 I welcome to the seventh meeting in 2023 of the local government housing and planning committee. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take item 6 and 7 in private. Are members agreed? We're all agreed. The next item on our agenda today is to take evidence from three panels of witnesses as part of our community planning inquiry post legislative scrutiny of the community empowerment act 2015. This is our second session in this inquiry. The inquiry is looking at the impact of the community empowerment act 2015 on community planning and how community planning partnerships respond to significant levels such as the significant events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current cost of living crisis. We are joined in the room on our first panel of witnesses by Michelle Cromby, who is the corporate strategy and community planning manager at Aberdeen City Council. Jennifer Lees, who is the business partnership manager at North Lanarkshire Council, and Bernadette Monahan, who is the director of community empowerment and equalities at Glasgow City Council. Online, we are joined by Yvonne Bauer, who is the executive officer of place and community planning at Easton-Bartonshire Council, and Shaw Anderson, who is the partnership and development manager at Glasgow City Council. I warmly welcome our witnesses to this meeting. We will try to direct our questions to a specific witness to start where possible, and if you would like to come in, please indicate to myself or the clerks. Yvonne and Shaw, as you are appearing virtually, could you please do this by typing an R in the chat function, and then we will bring you in. There is no need to operate your microphones on and off, as we will do that for you. Each committee member is exploring a particular theme on this topic, and Annie Wells will be starting our discussion this morning by asking some questions about the challenges that communities face. Good morning, convener, and good morning, panel. We heard last week that inequalities can be a moving target, and lots have changed over the past eight years. In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing your communities at the moment, and how do you prioritise which ones the CPP tackles? Being a Glasgow MSP, I will go to Bernardette first, please. I think that over the last few years, in particular, communities have dealt with the impacts of Covid, and some communities have mobilised really well, and organisations came together and really responded in other communities. I think that services and provision that we had just kind of shut down, and we know that through our locality planning model, which we refer to as thriving places that currently operates in 10 areas across the city, so I think that there was a kind of a mixed bag to that. A lot of our communities depend on local services, such as libraries, community centres, and obviously they were all impacted. They all closed down, so that kind of lifeline was missing for a lot of people. I think that some of our colleagues across the council family struggled in terms of budgets, etc., to reopen a lot of those facilities, and we're still working our way through that. I think that it was really communities feeling that they were left without support, and a lot of local provision that they had. I mean, libraries, as you know, are a hub as our community centres, so that was quite vital. We do have, as you know, the Glasgow Communities Fund, and we fund a lot of very local grassroots community groups, community centres, community organisations through that. The demand for phase 2, which will start in 1 April, was far outstripped. They might have funding available. The fund, it's a discretionary grant fund, and that fund's available. It's £49 million, and it's available over three years. We will review what we've learned from phase 2, but I think that one thing is really thinking through the purpose and criteria of the fund, and how we can actually best support local grassroots organisations, but also make sure that there aren't gaps in provision locally. It's part of the assessment process. We had sector review panels, and they gave us some really valuable feedback about geographies, so I think that that's really important to us, but I suppose that on the positive side, the funding that we were able to give to organisations was that it wasn't everything that they asked for. It is a three-year award, so we don't have enough money to support the need, but we can offer flexibility in terms of organisations who've been successful actually use the award over the three years, and they can underspend in one year, overspend in another, et cetera. I think that with limited resources, we're doing our very best to try to make sure that we can support as many community organisations and services for local people as possible. I think that in response to the question, one of the things that we've tried very hard to do is build the capacity of our communities, and this is very much consistent with the Empowerment Act 2015. We're looking to equip our communities with the information and data that they need so that they can influence the decisions that we make. Primarily, but not exclusively, people at that time tend to think about money, but we're also going through the approach that was taken to our decentralised multi-member ward structures to empower our citizens to influence the way that people provide services. Now, that won't happen overnight, but we believe that we're well down that route and down that journey. That's very much consistent with the Empowerment Act 2015. It's also targeted—all what we do is targeted to try to address the trends problems we're having with Glasgow in terms of poverty and inequality, so that very much is our focus. We were allocated £23 million in the last financial year—£1 million across each of our multi-member wards. The intention has been and will be going forward that our communities more directly influence how that money is spent in their communities, because our communities know better than we do as officials what they need and what they require. That's one of the key things that we're trying to do. It's also consistent with something that Glasgow City Council is involved in called open government, which is an international approach to trying to make things more democratic, and the strand that Bernadette and I have a responsibility for that is participatory democracy, not when it runs off the tongue with a waste of Scotland axi, but participatory democracy is an or key strand. I hope that that is helpful and we have a bit of answer to any questions that that money has generated. My next question is short, so I have a touch on that. The 2015 act put a duty on CPPs to tackle social economic inequalities. To what extent can CPPs and their partners tackle the cause and not just deal with the consequences? I'm going to go for a different angle and I'm going to go to Michelle to see what's happening up in Aberdeen. Thank you for that question. I think that CPPs are critical in tackling the underlying causes of social economic disadvantage. In fact, I think that that's where there's a space that they can support that more preventative approach. Communities are very good at galvanising and coming together and they've been amazing during the pandemic and even now in the cost of living crisis, and we have really been able to nurture our relationships with them during this time. But I think that there is a sense over the last few years that there's a feeling that that's community planning for real or that's what community planning should be. But that crisis response doesn't allow us to prevent that disadvantage and inequality happening, so we have to work as a partnership across all our services. In Aberdeen, we take an approach where we analyse our planned improvement activity as part of our local outcome improvement plan and our locality plans in terms of three tiers of prevention, so from up, mid and downstream, so we've always got that kind of balance. Following the pandemic, we did add a new priority outcome to our local outcome improvement plan that was to reduce suffering due to poverty, and that was in recognition that there was a short-term response that we had to make. But the rest of our 15 priority stretch outcomes are about prevention, and, as I said, there will be various tiers of activity there about how preventative they can be, but we've always got that eye on the longer-term goal to try and prevent these inequalities from existing. Thanks for that, Michelle. I don't know if anyone else wants to come in on that, or we can move on to the next. Thank you, convener. All right, we're going to move on to questions from Mark Griffin, who's joining us online. Thanks, convener. I might come to the volume first and give you a chance to answer this one. Just ask how community planning partnerships have helped to marginalise and disperse communities to build capacity with themselves, build confidence amongst themselves to challenge decision making or influence decision making, so that they are able to engage fully in the community planning process. Just to ask as well whether communities, particularly marginalised or disadvantaged communities, are aware that community planning partnerships even exist? Thank you for that question. We use our SIMD data to identify challenges and also the work around our locality plans in our loyp. We're very much engaged with a small local authority in eastern Markshire. We're very much engaged in capacity building and engaging with our communities and particularly those in the locality areas. We use a CLD, a community learning and development approach, and join and work with our partners in the HSCP and in the third sector. For us, it's all about access to services and empowering and building and learning from those with lived experience. One of the examples that we've got is our community grant scheme, which we've boosted going forward for 2023-24. We're working with our community so that they have the ability to apply for that and can build their own capacity in their own areas. One of the things that we've done in North Lanarkshire Council is that we have established our community board development portal. We have nine community boards across North Lanarkshire based around our eight towns, and the ninth board, Northern Corridor, encompasses the villages that straddle the M80. The community board development programme was custom written and developed based on training needs analysis that we did with our community board members, so at a practical level it includes things like what is your role as a community board rep, how to chair a meeting, but it also goes on to look at the different partner agencies and their responsibilities and also participatory budgeting, finance, meeting skills and so on. The other thing, just to pick up on Mr Griffin's question, how do we engage with communities who maybe don't even know that community planning exists? It's important that, on all of us in our work in local areas and with local people, we identify those touch points when we're working with people, be it in schools, be it in our health centres, and to find out at those opportunities what matters most to them and how can we, as community planning partners, use Michelle's word, galvanise around the local issues that matter most to local people? We work with a wide range of partners. We have a very vocal community council collective that's working to help shape what our new citizen engagement framework is going to look like around the area partnerships that Shaw spoke about, the 23-area partnerships. We have contact with our third sector colleagues. We're working on a better relationship implementation group and that's council family members with third sector leaders looking at an action plan that we'll sign up to jointly that will shape how we work going forward. That came on the back of the move from our previous grant fund to the new Glasgow communities fund and the learning that came with that. We have disabled communities work streams that came from our social recovery task force, the Glasgow Qualities working group, the BME task group, but the reason I suppose that I'm saying all that is that I think the points really well made. How do we get beyond the existing third sector networks and community groups, community councils that we have and really reach people who haven't had the opportunity to engage and I think that's what we're aiming to do through the new citizen engagement approach that we take. We're working with our colleagues in the Centre for Civic Innovation, colleagues in neighbourhoods regeneration and sustainability and what we're trying to do is put in place something that will give as many local people as possible the opportunity to engage through our area partnerships and initially make decisions around this new neighbourhoods infrastructure investment fund that Shaw mentioned of £23 million, because what we're conscious of is we don't just want people who turn up to an area partnership meeting to have the opportunity to make decisions on how local devolved budgets are spent and resources are targeted and we really want to go beyond that. So we're aiming to have our framework in place by June and test it out in three pilot areas where we run our original participatory budgeting pilots and then roll it out beyond that. I can certainly bring more information back to the committee at the appropriate time on progress with that. Thanks very much for that. Shaw, you wanted to come in. Very pointed one and a very important one. There's not much point in us having many colourful documents and big strategies if it's not of relevance to our communities. So we are seeking and one of my colleagues mentioned at the expression touch points where we can get up close and personal with our communities and where it is relevant for our communities to engage with us and by relevant they have the opportunity to influence and shape what we actually do. I'll give an example of that. On Saturday past, we had 51 community councillors giving up their Saturday morning a meeting with council officers to work at housing and planning issues. That's maybe a statement in itself that people in that number are giving up their Saturday morning unpaid to work with us. We also, when we respond to requests for locality plans, were very active in the castle community of Glasgow just now responding to our community and said, we're not engaging effectively with you as a city council. We feel you've let us down in matters pertaining to the local supermarket, local transport. So we've got a team now working with local elected members and local community councillors and other community activists to try to address those issues. So I take the point because the point is very well made. If we do not have relevance to our communities and our communities don't think there's any point in engaging with us, then all we've got is strategies and documents. In response to that question, I believe that we're doing a great deal. I think that there's a need to do much more. In many ways, the legislation was significantly interrupted by Covid. A lot of our community councils almost stood down, forgive the language, because it wasn't intentional, but through Covid, the work digitally equipped to continue. Covid was a big pause or provided challenges and also provided opportunities. That's a bit of a long-winded answer to the question. We need to do more, but we are doing a great deal already in terms of engaging effectively with our communities. I think that engagement is effective when it changes things. I think that we are going to be doing quite a lot of in that regard, but maybe one of the outcomes of this inquiry will be that we get a better focus on that and better quality and we learn from each other. Mark, do you have any more questions? Yes, thanks. My second question is probably directed to Bernardette, given your role in Glasgow City Council. We heard from the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights that CPPs may be raceblind when it comes to tackling inequalities. I just want to see what you do in practice to ensure that all communities of interest and identity all get their voices heard in community planning. Thank you very much for that question. We work very closely with Creror through our Glasgow Qualities working group. In fact, we had at our last meeting, they talked us through their submission, which I think is very, very fair. I think that there could be more of an equality focus in terms of place-based work and that's something that we'll factor in to the strategic appraisal that we're going to do of our current locality planning model with a view to refreshing it and developing a new model because it did start back in 2013, so it predates the community empowerment legislation. I think that the point is well made about more of an equality focus. When we are looking at the framework for citizen engagement, we need to make sure that it reflects the equalities and the demographics in a particular community and that that's borne out as well in the people who engage, so we work closely with Creror on that. They basically looked at our performance management framework that we're developing for our new community action plan, and I think that they felt that it was very bottom-up. We have data from a lot of our partners that we can use basically to give us an indication of which direction we're going in, but I suppose as well just to mention that when we had our social recovery task force, we did look at the themes that came out from an initial discussion with all the partners and equalities very much featured in that, so we assigned work to particular existing community planning groups and structures that we had, including the Equalities Working Group or BME task group as well. All those workstreams did was focus on a framework of 10 questions that we gave them. We had an academic advisory group that we've now formally made part of a community planning structure and that was to allow them to set priorities going forward. We also had really good information that was produced by that academic group. It was initially Glasgow University and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, but they did some micro briefings for us and that was about the disproportionate impact of Covid in particular on BME communities, on women, on disabled people, so we're working very closely to look at not just at the disproportionate impact in relation to Covid, but obviously there's a disproportionate impact in BME communities in relation to hate crime and poverty as well. All those things we will take forward and factor into the review that we'll be doing of our current locality planning model and as I said we have regular engagement with Creror and through our Glasgow Colleges Working Group as well. That's me, convener. Thank you. When I move on to the theme of the role of the third sector and Paul McClellan has got some questions on that. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. It's really just talking around about the role of the third sector and a shared cross-party group on social enterprises, so I have quite a lot of interaction with them. It was fair to say that it was mixed across the country on and about how they thought their involvement in community planning was, both at a, I suppose, a local authority level, but also down to the locality planning plan. I know there's questioning on that. I just wondered what your thoughts were on that. Your experiences, how you involve them and where you think across the country it could be improved, but it was very mixed signal we got from the third sector in the gut. Jennifer probably comes to yourself first of all, that's okay, and then open up beyond that if anybody else wants to come in. Okay, thank you. Our third sector interface, voluntary action North Lanarkshire, is represented on our strategic leadership board as a community planning partnership, and also community and voluntary sector North Lanarkshire, which is an umbrella organisation for various community groups across North Lanarkshire, so they are both full strategic leadership board community planning partnership members. We rely heavily on voluntary action North Lanarkshire. The council provides funding of £191,000 per annum. Yes, that's the TSI. We rely heavily on them. We provide revenue funding, NHS Lanarkshire also provides funding, and Van El, the TSI, acts as the community development support, so they will encourage and facilitate and support community groups and individuals to become involved in the local community boards and wider community activity. They also manage our community solutions programme with £1.1 million funding per annum from the health and social care programme, and community solutions is designed as the name suggests to provide support for people who have mental health issues or people who are disabled in the local community and to allow and enable them to play a full and active part in their community, so we'll have a number of social enterprises funded through that community solutions budget. Voluntary sector North Lanarkshire Van El is also involved in helping to assess our community grant funding applications that sit on the panel, so I know from reading some of the other submissions to the committee that the experience of TSI's is mixed, but in North Lanarkshire we have a productive relationship. I want to ask one of the questions for me as well. How do you build that capacity? I know there's a TSI, and obviously you've got the third sector below, but how can you almost build that capacity within the sector itself? I suppose to try and develop itself, not just its core actions, but how does it develop itself in community planning? I would say that our position is very similar to, as Jennifer has explained in North Lanarkshire, but the three things that I would pull out directly answer on your query. Our TSI is a core member of our community planning partnership. In terms of the building capacity, it is a co-chair of our community empowerment group that supports communities to be able to thrive and be empowered to take forward action in the community. They have taken a leadership role with that. In terms of the actual involvement in our community planning and improvement activity, it is quite unique that the third sector, the TSI in Aberdeen, has been critical to us supporting communities to be upskilled in quality improvement, which is a tool that we use in Aberdeen to understand what impact we're having. Our TSI has had that role in working with third sector organisations so that they feel that they are more confident and upskilled to be able to operate in that environment. A third example of a unique relationship in Aberdeen is our joint work with business partners in the city. We try to encourage businesses to get involved in our improvement activity and to understand the impact that they can have and support that they can give to communities. Those are the three areas in which we are very strong working with the third sector in the city. I think that you touched on how do you improve public outcomes through community planning, through the TSI or the third sector or whatever. How do you engage in that? It comes back to the point that you made, Michelle. It's almost trying to make the community aware of where the improvement needs to be, what it needs to do, how it plays its role in that kind of stuff. So, I just wondered if you yourself have a chance to come and just touch on that particular element, but working with the third sector as well in terms of that, actually delivering right on the ground, if you know what I mean. I think that, as has been said by colleagues, we have third sector representation in all our community planning structures. The strategic partnership, which is carried by our political lead, the executive group, which I chair. We've also got our Public Health Oversight Board and other groups that report on community planning, so we have third. It's trying to flip it round to the communities themselves, if you know what I mean. The third sector is not so much at the community planning level as such, but almost down at the grass roots kind of stuff. Almost trying to say, right, okay, as a community, we know we need to improve this, and this is what we need to do as a third sector organisation working with the community planning almost up above it, if you know what I mean. So, how does it flow from there to almost, I know we're talking about the lousy new sector, but how does it flow from the community planning, talking in the office kind of level down to the local community, which I think is a key point for me. I hope that this answer is part of your question, but we do fund a range of third sector partners. We have a third sector capacity building working group, so we fund UCVS, Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector, SEMVO, Council for Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations, Voluntary Glasgow and Community Enterprise in Scotland. I think that's the core group, and that group is critical at the moment because obviously a lot of organisations who applied to the Glasgow Communities Fund will have asked for more money than they will have received, and some who have had the funding for the last three years may not have been successful, in fact won't have been successful this year, and that's nothing to do with the quality of applications, unfortunately. They were of an incredibly high standard. It was just such a competitive process, and we just didn't have enough funds to fund everything, so we had to come up with a formula to make best use of the resources that we actually have. We rely on our capacity building partners in particular to provide that grassroots support. We also have what we call People Make Glasgow Communities programme, which aims to go beyond asset transfer, so it doesn't necessarily mean that people will go down the road of ownership, and so far I think we've had something like 556 expressions of interest, so a lot of that is about local organisations looking for premises, wanting to take on a community centre, whatever and run it, and it's a five-stage process, but one of the challenges of course is that utilities costs are going up, staff salaries need to increase, funding is not always available, so it's working through those with all our partners to think about how can we actually try and not set an organisation up to fail if they take on an asset, but how are we going to support them to make sure that they make a success of it, so that programme is much more flexible than the community asset transfer approach, but there are challenges undoubtedly. The Glasgow Communities Fund is a discretionary grant fund, it's the council's money that you could argue, it doesn't have to put it out the door, but we depend on the third sector to really reach grassroots organisations and provide local services, local community, community grassroots services that the council just couldn't provide for a range of very vulnerable people, and I think it would be an absolute misnomer to think that we don't need to fund the third sector as a really strong and really equal partner going forward, because we do. The other thing is that the third sector brings a lot of resource into the city, it's not just the money that we provide, so there is a huge amount of money that comes in. We have regular discussions with our colleagues in the national lottery community fund, Robertson Trust, and we do talk to them about where there are gaps and what we are able to fund and conversations about where they might want to put resources as well. I don't know if that answers your question. It's spotting exactly what we're trying to do. I mean, you people come into the cross-party group, and one of the feedback from Glasgow is that it's very supportive, and I think the key thing of us is the support infrastructure that's there for organisations, one in terms of the funding, but two, if they're not successful, how do they then adapt and change in whatever in terms of that, so no, that's been really helpful. I don't know if, for sure, Yvonne wants to come in on that. I will not go one question. I know, but we're going to have to move on just in the interest of time, but if other folks want to come in and you get the mic, so to speak, you can tuck in your answers there, but sorry about that, but just we've got quite a bit more to go to get on with. So I'm actually going to come in with a theme of local outcome improvement plans and locality plans, and I'll start, I'll direct the question initially to Yvonne, and because some of you have already started to touch on plans, just as the nature of answering the questions, but I'll start with Yvonne. I'd be interested to hear what processes your community planning partnership follows when developing your loypes and locality plans, and if you think you'll do things differently when developing new or refreshed plans. Thank you. We are currently finalising the refresh of our locality plans, and our locality plans that are for most deprived areas in eastern Martinshire, and that's been a sort of consultation and engagement process with all our community planning partners and with the community that has spanned since the middle of 2022, and it's to reflect the cost of living and also reflect the recovery from the pandemic. So that has involved engagement, focus groups, we called Bletherboxes. We had our community development workers working with development workers from the EDVA and from the HSCP. Everybody all hands to deck, and we've also had face-to-face workshops with partners to test the themes, so we're quite progressed on the locality plans. Coming from that will be the refresh of our loype, which we'll be, hopefully, later on this year, and it will, again, reflect where we are. We also have had an extensive budget consultation exercise at eastern Martinshire for the budget now for 23.24, and it has put up priorities, so those will also be core to the loype going forward, but in the background, in relation to data, we are looking at SIMD and we're looking at a strategic needs assessment and also our governance around the CPP framework. Thanks, Yvonne. Shaw, would you like to come in on your methods, your processes for community planning partnership in developing the loypes and the locality plans? That was when I was going to defer to my director, and I'll do a very, very brief intro, and then hand over to Beledith, who's probably a better place than I am. But it's devised to say that the refresh that's under way this time, we believe, has been heavily and correctly influenced by the social recovery task force, which was set up in response to the pandemic. We're in the midst of a refresh, we're in the midst of also adapting our performance management framework, but in terms of the detail on a day-to-day operational basis, Beledith is more appropriate to probably answer that one. Apologies if I've just given my director a hospital class, I don't think I have. Thanks, Bernardette. There's a few things there. I mean, our existing locality planning model is thriving places started in 2013, and it was a 10-year commitment, largely a partnership between the council and the health and social care partnership. Essentially, between us, we fund a community connector post that's usually hosted by an anchor organisation, so each area is different. There have been different experiences in each area. We did an evaluation quite a while ago with What Works Scotland, and I think they felt that we need qualitative information and stories about the impact that that might be having at local level. It's fair to say that, given, as I said, Covid, there have been, I suppose, some areas where things have not progressed and other areas where things have really, really just gathered a pace of steam, but since that was set up as the local model, we're aware that the commitment was 10 areas, and there are other areas in Glasgow, as we know, in terms of SIMD, where there needs to be locality planning, so participation requests, for example, is one route where that's happening. There have been quite a few new developments as well that we want to take on board, so one is the new model for our area partnerships, which essentially used to be area committees, and when they became area partnerships, essentially received reports. We are moving away from that. We've reshaped the area partnerships. We've reshaped our sector partnerships, so they will still exist in the three sectors, but not made four times a year, come together twice a year, and focus on learning and sharing information and practice around common themes. The local area partnerships will be responsible for producing a local area action plan. That won't displace work that's already gone on through thriving places or work that's happening on the neighbourhood's regeneration and sustainability side of the council, where we have the local planners, we have local development frameworks, work that's also going on through Glasgow Life, where they have a locality planning team, which will closely work with our area partnerships. We've had those developments more recently, and we've also had the report of the Independent Place Commission, which was looking at particularly the impact of place on health and wellbeing. What we want to do through the strategic appraisal that I was talking about is really take the learning that we have so far, look at all that we have in terms of resource and what's going on across the council family, and in a sense create a locality planning model that brings it all together. It's not just about our responsibilities under the Community Empowerment Scotland Act. It's what's happening in terms of place-based work across the council family, and how we actually bring that together and take the learning and the positive factors of our current locality planning approach into that new model. I think that's where we're at is really looking at. We have a model and it's effective in those areas, but there is a gap between the areas where locality planning is happening and where it isn't. The question is really how do we move beyond that now and address locality planning in all areas of need across the city. Thank you very much for that, Bernadette. I have two questions, but I'm going to just ask one again because of time. I'm going to direct this to you, Michelle. Last week, the Accounts Commission stated that a number of partnerships have not published locality plans despite being required to do so by the 2015 act. I'd be interested to hear how locality plans have worked in your area and how has your CPP targeted interventions to those areas needing the most assistance, and you have touched on it a bit, but if you wanted to elaborate. We have published locality plans and we refreshed them in 2021 in parallel with our local outcome improvement plan. We use population needs assessment. We undertake that as the foundation of our Loip and locality plan development processes. We're looking at a range of data to identify from there where the data is pointing to priority need. Of course, the development process is about engaging with partners and communities on the ground. In 2021, we took a change of approach learning from the 2015 act and where we'd been with locality planning. We found that our landscape was quite clittered because as a CPP, we were meeting our duties under locality planning. At the same time, our health and social care partnership were also implementing a locality planning model that did the same but different. There were different groups around it and communities were getting confused by what locality planning was. We did undertake a review in 2020 to develop an integrated model. I think that it is the only integrated model in Scotland. We did do benchmarking at the time to understand if other council areas were having the same issues with their locality planning. My understanding was that they were having the same issues. We have tried to take a bold step in developing an integrated locality planning team across the CPP, which is facilitated by council officers and the health and social care partnership. We now have joint locality plans that seek to meet the duties of both the community empowerment act legislation and the IGB legislation. We have those plans across the whole of the city, but they also identify those priority areas of need for specific communities. What we are trying to do is to have a much stronger connection with those locality plans and partner organisations. What we found before is that there seemed to be a bit of a split where we had partner staff around strategic outcome improvement groups. Communities were doing the same kind of addressing the same issues but within their community, and it was just a bit fragmented. As I said, we have just done that in 2021. We are still experiencing some teeth in issues with it. I think that the pandemic did not help. It disrupted our groups. There have been some resource issues around locality planning, but we are very much committed to the model and overcoming those resource issues. Communities just want support and for us to be working with them jointly to address their priority need and to see that in the core master locality plans. I think that we are in a good place, but there are definitely areas for improvement going forward. Thank you very much for that response. It sounds in general just around loyps and locality plans that from the three that I have heard from, that it is very much a living, breathing process that you are very much keen to engage with it and really make it work. It is not just something that got handed out after the 2015 act and you really want to keep it living. I am going to move on to the next theme, which is going to be introduced by Marie McNair on measuring impact. Last week, the Accounts Commission said that it is still difficult for CPPs to demonstrate what impact they are having. Does data at a local level allow CPPs to demonstrate the impact that decisions and actions they are having on inequality levels and other outcomes? I will pop that first to Shaw. Thank you very much. The key word here is probably attribution. How can you attribute what to which structures or mechanisms? I think that we can demonstrate and I think that you have already begun to, in many ways, answer your own question by saying that it is the local data that will inform that. One of our key frustrations—perhaps it sounds if I am going off message, but I do not think that I am—one of our key frustrations can be that the macroeconomic impact is what we are doing. We might well be doing the right things in our own locality or within the city of Glasgow, but the stats would indicate failure. I will illustrate that by the macroeconomic influences on, for example, child poverty. I believe that what we have done in Glasgow in child poverty has been quite innovative. It has been driven with a purpose and with clarity, and it has got a clear focus. However, if you just look at the cold high level stats, they are almost all going the wrong way, despite what we are doing. As I said, the key word for me in terms of impact is attribution. Are we doing the right things? Are we establishing and forming the correct, meaningful working relationships across partnerships and with our communities and with our third sector partners? In many ways, I think that we are. I think that it is a ffiendishly difficult thing to attribute to specific activities, or actions or even legislation that is changing things for the better. I think that that sounds like a cop-out, but I think that I can justify saying that. I am a great believer that, if we cannot measure it, we cannot manage it, if we cannot manage it, we should not be doing it, so we really need hard facts and figures. However, knowing exactly which mechanism or what behaviours or what piece of legislation is having the most impact is very complex. The closest we come to meaningful answers in that way are to work as locally and in a granular way as we can. What is the impact on the ground? Is the day-to-day life of our citizens being impacted in a positive way? Are they better off? Are they more cash in their hand? Are they access to better services in a meaningful way? I am not certain that that is a direct answer, because I have constantly struggled on a personal basis with that word of attribution and impact and how we can be really clear about what is having the most impact. I think that we can point to trains and activities in terms of empirical evidence. I think that that gets more difficult, and it probably would be fair to academic colleagues on that one. I hope that that answers the question in some way. Thank you. I will move on to my next question. I was just wanting to sympathise with Shaw about the attribution. It can be quite difficult, but in Aberdeen we, as I mentioned before, use quality improvement. It has changed our approach to how we use data to understand impact, which is absolutely critical. There is so much data that, if you are just looking across at trends, you can get lost in a sea of what difference are we making. Using the fundamental principles of quality improvement, we set out within our local outcome improvement plan our 15 stretch outcomes that identify exactly how much it is that we want to improve and buy when. We break those high-level, longer-term stretch outcomes into specific improvement projects with those aims. Those are the projects that we believe that will allow us to achieve our priority outcomes. To this point, we have achieved five of our stretch outcomes that we set in 2016. Those are ambitious stretch outcomes, but we can point to the things that we have done that we believe have made a difference, and those things that have not made a difference and that we have had to change tax. Data has been fundamental to it, but it is also involved in communities in that improvement work. We are in quite a confident place where we can understand what impact we are having. It does not mean that we have cracked it because there are complex issues, but it gives us some confidence to keep pushing forward and to make a difference where we can. In addition to the qualitative data, it is important that we use case studies and examples of feedback from community organisations and local areas where we have worked. That does not always lend itself to numeric indicators, but it is equally as important feedback on where we are improving outcomes. We are now going to move on to our sixth theme, which is the culture of public bodies, and Miles Briggs is leading on that. Good morning to our panel. Thank you for joining us today. In the submission, Aberdeen states that their CPP had secured a commitment of partners to divert resources for shared priorities. Have other CPPs also had that experience and how that collaborative workings, as part of the 2015 act, have been able to take place? As I mentioned, Aberdeen, do you want to outline more information about how that has worked between them? Just that commitment to our local outcome improvement plan and those specific improvement projects that are referred to, we have partners taking a lead on each of those projects and then bringing in partner colleagues together. We have certainly got the commitment of partners. I think that, although the act places an equal duty on partners, it does not necessarily result in an equal contribution of resource. There is variation across partners. I think that so much of it is about identifying where the priority areas are and seeking partners' involvement and that they know what they are being asked to lead on. That is helpful. I think that one of my concerns around where the act has not really progressed is that it outlines a process but not necessarily then a real outcome for people to focus on. Do you think that how that could be improved within the act to actually get to empower communities and get them to the outcome that they all want to see, rather than sometimes the process stopping them from doing that? Do you want to add anything to that? Just thinking about how we work with other public bodies and partners, one of the questions in the inquiry response was about have we achieved that kind of shared leadership. It is fair to say that the council probably is the dominant partner, but what we have done is changed the way that we work particularly on our executive group, strategic partnership, to say to all the partners, please set the agenda. If you have challenges and issues, bring them to the table. Use the collective experience and knowledge that you have around that community planning table to help move things forward. We have seen that working. That has been really quite good where we know that there will be conversations and follow-up off-table, and then we can pick it up at future community planning meetings. We have shared resources in kind, and we have a local authority liaison officer within our team from Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and we work closely with them. We have individual meetings with them. Indeed, we are looking at bringing together a range of public bodies to look at more inward focus, but it is about given the budget pressures that we all have, how we can make more effective use of our own resources and buildings and work more collaboratively. We have that work starting as well. There are other examples of really good collaboration. For instance, the police are a key player in our public health oversight board, and they have reshaped the approach that they take to policing and to solving issues and seeing the problems through a public health lens and how that approach in working with a greater number of partners can help them to achieve much more effective outcomes. That is working particularly well. I think that our gambling harms group is very much focused on lived experience and what that tells us. I suppose that there are resources from partners, but not necessarily money, as it were, but more about how we work collaboratively across the partners and how we do things differently. We have examples of really good partnerships. Things like the Glasgow Life have a live well community referral scheme. Again, that is working across partners and working with partner agencies. It is in one word at the moment and is due to be rolled out. We have Glasgow Help, which was a helpline that was set up within a few days of the pandemic, and that was initially a partnership between Council Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Health and Social Care Partnership and Glasgow Council Voluntary Sector. We have now tried to test that model out by scaling it up and seeing if we can use that as a way of making sure that people get to the right services at the right time, rather than having to navigate their way through various community and council departments. We are testing out that model to see whether that works and how that might go forward. The community learning and development action plan is closely related to our community action plan and is built into the community planning partnerships work. There are lots of examples of good collaboration. I am not quite sure that I have answered that question in terms of resources, but we are making a conscious effort to facilitate the community planning executive group, but we are not setting the agenda. We are saying to partners that this is for you to bring your challenges in particular to the table and collectively find a way that we can move forward on those challenges. I think that that has worked quite well. It is obviously still work in progress, but it is working well. We are finding that partners are sharing their data with us a lot more in terms of what they are achieving. That is helping us to build from the bottom up a much more comprehensive performance management framework to show where trends are going in a positive direction and where they are going in a negative direction. It is all work in progress, but it feels like we have moved a long way from the council being the dominant partner and setting the agenda and bringing papers and potentially recycling papers around all our community planning structures. It feels more proactive. North Lanarkshire Council has an annual programme of work that sets out how we will deliver the plan for North Lanarkshire, which is our overarching loyp. 80 per cent of the actions in that programme of work are delivered in partnership, so it is not about additional resources. It is about partners looking at the issues and where they can contribute and support that work with existing resources and by doing things differently. As was evidenced in a piece of work that police housing and social work did in Craig Newke around antisocial behaviour and drug fewds in the local scheme. In terms of the main challenge then to that shared leadership, is it then that final resource? There is resources being able to provide in terms of administration and support services, but then the cost of delivering an outcome. I know sure in Glasgow City Council's submission, you did state that the local authority does remain the dominant partner in your CPP. Is it that financial barrier then in the end, which is stopping some of these projects moving forward? It is not necessary what you have said, suggest it is not willingness to try to let communities take things forward. It is that final financial issue. In part, it is the capacity issue in some ways. The two really, really big structures are health and councils around the tables. Sometimes it is capacity. If I was just to try and compartmentalise it into two things, I think that we are really quite weak and remain quite weak in terms of joint approaches to capital investment, the big structural chunky joint capital investment things. I am not convinced that I may be controversial here, but I am not convinced that we are very good at that. But on the more operational day-to-day service design allocation of staff time to common purpose, that synergy approach is pretty strong, I think. It is perhaps not surprising that councils would become first amongst equals because of their capacity, because of their reach. In many ways, what I was going to say has already been said by Bernadette and Jennifer, but a really good example for me that I refer people to as the activities of Police Scotland colleagues on our public health oversight board. The local chief superintendent realised the impact that mental health issues had on his ability to deliver a police service, so it might be almost counterintuitive to see the police lead on an issue such as mental health, but I think that that is the fruit of community planning in many ways, because we better understand what each other do and that that collaboration and partnership space is identified so that you can see the police taking a very key role and viewing policing as taking a public health approach to policing. To compartmentalise it, I think that we are weak in terms of capital investment and the big structural financial decisions that we sometimes make. I could reference that and give examples that have passed, but I think that we are really quite strong in some of the operational aspects. I hope that that helps answer that. Thanks for that, Jennifer. Sorry, do you have another point? You want to show us covered it. No worries. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks, community. Thanks, Miles. We are going to move on to our last theme, which is with Willie Coffey on national and local leadership. Thanks very much, convener. We have been in that space. They are talking about leadership for a little bit. I wonder if I could just develop it a little bit with you all just to get your views on this. We have taken evidence over a number of weeks on from a number of partners and it is a mixed picture. I would say that they presented to us about the success of community planning and where particular locales. They put their finger on leadership, local leadership and the drive, determination, innovation, all that stuff to drive that stuff forward. It is not about structures and plans and documents and stuff. It is about doing things that the communities want to have done and the focus on leadership. What are your views on that? Do you recognise that as important? Do you see it in your own authority? What can we do to take that forward and make sure that we really deliver the leadership that we need? I will start with Jennifer, if I may, please. As I said, in 2018, we had the community planning local outcome improvement plan and the council had its own business plan. The council and the partners came together and produced and adopted the plan for North Lanarkshire as our single overarching plan, so that provides that strategic direction. In September 2019, our strategic leadership board had a development day and looked at the community planning board, which had grown in size and involved all the statutory members attending more or less all the meetings, which meant that very often we had 26 or 30 people in the community planning board room, we had different faces, there was not that level of consistency in knowing one another sitting around the table, so we recognised that partnership working was actually taking place at the level below through our children's services partnership, through our community justice partnership, through our tackling poverty officers group, and we decided to let those partnership working arrangements, because they are community planning partnership working arrangements concentrate on their thematic issues, be they poverty, be they climate change, be they children's services, and the community planning partnership board would become a strategic leadership board similar to the model in Aberdeen and Glasgow, and that strategic leadership board comprises police, fire, health, health and social care partnership, the voluntary sector that I have spoken about, Scottish Enterprise, the council. There are eight organisations represented on the strategic leadership board, and that may not sound many, but remember, SPT, SIPA, are involved at the level below doing the partnership working, and that strategic leadership board provides very clear strategic decisive leadership. Pieces of work come to us, yes, for reporting and accountability and oversight, but also when there's a hurdle that needs overcome, or when there's a bit of strategic direction and leadership that needs to be given. There is a real experience of trust and working together between the strategic leaders, and that was very much heightened through Covid, when they were all serving on the local resilience partnership, so they have got that ability to work together at pace and at scale. Our strategic leadership board is chaired by Police Scotland and Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, our advice chair. Thanks for that, Jennifer. Other views on that, I'm particularly interested in leadership at the local level to drive a lot of the initiatives that come forward. We had some great experiences that we learned about through Covid, that emerged because of Covid, that communities feel these are the things that we should be doing now, not perhaps the things that we were doing as part of a CPP process prior to that, so that was a surprise to many of us that they want to keep this, and it was local people driving that with support from local councillors officials and otherwise. Do you see that working? Bernardette and Glasgow and Michelle and Aberdey, do you see that taking place? Sure. I suppose at the level that Sean and I work at, which is the community planning executive group, which is operational. It largely depends on relationships with key partners, and there is more turnover in some key partners than others, but we meet regularly with all our partners around that table individually. For instance, the chief executive of GCVS, I meet with them regularly, and we have those conversations as well, so it is not just that we facilitate the executive group meeting, I chair it, but that is not the be-all and end-all. The work largely happens off table as well. In terms of strategic leadership, we have the strategic partnership, which again is the policymaking bit of our community planning structures, and that is chaired by our political lead. Councillor Christina Cannon has elected member representation on it, as well as on the kind of statutory partners in the third sector, so that is very much about setting the policy in direction. We had our social recovery task force running from about July 2020 until the end of January 2022, and what was agreed with the strategic partnership was that the work of that task force would fold in to the strategic partnership, so, essentially, the work now is oversight of the development of the new community action plan. It is basically all the work streams that were part of that task force are on a rolling programme basis. We will come to the strategic partnership and we will report on what they are doing around the priorities that they set out, and those were priorities that we were asking them to think about. What could they really do that would be impactful and make a difference, so I suppose that they report into the policymaking part of our structures, and that works quite well. As I said, the academic advisory group has been expanded. It now includes all the universities in the city, and that has a kind of formal locus as a subgroup of the strategic partnership. Again, what we are wanting to do is use what the evidence is telling us in terms of setting priorities and moving forward. We know that various academics, for instance, are engaging with different people in the council at different levels around child poverty, and we want to try to unpick that a bit and perhaps have some sort of workshop or event around how we really shift the dial on this. Obviously, it is a kind of top strategic priority for the council in the new council strategic plan, so there are various ways that we work, but the strategic partnership largely, as you were saying, is the policymaking arm. That comes to the executive group, which is more operational, and our job is to go, I suppose, and make sure that it happens and report back on how we deliver on that. Thanks for that, Bernadette. Michelle, I want to be in a different perspective to add that we just share those experiences. I share all those experiences. I think that leadership can sometimes be seen as being at that strategic level, but improvement means leadership at all levels. One thing that I can say that we have done in Aberdeen, and I am not sure if it is different, but just to bring it out, is that I think that often there is a turnover of whether it is staff that is working on improvement or even community members. There can be a lot of change in people, and what we have tried to do in Aberdeen is put in place a system that allows anyone who is picking up the baton or taking on that piece of improvement work to understand where we are at and what changes we have already tried, what changes are successful and to allow them to carry on from there. That is something that has been really important for all of our priorities at a strategic and community level. We have documents that we call project charters that set out the issues with the current system, the changes that we think will make an improvement and a plan for testing those changes. It does not matter who comes in at that leadership level, whether it is strategic or on the ground, they have that starting point that they can pick up with that and take that forward. I think that that has been absolutely critical to maintain the momentum in Aberdeen and to achieve the improvements that we have achieved so far. Just to pick up on your community leadership question, Mr Coffey, our community boards are representing the towns and we make the point with the community board members that they are not necessarily there to represent Croy tenants association, they are there to represent Cilsaith community board. As community board members, they are accountable to that wider Cilsaith town and Croy village. I agree with all that has been said. Finally, we have had some recent success with some projects and programmes where we have co-produced them with members of the community that are from anchor organisations. We have been capacity building for some time and we are very active during Covid, so that is a bit of a good news story that they are now engaged to that level that they will work hand in hand with us. That concludes our questions. Clearly, we could spend a lot more time delving deeply into the work that you are doing. It certainly feels like it is a living, breathing piece of work that you are constantly re-evaluating. You have lots of measures in place and from talking to all of you, it seems that it is working and it is moving in the right direction. Thank you so much for spending some time with us this morning. I now suspend the meeting to allow for change of witnesses. On our second panel, we are joined in the room by Kevin Anderson, who is the service lead for policy performance and community planning from South Ayrshire Council, and Susan McCarty, who is the community planning officer from South Ayrshire Council. We are joined by Lee Hackston, who is the community planning team lead from Perth and Kinross Council, and Fiona Robertson, who is the head of culture and community service also from Perth and Kinross Council. On-line, we are joined by Anna Wheelan, who is the service manager in strategy and partnership at Orkney Island Council. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting. As mentioned to the first panel, we will try to direct our questions to a specific witness where possible, but if you would like to come in, please indicate to myself or the clerks. Anna, as you are appearing virtually, please do this by putting an R in the chat function, and there is no need to manually turn your microphones on and off as we will be doing that for you automatically. We are going to start with questions from Annie Wells. Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel. I want to touch on what challenges face communities. We heard last week that inequality can be a move-and-target and has lots of change over the last eight years, but what do you believe are the biggest challenges facing your communities at the moment? How do you prioritise which ones the CPP tackles? I think that I will go to Lee first on this one, if you do not mind, Lee. I suppose that you got right to the root of the problems straight away. I think that the multiple initiatives that are around just now, whether it is through funding or whether it is through communities telling us what the priorities are, you can be stretched so thin that it is really difficult to respond as well as we possibly could. That can sometimes be exacerbated by the way that funding is provided, specifically for particular issues as opposed to a broader spread. Unless that is sustained over long periods of time, because a lot of those issues are deep rooted and have been around for a long time, three- and five-year funding programmes just do not cut it. If that is added upon by additional issues coming forward, that can just make things even worse and more challenging for us. However, trying to find the key challenge and what is inherent in trying to focus on what we can do collectively is the main thing through community planning partnerships, because we all have our own individual responsibilities as public sector bodies, but how we do that collectively through community planning partnership and focusing on what only we can do as opposed to the business as usual gives us a key insight into trying to challenge those multiple issues that we are all trying to deal with at the same time. I think that there is a cultural aspect to that as well in terms of how the individual partners around the CPP table can hold each other to account to make sure that they are actually contributing as effectively as they can to those deep-seeded inequalities that we are all trying to deal with. I think that your question was also around the specific issues that we are facing, so from a Perthyn Cynros context, obviously the geography of Perthyn Cynros is varied, so we have one large city, some small towns in a very, very large rural area, so the needs are not the same. That adds another layer of complexity to how we deal with those in terms of what the very rural parts of Perthyn Cynros are facing compared to the centre of Perth City. It is a challenge, but the community planning structure is one that is set up to try to deal with that as best it can. I do not know if Kevin Orr Susan will want to come in or Anna, or anything further to add, no? I suppose just to add that in terms of the immediate pressure right now that seems to be overwhelming when it is the cost of living crisis. I think that in areas that already were suffering multiple complex disadvantage, it has actually just made things a lot worse, so it is not a case of trying to do lots of new things, it is trying to just actually put the extra emphasis into the stuff that we are already doing in some of these communities as well, but it is certainly pressing. Actually, because it cuts across so many different services and parts of people's lives that community planning is the place to actually try to address that. That brings one nicely to my next question, so we will get some further information here, but the 2015 act does put a duty on CPPs to tackle social economic inequalities, so to what extent can CPPs and their partners tackle the cause of social economic disadvantage, and not just deal with the consequences. For example, we heard last week about the growth in work poverty, so I do not know if somebody wants to give me a wee bit further information on that. I think that it is a shades of grey matter of degrees in terms of the impact that we can have, and I understand why the question is worded in the way it is, because we are often dealing with just the consequences, and it is hard to get ahead of yourself and into that prevention space. I will point back to local government and community planning. It is the best space to try and do that prevention type of work, and it is challenging when you are firefighting all the time. I think that there is a sense sometimes of that cluttered landscape within community planning when you have various national, local priorities playing against each other, and how do you find that consistency of focus through all those partners and trying to bring them together? We try to do it through a cross-cutting agenda impact assessment. They say, are we always thinking about climate change? Are we always thinking about poverty? Even that is quite hard to try and pull everyone together in that same direction. I do not think that I could definitively say whether we are dealing with more than just the consequences right now, but I certainly think that we are in the right place to start moving into that more preventative side of things. It is certainly true that the last few years have been a lot about firefighting and dealing with immediate issues. Our response to that within our community planning partnership was to come up with a two-year emergency recovery loyp, if you like, where we focused on the immediate issues. However, the one that we are developing at the moment, which will come into effect from 1 April, is a much longer term loyp. It is a seven-year one this time. We are being quite ambitious because we are focusing on 2030, which is the target that we have adopted for net zero. That is enabling us to include both immediate measures to tackle our top priorities and also longer-term preventative measures. The three priorities that the partnership has chosen for this new loyp. It has chosen things where the partnership itself can make a difference, not the big issues that are being addressed mainly by individual partners. We have picked the cost of living, which is a very obvious one, and there we have immediate measures to address the problems that are happening now. However, we are also looking longer term. We are looking at things like exploring minimum income guarantee, which we are very interested in in Orkney, because we could be a little pilot area for that. We are looking at things like community wealth building, and that crosses over with our second priority, which is sustainable development. Finally, we are looking at local equality, which I know got a lot of discussion in your session earlier this morning, where we still have parts of Orkney, which are not doing so well compared with other parts in terms of the usual socio-economic indicators. We are now going to move to community empowerment and questions from Mark Griffin, who is joining us online. I just wanted to ask what experiences have helped to marginalise and disperse communities to build capacity and confidence, so that they are then able to engage with their community planning process. On an even more basic level, is there even a public awareness of what community planning is, what it does, what it can do to support communities? Can we come to Kevin first? Yes, I am happy to answer that in terms of the first part. We have a duty upon us to make sure that we are listening to communities and what we are doing. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to do in our more marginalised communities, and it is about building capacity within those communities to help to play a part where they want to. I think that we also need to be realistic about how much time people want to give to these sort of initiatives. We are always keen to have people come on and speak to us, but they want to see deliverables, to see things changing in their community, and that constant string of consultation can sometimes work more than help situation. What is key is not making it so formal in terms of the interaction that you can come and engage with. People will engage if they are there for another reason. We do a lot of engagement at our food banks. We do a lot of engagement at events aimed at younger people, so that we are not just getting the usual suspects, the idea that we can get a breadth of input into what we are doing and that feedback on people who would not normally find that sense. What was the second part of your question, sorry? Just about whether there is even an awareness of community planning and what benefits it can bring, do people even know that it exists? I would hazard that, and say probably no. It is probably not up the list. I think that even people within certain parts of local authority will not really know what community planning is. I think that it is quite a corporate entity where it is trying to organise at a very strategic level. Obviously, when it is delivering on the ground, it is usually the partner services who are delivering on the ground, so it is not really badged this community planning, I would say. I would not say that communities are particularly well versed in what community planning partnership is doing and what their aims are. Thanks. Anyone else in the room or online want to contribute to that? I think that the questions and the challenges that Kevin Reyes is right, but things are changing partly through the act, although I would make the broader point that it is really important to see the act in a broader context as part of a whole system within a much wider framework of legislation around public service reform, all of which has this thread around community empowerment and community participation running through it, the role of the third sector interfaces, the role of audit, scrutiny, regulatory bodies. Thinking about community planning in that broader context is really important before we come to consider the question of whether communities genuinely feel that they have skin in the game, if you like. In Perthink and Ross, we have seven local area partnerships, which are the local delivery tier of community planning. In all cases, they are now chaired by a community representative. They make decisions about grant schemes and we are rolling out local area committees. We have a pilot in CanRoss down in the south of our local authority area, which is quite significant in terms of the devolved decision making powers that it has, and we will be extending that model to other parts of Perthink and Ross over the next two years. Do the public communities know what community planning is? Possibly not, as Kevin Reyes says. Does that really matter if the language and terminology make sense to them in terms of opportunities to take part in things, decisions, bid for money through participatory budgeting and other schemes? That is the key bit. We have put quite a lot of emphasis through our social media channels and other routes to publicising the opportunities for communities to get more actively involved in what is going on in their locality, and that is what matters, I think, at the end of the day. We have struggled with this, of course, like every partnership. We have had a lot of success in using our third sector interface voluntary action orcney as a trusted intermediate and advocate for marginalised communities. An example of that was when we were developing our first locality plan, which was in 2018, where the development was in the two years before that. That was for the ferry-linked aisles. Geographically, they are far and away our most marginalised communities. We went with VAO voluntary action orcney to visit all of those islands. We used two techniques to include different community groups and community interests and to keep them engaged. One was to conduct a place standard exercise for each island, and that helped to focus on the priorities that that island wanted to see addressed in the locality plan. The second one was to do jointly with that a participatory budgeting exercise, again for each island, and then one crossing the islands. VAO was very successful in gaining two rounds of funding from the community choices fund for that. That enabled the islands to put some of their proposed actions into effect. We have also seen VAO take a lead in helping to communicate with disempowered communities on a more generic level. Most recently, for the cost of living, we have set up Orcney money matters, which is a unified pathway to joining together the various voluntary sector agencies to support people in struggling with the cost of living crisis. My other question was about comments that the committee received from the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights saying that they have a concern that CPPs may be raceblind when it comes to tackling inequalities. I just wanted to ask witnesses how do you ensure that communities, including communities of interest and identity, people with protected characteristics, those that are marginalised, and how do you ensure that all their voices are heard in community planning and that community planning is aware to issues affecting particular interest groups? It is a challenge. One of the tensions within community planning always is the emphasis on spatial planning matters and thinking about geographies of place alongside communities of interest. Again, what I would say is really important to see, understand and actively use community planning as a mechanism because it is a mechanism within a wider systems approach and thinking about, for example, the regulations and the legislation around community learning and development, where community planning partners, including the local authority, have to be really active around understanding unmet need. Therefore, the engagement with communities of interest equality groups is particularly important in that context and others. A couple of other things, I would say, in Porthing Cross we have an equalities forum and the interface between our equalities forum and the CPP is quite key. Also, as other witnesses have said, the Covid experience really brought to the fore the fact that inequalities, inequalities and how they affect communities of geography and of interest has been a very significant moving target in some parts of Porthing Cross. I am thinking of some very detailed emergency response work that we did in one part of Porthing Cross where we were dealing with a whole range of households and individuals and families from a very wide range of ethnic backgrounds. That really tested our metal in terms of our understanding of the equalities issues and the different communities that we are here to serve. However, it is that whole systems thinking, though wanting to sound too theoretical about it, that is absolutely key. The loyp is the foundation stone or should be the foundation stone in terms of data and evidence, understanding communities, their diversity, their makeup, the things that are shifting and changing. If the loyp is right, the loyp is based on data and evidence, and the loyp is not focused on business as usual. It is focused on what the CPP can do that, as Lee said, only it can do. Those should be the touchstones for how we go about our work. Thanks. Anybody else want to come in on that question? Certainly, I suppose that touching on our loyp, our loyp actually does focus on communities of interest as our priority areas. We are looking at improving outcomes for older people, particularly around supporting people living with dementia and looking at social isolation and loneliness. I suppose that, for us in South Ayrshire, we have one of the highest population of older people in Scotland and, potentially, within Europe. For us, forward planning, we have to think about that ageing population as well. Again, communities of interest, we are looking at care experience to children and young people and young carers. We, as a loyp, look at communities of interest. Equalities are part of our team. The equalities officer sits within our team, so we work very closely with how the equalities officer is. That sort of engagement is something that we have been looking at within community planning and how we can get it better than we are already doing. We are looking at community engagement and setting up a new group, which will be led by our third sector interface, and it is formalising that community engagement to ensure that we are guiding engagement community through various routes. That could be locality, specific thematic, specific community groups, communities of interest and general consultation. It is something that we are continually looking to improve. Add on to that as well to something else that I think is useful when trying to engage with more modernised communities as we have adopted the trauma pledge as a community planning partnership and understanding that sometimes our systems are built in such a way that it may be pushed people away from engaging unintentionally, but actually applying what we do through our trauma informed lens and understanding the different experiences of people is really helping us to get a better understanding of what we need to do better. That sort of self-reflective bit of it, but it's been really successful and all our partners are really brought into it as well, so it's been really helpful. Thanks very much for adding that. Mark, do you have any more questions? No, no more questions, convener, thank you yet. Thanks very much. It's interesting to see more and more organisations, councils are looking at that trauma-led approach and it does seem to be bringing good outcomes. I'm going to move on to the next theme, which is the role of third sector, and that's going to be led by Paul McClellan. Yes, thanks, convener, and good morning panel. Like a couple of other colleagues who were previous councillors for 15 years, I also chaired a cross-party group on social enterprise. It's a real interest, I suppose, in the third sector, and I suppose it's really coming down between where the community planning sits within local councils and where it sits in localities, where the third sector almost comes in, and how do they feel involved, and the feedback that we've got from events that we've had is very mixed across Scotland, in terms of that. So it's trying to look at consistency, I suppose, models of good practice and kind of where you see the third sector playing that role, not just in being part of decision-making but also delivering some services as well. I don't know who wants to take that one first of all, and Susan, you might be coming to yourself first of all, but that's okay. Yes, so Volentary Action South Airshire of Assa, so that's our TSI, and they're a very active member of our community planning board and within our community planning structures. And certainly, the pandemic highlighted that crucial role of the third sector within community planning and supporting our communities, particularly around that initial response. You know, Assa has been instrumental, certainly leading in some key pieces of working, I think, from the pandemic, things like the volunteer strategy. They've developed a volunteer strategy for South Airshire. They're going to be leading in that one. They've been leading on some of the response to the cost of living crisis, and I think we've concluded that part by the evidence, and they've developed a booklet for all homes within South Airshire, which has been absolutely brilliant, and the feedback that they've got from the communities well to actually have something posted through the doors has been really, really good. You know, they've been leading the development of the cosy hubs. They're crucial for us around that engagement, particularly with wider community organisations and people they support within the communities well. And actually, they deliver in some of the key projects within our local outcome improvement plan. So, yeah, I would say that, you know, the third sector and ensuring that the third sector is very much part of the work that we do, certainly does happen, I would say, within South Airshire. And, you know, there's other areas, you know, community food network. They've got lots of, you know, fordums that align to some of our community planning structures, as well around older people, our children and young people, they're looking at climate change now and sustainability. So, yeah, really very well engaged. Yeah, thanks. Anyone else want to pick that up, please? Yeah, thank you. Similar experience to Vasa, I think you said it was, we have an interesting acronym, PCAVS, for our third sector interface in Perth and Cynros. For the last 18 months to two years, the community planning board has been co-chaired by our third sector interface, which I suppose reflects the value we place on their input and the fact that they can bring a different perspective to all the issues that are being discussed around the table. I mentioned in my response to the first question the geography of Perth and Cynros and the challenges that I can provide, similar to the TSI in terms of a significant area to cover with very different issues and how they can use their resources to the best effect to make sure they're representing that third sector voice, as it were. But what I would say is that a proactive third sector interface can play a very, very important role at that strategic level around the board table, but also at a very local level in terms of supporting communities to build their own capacity, skills and confidence to get involved, not just in community planning as a process, but in general community empowerment activity, which all kind of adds to the same greater whole. So they're a fundamental partner in Perth and Cynros. I think that that's important because these were some of the good examples that came through and used as an interlink between local authority, but also the local community. If that's kind of missing, there's a real element of that. From an island point of view, I don't know, from the Orkney's point of view, does that make it more difficult, for example, in that one? Does that, I suppose, a TSI be a slightly different scale, but does it make it more difficult or easier, for example, in new involvement? Well, our TSI has been an absolutely core member of our partnership right from the very beginning. They are hugely influential and important in what we do. I know many CPPs—well, all CPPs, as far as I know, are in the same position—and yet TSIs still feel somehow like a second-class citizen because they're not specified in the act as a partner. Obviously, that's because the act can't place a public duty on a body that isn't a public body. However, one thing that we suggested in our response to the inquiry, our written response, was that perhaps the act, as well as the schedule of statutory partners, could perhaps have a list of partners who have a right to be invited to participate in boards, so that it would be up to them, but they would then have that statutory right to be there. On that, convener, I'm just trying to ask one question. On the point that was mentioned about the TSI's becoming a statutory partner, would that be something that you would support from your own local authority point of view? I mean, it's certainly something I'm talking for myself, but certainly something that I would think would make sense, but I don't know from your own point of view what your own points of view would be on that. Even just from what we've described so far, they're so integral to what we're doing, and if I'm honest, we probably treat them like a statutory partner already without it actually just being down there in the law, but certainly they're so integral to what we're doing that we treat them that way. Yeah, I know we explained some of my own TSI, but it's invaluable about what they do. Do you yourself, Lee? I'm not really sure, to be honest. Legislation in this context, as in other contexts, is your tool of last resort, really, or it should be? In the relationship, would that be something? Fundamentally, like colleagues in South Asia, I think stroke hope that our third sector colleagues would see themselves very much as equal partners around the table, not least because they co-chair the CPP. I think the focus around the list of those who are duty-bound to participate in community planning probably needs to focus around national bodies and their role, which you may be going to come on to. I can't see that that recommendation would do any harm. Equally, it's fundamentally down to the quality of the relationship at the local level, in a parity of esteem. Yeah, I suppose that Kenny came back at the start, but it was very mixed. There were some TSIs that felt that had good involvement in the council, and some third sector organisations didn't feel had a good relationship with the TSI, so that might be something for the committee to take away and discuss. So, I'm now going to come on to lights and locality plans. I was interested here, Fiona, you saying that lights are the foundation stone and that they should be focusing on what CPPs can do. So, I'd be interested here about the processes your community planning partnerships follow when developing lights and locality plans. We heard in the previous panel that there's quite a lot of refreshing and new plans happening now, so I'd be interested here if you've got ideas of doing things differently. Maybe I'll start with you and then hear from the others. Sure. I think the big shift for us, again partly catalyzed by Covid, but we were moving in this direction anyway, has been, as I think everyone's aware, when you're writing a 10-year strategy of any kind, it can be a risky business because in terms of looking forward in a meaningful way to how the world needs to be in 10 years' time, that can feel, particularly when you're trying to generate grassroots input into the LOIP, that can all feel quite distant and theoretical. There is a balance for the CPP in developing a LOIP, which is strategic, takes an area-wide view, is clear about the priorities within the priorities, but it also makes it real and is sufficiently focused on the issues and the challenges in the here and now. During Covid, we took the decision as a CPP, as we've done with a number of key strategies, to write a one-year delivery plan, which is constantly reviewed and rolled forward, because there were significant issues for us, even thinking back two years ago, where we just did not know how things would unfold. We had a short-life working group, which was led by one of the CPP partners, STS, Skills Development Scotland, in this instance, which developed our new set of priorities for the LOIP, which are very much focused around, again, in common with other colleagues, as you would expect, tackling poverty, mental and physical health and wellbeing, digital participation and engagement and inclusion, which emerged as quite a big issue for us and skills and employability, again, as part of our Covid recovery thing. It's a dilemma to be managed, rather than an intractable problem, between the area-level strategic part of the LOIP, which can't be too distant and managerial and theoretical, and what is actually happening bottom-up grassroots and how you join up the two. I've got another question, but I think you've already answered that one, too, which is about the level of involvement in the development of LOIPs from communities. But you said that TSI certainly are on, I think it was you that said that, they're chairing your seven local area partnerships, so are they involved in the agenda setting as well? Yes. Great. So, just somebody from South Ayrshire wants to come in on that question. So, in terms of the actual development of our current LOIP, neither Susan or I were in post at that point, so we don't have too much detail in that, but we are getting to the stage where we're looking at our next iteration and we're exploring maybe the idea of some local LOIPs. I know that the L stands for local already, but actually, instead of having just one LOIP for the entire geography, we'll split that down into six area-based LOIPs with smaller outcomes on there. So, again, they'll really be derived from what the community feel that they need and what they want and how they can feed that back in, but also what the data tells us, and I think that's difficult sometimes when you're trying to make a strategic plan and you have the needs of the community that are very apparent right in front of you, but actually when you get into the data, whether it be health data, whether it be early social behaviour data, then you can really see some longer-term trends in there that you need to start addressing as well, so it's getting that balance right between finding the big strategic goals that we need to try and meet for our localities, but also what's important to communities and that that's always going to be a tough balancing act. And to what level are communities involved in the kind of agenda setting do you imagine as you go forward with that work? So, it's theoretical in our own minds at the moment, but I would expect that they would be involved in the setting of the LOIP priorities. I think there would have to be a sort of role, this is what we think, what do you think and trying to get a balance of it in between there, but it needs to make sure that it's strategic enough, but also has that resonance with the local communities. Thanks, and I think you already touched a bit on LOIPs, but if you want to come in and share anything more about the Orkney Islands work. I did, yes. I mean, in terms of our current LOIP, the process started over a year ago with a major public consultation engagement exercise, Orkney Matters, and that was a joint collaborative exercise across a number of different service areas and partners, because we don't want to be constantly consulting our communities over and over again for different plans. So, the outcome from that exercise, which visited a number of different geographical areas, islands, communities of interest, young people's groups and so on, and those who have seldom heard, that huge information resource has been used to develop both our LOIP, our new council plan and a number of other partner plans that have been in development lately as well. Having gathered that huge amount of information, the community planning board met and did what it periodically does, what it calls a horizon scanning exercise, and it looks at that information, it looks at everything that's coming in in terms of legislation, what different partner strategies are wanting, things like our net zero target. That was a subject of a great deal of discussion, whether we should go for 2030 or not, and we did. They also think about what can the partnership add value to in terms of selecting strategies. It's not every area that it can. It has to be things that can only be delivered through a partnership approach. That's how we came up with our three, which I mentioned earlier, the cost of living, sustainable development and local equality. The next stage of this now, having drafted our LOIP, put it out again for another consultation in draft form, although we know that you don't often get much back in the way of response to that sort of thing. We did get about 89 responses, which is not too bad for a small island area. The next stage now is for our delivery groups to take those strategic priorities away and work them up, and two of them are well under way already, and the third one will be getting going very soon. Can I just clarify? The delivery groups are at what level? Are they place-based or theme-based? They're theme-based. They are assigned a strategic priority by our board, and they take it away and work it up. The LOIP contains the basic things that the board wants to see delivered. For example, for local equality, we have things like a locality plan, which supports local community-led development plans. We don't want to duplicate those. We want to find ways in which we can reinforce them and help deliver them. It's been assigned to look at things like digital connectivity, which will meet the needs of every user in every community, because we still have areas where our 100 has not reached. We know that when something says it will reach 95 per cent, we are the 5 per cent. We know that. We also have things like transport connectivity, which again meets the needs of users within what is achievable in the timeframe. Even in seven years' time, we are fairly sure that we are still not going to have our completely new ferry fleet, although that is looking a lot more hopeful since the ferry task force started to address that very recently. We want to see an improvement in the population, the demographic balance, the resilience and the wellbeing of our most fragile communities. I know that that is absolutely core to the national islands plan. In terms of measuring that in the long term, we want to see a long-term improvement in the ratings of our most disadvantaged communities in the SIMD. I thank you very much for that detail. You can start to touch into another question that I have, which I may direct to folks in the room. Last week, we heard from the Accounts Commission that a number of partners have not published locality plans despite being required to do so in the 2015 act. I would be interested to hear how locality plans have worked in your areas and how has the CPP targeted interventions to those areas that are needing most assistance. Within South Ayrshire locality, planning is known as place plans. That was a bit like confusion around the language. We are not directly involved in that place planning process, but there has certainly been a tremendous amount of engagements taking place within our local communities using the place standard toolkit. That has been taking place since 2021-22. Engagement outcome reports had been published during the summer of 2022, setting out priorities and comments from the early engagements. Times will now be taking to write up action plans or place plans for those areas. I think that the plan is that there is going to be somebody brought in to support that process. I think that they are hoping that by early 2023 that action plans will be developed and published for our local communities. However, as I say within South Ayrshire, they are known as place plans. We are going to do some work around the language. I am conscious that there could be confusion because there is also a local place plan that is part of the NPF4. That is what we are doing. However, in terms of locality plans, there is a work taking place in Wallace town. Kevin probably would be better place to talk about it than me, but that is looking at the development of a team around a community model. When I look at the community empowerment legislation and the guidance that we have, I meet that as our locality planning requirement. There is extensive work that is taken place to bring the team into the community and to develop an action plan to support that community going forward. Wallace town is one of our most deprived communities in South Ayrshire, so there is a huge strategic piece of work that has been taken place. I do not know if you want to pass over to Kevin to talk more about that, if that was okay. The Wallace town works largely data driven as well. If you look at where the poverty inequalities are coming from in South Ayrshire, it is quite concentrated in Wallace town in the wider Air North area. It has really been data driven for us, which has been useful to try to explain why we possibly need additional resource in a different approach in this locality. I think that that is the real strength of locality plans and the locality planning is understanding that, okay, South Ayrshire is not a huge local authority, but it needs very quite wildly to different parts of rural and urban areas. I think that the ability to use that data and work out what is different is the real strength in locality planning. The stage that we would love to get to, instead of our resources being dragged into these areas of high demand and high need that we start planning at the start and say, well, we know that this is where we are going to need to focus our attention, so let's budget for that in the first instance. I think that locality planning gives you the platform to go on and do that, so I think that there is real potential to grow that out, and that is why we are looking at those local loypes. That is six locality plans that are much more focused on those specific areas and what they need. Thanks for that detail. There are a couple of things that I would maybe say in response to that. The Accounts Commission report and findings are interesting and important to be curious about the reasons why not all local authorities and CPPs will have necessarily published those plans. One of the points I made earlier on around understanding community planning in a broader context is the role of the scrutiny bodies and the way in which scrutiny practice has evolved and changed along the wider community empowerment agenda. A couple of other more specific things. We have a number of community action plans in place that have emerged across different localities of Perth and Kinross in the last couple of years, funded largely by leader funding, rural economic development funding, for the most part, and in other routes, in other cases. What is really important, and I think that this is a genuine challenge, is to make sure that that local action planning process is happening consistently and is, again, going back to one of your earlier questions, engaging with some of the less vocal communities of either place or interest. Well-mobilised communities with strong local infrastructure tend to be the ones that come forward first with that kind of local action plan, which is used to inform the loyb bottom-up. We have a couple of areas in Perth and Kinross that the CPP board has identified as priorities for some quite deep locality working and locality action planning, one out in Eastern Perthshire, which, again, I mentioned in one of my earlier answers where we've had some quite significant issues that have come to the fore in the last two to three years, and that local action planning process has been really important there, we're just about to bring that work to fruition. Final point, not to dominate this, but again, this tension which colleagues in South Ayrshire have referred to around spatial planning and the emphasis through MPF4 on spatial planning and the requirement for place plans, which do have the place principle understanding what is the place about through its skin, what is its aspiration, what does its community want it to be and become, but sometimes inevitably that spatial planning agenda does drive the agenda in a way that is not necessarily easy for the CPP to reconcile. So I think there are a few things on the back of the Accounts Commission finding for us all to reflect on and be curious about. I think that's an interesting point that you raised that tension between the spatial planning, local place plans and the locality plans and the more kind of delivery of service, isn't it, in a way? It's all connected somehow and then it becomes quite complex in the thinking through to pull in all of those threads. I'm going to move on to the next theme and bring in Marie McNair with measuring impact. Last week's session, the Accounts Commission stated that it's still difficult for CPPs to demonstrate what impact they're having. Does data at a local level allow CPPs to demonstrate the impact their decisions and actions are having on inequality levels and other outcomes in a poppet first to Kevin, if that's okay? Thanks very much. The data is absolutely critical. It is. I think that we've become on a bit of a journey recently in South Ayrs in terms of our data. One of the best things we did was start working with our list analysts at the NHS to get some really, really good, rich data on our localities and they can take that down, so that has been really, really helpful to us. I think that's fair to say that's changed our approach to what we're going to do. Data is absolutely key. The challenge we have is when you're trying to deal with some of those very real, on-the-ground things that we want to see make a difference and are dead easily measurable towards some of those longer-term life expectancy, healthy life expectancy difference you want to make to your more modern life communities. Regardless of whether it's that local priority or that strategic priority, the data is absolutely key to doing it. I think that we're much better at demonstrating those immediate impacts, demonstrating where we are over the longer term and those bigger challenges like poverty and equality. It's much harder to measure and there's much more that can influence them externally, which is difficult. We're often wrestling with the idea between contribution and attribution in terms of what we've done as a community planning partnership because it's difficult to attribute changes in child poverty to the community planning partnership, but certainly from a contribution analysis point of view, we do make a difference and we no make a difference, but it's difficult to capture at times. Thank you. Lee, do you want to add any further? Yeah, thanks. Quite similar in many ways to what Kevin had said. A lot of the data that's provided, obviously crucial, a lot of it is quantitative and can sometimes miss the qualitative element in trying to get that balance right between ensuring that the community voice is heard because often that's not captured in bare statistics. We do have a small data team within Perthlyn-Kirranos council and there are other teams within other community planning partners, but certainly there is an issue longer term in terms of how that information is collected and shared and perhaps some kind of joint resourcing between partners would make that straightforward and give us one foundation of evidence that we could all use. I liked Kevin's turn of phrase contribution and attribution. The word that I heard on my head was causality. We could quite conceivably make a significant impact, but can we actually attribute that cause to something that we've done as a community planning partnership? The data probably wouldn't show us that, but within our gut we probably know that something that we've done has made that difference. It's maybe some kind of broader impact studies of the work that CPPs have done in terms of how they've evidenced the impact that they've made over a longer period of time would help inform us and other community planning partners in terms of how we do that going forward, but at the same time you currently do so much analysis, if you want to is very good at using the phrase avoid paralysis by analysis because sometimes you can spend so long considering the data that you forget to actually get down to the actual action bit, so we need to be clear that the data that we're using and collecting is the best data that we have. It tells us where it is that we need to focus our time and our resources, and then we go on and take the action that we think we need to take collectively to make the impact. Then over a period of time you'll hopefully see that dial being shifted, but I mentioned earlier that a lot of these issues that we're dealing with are very long seated and it's going to be almost impossible to be able to show a change in those issues over a short period of time, whether it's one to three years or even five to ten years, so we need to be patient with that. Absolutely. Thank you, Lee. Anna, do you want to come in further on that? I will, yes, thank you. Yes, on islands of course we're dealing with microdata and that has problems of its own because firstly it's not often reported nationally in any form we can use, and then secondly even if it is very often it'll be redacted because the numbers in any one minority are too small. We regularly have to explain that we can't report, for example, on protected characteristics in subjects such as child poverty because the numbers are so small that it would be intrusive even if we could report them at all. We're always looking for sources of data that are useful to us and a very good one that's recently become available to the National Islands Plan Survey, which has been done specifically to track progress on the National Islands Plan. That was done in 2020 the first time. It will be done again this year and then after that every two years I hope. What makes that one so useful is that the data is being reported as we requested on all the islands in such a way that we can split out our ferry link tiles from our islands joined to our mainland effectively. The big divide that we have is between the ferry link tiles and the ones that are joined by causeways to the only mainland. That is useful, but, as Lee said, qualitative reporting is very important for us because that is one way that we can assess whether we are being effective and it's a lot more useful for benchmarking purposes. My second question is, obviously, some submissions to the inquiry spoke about equalities in terms of equal access to high-quality public services. What impact has the 2015 act had on the quality of public services? Are you confident that people in your area have equal access to public services, regardless of where they live or the community of interests? I know it's already been touched slightly on some of the responses, but if anyone would like to sort of add in further and well, I've got you, Anna. Would you like to come in? Well, yes, since my mic is still on, yes. I'd say no, we do not have equal access by any means and that's why local equality has been selected by the partnership, as is one of its top priorities this time round. A recent example would be something that was brought to the attention of our community planning board, which was the issue of first responders on each of our islands, which is at the moment a collection of very ad hoc arrangements, and so we're looking for a partnership solution to ensure that there is equal access to these services whenever they're needed. Thank you. Anyone else want to come in? I think it's very difficult and the question is around, well, a couple of questions. One is, you know, do we mean equal access? Do we mean equitable access and the role of the CPP board in strategic resource management, if you like, making sure that the resources at its disposal, money, people, skills, property and other physical assets are well aligned to the priorities and that the priorities in turn are well informed by good data about socioeconomic disadvantage? And Perth and Kerwell's is not unique by any means and has, you know, brought this to life beautifully in her evidence to you, but in a very big geography, in a very diverse geography, where you've got quite a small population widely dispersed over a big rural area, you know, only a third of our population lives in Perth. The rest lives outside Perth in one of our towns or, you know, we've got over, I think, it's about 154 Hamlets villages, et cetera. How you make decisions about equitable distribution of resources that is well tailored to particular locality needs is a huge challenge and some very tough decisions for the CPP, both as an individual partner, level and collectively, about how those are best used. But the role of communities themselves, and we spoke about community empowerment earlier, is key in this and increasingly our dialogue with communities is about where the CPP increasingly will focus its resource and its time and maybe pull back as public finances continue to tighten in areas where the community is well mobilised and best placed, sometimes better placed to take the lead in addressing a particular issue. Thanks for that contribution. Nothing's other than that. I think we'll just pass it back to yourself. Marie, I'm now going to move on to the culture of public bodies with Miles Briggs. Thank you, Camilla. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us today. My questions relate to what you've just touched on at their funeral around diverting resources for shared priorities. I wonder if you have any examples of where a change in culture and partnership working has facilitated that. I was interested to hear from Anna, you had individual island plans, and I wondered how these are then shaping how resources are allocated. I don't know if you want to come in on that, Anna. I would say, as yet, it's not happened simply because I mentioned the individual community-led plans as one of the things that will feed into our local equality plan. I do have some interesting examples of sharing resources. One is that our partnership support team is jointly funded by the five facilitating partners and has been for about six or seven years, which I think is perhaps unique in Scotland. We have recently twice run a funding exercise whereby the board has asked voluntary action at Orkney to take the lead. That happened first of all during the pandemic when VAO brought to the attention of the board the fact that some of the third sector bodies that people were depending on were really struggling. The council allocated a sum of £300,000 to be distributed by voluntary action at Orkney. We drew up some criteria around a bidding round. The decision-making, not just the management, but the decision-making was also done by their finance and audit committee with support from myself as a council representative. We ran the exercise for a different reason. Very recently, we are in the middle of a second round being managed in the same way, which is in response to the cost of living crisis, which has hit our third sector organisations very hard again. We are using the island's cost crisis fund, which the island's team managed to pull together. We are hugely grateful for that, and that, again, has been allocated to VAO to distribute by a similar mechanism before to ensure that our third sector agencies, who are right on the front line in supporting people through this, are adequately supported themselves. Thank you. Does anyone else have anything to add on that? I suppose what I was interested in and I think everyone has touched upon this today around your councils and the relatively urban and rural dynamics, and both have been competing—I think that Lee Yoo said that the needs are just not the same. How is that then facilitating a different model where sometimes you will have fewer people who maybe can take forward different projects, or, interestingly, you might not have a council owned facility in these communities? How do you put together that support is my question, or how do you facilitate the community to take that lead? That's a huge question to which there are many different answers, but I'll just try and say a few things maybe to stimulate thinking. Very unfortunately, poverty and the cost of living crisis has been probably the one single thing that has really catalyzed some of these discussions about where we need as a CPP to focus our attention on what we can do that only we can do and where we may need to disinvest or pull back. Our conversations with communities about, for example, local asset transfer, which can be a very powerful tool and way of shifting power away from public bodies into the hands of communities, but also protecting assets, particularly in small rural communities where otherwise they might just become deteriorating assets. That conversation around cost of living crisis, increasing prevalence of poverty and our data and evidence has shifted quite significantly around that in Perthyn Cymruolth. It has stimulated a lot of very different conversations, much more hard-edged conversations. The council has established in the last six months, although this is a council initiative, its interface with the CPP is really key, a poverty task force, which is a multi-agency task force, and that is stimulating, I think, a very different thinking about how resources are best used, but it is a huge topic, Mr Briggs, so probably not one that I can cover adequately. Does anyone else have anything to add on that? The budget is a real challenge. My experience with community planning is that partners are very willing to share resources in terms of staff time and rearrange their staff around that, but actually putting money together in a pot is much more difficult and we have tried a few times, and it can be quite frustrating when you think about the money that is around the table at times that we cannot put a small pot together. Likewise, under the current budget round that we just had there, it is probably one of the things that would have had to have gone if we did have it in the first place, so times are really tight. If we are moving towards a more locality-based model of service delivery, the budgets need to align for that as well. When you see where localities have been really successful is when there is a budget attached to them, it does not have to be a huge budget, but when there is that decision to go and make those decisions locally and act on and be very responsive to the needs of communities, that helps. The closer we can align our budgets to localities would give us more flexibility in how we deliver services specifically to those needs. Have you seen improvements when you can see that as a co-location of services, especially in rural communities? I grew up in Bankfoot up in Perthyr, and looking back at what was there during my childhood, it is all gone from the police station to the nursing. To now actually co-locate in the new church centre, there is lots going on there, but it has all had to come together. I do not know if that has been a benefit for some services, but then a detriment to another. I just wonder if there is any data around how people then change their accessing of these services as well. I do not know that there is much data so far, but you do that kind of co-location and thinking about one public estate increasingly is a big… I know the centre at Backfoot that you mentioned. We have another example, again out in Easton Perthyrshire, where a community-led initiative to repurpose a local health centre using town centre regeneration money. That has just opened in the last few months. It is community-led, but the opportunity to co-locate public services under that roof is something that we are exploring. In terms of shifts in behaviour, shifts in demand and need, I am not sure that there is much evidence around that yet, although it is a very good question. Lots of local authorities distinguishing from CPP role obviously have the community campus model. We do in Perth and Kymos, and that has seen some quite significant shifts in behaviour and expectation within public services and communities about where you can create that hub model. It does not work everywhere for a variety of reasons, but the role of physical assets in communities, whether you are talking about a small community hall or a much bigger facility in a larger urban area, is really important. It is sometimes overlooked. A small addition to that. Your question touched on resourcing at a local level. One of the things that has been successful in Perth and Kymos has been that the in the main council funding has been a portion to the local action partnerships that Fiona mentioned earlier. In the main, to allow them to invest in projects that help to deliver their locality action plan. We have seen some positive results in terms of two examples. In eastern Perthshire, there was a view locally that there was an issue around the provision of youth work in youth facilities, and they used a significant amount of their budget to support additional work in that area. In the south, in the Conroshshire area, one of the issues that was highlighted was Wi-Fi access, and the local action partnership decided to use a significant amount of their money to pay for Wi-Fi installation in village halls so that there was improved coverage. I think that that has shifted the dial, but again, as Fiona alluded to the data, I do not think that we would be there, but we know in ourselves that that has made a positive difference. Now we are going to move on to our final theme, which is national and local leadership with Willie Coffey. You might have heard the previous discussion when we were talking about leadership at national and local level, and I was trying to focus in with the other panel on how local leadership works. I wonder if I could turn the question around a wee bit for yourselves and ask you, where does your local community think about the leadership that you show in the community planning partnerships that you ever asked them? I will start with Perth first, then maybe Orkney, then South Ayrshire. I am interested in examples of local leadership and how that drives the CPP process and what the community thinks of it. Do you ever ask your local community what they think of the leadership that you show in driving the CPPs that we ever asked them? I cannot say that we have ever asked that question explicitly in my time in the council, but what I can say is that there is a very strong culture within the CPP statutory partners and certainly within the local authority to be visible and present within communities. A model that we have been developing because we have the local action partnerships and have had them in place for some years is a lead officer, which may be a council officer or it may be from another CPP partner who is meant to be the go-to person within that locality for the community to pick up with in terms of troubleshooting any issues, understanding new issues or problems or challenges as they are emerging on the ground. We have alongside that, I think, through the process of developing the loypes, the community action plans, which I mentioned earlier. In fairness, it is a pretty two-way street in terms of the dialogue between public authorities and communities about the quality of local public services that are designed and delivered in their area. I think that your question is a good one. What is also important in that dialogue with communities is that it is honest, open and, perhaps most importantly, sustained over time, so that it is a process, not just an event, to reach for a cliché. That is what has credibility and integrity for communities is that they feel that the individuals may change inevitably over the long term but that the public authorities and the public services that are rooted in those communities are in it for the long term and that they have a stake in the success of that area. I hope that I will hop up to Yorkney and ask you, Anna, what does the local community there think of the engagement and leadership shown to drive the CPP process up there? It is an interesting question. It is the other way around from what we were expecting. I think that our community is probably less interested in who is sitting in the chair than in what the CPP is actually achieving. We do have strong leadership from many of the partners within the CPP. It is difficult to answer the exact question that you are posing because that is not the one that we were led to believe that we were going to get. I will come back later when we move on to the question that we are expecting. I will turn to my colleagues in South Ayrshire. Just about how do you engage with local people and what their views are of the whole leadership process that you engage with them on? Other authorities, it is not a question that we specifically asked. I think that the knowledge of what community planning is is not particularly strong in communities. For me, the key measure of how well we are doing in engaging with communities is trust. I know that that is a difficult thing to measure, but if our communities are approaching us, if they are seeing the benefits of that co-location, if they are seeing the benefits of our trauma informed practice, then the trust will continue to build. We have seen some of our more marginalised communities where that trust has gone, promises made not kept. If we work collectively with that sense of building trust, not just between the council but between all those partners involved, we can really start making that difference to communities. Once the trust is there, it is much harder to break. In terms of prevention as well, we do not want to see people in a crisis. We want to have systems that allow people to come and speak to us in accesses. Trust is an absolute key part of that. That is how I am trying to measure how well we are doing. That is a difficult thing to do, but you see it when we do that co-location is that people coming in, just to speak, people coming in to engage that maybe we would not have done in the past. Again, I think that that is not an exact measure, but it is certainly a sense that we are moving in the right direction. Thank you. The other question I have is just because I have got my Ayrshire colleagues here, but this question can probably be asked of any community with areas where multiple deprivation issues are mentioned, such as Wallace Town. Part of it is affectionately known locally as White City, as I am sure you know. A few years ago, that community wanted the demolition of its own houses and to start again. How does a community planning process engage with that kind of issue to try to turn that around? It is the same story that could be around in Scotland and other communities. How have you engaged with that community through the CPP process? To influence that outcome and to try to turn it around? We established, trying to think, a couple of years ago that there was work done with our community planning executive at the time of the community planning board and made a workshop session around Wallace Town and asking partners how we could support communities and what we could do to improve outcomes within that area. What we did was establish a Wallace Town strategic delivery partnership that supports to our community planning board. The main aim of that group was the development of a team around the community model, where that was bringing services into Wallace Town. It was a book that Kevin touched on about that co-location. Fire service, Police Scotland, NHS Health and Social Care partnership have committed to bringing staff within the area. Co-location, we have got teams going out on joint patrols, that they are doing joint visits. We have got members of the community very much engaging with officers within the area. Police are very much focusing on that wellbeing role. It is all around that link between poverty, health inequalities and those poorer outcomes. There is a lot of work that has taken place. It is very much a multi-agency project. All partners are very much equal within that process. As Kevin touched on, the food banks are now engaging with the members of the community that they would not necessarily have engaged before. What they did do early on was that it was called a street week. That is for every single door within that community. Every single door was trapped within that community. We were both involved in that process. We spoke to members of the community and we had a questionnaire. We actually asked them how they felt about living within the area. There were very, very mixed results. That feedback has gone out to the community. They are about to do that again. I think that the next couple of months they are going to go back around the doors again and speak to the community and say, what difference have you made? As part of the Wallace Town project, there have been several subgroups set up. There is a community voice group that is to encourage members of the community to come forward and participate within conversations with services and to look at re-establishing some of those local groups. There is lots of work taken place with our thriving community service around parents and family, supporting children and young people. There is work around the cleanliness of the area, so environmental hit squads are going in. The feedback that they are getting is tremendous. They are cleaning up the local area, shaping places for wellbeing. They are looking at air as an area and linking into Wallace Town and looking at the place and how the impact of improving place can have on health inequalities in those outcomes. The other group is focusing on the co-location services. It has been a big piece of work. Kevin is probably better to speak about it than me, but it is... Thank you very much. Is that set of actions driven through the CPP process? Would you say hand in heart that that community now does not think the way they did a few years ago, or have we still got a journey to travel? There is a journey to travel. It did not happen overnight, the issues in Wallace Town. I have always said to partners that this is 10 years before we can really say whether we have been successful or not, but there are lots of interim steps in between there that we need to keep an eye on. The first part of your question is it coming through community planning? Absolutely. When we went and we spoke to it, we did that street week, so about 1,000 households, we got about 450 in, so it is a pretty good sample size. We just asked them what it is like to live in Wallace Town, and what are the experiences of it. There is nothing in there that the council could address on its own, so it has absolutely got to be a community planning-led approach to that. I also suggest what I talked about earlier, so that is the data from the people living there and what their experiences of living there are right now. We also have a lot of detailed health data that shows you the outcomes of the worst in South Ayrshire, so we need to try and make sure that we are not just looking at that on the ground. How can we make things better? Strategically, how do we start focusing on public health initiatives in the area to try to tackle that longer-term sort of poor health outcomes that go along with it? So, there is a balance in that, but community planning is absolutely a place to do it. Absolutely, brilliant to hear that. Thank you so much. It is a specific and a real example, convener, about how that stuff works, not just in theory but in practice on the ground, so it is really welcome to hear those responses. Thank you very much. Thanks, Willie. That concludes our themes for today. It has been really great to get your perspectives and delve a little bit more deeply into your work in community planning partnerships. I now suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses. Thank you. On our third panel, we are joined by Dr Oliver Escobar, who is a senior lecturer in public policy at the University of Edinburgh. Mark Macathear, who today is representing the Community Planning Improvement Board, but he is also the director of strategic planning, performance and communications in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. I welcome the witnesses to the meeting. As mentioned to previous panels, we will try to direct our questions to specific witnesses where possible, but if you would like to come in, please indicate this to the clerks. Again, there is no need to turn your microphones on or off. We will do that automatically for you. We are going to start our questions with questions from Annie Wells. How can CPPs ensure that all communities, including deprived communities and marginalised communities of interest, have a say in the design, delivery and evaluation of local services? I think that I will go to work first on that one. There are a number of, I suppose, areas where CPPs and partners generally work in those areas. You will know from some of your previous sessions, I just heard the tail end of your discussions there with Perth and Kinross, Orkney and Ayrshire, South Ayrshire, I believe. As partners, they do a lot of local work. That will range from formal surveys that we will undertake within localities across the council area as a whole, the CPP area as a whole, where they will routinely ask a variety of questions that then help to shape priorities for the area. More importantly, it is, if you like, the outreach work that takes place in communities themselves. That is where we have all got officers embedded within those communities as part of their day-to-day work, as well as when they are working under the CPP guys. I heard a brief discussion about Wallastown. There was reference to that in South Ayrshire. For example, as fire and rescue service, we have got a permanent member of staff based in Wallastown, and they do that walk the beat with their partners, constantly engaging with the community on things that are directly related to the CPP, but very often just helping out where they can. That is to build a relationship that then brings that intelligence back into the CPP and for us back up to the national level within fire and rescue Scotland. There is a range of different approaches that you see across the country, but I think that it is that engagement at the local level, that discussion with the community that gives you the best insight and intelligence into what really matters to a community and what it is that we then start to think about in terms of how we address the issues and challenges that they have got. I do not know if you have got anything that you would like to add. Yeah, thanks for having me. I think the short answer is by going back to the original purpose of community planning, which was always to find a working combination of partnership at the strategic level and community grassroots engagement. Some places have done that better than others, and we have been working at this for 40 years. Sometimes we think community planning is more recent, but the pilots were in the 90s, so we are close to the 40-year anniversary of the pilots. Now, what does that mean on the ground? Some community planning partnerships do this already quite well, but a lot of them rely on intermediaries, and that means that some communities of interest, some communities of play, some communities of practice don't see themselves represented, because they might not feel that existing associations and groups represent them. So, we need more opportunities for direct engagement, and some of the examples are participatory budgeting, and some community planning partnerships are supporting that, better digital infrastructure, and that's now accelerating as a consequence of the pandemic, and then I think there is a lot still to be done to include, to work better with community anchor organizations, because at the moment many CPPs only have community councils and TSIs represented. I think there is a role given how important community anchor organizations, such as community development trusts, housing associations, community ownership initiatives and so on, have become, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, and right now, dealing with the cost of living crisis, community anchor organizations need a stronger seat, and that would increase the capacity of CPPs to act, because community anchor organizations have strong networks that reach deep into communities. So, there's a lot to be done, but I think we need to retain the original purpose. Thank you, that's really interesting. 40 years, whoever you've thought of. My second question is that we've actually heard that there are a few community participation specialists left in local authorities, and that's leaving a gap, obviously, in expertise. Do community participation professionals have the resources they need to build the capacity and support in community participation? So, we've sort of heard that there's a lack of, in order to achieve what users said in the first one. I'll maybe come in on that first, I think, for all public service partners. I'll also include the third sector as well as part of this. The recruitment and retention of staff is a massive challenge for all of us in all sectors. I think, particularly when you're talking about people with specialist skillsets, which are clearly for community engagement purposes, it's a very skilled area of work. So, we've all got that challenge across the board. If you look at CPPs, if you look at local authorities, yes, it is a challenge. Some are better provided than others, but what we do across the sector and we do well is we share insight and intelligence and learning and understanding about what you can do to engage better with communities. So, the community planning networks manager brings together the 32 network managers and people from across the sector. There's a lot of exchange and learning is through that, but how can we, therefore, when we don't have that skill, learn from your insight, where your CPP does have that skill, perhaps more than me? So, there's a lot of work going on that way, but as I say, I'll come back to that. We also have staff on the ground in many of these communities, and therefore we're using the insight that you'll gain from that. That's not a substitute for the specialist skills where you want more strategically organised conversations and engagements with communities, but that gives us, again, another avenue into those communities. If I can maybe pick up on something that Oliver was talking about earlier on here, because I think it also comes into this, we tend to talk about community and geographical terms. It's a place, and it is. I think the evidence that we've built up over the last 10 years tells us why the place focus should be critically important, but let's not forget that there are communities of interest and communities of identity, and they can be much more challenging to engage with, because they are not as geographically concentrated. It's harder to go in shop doors, as we were hearing from the South Ayrshire example earlier, when you've got a dispersed community, perhaps across the country, and finding means to engage with them. To get their voice heard is a challenge, and I think that's where some of those technical skill sets become more of an issue for us, because they have a harder group to reach. That's why I end up with the intermediaries, even at times finding the intermediary channels to have conversations can prove to be difficult. Yes, it's a challenge, but we do, I think, try and work across the sector to support one another and share the learning and insight and the capacity that we do have, but could we do with more? Yes, but that's probably a common refrain across every single public service and every single conversation that we've maybe wished to have right now. Yes, thank you very much for that. Yes, if I may. This is one of my favourite topics, so I'll try to really keep it short. We did a lot of research on this, and we've been doing research with committee planning workers, both officers as well as managers and people working in between, and trying to track over time their situation, the challenges they face, and so on. I think the first is to appreciate this is a workforce that is often invisible, because everyone knows what a housing officer does, or what a transport coordinator does, but when you tell someone that you're a community planning official, and when something is invisible, it's really difficult to value what they do, and what they do is that working between the broker and connecting across sectors, connecting between institutions and communities, which is often invisible work. And again, if it's not visible, it's often not valued. So we're having in Scotland this paradox over the last 10 years where we are really rich in community empowerment narrative, and relatively poor in capacity to implement the aspirations of the Community Empowerment Act and other legislation. What does that mean? Well, that means that community learning and development departments have been cut over the last 10 years, more than in the previous 20. A lot of the capacity that has been built in the early 2000s has been dismantled. There's a real knock-on effect of public spending cuts, because the first thing that tends to go is the community workforce, and so there's a real issue with that. If we are to really live up to the aspirations of the Community Empowerment Act of the Local Governance Review of the Community Wealth Building agenda of the planning framework, all these things that have at their heart community empowerment, then we need to look at the community workforce. And the final point I'll make, although we can get a little bit deeper into this. In many ways, what has happened is that instead of building a community planning workforce, people have been pulled in from other sections of councils. It's mainly a council-based workforce. Partners have not really been able to dedicate as much stuff as many they would like. So what that means is that essentially instead of increasing capacity, we just shifted capacity across departments, and then that makes it really hard, also bearing in mind that these workers do not have formal power. They depend on diplomatic skills and soft power to get things done, which is the hardest thing, not just within a local authority area or local authority or council, but also across sectors. And then you find yourself being an official who has no formal power, trying to negotiate very complex issues with chief execs and very senior officials in public institutions. And that's, yeah, it's a really challenging task, and the bar now is incredible. Thank you very much, and thank you, convener. I'm done with just me, thank you. Thanks, Annie, and that's a very interesting response there. We're now going to move on to questions on community empowerment, and those are being led by Mark Griffin, who's joining us online. I'll come to Mark first, because it is the improvement board that said councils seem to be focused on consultation and engagement, but not necessarily empowering communities to make decisions. I wonder if you could maybe set out to committee what you think the difference between consultation and engagement is with empowering empowerment, and if you've got any examples across the country of what genuine empowerment looks like. In terms of your definition, consultation is let's have a conversation but I'll make a decision, and I'll use your insight and intelligence to help inform the decision and hope that I get that decision right. Empowerment is genuinely about what it says in the tin, empowering people, giving them more choice, more control over decisions that affect them, their family, their community. It's allowing them to set the agenda about what the issues are for the public services and their locality, their community, and I think it's a spectrum that we've therefore got across the country, so I don't think it's either or, it's both. If I look back over the time that I've certainly sat with the community planning improvement board, in terms of the journey that we're on, we'd say it's improving. It's not perfect, it's not there yet, all of us, I think, set out some of the issues and challenges that we all face, but we are getting better at it. I don't think you could speak to a CPP where they will not sit and genuinely say they wish to be more empowering with and off communities. It runs through community planning, but it's a challenge, and there's no doubt about it. Some of the issues that Oliver talked about, we're doing this against a constrained resource base, and therefore there are priorities that have to be set, and that's just a reality that we all have to wrestle with every single day. But there are also challenges within communities themselves in terms of their own capability, capacity to work in that empowered fashion. I think that the pandemic taught us a good lesson. We saw some communities step up at pace to be able to work with CPP partners to address the issues around the pandemic, and that was a fantastic resource that allowed us to get into households and communities to access what people needed and get things to them and so on and so forth. Other communities struggled, they didn't have that capability capacity, so building that capability with communities to work in that fashion with you, it sounds as if I'm making an excuse here, I don't mean it to be that way. We need to have empowered individuals, we need to help people to become empowered in order to work in the ways in which empowerment obliges us to do, so there's a lot of challenges in there, different communities will get different needs, different interests, the issues we're dealing with are highly complex, and let's be honest, not everyone wants to be engaged in that kind of a conversation. For want of a better expression, sometimes we outsource these decisions and these discussions and these complexities to politicians. That's why we elect politicians to make those choices and decisions on our behalf as a community, so there's a whole, I think, complex set of issues that sit within that, but again, I'll come back to it across the piece. I think that journey towards empowerment is one that we're on, but there's still much more that we need to do in order to make it work truly for us, so we're getting there, but we're certainly not there yet. Thanks, Mark. Paul, about do you want to add anything? Yeah, if I may. On the difference, Mark got it right, I mean it's about the level of power sharing, and there are different degrees from consulting, to involving, to delegating, and different circumstances and contexts will dictate what's decidable. And in our research, we do see that some CPPs are quite good at this, but it's very difficult to make a general statement about the quality of community engagement and community empowerment in the community planning world because the community planning world is not homogeneous. Even a single CPP is not a thing, it's a network of networks. What you have is all these multiple layers, different governance levels, forums that are really close to communities, thematic forums that sit somewhere in between a local community and strategic decision making space, so these are super complex networks, and we should remember, sometimes when people think, could we do better than having CPPs? You know, maybe, but if we didn't have them, I think we'll have to invent them because we need to remember where we were before CPPs, where we had hundreds and hundreds of partnerships that now have been kind of coordinated under the banner of CPPs that mirror the local authority area boundaries. So that's where we were, so we arrived at CPPs already trying to coordinate a bit better and create a space that unified a very dispersed landscape of partnerships. So when you're dealing with all that complex network of networks and you have all these different levels and policy areas, levels of governance, then community engagement quality is going to be patchy because in some areas on some particular issues on, you know, some alcohol and addiction forums are excellent, some work with children and young people is excellent, some work on health on mental health is excellent. So you will find examples almost in every CPP, good examples of some community engagement, but never across the board because there are multiple spaces and for that you would need far more investment in the community workforce. And a final point on this, precisely because CPP is just connecting to the point that Mark made about the pandemic recovery and now cost of living crisis, you know, if CPPs were better supported and put in the place they need to be put, and I can explain what I mean by that, essentially I mean seeing a sub primary decision making and coordination arena rather than a secondary space. A lot of people involved in CPPs see that as the secondary space. The real business happens in bilateral meetings between the bigger players, that kind of, so unless CPPs are seeing as the place where business is done, then it's really difficult to create the incentives for people to collaborate meaningfully and to focus on achieving outcomes. But if we had a fully functional system of community planning partnerships, all the sudden we have a very decentralized system of governance that can really help in situations like the pandemic, with the climate crisis, with the cost of living crisis, and it's quite telling that the Scottish Government hasn't relied more on CPPs in post pandemic recovery. They don't see them as the primary spaces and you can see this in the call for public views that was there in the report. I think that that's, you know, we really need to get back to a place where if we think that CPPs are the place to articulate local governance across sectors and with communities, then they should be given that primary spot rather than being a secondary space so that then people are not quite sure if they should invest their time and money in that space. Can I have a come back in on that, CPP? Just to build briefly on what Oliver said there, I think that as an arena community planning is a fantastic co-ordination device. Again, we saw a lot of evidence through the pandemic and onwards about how it helps to bring partners together to co-ordinate activities at a local level on the ground. The real challenge, though, remains around governance, but they are not the primary governors of public services within all accountability. So again, from my own organisational perspective, we operate to a national fire and rescue framework for Scotland that sets out Scottish governance priorities and there are aversions of that to run through the whole public sector, so you get different lines of accountability across public services and community planning is not necessarily an accountability body in the same sense as I report through the board to the Minister for Community Safety. There are differences in governance that cut through this as well that create sets of issues and challenges. Oliver has got a view, should we make it the primary governance arena perhaps for public services, we could do, but it is not at the moment and that is where we are. Within those system constraints, I think that you still see lots of real progress on the ground in terms of what community planning can do, bring people together and certainly, if you go below the level of the boards down into the more functional partnerships that are there, then, if you like the day-to-day work of the CPP, you will see strength and operational partnership working, again, working with communities in a more empowered fashion than perhaps you might imagine if you only look at the CPP board at that kind of strategic level. It is a complex picture, lots of issues in there and governance is certainly one of the challenges that we face. Mark Griffin, do you have another question? I did, convener, but, helpfully, Mark and Oliver have both covered my second question and the extensive answer, so thanks for that. That was very helpful, thank you. We are now going to move on to our third theme, which is the role of the third sector in community bodies with Paul McCann. Morning, Mark and Oliver. I think that we have both engaged with each other in a number of years over in East Lothian and so on, so good to see you both. A couple of questions. One was, Mark, probably to yourself first of all, was talking about you talked about public sectors, I suppose, interpretation of community planning. One of the key things I think for me was talking about what is the difference between public bodies and that of community bodies, and by that I am talking about development trusts, housing associations and so on. What is their interpretation of that? Is there a disparity? For example, in that regard, could that be strengthened at community level organisation? Are there good examples at the moment that you could almost try and highlight to say, this model is working in certain parts of the partner? I will come across to Oliver with the same question, but Mark, just building on your last answer there. I suppose when you start to think about who is represented, which bodies are represented within community planning, you start with the statutory partners that are set out in the act, who should be around the table, and that very much drives things across most CPPs. You think that those other organisations are invited, if you like, to be part of the CPP, but again I will say, if you go below the level of the boards into functional partnerships, community safety, drug and alcohol partnerships, you tend to see more of those anchor organisations functioning at that level, and they are very much valuable, I think, at that level of the organisation. I suppose the challenge ultimately at the strategic level of this is equilibrium, what is the perfect size to have a CPP board? What organisations should be there so that we could have a cast of thousands and then try to make a decision across the cast of thousands when the way causes even more challenges than we have at the present moment in time? I do not think that there is a right or wrong answer, but I certainly think that if you look across the country, CPPs do reach out, they are not close shops in that sense, they try to engage with communities directly and with those intermediate bodies that Oliver described them. I mean, some good examples going on in Dundee at the moment around about the work they are doing to build a food strategy across the city. It is building on what they did through the pandemic period and it is very much that co-production with communities and community bodies to build that. Rent for sure is another area, there is a lot of really good work going on there post-pandemic where they are looking at the cost of living crisis, what does it mean in terms of poverty and inequality? It is at the thematic level that you will see much of those community organisations coming together to be part of the decision making, which is then part of community planning itself. I do not think that you need to go far to find really strong examples, but do they all sit at the top table? No, they do not. Do they need to? I am not convinced that they do. Is it that functional level if they are engaged, if they are part, if they can influence and make change happen, that is where the value comes from having them within community planning? That is really helpful. Oliver, just on the same point. It is interesting because a couple of years ago, just before the pandemic, we had a delegation of European partners from other countries, from Denmark, from Portugal, from Poland, from Netherlands, and we were all interested in local governance and how these things are arranged. So they came over to Glasgow and we had a peer learning exchange programme. One of the things that was quite striking is, I mean, they really liked the notion of a CPP, a place where you bring all these sectors together, where there is representation for different sectors and communities, but then they started to ask questions like, OK, so what is the budget of a CPP? You are telling us that they cover everything, from transport to environment to housing. You name it. What budget do you have? Well, they don't quite have a budget. In some places, they managed to pull some budgets together to do specific things and projects, but we don't think of them as budget holders, and therefore they don't have the capacity to invest in certain things or to bring in, or to support their sector interfaces and some of the things that they could do together. You depend on the goodwill of different organisations pulling together budgets for the specific projects rather than having capacity to be proactive. And then they would ask, and who are they accountable to? Well, each member, there has an accountability line to a different body. Some of them are accountable to a minister, some of them are locally accountable or to the electorate. So, again, the more you begin to unpick it, you see how unusual this type of governance construct that we've built here is. That doesn't mean, I do think, I agree with Mark, they have value, and as I said, if they didn't exist, we'll be creating something similar. But we need to realise that we've put CPPs in a position where they don't have the formal power to do the things they want to do. And that doesn't depend just on CPPs, which is why it's so good that this inquiry is happening. We really need to take stock of these things, but they need to be placed in the context of local governance. On the context of the local governance review or the much needed reform of community councils in the context of thinking how health and social care integration partnerships are working or are in working in some places, at least. And once you begin to look across the board, you will begin to see that CPPs will only work better, and some of them work quite well, but will only work better and more coherently if the landscape of local governance is reformed more substantially. And that is difficult because, as we all know here, it touches on so many issues that are politically difficult. But we do have still an ongoing local governance review that hopefully is going to now accelerate and land, and there are other things that are happening. And I think we need to take that wholesale picture because CPPs are only going to be as good as the local governance context in which they try to operate. I'm going to only ask one question that's on the list, so actually just coming off the back of that, Oliver. I'm really interested to hear you talking about the CPPs needing to be seen as that place where business is being done, as you've extrapolated on there. I do wonder the committee is going to be doing, we've got this community wealth building build that's going to be coming. The committee is going to be taking evidence on that and doing work on it. And it started to, as we've been doing this work, it feels like that's the big dot to join, is if we get CPPs right, is that the place that we need to be doing the community wealth building? And I see you nodding, so I'd love to hear you open up on that a little bit. Absolutely, I think it's an incredible opportunity to join the dots, because we know that CPPs work best when they have a sharp purpose, or mission to use the word of the day, Mariano Mazzucato's approach, having a clear mission. So the best CPPs I've seen at work are when they have a very clear purpose. Some years ago, in Woodworks Scotland, we were doing research and following how CPPs were helping with the refugees and asylum crisis and rehousing lots of people, CPPs in the area mobilized, clear shared purpose. Again, around COVID, those that managed to pull together did incredible work, coordinating, doing things, again, strong shared purpose. Community wealth building could be part of that shared purpose and shared mechanism. But we made the same case for participatory budgeting, which could have been a stronger catalyst for CPPs to fall into place and really connect the strategic and the grassroots and bring communities and institutions together with a shared purpose. So I think it's going to be a really good opportunity. In many ways, I just hope that my fear, I suppose, so let me put it this way. My worry is that, as it happened with the Community Empowerment Act, which took three years to develop and what we had at the beginning was very different from what then came to Parliament towards the end of those three years, I'm worried about the silo thinking that might be happening because community wealth building to work well has to go across all the pillars. At the moment, I see a lot of emphasis on the role of the public sector. I don't see enough on the community investment side of things and the community economy side of things. So I think this is going to be an opportunity to connect the dots. At the end of the final point I'll make on this. We know the research is actually quite clear on this, not just in Scotland. This is from international evidence. The one single factor that makes partnerships work is a sense of interdependence. Interdependence is the single most important factor. Without that, partnerships cannot work. So unless people around the table, virtual or physical or around the partnership board or the thematic groups, unless they feel that they cannot accomplish what they need to accomplish, unless they collaborate with the others around the table, then there's no incentive. There's no incentive to pull budgets, to change things, to go over silos. I could give examples of how you get beyond that because we've seen it, but it's pockets rather than across the board. So a sense of interdependence and something like the committee wealth building agenda can hopefully create a sense of interdependence towards a better community-based economy. Thanks very much for that. In a way, maybe you're starting to touch on my next question, which is a bit more on the ground and that's around the local outcome improvement plan, so a tool for that kind of shared purpose and so on and so forth. We heard from witnesses last week and actually even this week that the loypes are like the foundation stone and they're effective if they have a clear set of outcomes and a good data set that allows the measurement of those outcomes. Why doesn't this always happen, Mark? I'll have the first go at any of that question. I think there's a range of issues. Let's also be mindful of the context that we've been operating on, so if you take from the progress of the legislation through Parliament to when we hit the pandemic gap of roughly three years or so, we were starting to make, I think, real good progress with loypes, people understanding what it was that they needed to be doing on behalf of their community. The evidence base was building up. There was a strong focus within the loypes at that stage of inequality and how do we address the underpinning issues that drive inequality, which in turn drives much of the demand across statutory voluntary and other sectors within a community. Then we hit a pandemic and I think one of the things that the pandemic exposed way beyond the data itself was the level of inequality in Scotland. There was hidden inequality within the statistics. I think the pandemic truly exposed just how fragile some of our communities were. So there's a reprioritisation that's required at that stage because suddenly you find there are issues where the issues didn't exist before because the evidence base didn't tell us that that issue existed. Then that's followed by a cost of living to a crisis, where again the pressures within communities is significant. Therefore for partners across CPPs responding to that is absolutely critical. Do you always in that sense have time to develop the well-polished loype? No, they don't. That's not to say they're not making issues that you would expect to see in the loype, so in some cases I think the documentation will have to catch up with the practice that's on the ground at the moment across CPPs. But that sense of common purpose, going back to the points that Oliver was making there, that mission, I think you see strong evidence across the CPPs in Scotland that they understand that they have to work together in order to address some of these issues. Inequality drives issues in demand in terms of health, but talk to health colleagues and they'll tell you they know what causes that are issues that lie within communities themselves. They are not divorced from the pressures on a day-to-day basis across a community. So how do they work with councils? How do they work with housing associations as a key part of their agenda? So I think you're seeing a common purpose across CPPs. Has it always translated into well-polished documents? No, it's not. But I think the evidence still points us towards there's some really strong practice across community planning in Scotland in every locality and they have all got their own stories to tell around about that. Someone just better at writing it up than others is why with themself. I think that's a very good point, that whole piece around. Some are good at doing it and then the writing up is another piece of work that maybe there isn't capacity because the most important thing is to actually deliver the service and meet the needs. I'm going to move on to the next theme, which is measuring impact and Marie McNair has got some questions on that. Thank you, convener, and good afternoon panel. Thank you for your time. What evidence is there that community planning efforts are being focused on in most disadvantaged communities? Is there any evidence of partnerships using improvement services, community planning outcomes profiles to target interventions and budgets? I'll pop that to Mark first. I did specifically ask the community improvement services about how they track the usage of the data in the portal and the answer is no, but certainly what I've done on the community planning improvement board, I see evidence of it because I speak to people and through the various other partners in the body we talk about these issues. We do all make common use of some of that data. My own organisation uses some of that data. We also use data that's provided through Public Health Scotland increasingly, so we are all aware I think of the rich sources of data that are out there, but you also have issues around sometimes the data doesn't fit exactly with the needs of your organisation, because it's fairly generic information in terms of profiling communities and so forth, and sometimes it doesn't get to the level of granularity you need either, so there are still challenges there about how do we join up our data sets to make them more insightful and powerful going forward? How do we also make better use of big data so it's not public service data that can tell us what's going on in communities? Again, during the pandemic, we saw some really powerful usage of that type of data to tell us what was going on through looking at travelled information that we could source through Google, so there's more to be done in terms of using it, but certainly if I go back to my time with community planning, I was around when the first single outcome agreements were first pulled together, and if I compare where we were then to where we are now, there's a much stronger use of data and evidence to help paint a picture and tell us what the priorities are. It's used, I think, more about trying to define interventions rather than budgets, and again for good reasons. Most organisations, public and private, and certainly third sector organisations, are budgets by people in terms of employment. 82 per cent of my organisation's budget goes in staff, so I don't have much free budget to then put on the table for communities planning to say let's go and spend it over there. What we do have are staff that we can deploy and work in partnership with other staff from other bodies to say right let's go and work in Wallis Town or wherever the case may be, and that tends to where the evidence is used. It's more to set what we're going to do with the resources that we have in order to help address these issues within communities rather than say right let's free up some budget and go and spend it in Wallis Town because most of us don't have free budget in that sense to spend, but there's certainly a good use of the evidence, but I think it's one of the things that the improvement service is only going to pick up about how do they begin to track better the usage of the data that they are using, but certainly across the sector you see people using it and talking about it, and increasingly so again with Public Health Scotland data that's becoming available as we go. Thanks to that mark, Oliver. Do you want to come in? Yeah, if I may. This was one of the items that we investigated through. We did two waves of surveys with community planning officials across Scotland, and one of the things we were tracking was the use of evidence, and we saw across those two waves of the survey that people do utilize evidence to understand better local challenges, areas of deprivation, local assets as well, the more positive side, so we saw improvement, but it comes back to that issue of a workforce that is under tremendous pressure. Let's remember, in some CPPs, some CPPs have large teams, Glasgow has a relatively large, but many CPPs only have a couple of people or one and a half, I saw once years ago that might no longer be the case, a CPP that has half a person working for it, so now if you think about that, if then if you need to connect people across sectors, hold the space of the partnership, look at evidence and mobilize evidence to get things going, organize community engagement processes, I mean it's just, you can see what I'm going with this, so the use of evidence suffers from the shortages of the workforce, and that of course connects to a bigger issue about the public sector workforce, not just in Scotland but in the UK, and we can't get away with that, I mean without thinking about what's happened to the public services workforce over the last 10 years because it has a ripple effect on this, and the second point I would make, this also applies by the way at researchers based within councils and based within some of the other partners, and to what extent CPPs can tap into existing resource, in some places they are really good at working across the council or bringing intelligence from fire employees or from NHS, but not all of them because not everywhere there is an ethos of sharing data across organizations, that's still an issue as well, and sometimes the data is not, it can give you, you know sometimes the data is aggregated about an entire area rather than a specific neighborhood or community, and that's another challenge, which again the improvement services has been trying to address that, but it's challenging, although Scotland has struggled to measure these things for CPPs because of the same issues, difficult to get granular unless you invest in a research agenda, and if you invest in that then you're pulling the money away from the actual implementation of all the projects that CPPs try to develop. And the final point I would make on this, you know, what we saw in the service is that there was a clear focus of using evidence that was about disadvantaged communities, but we got a wasp in the building, isn't it? Okay, so when we asked specifically what do you use evidence for, they tended to say, well particularly to understand the challenges and the inequalities that our communities are trying to cope with, but then, and this is the other challenge, is that you have the loyps, right, and those tend to look quite good, I mean I had the students a years ago looking at them and on paper they look quite good, and some CPPs then have a traffic light system, used to see how progress is going, all of that, then locality plans, they tend to look okay, but then in parallel to that you have the place plans, then you have local plans developed by community groups, by community councils, by sometimes by community anchor organizations, so in the end what do you measure and how do you cope to evaluate that variety, right, and loyps are supposed to unify all of that and to create an umbrella where all these things can fit in, and that's not quite happening, I don't think. In some places it might be happening, but not across the board, there's still a lot of co-ordinating, and accepting that these plans don't have to come from public authorities, they can also start from communities themselves who bring plans to the table and then the CPP could be a channel to them, so that there is less duplication and that leadership is shared between the community sector and the public sector. Thank you. My last question of the committee heard last week about the weaknesses you already mentioned in data available in rural setting, as well as the lack of robust data on ethnicity and other equality characteristics. Do you have any views on what needs to be done to improve that? Again, there's a couple of things we can look at. Within organisations, within partnerships, we all have a host of administrative data, and I think how do we improve data collection at rural areas in relation to issues of ethnicity and the equality characteristics more generally of the people who use our services? There's much more that we need to do. I think that more positively, though, recently we've set up Research Data Scotland. Roger Halladay, former chief statistician now leads that organisation, and they're charged with working with public and other bodies about how we get more value out of all of that data that we collect. How can we perhaps take our data, cleanse it, so that when all of us write, when we talk about an area, we are all talking about the same area, the same community, and we'll get better understanding of that community as a consequence. Research Data Scotland's got a big task ahead of itself in order to make better use of that data to give us the insights that joining up could bring. I certainly also know that the chief statistician has got a strong commitment to using the collective resources that sit within Scottish Government to help support local partnerships, because they are a centre of excellence that most of us across the public sector cannot afford just because of the scale of requirements that we all have. There's partnership work that goes on in the data side of things that will give us more going forward. However, the challenges are significant. Not only does data not align, systems sometimes don't talk to one another, and trying to get to even a point of convergence across different partners where our systems might well be the right systems going forward is difficult. I might have a contractor with a contract that's got another five years to run, Oliver may have a contract with someone that's got two years to run, so we're never ever going to be in sync at a point to say we both want to get into this system. There's a plethora of day-to-day operational issues that sit behind all of this as well, but don't make it easy. Nobody ever set out to design the system that we have when it comes to data management and data analysis in Scotland, and they're in lives part of the problem. There is no design. Getting ourselves out of the morass that we're in on that is a complicated set of issues, and it's not something that's going to be easy or quick to do, but I think that the digital strategies that are emerging give again a bit of hope for that, to say, right, at least let's start a process of convergence so that we are all in the same journey and then we can start to make better use of the information and data that we do have. So it sounds like a set of excuses I don't mean it to be. It is just difficult and complicated because of the inheritance around data and technology that we're all working with at the present moment in time. Thank you Mark briefly. Oliver, are you okay with that just in the interest of time? Yeah, sure. From the university-based research on this area, it's actually very limited, which is really striking. I've been in Scotland for 17 years. This is the only country I know, and I do work in other countries as well, where attention to local government and local governance is so scarce. It has a lot to do with seeing local government as again a secondary. It's not, you know, the real business happens at national level. That's the mentality and a lack of valuing how local government is an absolute pillar of democracy, of public services, of everything else. And because of that, there's a ripple effect into the way we channel research funding to try and understand these issues better. And there are a few excellent researchers across Scotland looking at these issues, but there's not a critical mass where we can tap into that and connect it to the work of the improvement service of the Scotland and others to try and make the most of it. And for me, that has a lot to do with the undervaluing of the role of local government here. I come originally from Galicia in Spain. Local government and national government have parity in the constitution. That means sometimes they can be at logger heads. That's the case. That's true. But it's also, you know, a counter power, and they need to negotiate and work much more closely together, rather than in a top-down hierarchical way, whereas here sometimes local government is seeing us a delivery arm of the national state. I'm being a physician with that. But I'm trying to be a bit provocative because I just think local government is not giving the legitimate place it has. And with that comes a lack of attention, resource, investment, and so on. And just on the data on the qualities and race, for me, that's a knock-on effect. If you're having to choose whether you put limited research funding, sometimes it's not going precisely where it should go because it doesn't become a priority for a lot of bodies. And in the end, there are ways of overcoming this, and it has a lot to do with the sharing of data, how do you overcome silos. And we have examples, we mapped some of these examples in our work years ago, where you persuade and create a situation where partners in a CPP let go of the boundaries and open up data to be shared. But that has a lot to do with the problem of problem ownership. And I don't want to get to academic on this, but there is this mentality that certain services and certain institutions own certain problems, right? And with that comes a lack of sharing budgets because that's an issue that we are supposed to tackle, and therefore the budget belongs to us. Now let me give you a specific example, and I'll finish on this. In Glasgow, some time ago, we have reports on this, so I won't give a lot of details, but there was something called operation modulus, which was led by the fire service. It was to deal with an issue of, there were a group of young people who were getting themselves into a lot of trouble in a particular area of the city, right? Social workers were not really managing to act, the police was struggling to act, other partners were struggling to act. What it took to act was to bringing a partner, which in theory was not directly involved in that kind of problem ownership of that issue, and created a space where these young people started to get apprenticeships, a program of two years working closely with them, and it reduced all kinds of offending, et cetera, considerably. It was a small group, but it shows what happens when partners across the board don't think, is that problem mine, or yours? This is our problem, and therefore we're going to share the resources, and we're going to tackle it in ways that might seem unusual, and with that comes sharing budgets and letting go of the silo thinking, and that to me needs to come from an authorizing environment created at the national level and through the kind of inquiry you're doing here. We have a theme on the culture of public bodies, but you've kind of touched on those areas, so we're going to actually move on to the next theme, which is national and local leadership, and that's going to be led by Willie Coffey. Thanks very much, convener. I wonder if I could ask you, Oliver, you mentioned silos a couple of times in the discussion a moment ago, and last week our colleagues from Audit Scotland who came here said that CPP leadership should leave at the door their silos, egos and logos. Could you offer the committee a few comments on that from your perspective, and perhaps Mark, could you offer some views as well on that? The research we've done surveys and things like that, but I've also spent a lot of my time over the last 14 years shadowing committee planning officials and observing committee planning boards, and some of them work very well, and some of them are rubber stamping places where not a lot happens. So it's really, depending on, I don't want to name names, but there is research out there that shows the ones that are really trying to be a genuine space, and the ones that are spaces for the kind of posturing that you are alluding to. Sometimes that comes down to the culture of different organisations around the table, to the style of leadership, so it does get a bit personal. It makes a huge difference if you are a traditional authoritative leader or a more kind of facilitative leader, a leader that is less about command and control, and is more about facilitation, mediation, collaboration. That makes a huge difference, but then that's at the personal level. Then at the organisational level, sometimes people sit around those tables without being empowered by their own organisation to go there and get things going and happening in that space. They are there just to carry messages in between the organisation and the CPP. So I think there's a real issue about asking, asking the NHS and some others as well, how seriously they take CPPs and whether they can leave the logos and the egos and all of that at the door, and some of them do by the way. It's just, it really depends on the people and the culture of the local authority. Who decides who the leaders are, are they appointed from the top or do they emerge from the local people? Who empowers the leaders? Yeah, I mean, I'll have a quick go on them. I'll hand over to Mark, but I mean, there's the statutory members and those are, you know, so you will have a typical CPP board, we'll have your leader of the council. In some places now we also see opposition councillors, you will have the chief exec of the TSI, you will have, in some cases, you will have a community councillor where there's a federation in the local authority area, and then you will have kind of senior people from different organisations across business, across different sectors. So those are statutory, but in some of the best CPPs, then there are also leaders that are brought in from the community sector and the third sector, and we've seen some CPPs over the years really make a space for that, but that's a mixed blessing, because if you're from a community anchor organisation or a network of third sector organisations, you've got to really be careful. Do I put my time into a board where I might not get much done, or do I put it in other kinds of spaces, which comes back to this thing? If the CPP is the place where a lot of business, not all, but a lot of business actually happens, then that gives an incentive for that space to become more inclusive, because people will be able to invest their time there. Mark. Yeah, if I can just touch on a couple of things, I suppose the question is worth asking as well, why do we get silos? Because the thought that Scotland's observation is right that we should be leaving our silos, logos and egos at the door, then what drives us in the first place? Across Scotland as a whole, across the UK as a whole, we remain a very centralized political system, and that still sits at the core of a lot of it. There have been ongoing tensions over the decades, not just recently around community planning, but you could go right back to the reform of local government in the 60s and 70s between do you create integrationist models for public service delivery versus sectoral models, and we can come back and forward over time on that, and that's an ongoing challenge. Community planning clearly is an integration model, but it is not a homogenous model across the whole public sector in terms of policy-making in Scotland. That remains a key driver for many of the public bodies, the partners that you talk about. We still exist within a silo that ultimately is driven by a policy system that is linked into government, to a particular cabinet secretary, and that's the tramline that you're set upon as a body, and at the same time you're asked to go and integrate and work in partnership with others. The system remains fragmented, but I still think that there's a lot of strong evidence that says that despite the system being still fragmented, there is a lot of strong local partnership working taking place. There is a strong drive to integrate and share resources locally, so we sometimes have to work around the system rather than redraw the system itself, because the system again is highly complicated. There are issues of governance and accountability that cut through all of that. Not all of that is in our gift at a community planning level. A lot of that still sits within Parliament, it sits within government, and there are big questions and choices about what kind of public service system do we wish to have in Scotland. If we could get some clarity and resolve some of the issues, then that might then help break down some of the silos that you see or audit Scotland certainly see when they're looking at CPPs, so it's not all CPPs fault in that sense. Okay, right. Thank you very much for that. Thank you both. Thanks, Willie. I'm just actually going to continue on that national and local leadership theme, because we've got a few more minutes, but we've got five minutes, so I hope you can work with me on that big topic. I'm interested here if there's sufficient leadership and support at a national level to support community planning. What more can be done at the local level to ensure leadership is sufficient to meet the requirements of the 2015 act? For example, what's the role of the local councillors? If I may be kick off on a couple of things. In the national level, there's been a lot of work done, a lot of ongoing work done around collaborative forms of leadership, so you've got, for example, the Scottish Leaders Forum, which brings together representation across the whole public service system in Scotland at a strategic senior level, and within that we have set up various working arrangements where we've got issues that we go and work almost on a kind of learning basis. Let's go and tackle a wicked issue and all our work together as a group to do so. Also to support the work through SLF, there's a programme that's under way at the moment supported by the Hunter Foundation and the Scottish Government. It's a Columba 1400 programme, I've been on it myself, and again it's a very different form of leadership development, and again it's very much based on bringing people together to talk about common issues and problems, and the intention of that is you use those types of interventions to break down barriers that then hopefully break down the barriers back in the workplace. So there's work on going at that level. At local level, a lot of it comes down to resources and priorities, and in difficult times these are the things as Oliver noted earlier on, learning and development budgets tend to be one of the first things to go, so finding the capacity and the resource at a point in time when the budget is under pressure remains a real challenge for local partners and individual partners within that, but what we then typically do is we don't do the leadership development, we try and get people together to work together locally to compensate for some of that, so I don't think we're doing enough at that level and I think we could do more, but it's always coming down to who pays for it, because that's a big cost. Thanks Mark, Oliver. Great, I'll try to be brief. I think I'm living up to the academic stereotype of talking too much, so apologies for that. Two quick points. So community planning, in terms of national attention and attention by the Scottish Government and attention by national bodies, community planning is not the kind of thing where people are prepared to spend political capital. In the same way that we haven't reformed community councils for 50 years because people are not prepared to spend political capital on these very difficult issues, and then they have a ripple effect in the quality for local governance and what CPPs and other bodies can achieve, so I think there is a need, it's not the kind of thing that if you're a minister you're going to get a lot of kudos for getting community planning reform going well. The closest we got to that was when it was part of the Christie Commission agenda and we spent 10 years trying to, you know, as part of that, so I think there is still an investment of political capital, the hard yards of investing, knowing that it's not the kind of issue that is going to give you political kudos and that's not easy. And the second point I'll make, and this is my final point, for me working with local leaders in communities, community leaders as well as formal leaders in institutions, the thing that really makes a massive difference is when people start to think about power in a different way. Often we think about power as a zero sum game. If I share power, I lose power. And what we need to start thinking is if I share power sometimes I can create power that wasn't there. We see this through things like participatory budgeting and we could see it through CPPs. If I share the power I have as a councillor or as a body of councillors, if we share power with a set of partners that have capacity to act on a complex issue, I'm generating a form of power that I didn't have as a formal councillor before I share the power to act on this issue. So we need to start thinking of power as productive, not just restrictive. Power, when you share power, sometimes you can generate capacity to do things that you didn't have before. And if we get leaders across the board understanding that power sharing is part of the improvements and of the ways of achieving the things we're trying to achieve, then we get ourselves into a better mindset for these things. Not just committee planning but committee empowerment more broadly to have a chance of moving forward. Thanks very much for those responses and I'll just say that we will be doing work on, we are doing work on the local governance review and maybe we need to have you come back and speak to us more on that. And also I think what you've highlighted there a little bit connects into the work with the new deal for local government and that a new talk right at the beginning or at some point during your evidence around the parity piece and how do we get there but interesting points around you know who's willing to actually take those steps. So thanks so much I think it's been very helpful and I think it's actually helped to create a broader context to the previous panels that we've had. I now briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change over witnesses. We now turn to agenda item 3 which is to take evidence on the non-domestic rates miscellaneous anti-avoidance measures Scotland regulations 2023 from Thomas Arthur who's the minister for public finance planning and community wealth at the Scottish Government and Mr Arthur is joined for this item by Scottish Government officials James Messes who's the policy team leader and James Rees who's a solicitor in the legal director directorate and I welcome the minister and his officials to the meeting and invite the minister to make an opening statement. Thank you convener and good afternoon to the committee. The draft instrument under consideration is as you will have been able to tell quite technical but simply put it is intended to assist councils from the 1st of April 2023 in tackling non-domestic rates avoidance arrangements. The measures contained within the regulations are unique in the UK. Tax avoidance in non-domestic rates takes place when a rate payer seeks to reduce or avoid the liability on their property through activity which although permissible within the existing legal framework is not in keeping with the spirit of non-domestic rates law. In 2017 the independent Barclay review of non-domestic rates recommended that a general anti-avoidance rule be created to make it harder for loopholes to be exploited. Subsequently the non-domestic rates Scotland act 2020 provided powers enabling Scottish ministers to make regulations to prevent or minimise advantages arising from arrangements that are artificial, all of those terms being defined in the 2020 act. We committed to utilising these powers including in the programme for government 2021-22 and the Bute House agreement. The draft regulations that were laid before this committee deliver on these commitments and aim to strike the right balance between empowering councils to tackle rates avoidance whilst also allowing property owners and occupiers to engage in business practices carried out for a reason other than simply tax avoidance. The first target of the regulations is the artificial use of insolvency, of particular leasing arrangements and of shell companies. Within prescribed circumstances councils will be able to make the owners of non-domestic properties liable for the payment of rates rather than the property's occupier. In this circumstance non-domestic rates relief awarded to the property would cease. The regulations have a number of built in safeguards to protect legitimate operators. Firstly, the triggers for the transfer of rates liability are not actionable unless it is a non-domestic rates advantage such as an outstanding non-domestic rates liability. Further, the circumstances in which a council may transfer the rates liability from the occupier to the owner of a property are carefully defined and include tenancies not on a commercial basis, insolvency in conjunction with other artificial indicators and specific characteristics and behaviours of the occupier. Councils must notify the property owner of any intention to transfer the rates liability to the owner and must provide an opportunity for the owner to make representations before a final determination is made. Only if there has been a similar offence within the last five years can there be a retroactive transfer of liability from the start of a given artificial lease agreement. The second target of this draft instrument is rates avoidance through a reduction of rateable value by making deliberate physical changes to the state of the property solely for the purpose of reducing the rates liability. This can include intentional property destruction. The conditions for the use of this power are set out in the regulations and are necessary to support the devolution of responsibility for empty property relief to councils. As with the other provisions in this instrument, this is not intended to target legitimate enterprise. Where the council questions the appropriateness of any arrangement, the owner will have the opportunity, in all instances, to demonstrate the commercial rationale for doing so. The draft regulations were subject to consultation with industry experts and practitioners, including assessors and local authorities, through the Institute of Revenue, Rating and Evaluation. I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who engaged with Government officials in this regard. To conclude, tax avoidance reduces public revenues and is unfair to the majority of rate player pairs who do not engage in such practices. The presence of avoidance behaviours can also undermine public confidence in the non-domestic rate system and lead to reduced rates of compliance. I think that it is not just appropriate but necessary that we bring forward these regulations to tackle tax avoidance where we can and ensure greater fairness and transparency in the non-domestic rate system. As such, the instrument supports the principles of the Scottish Government's framework for tax and aligns with the strategic objectives contained within it. I will close and say that I hope that members will agree with me and support the draft instrument today. Could you provide any indication of the scale of non-domestic rate's income currently being lost as a result of the avoidance measures that are covered by the regulations or an indication of the number of cases expected to be dealt with under the regulations? There is limited data on the number of avoidance practices that are being engaged in. We have individual case examples and anecdotal evidence, but across Scotland we just do not have the data on the right. Is there any risk that the regulations might result in genuine situations being incorrectly classified as an example to share with you? Supposing a tenancy agreement was signed and the occupier genuinely became insolvent after that, how would the owner be able to demonstrate that that was not an avoidance mechanism? There is sufficient flexibility within the regulations so that the local authority via effective tax authority can engage with owners and indeed there is an opportunity for owners to engage following local authority giving notice. Do you want to expand on that slightly, James? Yes, absolutely. It is worth pointing out as well that in the circumstances that you pointed out in the case of insolvency there are safeguards contained within the regulations, notably that as well as entering insolvency within the first 12 months of signing the lease, the non-domestic property continues to be occupied and used commercially. That is just one. The other might be that the property continues to be in receipt of non-domestic rates relief, is continuing to receive an advantage. But as the minister sets out, there's an entire process for an individual that receives a notice to provide evidence that their arrangement is not for the purposes of an artificial advantage. Does the minister consider the dispute mechanism within the regulations to be sufficiently robust and also if an owner occupies or challenges the local authority decision regarding the rates bill but the decision is not overturned, what further course of action is open to the owner if they are still dissatisfied with the decision? I'll turn to that in just a moment. I do think that it is robust and it provides sufficient flexibility as well. I think that it's also important to recognise the impact that this will have on rate players, is that avoidance measures are fundamentally unfair and the disadvantage of those who do engage in legitimate practice. On specific points with regards to the dispute mechanism and what recourse there is, should a occupier disagree with local authority or ask James to come in? Absolutely. When an individual first receives a notice, they'll have 28 days to reply, as I said before, setting out why they do not think that their arrangement is for the purposes of an artificial advantage. Subsequently, the local authority will have a further 28 days to respond, consider the information and the evidence and provide a final notice. Where an individual disagrees with the final determination, they can apply for an internal review within the local authority. Where they disagree with the determination of that internal review, they can then pursue that through the courts via judicial review. What is the scale of the administrative budget that is expected to be faced by local authorities in implementing those regulations and will local authorities have the resources to undertake action under those regulations? Of course, local authorities are responsible for the administration and that is something to undertake. More generally, it's not specific to this, but resource has been provided for local government in recent financial settlements with regard to the reforms that are falling on from Barley. I don't know if you want to add to that, James. Absolutely. The intention of the regulations is to protect revenue. That is something that local authorities have been asking for. Further, the instances of avoidance are not so prevalent that it would potentially cost or create such an administrative burden. I thank the minister and his officials for their evidence today. We now turn to agenda item 4, which is consideration of the motion on the instrument. I invite the minister to move motion S6M-07676 that the local government housing and planning committee recommends that the non-domestic rates miscellaneous anti-avoidance measures Scotland regulations 2023 be approved. Thank you. Do members have any points they wish to make? Nobody has any points. Minister, is there anything you would wish to add? The question is that motion S6M-07676 in the name of Tom Arthur be approved. Are we all agreed? The committee will publish a report setting out its recommendations on the instrument in the coming days. The next item on our agenda for today is consideration of two negative instruments. The council tax discounts Scotland amendment order 2023 and the non-domestics rate valuation of sites of reverse vending machines Scotland regulations 2023. There is no requirement for the committee to make any recommendations on negative instruments. Do members have any comments on the instrument? No comments. Is the committee agreed that we do not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? Agreed. Thank you. We agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next two items in private, so as that was the last public item on our agenda for today, I now close the public part of our meeting.