We are embarked on things such as the single health and social care record. That is a unique identifier. We are doing that in conjunction with colleagues in Scotland in the Scottish Government. That is only the type of iceberg. We should be looking at whole systems like the CMIS model. I commend that. However, there are many examples. The final thing is that you will see within our submission that there is a reference to my account, which again is another exemplar system that gives the opportunity for 40 organisations to have a single sign-in service for public services. However, we understand that there is no work on going for a thing called digital identity Scotland. It would duplicate, it would compete with that. I cannot, I must admit, understand why we would look to develop a competitor system in Scotland for something that is already up and running. That is a point that we have made. I know that you are going to come and say it, but I am trying to move on, because I want colleagues to come in. I could spend the whole session asking questions because there is so much really good detail here. One of the things—I will just ask this one-hour question—is about best practice. What is good about this document is that there are some tremendous examples of good practice. For example, Renfrewshire Council's Tackling Poverty Commission, North Ayrshire Council's Skills for Life programme, East and Battershire Council's Snack and Play programme. You give an example of North Ayrshire's community wealth building programme, which is expanding throughout Scotland. However, it is just to say that one of the things that I have asked over many years in a number of committees is about how such good practice has actually spread throughout local government. One of the concerns that I have always had is that, yes, they have a great project in Council X and another brilliant project in Council Y, but there is not really as much sharing and cross-cutting as there should be to ensure that those projects are implemented on a much wider basis. Sorry, convener. I would probably say that I would give you a more rounded answer. There are two things around this. One is the continuation of short-term pilot funding, pilotitis. To be honest, we kind of know what works. It might look slightly different in different areas. It might have a different title, etc. The North Ayrshire work on community wealth building is exemplar, but by no means unique. You will find a number of authorities that have got very similar programmes. The East Ayrshire programme around vibrant communities, and the document that hints at 65 community asset transfers, again, is an exemplar, but it is no by no means unique. We have, through colleagues in the local government improvement service, the knowledge hub and a whole range of other mechanisms, including the professional networks, such as Scots Network for Roads, etc., the heads of planning services hops for planning services. There are those mechanisms to share good practice and to try and consider what would work within your local area. The problem, if I would describe it that way, is we always get to a point of seeing something that works, but it does not automatically give you an immediate disinvestment. The best example that I can give you on scale is the work that was done through the early learning collaborative. It then became the early learning and childcare collaborative. It will probably take a generation of children to see the true benefits of that, but again, the pressure on local government budgets that contribute to that, including things like leisure and sport, etc., that are part of that healthy lifestyle and opportunities for our young people. The pressure on those short-term budgets means that there is a difficulty in sustaining the services, but I do not have concerns about our internal mechanisms to share good practice and then think about what would work best in our locality. The final point that I would make is that delivering certain services entirely, for example, will look dramatically different to rural Aberdeenshire and it will look dramatically different to East End of Glasgow. It has to be place specific. I do not know if Sarah Boyle wants to add. The committee will be aware that we have had a Covid recovery strategy program board up until fairly recently. It met a couple of weeks ago and it is looking at the options for the future, but the community planning improvement board was one of the key players in that. I think that there are some examples in the submission around the pilot work that is being done in Dundee, the pathfinder work done in Glasgow. There were three strands of the community planning improvement board's work. One was climate change, financial security and child poverty, so it mapped very closely to the three missions in the First Minister's perspective. The three work streams that involved people from Scottish Government, SCVO, Scottish Enterprise, all sorts of stakeholders were involved in those pilots. There were a couple of things that came up in every single work stream. One was funding fragmentation, sustainability of funding for the third sector and data sharing. There are things that the community planning improvement board work is telling us that have been around for years. I could have said some of those when I was a community planning coordinator 20 years ago that some of those things are data sharing for example, but I think that what we have got to do is take those issues out of those spaces and say what can we fundamentally do through the partnership agreement that we're hopefully going to sign next week between local and Scottish Government and actually drive the improvement that is required to make us have an environment that we can share data securely. The funding landscape is much less fragmented and it's much more sustainable so that we can start to plan, but like Clyland, I don't think that there's any problem sharing. I think that we have a lot of really good mechanisms to share. It's just sometimes it's really frustrating that these same issues keep coming up, but we're not necessarily addressing them. I think that the pilots highlight things, but we need to take those and make them the big issues that we have to tackle. Okay, thank you. I'm going to open up the session for a colleague to ask a question. She'll be drawn to a follow by Ross. Okay, thanks very much. We've had various evidence already on this subject, as you may have realised. One of the things that we were told was that the kind of budget pressures and having to find efficiencies that you've both been talking about are not the same as fundamental reform. If you agree with that, is reform something different? If so, what is it? Thank you, Mr Mason and the convener. I think that we're at a crossroads point now. I think that the partnership agreement sets the platform for perhaps a greater shared narrative. I said recently to elected members in my authority that efficiencies won't get us out of this situation now. Communities will not be able to save the day and mitigate the full impact of what we are facing. My authority, and I'll just bring it down to yours, is looking at a budget gap of around about £60 million next year. That's on just to put it in scale. That's on a revenue budget of £845 million. Most of which is, when I say in terms of that budget's make-up, there's a limited flexibility to put it that way around that. That £60 million will probably mitigate through some of our service concessions to buy us some time for reform. That's coming back to the core point. The capacity even is of a big authority like South Lancer, which is the fifth biggest in Scotland. There are only so many managers, there are only so many staff who can be working on a reform agenda at the one time. We are now going to face very significant decisions for elected members on what services are provided from the resource that we have. I was thinking of something more fundamental. The police told us that they went from however many police forces to one. If we were to go from 32 local authorities to 10 or 15, that's not going to come from local authorities. No local authorities are going to suggest that. That would have to come from central government, wouldn't it? It would require legislation to do it. It would save chief executives on some of the... Let me put it in this way. Show me the business case where moving from 32 to 15 or to 10 or to any number would substantially change the resource position for local government, and then we have a conversation. I am old enough to have gone through the last reorganisation. It was a very significant eye-opener in terms of the loss of capacity knowledge experience, and I am not sure that it merited the disruption in terms of the change. If I can maybe just come back to the point about a shared narrative, though, I think that this is really important. We need to have a dialogue with communities and with our taxpayers and our residents and our businesses that says, this is what is affordable, and this is what will be delivered going forward, and that reflects the following priorities. I think that the challenge, and if I can just give you an example around last year's budget, the challenge for our communities was that COSLA colleagues published a budget reality statement indicating that the Scottish local government required £1 billion more because of the... I mean, with all due respect, I am not really here to just hear about you want more money, because I do understand that, and we will look at that in the budget. I am looking at public sector reform, should we be... I will just come to this in a minute, but if we are not going to change the number of local authorities, are there too many other things? We used to have health boards and local authorities, so that was two. Now we've got HSCPs in the middle, so that's three. We used to have two enterprises, Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands, now we've got three, we've got South of Scotland. So are there just too many bodies out there? So, if I can talk about the local governance review just briefly, the first phases of that, I was the chief executive in Argyll and Bute at the time. So we conducted a roadshow around all the main communities, and one of... We had a set of presentations, boards that people would come in, they did a drop-in in the afternoon and workshops in the evening, and we tried to include the logo of all the public bodies active in Argyll and Bute. And yes, of course, people would know what the NHS looks like, they know what the council looks like, et cetera, but we had a huge number of people saying, who's that organisation? And you told them, and they say, well, what do they do? And you tell them, and they say, well, how do they connect to me? Well, actually, if you've never heard of them, then they probably haven't. So there are different sectors where you'll find quite a cluttered landscape. You can fill these bits in yourself from other evidence that you've got on the individual sectors in this session. But you'll have seen a number of reviews recently, and they'll have reported recently, you can see where I'm going here, that, effectively, there's name changes, but not really rationalisations. So I think it's something like 130 public bodies are in scope of the local governance review, excluding local government and the NHS. So undoubtedly, the public sector in Scotland is quite cluttered. There has been discussion, for example, around... Okay, maybe I can move on to Ms Water now to give her a chance. Okay. I mean, you yourself said, Ms Water, that the funding landscape is cluttered, and so we've got Scottish Enterprise, we've got Gateway, we've got local authorities, we've now got SNP as well. Is it all too cluttered? I don't think it's cluttered if you look at it on a place-based basis and think about the strategic planning that needs to happen in that place. I think that local partners are pretty clear about who they need and what they need locally, and I think that this comes back to... We'd like to conclude the local governance review, because that will establish what we need in terms of... I don't mean we as in local government, I mean we as in public services, because it's a local governance review. We must extend it to other partners who are key players within place-based services. So it's fiscal empowerment, functional empowerment, and as Clellyn said, community empowerment, what do communities need? So we need to conclude that. I was at an event, the local government committee ran an event a couple of weeks ago looking at the relationship between Scottish and local government. The headline report is that there is a democratic deficit in Scotland, there is a democratic deficit in the UK as well, but it is marked, the structure of democracy in Scotland compared to other countries. So I would argue that we should be thinking about what do we need in places and what makes sense in terms of place, what do people associate with, how would they like their services delivered, but it's not just that... Local government is, I would argue, is one of the key players, but they reach into so many others and it's about what needs to be delivered in that local area, take the logos, who do you need to actually help you deliver those services, and can you move resources from one bit of their service to a bit of a council service, for example, that are doing things that are absolutely complementary, and from a business perspective or a poverty perspective it would make sense just to pool the money and deliver a consolidated service. That's a good point, because pooling the money idea, do you think then, rather than changing the number of organisations, it's more about the relationship between them, for example we've got the city deals, which seem to have kind of worked to some extent that, like in Glasgow in the west of Scotland, the authorities have kind of worked together as I understand it, and I think sometimes with the health boards they do things kind of jointly as well, because they don't have the size themselves, is that the way to go is better co-operation? When you see the submission, there's a lot of examples of very good strategic planning within local areas to get the best for that local area, so you've mentioned the city deals, other communities, you will not see a community plan or a local outcome improvement plan across the country that does not refer to economic development, child poverty, net zero etc. But I think that the enablers are very varied and the ability to pool resources etc is just not there. Unfortunately it comes back to, you asked about budget pressures versus reform, everybody retreats into their I must prepare a balanced budget silo and does what they have to do back at the ranch to make that budget balance, and then comes up for air in kind of April time and says, oh yes, we must look at all that reform stuff and then it's oh my gosh, we're reporting budget time back in. We've got to get out of that, we've absolutely got. If I can just ask one more question then to either of you. I mean the islands have suggested this idea of a single authority that you would put health and local government together in say Shetland or Orkney or the Western Isles or maybe in Fife where I think they're already quite coterminous. Is that something that we should be looking at? It's part of our local governance review, that's what we want to look at. All I would say is what suits that locality, so it shouldn't be mandated from the centre that every area should have exactly the same model. Now the single island authority has been around for a number of years, it was generated within that locality because the development of health and social care partnerships would actually require initially the Western Isles to create a new entity and that would be madness. However, the local governance review should look at in my view permissive legislation so that whatever structure or whatever partnership suits that particular area would be able to be delivered with a presumption in favour of it. So single island authority is ostensibly health and the council's functions. However it could be you'd mentioned enterprise agencies etc. It could be that in a certain locality, it makes sense to integrate the teams. It could be any other of the 130 other public bodies but it should be what suits that particular locality. Thank you. Your paper makes calls for empowerment of local government in a number of places, which we have no surprise to committee members. It's a long-running theme for COSLA, but I wonder if you could distinguish between the powers that you believe are currently exercising nationally that you think that if exercise locally would result in better outcomes and more efficiencies versus powers that do not currently exist that you would wish to see created for local governments. In the first instance, what is it that is exercise nationally that you believe could be more efficiently or with better outcomes exercised by local government if it was devolved? We have the opportunity locally to consider how we make better use of the resources that we have. Sarah mentioned that as a fiscal framework. For us to have the determination as to how best we use those resources, I don't want to make this about teachers and teacher numbers etc. It's too trite, it's too good an example actually. I do have a specific question about teacher numbers at the moment, so if you want to get into it feel free to do it. I was going to say that it's too obvious an answer but I'll maybe just expand on it. In our classrooms there's a number of potential inputs that we could make for our young people that would help them towards their achievement. It doesn't always necessarily require a teacher. In fact, bringing in different professions, bringing in people with different qualifications, all will be down to primary schools. You can tell me that a generically trained primary school teacher is always best placed to provide the two hours PE for a child rather than someone with a sports and leisure qualification. That's just another example. To give you a very quick illustration, our authority decided to, as part of learning catch-up, to put some of its reserve in place. We funded on a temporary basis a number of teaching posts. We also had some temporary PEF posts, so when the census rolled down last year to December 2022, we had 114 supernumini teachers on contract on a temporary basis. We then got letters saying, if you reduce your teacher numbers, we will financially penalise you by the same value. I don't have a budget for those posts, because the posts were temporary. To then have a further restriction placed on the use of budget is a real challenge for us. What would it look like in future? That was the second part of your question. For us, we would like the flexibility to look at how we make use of our resources, how we generate resources. We would like the opportunity to have the ability to plan in a much more longer-term strategic way. If we may just jump into the world of capital just for a second, the experience that many authorities had around the levelling up fund was a really poor one. It was unnecessarily competitive, so there was an awful lot of resource left on the cutting floor when awards were made. It got tighter and tighter each year, so it became a game of, what could you spend by the cut-off date, rather than what would you spend on to get the best strategic outcome? That longer-term financial and fiscal empowerment is an illustration of the type of thing that would help us plan in the longer-term. I will very quickly, because I think that that might be of interest to you. When we look at the Shawfield site, which straddles Glasgow in South Lanarkshire's area, it is the most contaminated site in Europe. It has hexavalent chromium, which pollutes the water table, which means that the water quality down at the Gantogs fails the test. That is how devastating the contamination is. We have got decades of investing in tens of millions of pounds. We need probably another £50 million to £60 million just to deal with it. If we do not, over time, the water table will recontaminate the land that we have remediated. There is an example of something that is longer-term, a big strategic impact, and the economic development potential of that site is enormous, as we have seen from the remediated land now. That type of fiscal empowerment in the future would allow us, and our colleagues in Glasgow and potentially Scottish and UK Governments, to invest over the longer-term reap significant economic benefits, reap significant environmental benefits, and it is an example of that type of planning that, at the moment, we are absent. There is a huge amount to unpack there, but I want to bring it in first. The obvious one is local taxation and power to raise revenue locally. We do absolutely welcome the current joint consultation on visitor levy. We have worked really hard and for a long time on that, but we would have preferred a general power to raise revenue and trust local government that will do the engagement that is required with the business community, with other communities of interest when a local tax is being proposed. It is about that level of trust, instead of having to go back to the beginning and go through the whole legislative process. It is going to be another two or three years before—two years, I think—until any council can actually use that visitor levy, which will be welcomed by some and will not be used by others. I think that general revenue is an important point. Is that one of your preferred outcomes of the new deal for local government, the fiscal framework wider package of work and discussions that are taking place there? Are you advocating for that with the Scottish Government? It has been a long-held ask of COSLA about local revenue raising. We are getting through the fiscal framework development. We are getting there, but what we are doing is developing a process for exploration of revenue-raising powers, which is welcomed, but it is probably a step that we would say that if we had the powers, we would not need that step. It is a good opportunity for local government, experts within the Scottish Government and our professional associations to say that we have an idea, so let's explore it together. The benefit of doing that is that it might be an idea that a couple of local authorities have that others have not thought about. If we have that process, then that brings it to the fore. More of a trusted revenue-raising power would be preferable. You mentioned the level and upfund of the UK Government. The committee is very much trying to re-engage with the UK Government on that and trying to get Michael Gove to come back to the committee to give evidence on it, but there is also the point that was made in the written submission about the value of multi-year funding, which is another area that is ultimately the gift of the UK Government. The Scottish Government cannot give multi-year funding if it is not getting a multi-year settlement. I am interested in what direct engagement Solicent and COSLA have with the UK Government. Every year, when we come to the point of setting the grant for local government in Scotland, it feels like it is a very two-way discussion between local government and the Scottish Government when one of your key asks, and actually the overall financial envelope, is ultimately in the power of the third level of government that we are talking about here. What direct engagement do you have on an annual basis with the UK Government? If I can maybe answer first of all, I will make a distinction. Quite often we talk on the same topics, but Solicent Scotland is a professional network of senior executives. The engagement that we have with senior civil servants of the UK Government and potentially even ministers or MPs is different from the formal engagement that COSLA would have. We have had the opportunity to do a very interesting document, which I believe has just been published authored by Ian Stewart, the MP for Milton Keynes, who originates from Hamilton, where he has looked at city growth deals to the successor to the current programme, because the Glasgow one will reach its maturity next year. It takes into consideration the learning from Lough, shared prosperity funds and a whole range of other funding. There are two very interesting takeaways from the exact summary around that. First of all, it calls for a better engagement between the UK Government and the Scottish Government to help to define shared outcomes. After that point—this is the interesting point for us—it talks about long-term European-style length programmes, 79 years, where there would be a commitment of a single fund rolling all of those individual component parts in and allowing local partnerships through the local authority, co-ordinated locally through the local authority, enabling local partnerships, and sometimes, as I have mentioned, continuing on an original basis through the existing growth deals to decide how best to deliver those outcomes over the longer term. I come back to the comment I made earlier that it is better to strategically plan on what will give the best outcomes rather than what you can spend by an arbitrary cut-off debt. That would allow for better longer term and more impactful investment in our communities. That is the kind of conversations that we have had that saw Scotland with senior civil servants in the UK Government, but it is also an opportunity to meet MPs and ministers who have been on that agenda. However, that is in an informal space, the more formal one. Because the president and vice president meet Scotland's office on a fairly regular basis, Mr Gove is coming to because of leaders next week to speak to leaders. Predominantly, levelling up funding will dominate that discussion, but leaders want to move into other spaces as well. As the committee will know, we have structured processes around settlement and distribution issues through a settlement and distribution group involving professional associations. If we get to a situation in which the UK Government is making funding available for local government, local government will, of course, engage on that, but we would want to see more structure, bid funds. We absolutely would argue that they are not the best use of funding. Next week's settlement and distribution group will consider a bid fund for £500,000 in total. That is not from the UK Government. That is a Scottish Government funding coming from a portfolio. We do not think that that is good use of anybody's time. Can I just check, though? Does COSLA lobby the UK Government to give the Scottish Government a multi-year settlement? That is the only way that local government is going to get a multi-year settlement. Absolutely. It is our ask right through that all spheres of government is multi-year. Obviously, a few years ago, we did almost reach a point of having a spending review period of three years, but then there was a lot going on the way, which was disappointing. Thanks. I have loads more questions, but I am conscious of the time, convener. I dogglish to be followed by Liz. Thank you, convener, and it is good to see you back. It was good that you brought up local governance review. As you point out, it is local governance review, not a local government review, because that is something that I often bring up in committee and ask government about, but I do not seem to get any answers back on where it is and when we are going to see some output from that. What is your understanding of it and when do you think that we will be able to see something coming from that local governance review? For me, that is public sector reform. That is what we should be focusing on right now. I bought a phrase from Sarah. There were a number of things going on the way, ostensibly, Covid and, laterally, the cost of living issues. We had the outcome of the first phase of the LGR, which pointed to a second phase of discussion. If I understand correctly, that has now been dusted down and there is proposed, I think that they are calling them community conversations over the course of the autumn of this year. Those will be convened discussions. I am not sure how the Scottish Government has appointed to facilitate it. One observation, and it comes from a time as chief executor Gillian Buett, in a look to replicate it this time round in South Lanarkshire, was that it needs a deeper dive. It needs a longer session with real people, not the representatives of the community organisations only. They obviously have a role, but if you conven a single session as a community conversation, you will have representatives of the normal community organisations turning up and participating. I found the opportunity to literally land in a community, open the doors, give them a coffee, a scone and a conversation, much more enlightening about what people generally wanted. There are an awful lot of assumptions about what people really want, particularly when people talk about community empowerment, as if the communities are just all homogeneous and ready to grab the handles of various services. What generally people want is good quality public services and an opportunity to influence how they are delivered, how they are delivered, etc. They do not necessarily all want to form them into organisations that become employers and run some of those services with all the risks that go alongside it. We need to have that type of valuable conversation with wider communities, so we would look to complement the work that is planned for this autumn. As to when it reports, I am not sure that I have got that. Will the review give us an idea of how funding should work between different organisations, or is it not going into that sort of level? In terms of the formal local governance review, as Clarellen said, democracy matters too is being launched again, and that will go through the steps that he has outlined. The single island authority model work seems to be getting a lot of traction within the Scottish Government, but we encourage the Government to look at the submissions from all parts of local government. There were a lot of other ideas out there that were submitted back at the end of 2019. The last meeting with the Cabinet Sub-Committee was held just before Covid, so we want to revisit all those ideas. As part of the partnership agreement, we will need to establish some kind of governance arrangements for that partnership agreement. At the heart of the partnership agreement is local governance and local empowerment, so the two need to be cognisant of the two, so we do not want to create structures. We did have joint political oversight for the local governance review, but if we have a partnership agreement governance structure, we need to make sure that the two things are speaking to each other. We have monthly relationship meetings now established with Mr Fitzpatrick, and local governance review is a standing item on that, so we really want to get the pace back into that, because the commitment to do something in this parliamentary term was there from the Scottish Government. However, it depends on whether we need primary or secondary legislation and what we are proposing. Some of it is that we are proposing more flexibility and empowerment at a local level through things such as community planning partnerships. Community planning partnerships are a key part of the partnership agreement, because we need partners to come to the table. We cannot have councils holding the baby locally. We absolutely need all partners engaged, and for too long it has been seen as something that councils do to partners. We need it to be seen as the local mechanism for strategic decision making about matters in local areas. I completely agree, because we are talking about reform today and the idea of that is to save cost. The key thing for that is early intervention and prevention. It seems to me that local government is at the heart of early intervention and prevention, but the problem that local government has is that you are saving money for other people, and you do not actually get that back. I think that sports facilities, for example, that will help them. Helping the health budget later, libraries, economic development, education will help on tackling poverty, working with communities that will reduce the justice bill. How does that money, if you are looking at two reforms, flow back into local government that will help to reduce the overall Scottish budget, even though it is not the local government budget that is going to help? I mentioned earlier in the session that we know what works, but it is extremely challenging when your child protection activity significantly increases, so that your social work staff are spending a greater and greater proportion of their time ensuring that we are appropriately investigating child protection. That is an absolutely top priority, but it limits the time that you are able to work with family pre-crisis to do that early intervention work. I gave an example earlier on homelessness. Every authority in Scotland has an outstanding prevention programme in terms of helping people to sustain tenancies or to prevent homelessness, etc., but when you are facing the scale of additional presentations and supporting people in temporary accommodation and trying to find further accommodations for them, again that limits the capacity of the system. I will link that to another comment that I made, which is just watching that you do not get pilotitis, that everything comes in short small bites, etc., and you are able to introduce something. I would point to a good example on the whole family wellbeing fund, which is one that has tremendous potential for us to intervene upstream and improve parenting skills, provide supports to young people, identify their needs at an earlier stage, and it gives us a greater capacity to level the playing field by the time they hit education in a formal sense. I welcome the line of sight that we have on the budget around that, but having that as a permanently sustained budget that we could rely on year on year would make a significant impact. I will finish on this final point, which is that some of those impacts will be a generation of children. If we look at the receptions into care for things such as residential care, the high capacity ones tend to be in that 13-, 14-, 15-, 16-year-old bracket, but some of the seeds that are growing in terms of some of the challenges that those children have are from their very earliest years. You can be investing for 10 years before you see the true outcome. The very last thing is just to quote Sir Harry Burns when he was the chief medical officer. He called for stickability. We do know what works, but you need to invest in it and keep doing it and have that stickability rather than three years of this and then try something else and give it a new name, give it a new better funding and constantly be moving the services around. Is that helpful? I think that there is maybe a misconception within the local governance review that fiscal empowerment is just about getting a set of rules that govern the relationship between local and Scottish government. It is actually fiscal empowerment across the system so that you have the totality of resource in a place being able to be used in such a way that it goes to the places that it needs to go to to do the early intervention. Unfortunately, the acute stuff will always take up a huge amount of the money, but we have just got to gradually start to move it. When we do a youth work intervention that takes children off the street and puts them into leisure centres and then the police find themselves with less to do on those Friday and Saturday evenings, at some point we have got to take the leap of faith and say, well, actually, we're better putting the funding into youth work than having those police officers not as busy as they were when the youth work wasn't happening because we've got to start moving the money about. Fiscal empowerment is not just about the rules, it's about being able to move that money and use it where it's needed. Again, that comes back to doing place-based community planning. If community planning didn't exist and I think it gets a lot of flak and it's had a lot of areas that work really well, but some areas may be less so, but if it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it because that's where the place leaders come together, but they need to be more ffiscally and functionally empowered to do the work that they need to do. Or is it even a case of some of the health budget comes to local government because you're spending it on early prevention? Some of the justice budget might come to local government because you're spending it on early prevention. If we're focusing on outcomes, then absolutely, that's what we need to start doing, but we're in this one-year budget retrench into your silos to make your budget balance as opposed to thinking, how can we focus on outcomes? Moving on, sorry, last question, around data sharing. How can data sharing make an impact and remove costs from the overall public purse? I think that there are clear examples in Dundee. The pilot that they're working on, they're absolutely clear. There are clear benefits. We can get some more information on that for the committee. I think that Greg Colgan would be more than happy to share some of that information. Just simple things like pushing benefits and reliefs and things towards families. The councils could do that. They're very well placed, but sometimes there's just barriers in the way, so we need to get over those barriers and empower our local benefits teams to be able to push benefits towards families as opposed to waiting until there's crisis. We just keep stumbling against the same data barriers. Is that data sharing between different organisations, like between welfare Scotland and local authorities, for example, and health boards, having all that people having access to the same data? DWP is an absolutely key player in that, but I think it's also about the joined up systems as well that Clylon was talking about. The CHI number is often quoted in terms of being the unique identifier for people in a locality. Is it really? I'm not sure that it is in the same way that the CMS identifier works for young people. I think that digitisation comes into that. I think that there is still work to be done across councils as well, but many councils are investing in their own customer portals and making sure that they are joined up before they then want to be joined up with others. I wouldn't like the committee to be under the impression that data sharing is an immature area. We have made very significant inroads and cross-organisations as well. We talked about DWP, Social Security Scotland and the sharing of information between councils in terms of their work. With those organisations, it is quite immature. It has come at a very fast pace because of the introduction of Social Security Scotland, etc. We participate in things like the national fraud initiatives. During the Covid period, the roll-out of additional benefits, which was handled by local government from a standing start, was testament to how well we shared information between organisations. There are undoubtedly some areas that we could improve, and we touched on some earlier in terms of the system development, but we have got some really, really good examples that we can provide to the committee on how we have used data to digitise processes, to transact, to do things in a much more seamless and human-free way, if that makes sense, without people touching them. There are some extraordinary examples around that. We will continue to try to get efficiencies around that. I wonder whether I can explore what is the tension at the heart of this, because you have both been very clear in your evidence this morning and for your written evidence that there is really no disagreement between national government and local government about the principles of what we are trying to achieve, whether that is in terms of addressing child poverty or net zero, whatever those principles are. There has to be much greater co-operation between national and local government. However, at the same time, you seem to be suggesting that there are difficulties about the delivery, or that there are different approaches. I wonder if I could take the example of the national care service for this, because you were very clear a few months ago—this is a causula in response to this committee—when you said that the Scottish Government should not consider breaking up the local government workforce as by doing so we would have a negative and damaging impact on the cohesion and effectiveness of it, but should instead ensure that proper funding is provided. Although we want to establish much better quality social care, particularly in relation to demographic changes, there seems to be a fundamental difference of approach between national government and local government. Would I be right in thinking that, on one hand, national government wants to ensure that there are national standards of good quality care, but a local government that thinks that the delivery of that has to be done by local providers because they are the ones that understand it best? Is that the fundamental tension when we come to this policy? Ms Smith, through you, convener. This could be my specialist subject, so I will keep my comments as short as I can. When the work was done originally, it relied heavily on lived experience in first-hand testimony in terms of the failure report, and it demonstrated how people felt about the process of accessing care in Scotland. Differences and standards were one very key part. The review did not go on and ask why, or consider why, and that is the real challenge. What underpins all of this, and it is not in the report, is that people's experiences come from decisions to rationalise care, decide who gets care and who does not, who gets a particular level of care when they think that they need more. Those decisions and the rationalisation of care come from the resource context, so the leaping from that set of conclusions into we need a structural reform that rips the core of about a third of local government out and puts it into a new bureaucratic structure without any evidence as to how that would lead to better care outcomes. We have found a challenge all the way through. I think that the committee has been very helpful in reviewing the work done to date and exploring the potential financial consequences of doing that without putting a penny more into care. That is one example where we share the same aspirations. We have said that all along right from the beginning of the original review, but we think that there are better and more fundamental and quicker ways to improve care outcomes than to create a national service. One caveat. There are certain aspects in the submission that COSLA and SOL have made to the original national care service consultation. There are certain things that would benefit from a national approach, and you have elated in one of them, which is the standards, but there are other areas such as workforce planning, for example, that would benefit from a national approach. However, decisions on commissioning of services and the delivery of services belong at a local level. I think that almost every stakeholder who has participated in this work has confirmed the same position. We are still quizzical as to why the vehicle is still hurtling downhill and costing a significant amount of money. I think that the last count that we had was 178 civil servants working on something that I think that everyone knows is unaffordable. We would welcome a more open discussion about how we improve care outcomes and do certain things at a national level and leave delivery local. I come to Mrs Waters in just a minute. Mr Snedden, is that a problem about the consultation process? Can we achieve both improved national outcomes and the quality of standards, but also the right delivery in local circumstances? Can we do that, or is there a structural problem there? Or is it just a matter of consultation and ensuring that local and national Government are working better together, as you indicated earlier this morning? That is a personal view, but I think that we have now got more of an opportunity to jointly agree the approach around care services. We can badge something as a national care service, and there are certain bits that would sit neatly within that, which would benefit from being undertaken at a national level. However, I think that there is more of an opportunity now for colleagues in the Scottish Government and local Government to agree what our priorities are and how we would go about that. As I said, it would be helpful if somebody would just stop the vehicle, just put the brakes on right now and refocus on what would improve care outcomes as opposed to a structure first approach. Even the financial memorandum, as far as it was, would indicate between £250 million and £500 million for the structure alone. That is money that we could put to far, far better use at local level, and we need to value care as a service, as a sector and as a workforce. When a Domino's Pizza delivery driver can get £12 per hour plus a pound per delivery, compare that with someone providing the most important and vital personal care that is being paid considerably less than that. That is why we have got recruitment challenges in the sector. That is why we are constantly struggling to ensure that people are getting the care at the right time and the right place. That is very helpful. If the vehicle is still running and you prefer it to stop, irrespective of that, are discussions on going between local government and national government about how to improve matters? Yes, they absolutely are. That is what I am saying. I think that now we have got it a better. That is a broader thing. There is a bit of a reset in relationships. We are working very proactively towards it. We welcome it. There is an on-going discussion through a number of fora to try to find the right outcome around care services that will fulfil certain aspirations at national level but will leave the commissioning, first of all, and then the delivery of care as a local service. That is what I hear that people want. I would echo that. There are some constructive discussions at the moment about finding joint governance arrangements that allow the Scottish Government's aspirations and local government's hopes for social care to be realised. I do not know whether the timing is good or bad. We will be signing a partnership agreement. Signing or developing something that has that level of tension could have been problematic but we are taking a very pragmatic way through it. What can we call a national care service and what can it usefully do? If you rewind right back, the commitment to create a national care service was right back in a programme for Government without any early engagement with local government. Through the partnership agreement, we are hoping that we avoid that. There is earlier discussion on whether that is the type of things that we are thinking of putting into the programme for government. Do you think that that would work? How would that operate locally? Just two very short questions to finish. First, do you have a timescale for the new discussions that are happening between local and national government? Secondly, do they include a lot of discussion about the financial commitments that would be involved from your perspectives? The timescales that COSLA leaders meet next week will consider the early proposals that are being developed jointly. I understand that the Cabinet also has to consider that. I understand that the timetables for stage 1 and 2 have been pushed into the new year. I think that that is helpful. That allows us to get into the trickier financial discussions that we absolutely need to have at the moment. I think that we are focusing on what it can do to support both spheres of government, but there is a lot of detail. It is helpful that, as I say, the timescales have been pushed into next year. Very brief on that point about early engagement on programme for government. Does COSLA accept that trust on that would have to be robust and work both ways? If I am being brutally honest, issues that have happened in the very recent past of leaks from COSLA about Scottish Government policy announcements, we would have to move quite dramatically from that culture. I presume that that is not an officer culture. That is the reality of COSLA being led by 32 councils from various political persuasions. Early engagement on a PFG, which is confidential until the moment that is published, could not work if the level of leaking that we have seen from the COSLA leaders group continues. The issue boils down to the culture that has been created over recent years. We are not getting sight of things until very late. There is political capital in some of the leaks, I would suggest. However, if we had a more constructive relationship earlier in the process, we would create a much better culture. The aspiration for the partnership agreement is to create a much more positive culture across both spheres. I apologise, just very briefly, on the discussions around the programme for government. What would be ideal, and my ambition for the partnership agreement, is that future policy announcements in a particular year consider the implications of putting resource or priority into one particular area. The most frustrating thing for myself and any other local authority colleague is to take the decisions that are necessary to balance our budget, and then face criticism or public calls for decisions to be reversed, etc., without a level of ownership. If I can give you a very quick example, before people pile on me, it is just that in 34 years, not once, not ever, has somebody written to me and said that the most important thing that you can do is provide free bus transport under 22-year-olds. However, perfectly legitimate national policy went forward, but the consequences of putting resources there still leave us considering rationalising swimming pools, ledger centres, libraries, money matter service and all the other things that we have had to cut, and yet there is not a shared ownership and a shared narrative. My ambition is that, if we are going into straight-in times and really difficult times, that central government and local government share a level of narrative and we explain to our constituents exactly what we are facing and why certain decisions are taking place. Good morning, this has been very interesting. I think that you fairly reflected the complexity of the matter at hand, and I agree with the convener that I think that your submission was excellent. Just a quick question, though. I still do not understand why we do not have a shared services centre and why we have a need for 32 different FDs across councils and HR, and I suppose I would throw in legal services there as well. I can understand the complexities in creating shared functions around digital. I can understand it around estates, particularly Argyll and Buttes, a good example procurement, all of those things. However, the financial element in particular is fundamentally accounting for money in, money out. My question then therefore to both of you is why have you not been looking at creating a shared service centre for this as a simple way of public sector reform? Yes, convener, I will, through yourself, combine that. You will find in the document that there is reference to some work that the local government improvement service and I think that they indicate that they mapped 373 separate collaborative or shared service arrangements in Scotland. To be honest, that is the tip of the iceberg. That is just when they mapped in that particular exercise. If you go across all authorities, you will find a huge number of similar examples. Those are really complex businesses without being obvious about it. My own organisation, 16,000 employees, £845 million revenue budget and an HRA beyond that and two capital programmes. Those are big and complex organisations. I agree, and I have read that bit with interest. I agree with you that there is clearly been a lot of work done around shared services, but I am asking specifically about the finance function, why, that is replicated across 32 different councils. In some respects, the work that you have done arguably is more complex than creating a shared service centre. I do not understand why that is not being considered. If you think that it is not within your gift to consider that, do you think that that is something that should be mandated by government? Straightforwardly, no. Again, I will come back to the complexities. If it is about complexity, what specific complexities are there for a finance director function in a council that merits 32 of them? I can see how in a framework principle that every council will have different partners, they may have different methods of payment, but the function itself is duplicated. I do not understand why we need 32 of them. You will find in the submission reference to local authorities of made efficiency around about 25 per cent of costs around the support services, the ones that you are giving an example on. Each authority is a sovereign state and has a different background and make-up, so they have different loan portfolios, investment portfolios, different asset bases, different liabilities, different contracts, etc. You would find that I would imagine, and one of my colleagues who is due to be here today would give you a director of finance answer on that. I would think that it is extraordinarily difficult to imagine a single service that would be in some form centralised that could give the same level of individual caring attention to the finance functions of the local authority. If you are talking about transactional stuff, things like payroll, for example, again, those are embedded. I think that the cost of payroll and local government would compare favourably with any other part of the public sector and a good proportion of the private sector. Pilling all into one big building somewhere centrally in Scotland, I do not think that it would be feasible. You would have 32 different sets of terms and conditions for a HR team centrally to try and administer. It would be remote from the locations. I do not think that it would be a practical way forward. It is not going to generate a massive efficiency given the work that has already been done in efficiency terms. Two points on that. In terms of HR, that is an argument that you have made for a centralised function. You have 32 different sets of terms and conditions, particularly where role types are broadly similar in many particular roles. There are large global companies who have a shared service centre where they represent a footprint in a multitude of different countries. Therefore, I struggle to see how on earth you cannot have that across 32 different councils. Critically, having the data set held in one area gives you greater insights into making improvements. I suppose that my final question—I know that Ms Waters might want to come in as well—is that not something that you have considered? Is it because you have not really thought about it or should it be mandated at your last point before I bring in Mr Waters? Just to answer your question directly. Has authorities thought about shared service arrangements? Yes, they have. Every one of them has. Many of them will have gone through the business case development to see whether it is worthwhile and whether they would get the response of local service to take the HR example that they would get and whether that would be worthwhile in financial terms and community terms as well. If I go back to my old patch at Ergel and Bute, in Campbelltown you have the centralised finance and transaction teams and the benefits teams down in that one community. If those jobs were exported into somewhere in the central belt, the impact on that particular community, just in terms of community wealth building, would be very significant. Would I support a central Government mandating that all authorities put their HR functions into one? No, I wouldn't. You would never design—I do not think that there is anybody, any entrepreneur out there who would design a business that was like a local authority, because you would not want to be providing all those services from collecting waste through to caring for older people and everything in between. We are, in many cases, the provider of last resort, so that comes with a number of challenges, I think, from a workforce and a financial perspective. In terms of workforce data, we share workforce data. In terms of workforce planning, we would welcome national approaches. I am meeting this afternoon with the Scottish Government's public sector pay policy team to look at pay policy across local government teaching and other parts of Scottish public service. If you were to do what you are suggesting, I think that the opportunities for fiscal empowerment and reaching into the place-based services that you need would be absolutely hampered. I think that there is a bit of a tension at the moment between replicating what we are all doing but then having the ability to be responsive locally. As Clellan said, every community is different. They have inherited different assets, liabilities and policies. If you are truly to empower local governance, having that unique function is still very important. Thank you. I have one final question from me. The local authorities were not asked by the Scottish Government to submit reform plans to inform the £24.25 Scottish budget. How do you feel about that? I think that we were asked to take, in the resource spending review, a complementary approach. I think that we feel quite concerned about what is happening in the public service reform space. We want to ensure that we are absolutely involved with that. I think that there is a danger that reform happens over a year and that it does not overlap with what is happening on the ground. There are practical examples such as roll-out of electric charging points. You could be doing that across a public services state locally, but there could be plans afoot to change that public sector state. That would be completely illogical. We will get on with reforming locally, and we have done that for many years, as the mission says, but we are concerned about the plans that others are putting in place because they will touch us on a local level, and we want to make sure that we are involved with those plans. It would be more effective and more efficient if it was done collaboratively? Collaboratively, yes. I want to thank you for your excellent evidence this morning. It is a very interesting and really good discussion. I just want to see whether you have any further points that you want to make before we wind up the session, if there is anything that you feel that we have not covered. The questions do not allow us to touch greatly on capital or zero emissions. One reflection that we would have is that we probably need a more in-depth dialogue with Government on those aspirations. The Accounts Commission colleague came along to the Solace conference last year and said that we cannot understand why local Government is not shouting from the rooftops and it is reporting that they have no prospect of hitting the zero emissions target in 2038, given the current financial context. South Lancer Council has replaced all its 148 schools in the early years' establishments in the last 15 years, bar 2, refords. We have, by a country mile, the most modern school estate in Scotland, if not in the UK. My team, looking at what it would require for us to take my non-domestic stock to zero emissions, is in today's money—in fact, it is not today's money, it is last year's money, so you can probably inflate that £550 million. My capital grant for this year reduced to £21 million, and that is for every commitment. There is something there around capital that we probably do not get a chance to get into today. That needs to feature as part of the conversation. We are one planet and it is our planet. We are as committed to hitting net zero as everybody else, but we need to stop playing at it. We will continue to take evidence on the Scottish Government's public service reform programme. After our next meeting, and that concludes the public part of today's meeting in the next item on agenda, which will be a discussion private, is consideration of our work programme, we will have a five-minute comfort break to allow us to report and our guests to leave.