 Astag iaeth y bconfled some聲 sefydlu â rhyw dd yn yr uneg, mewn gweld rai людей yn lleidre Tiolaidd. Llywydd Fromi Gwständy ac fel wochio ddiwr equity, amgylchedd mae'r mitt yn trumpolol yn gwasanaethauol o gael dropon yn ei bod wedi bodyn eu hwn yn fальная judgment i eisiau, ddim yn ei wneud ond dwi'n etod. to leave from time to time to honour those commitments, so no disrespect is meant to the witnesses at committee this morning when Mr Wightman's got to go and deal with his commitments elsewhere. That said, can we move to agenda item 1, which is draft budget scrutiny 2018-19? The committee will take evidence in the Scottish Government draft budget 2018-19 on welcoming Tony Cain, policy manager, association of local authority chief housing officers and David Stewart policy-lead Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, Douglas Black secretary, local government services group and Mark Ferguson chair, local government committee Unison Scotland. You are all very welcome. There are no open statements. It might just be some brief housekeeping. My apologies to our Unison representatives this morning if we dwell on housing for the first section. Of course, feel free to come in on relation to that, but we will be focused on housing a little bit more at the start of our evidence session and then move on, so just ask for a degree of latitude and patience there. Maybe just a general, very general question to opening up. I'm just back from a breakfast briefing about cuts to local authorities that Spice and partners at Glasgow University have done in relation to cuts to local government, but one of the areas that it would appear that it's not a cuts-based agenda would be in relation to the housing association movement, register social landlords, including local authorities that are in the business of building and giving subsidies to houses. Can I ask our housing representatives to give what their feeling is in relation to the financial environment? Certainly in the last financial year, in terms of the affordable housing budget for Scotland. Mr Cain. Absolutely. I think that it would be wrong to say that reductions in local authority resources haven't had an impact on the housing function within councils. Those bits of the activity that are funded from rents remain as robust as the housing revenue account business plan and the capacity of tenants to pay rents to fund services, but non-HRA services, particularly around homelessness support services and services around social care, have all seen reductions in capacity and they have a bearing and they have an impact on the clients in council housing and therefore on the housing service itself, but I think that the other area where significant issues are starting to arise is just around strategic capacity. Understandably, councils are focusing on preserving front-line services and looking at corporate head office and back-room functions. That has meant a thinning out of senior management and strategic management within organisations and it is reducing the ability to plan and spreading the focus, if you like, of many of the senior officers. In terms of, I apologise if I didn't mention it, that's helpful. That ties in with evidence that we've heard elsewhere and we've scrutinised other parts of the local authority budget. We're specifically asking about the affordable housing, the A-hit budget in the last financial year and going forward. Just to get balance, I can assure you that there will be lots of opportunities to put on record what the challenges are to local authorities. We have to get a balance at the committee in relation to the affordable housing budget, Mr Cain. Is that at an appropriate level, the trend in that budget? How do you feel that is going? The affordable housing programme has grown substantially in the last couple of years. It is sufficient broadly speaking within the current grant regime to meet the target and the focus is on meeting that target. I don't think that you're going to hear evidence that says that there isn't enough money in the affordable housing programme to deliver the commitment to 50,000 affordable houses or the social housing programme. I think we're confident that the resources are there. That's it. I might just, Mr O'Lite, in a second, but the first part of your answer was important because if you feel there's challenges in terms of senior officers you have within local authorities to help direct and shape some of that budget in terms of working partnership with the housing association movement. That is an appropriate thing to put on the record. You seem to be saying that the budget is of a good quality in terms of getting back in the business of building significantly more social rented and affordable homes, but if there are challenges in relation to having senior officials to direct that at a local level that would be an appropriate thing to put on the record, Mr Cain. Absolutely. I mean £3 billion over five years is a huge commitment. It's a huge commitment that the Scottish Government has made in a very welcome one and the sector is working hard to deliver on the target of 50,000. I don't think other than a continuing conversation around differential grant rates between local authorities and housing associations, I don't think anybody is expressing any substantial concern about the amount of money being committed by the Scottish Government to the affordable housing programme at this point. And your major previous point. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Which is generally helpful. It's just a balance to the evidence, Mr Stewart. Yeah, really just to say that the £50,000 homes target in the £3 billion commitment are very, very welcome. I mean, I think the target was based on solid evidence, including a report by SFHA Shelter and CIEH on the outstanding need for affordable housing in Scotland, but it's very positive that the levels of subsidy went out up after the 2015 subsidy review working group. It's very good that there's a three-year resource planning assumptions, which I think allows local authorities and housing associations to plan longer term and commit to the programme. So it's good news. I mean, there are some challenges in terms of ramping up to actually meet that commitment, but I know that the level of funding is very welcome. Are we in a situation where other parts of the wider local authority budgets would not bite your hand off for certainty over multi-year funding, which appears to be what local authorities and the housing association movement have in going forward? So is that helpful in planning ahead in relation to affordable housing programmes? Yeah, that would certainly say so. Absolutely. Although it's worth noting that the answer to that question is yes, but it is worth noting that we have three years' worth of resource planning assumptions and councils have just submitted a five-year ship, so we're back into a place now where the last two years of submitting programmes are speculative in terms of the resources available. We only have three, but we're already planning for years four, years five and years six, but we don't know what those resources will be, so one of the points we made in our submission is actually we need to move to a much longer timeframe for planning new affordable housing or planning housing supply, but it would be chaelish beyond belief to complain about the position we're in in terms of resources committed to the programme. Okay, that's helpful. We asked our committee clerk and team to pick through evidence, pick out things where we can give a bit additional scrutiny to, and we did pick up that our actual submission said there was a number of aspects to the housing programme that needed to be addressed, and at point 2.7 of that submission it has said there is no clarity about what overall objective intervention in the housing market is intended to achieve or what a properly effective housing system would look like. Would it be helpful if you were able to elaborate on that a little bit? We work with a numbers target. The target is 50,000. What's the connection between an additional 50,000 affordable houses or an additional 35,000 social rented housing and our expectations around homelessness, our expectations around housing need more generally? What impact do we think that that would have on waiting lists? What would be the economic impact of that beyond simple jobs in the construction sector? How will that bear on poverty, fuel poverty, child poverty and other aspects of that agenda? None of these things are worked through in a full rationale for the affordable housing programme. We work, if you'll forgive me, on the assumption that more houses are good, but we don't get much beneath that in terms of what we really expect the impact of that scale of expenditure to be. The other reason we make this point is that this year, very welcome, but for the first year in 30, we will arrive at 31 March 2018 with more social rented houses than we had at 1 April 2017. We haven't actually done that since 1981. Once you start to grow a sector, you have to ask the question, how many is too many? We've never had to ask ourselves that question for 30 years. We're probably moving into a phase where a more sophisticated conversation about the purpose of investment in affordable housing is needed. I accept all of that, but I'm a little bit confused. That's easily done, Mr Cain. I can assure you, but my understanding is that each year local authorities would do a housing needs assessment, which would then feed into a strategic housing investment programme. When you say that you're not quite sure what that would look like, is it not the job of local authorities to decide what that would look like? You've now been given significant increased monies to deliver what that would look like. Given that my understanding is that that's the process that local authorities are supposed to be delivering on in partnership with the housing association movement, what would a properly effective housing system look like? Why do you think that housing needs assessments and ships or strategic housing investment programmes are not delivering on that? Are they delivering on the relatively narrow purpose of planning an investment programme and an investment programme, which is driven by numbers? What they're not delivering on is what is the definition of a properly functioning housing system in Scotland? How does that differ between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Moray, Aberdein, Inverness and the Western Isles? I don't know that at a national level we have a clear understanding of what we're trying to achieve. I will ask the minister that very question when he appears at committee. I get the fact that the SHIP programme is numbers driven because the envelope, the monies available, the 35,000 minimum affordable social rented housing, up to 50,000 when you add in a mix of other affordable housing, but the housing needs assessment at a local level isn't numbers driven, that's a housing needs assessment. Do local authorities know what that would look like? You can't have a uniform national programme by definition when you make the point that each local authority area has very different dynamics. That's why it's localised to local authorities with housing needs assessment to feed into SHIPs, which I fully accept are numbers driven. So what do you think local authorities be doing more to have a proper effective housing system from your point of view? I wouldn't put this at the door entirely of local authorities. I think a national conversation about what a properly functioning housing system looks like. What is an appropriate balance across the tenures, for example? Do we think that the private rented sector is fully affordable across the whole of Scotland? Are we content with what is being built by the speculative construction sector in terms of size and numbers and distribution and types? Are we happy that the right number of houses is being built to meet the needs of older people or people with disabilities? Those are all questions that aren't clearly answered either locally or nationally. What we do locally is deliver a programme within the financial envelope that we have based on the opportunities that are there. What we're not necessarily saying is that we think that we should have x percentage of the stock locally in social renting, x percentage in private renting and x percentage in our own occupation. We don't have that conversation. As a consequence, we live in a world where in East Renfrewshire 12 per cent of the stock is in social renting and in West Dunbarton 37 per cent of the stock is in social renting. Which of those is right to my own nearest? I'm just adding to my confusion here because I thought that it was the job of local authorities and not national government to do their housing needs assessments and then to feed into a SHIP programme, which is numbers and revenue driven, a fully capital expenditure driven, and I fully accept that, and then for the housing minister to make sure that the transition between your housing needs assessment, i.e. how many large family homes do we need, how many disabled homes do we need, what mix of 10 years do we need? Those are things that I thought were fleshed out within a housing needs assessment at a local authority basis. So, maybe what our committee has to understand about what housing needs assessments do or don't do at a local authority level is part of that wider national housing strategy. Some of that effort is made, but I don't think that you'll find a housing needs assessment anywhere in Scotland that says that the private sector should double in size in the next 10 years or that a new house building should decline by 45 per cent in the next 10 years or that the cost of housing of particular type should rise at the rate that it does. Those are not, generally speaking, part of that calculation. It's an overview of how the system works. If we accept, and many folk do, that the housing system isn't functioning fully effectively and other people have said stronger things about it than that, if we accept it's not working fully effectively, then we need to start with the question, what does the Scottish housing system look like that does function fully effectively? I don't think you'll answer that at a local authority level. I think that that needs to be discussed and worked through at a national level. I'm not suggesting that it's solely the Scottish Government's responsibility to answer that question. I'm saying that we need a more sophisticated conversation about what we're trying to achieve in housing terms. I promise you that I'll ask all those questions to the Scottish Government. I didn't expect to get involved in this interaction because it is generally quite helpful. Do you think that we have to have an improved housing needs assessment at local level to start to tease out some of these things as part of that tying together what a national strategy looks like? I don't think that housing needs assessment is the weakness. It's as sophisticated now as it has ever been. When I started working in housing planning, we worked on prevalence rates. There are so many of these types of situations in the population as a whole, so we need as many houses to meet it. Fairly crude, but it was as good as we have. What we have now is more sophisticated and fit for purpose in the same way. But we're not answering its big strategic question. When is enough enough? When do we have enough social rented houses? We're going to build 35,000. How many do we need in the next five years? Right. I'm still not sure what's stopping local authorities. Local authorities didn't set the time. Hang on. I think that we're missing the point here. It's for local authorities, irrespective of the national target, to decide what their housing needs assessments are. They're democratically empowered to deliver on housing in their areas. I think that we would all agree that. We all appreciate that it feeds into a ship system, which is numbers and capital-driven, depending on funding from central government. I'm just going to leave the city and let my colleagues in who have got supplementaries on this particular matter. I would have thought if local authorities had a view in the mix between public and private sector housing or buy-to-rent or sublet properties or new-build properties within their local area, they're big enough and capable enough to take a view on that without waiting for national government. I thought that that's what housing needs assessments did. If they don't, maybe they should do. That's the point I'm making. Do you think that they should do? Housing needs assessments are part of a framework that is there to do particular things. I suspect that if you look at the outcomes of the housing needs assessments across the 32 councils, you will see conclusions being drawn about the need for affordable housing, which are substantially in excess of either the local land supply or the ship programme. There's a translation of housing needs assessment into land supply, which is done through the planning system, which invariably means a potential reduction from the total number of assessed houses required. I get all that, but I don't think that that was an answer to my question. Do you think that housing needs assessments should be making localised decisions on what the 10-year mix looks like and what that profile looks like? I think that that should be part of the local housing planning system. That's all that I wanted to establish. That makes it part of a national framework, but it's not nationally setting targets for local authority areas. There's nothing to stop local authorities doing that just now. That's what I have to check. Elaine Smith, followed by Graham Simpson. Thank you for joining us this morning, Mr Cain. It was something that you said earlier, and I just pursued that line of questioning. Are local authorities doing equality impact assessments on their strategic housing plans and on their plans? If they are not, how could they be taking steps to look at emerging inequalities and addressing those? I confess that I haven't searched all 30 websites but it's a statutory requirement. I would expect there to be equality impact assessments against ships published along with the ships. What steps do you think they'll be taking to address the emerging inequalities that might come out of that? It would, depending on the local environment, but what I expect them to do is identify particular equality impacts and then focus on those. One of them might be gendered equality impacts and victims or survivors of domestic violence and looking at how you would improve the provision for that particular group. You might look at young people. You will certainly look at older people and people with disabilities. However, invariably, you are planning to deliver at a level that is below your measured need. The measured need for wheelchair housing and accessible housing is substantially in excess of what the programme will produce in the next three years. I think that we might be coming on to some of that later with you, but it was domestic abuse that I was particularly interested in and you mentioned it yourself. I just wondered whether if you are aware that any progress has been recorded on the housing needs of that specific group. I would struggle to quote, but what I know is that there is a live conversation in the housing sector, certainly in the policy circles that I am involved in, about the extent to which our response to domestic abuse is adequate, sufficient and as sophisticated as it should be and whether or not we now need to move to a different approach to a whole range of issues. That conversation is starting. Just a quick follow-up, again for yourself, Mr Cain. You said earlier that ships are not the problem. The problem is that we have a relatively narrow conversation about what we are trying to achieve in the world of housing. For 30 years, that narrow conversation has been dominated by questions around tenure and the received wisdom has been that everybody really wants to own their own home and that would be best for everybody if they did, putting it crudely. I think that we are now moving to a slightly more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of tenure, but we have not yet turned that into the current levels of unoccupation are unsustainable, prices of unoccupation are too high, people are left without a choice because of the absence of genuinely affordable alternatives in every community area. Social housing still exists in a relatively narrow range of locations, not in every location that you might want to live in. We need to have a different conversation about how you balance that out. The convener focused his questions on councils. Are you saying that something needs to happen nationally if so? What needs to happen? I did not come here with the expectation of being asked to provide a prescription for a future housing planning and delivery programme. You have raised it, Mr King. I certainly did. We need to have a conversation about what we think a properly functioning housing system looks like, what ought to be the balance between under-occupation, private renting and social renting and other forms of affordable housing. How do we understand the choices that people are making and what the access routes are? How do you reflect that in the supply? The best example of a relatively narrow provision might be around young single people. To one side, it fits all in the world, accounts of social rented housing. It is a council house or a flat. Whether or not that meets the needs of young folk more particularly, we have not yet got into that conversation. If you look in contrast where we are with older people, we have a whole variety of different types, including types of shared accommodation for older people, which are useful in addressing things such as loneliness, for example, and helping in the provision of support. Those problems exist for young single people too, but we still insist on a relatively narrow offer. It is some of that conversation that we need to have. That could be young professionals just starting out. They cannot afford to buy their own home if they want to. That sort of person. The most clearly established route from home to independent living is to education university accommodation. For the privileged group that goes through that route, it is relatively clear. They get a chance to fail an experiment without too much difficulty. If you are not going to university, if you are at college instead and you do not want to live at home or you cannot live at home, we do not have an obvious route for that cohort of single people to think about and make choices in their housing options. Convener, I know that you want to move on to other subjects. Yes, yes. Do not worry about it. I am moving on from this, but we can certainly ask questions of this all day. I feel that Mr Gibson. Thank you very much, convener. I am pleased to say that Tony Cain actually answered what I was going to ask as my first question. I am going to move on straight to Dave Stewart and it is regarding his submission at paragraph 3.11. There is also a question as to whether sufficient housing has been developed in rural and remote communities. Recent research by the Rural Housing Scotland found that rural Scotland was not getting its fair share of affordable housing investment, and that the problem was particularly acute in remote areas although particular funds have been set up for rural and island communities to help to address that. I am asking this question because I actually have two islands company and are in my constituency as well as a rural hinterland in North Ayrshire. I am just wondering how useful has the Rural and Islands housing fund proved to date? I believe that the fund has proved very, very useful and that was acknowledged. I was at a recent round table event looking at the question of whether there was enough funding going to rural communities and whether they were getting their fair share. While, as I say, there is research that suggests that maybe there is not a fair share and that there is not enough of the funding for the 50,000 homes going to rural and remote communities, it was acknowledged that the Rural and Island fund has been helpful. Are there other ways, apart from that fund, that we could encourage investment in rural housing? I think that it is a matter for a conversation about the research that I saw suggested that over the past maybe five years there has been less investment going into rural areas, so perhaps it is a conversation that could be had with the Scottish Government and with housing associations just to tease that out and see whether there needs to be a change in where investment goes. The 50,000 homes, as I have said, the target and the £3 billion are very, very positive, but I suppose then there will be a question within that of can we make sure that either enough of the money goes to housing for older people or people with particular needs and can we make sure that enough of it goes to rural communities? I suppose looking at the ships as they come in and then building on those as they are delivered each year might be an opportunity to just make sure that a fair share of investment goes through these different areas. Mr Cain, you can come in. Yes, sorry. One of the issues that was raised at that session was the difficulty about the way in which the housing planning system works in order to qualify for investment from the affordable housing programme. You have to demonstrate housing need if your objective is to promote population growth, community growth and economic activity. You might struggle to demonstrate that there is anybody actually needing that house at that moment in our most remote rural communities, so you will struggle to secure investment through the affordable housing programme if your ambition is to grow your community and grow economic activity. I pick it out in the submission that I made about the Scottish Government's commitment to repopulating and empowering Scotland's rural, coastal and island communities. If you stick with, demonstrate that there is a need from the existing population before we will invest in new housing, then the people of, now forgive me, Ulva are six residents on an island that previously had 600, keen to grow the population, but they would not qualify for an investment through the affordable housing programme because they would not be able to demonstrate any need on that island. There are only six people living there, so it gets back to some of their earlier conversations as well. I think that there is a need to look again at how you are connecting the affordable housing investment programme with some of our wider policy objectives around remote rural communities in particular. The figure that the research suggested was that 18 per cent of the Scottish population lives in these areas, about six per cent of the affordable housing programme output is going to these areas, so there is some evidence that our remote rural communities are losing out. Can I just follow up briefly and convey all the means of Wilf Island incidentally? I do not know when the last Wilf actually lived on the island. In my constituency, when I was elected in 2007 to the highest per capita homeless, there is a problem in the whole of Scotland. There have been 96 houses built since then, but is the cost of building houses in remote areas a real disincentive for the local authorities? If one thinks about it, to build on an island can cost 50 per cent, perhaps even double what it might cost on the mainland because you have to often import not just materials but workers and they have to be housed, fed, etc. Is there some way in which that can be rebalanced to ensure that there is no disincentive for local authorities who are split between mainland and island, or Gaill, obviously, Highland, North Ayrshire? The delivery of housing investment programmes is the art of the practical, it is not a science, and you deliver where you can as much as where you want to. That is the reality of it, where the land is, where communities are supportive, where you can secure the opportunities, and that does mean that more difficult locations will tend to get put to the back of the queue. I think that it would be unrealistic to think anything else. I do not think that that means that there are not significant efforts being made to invest in remote rural communities where a need is demonstrated. I think that it means that where some other objective is being served, the less likely to spend some time actually looking at that. My understanding is that some of those conversations have gone around, for example, in the community ownership groups that have taken over control of the land around them, finding it more difficult to engage with the affordable housing programme and deliver it. I think that there is a conversation about how you match those two objectives. In terms of acquiring land in rural areas, are there any greater difficulties, do you feel, in rural and island areas? Sometimes local authorities tend to look at island communities perhaps differently from mainland, with things such as village envelopes, for example, where you cannot build outside unless it is specifically for agricultural use, and that can really inhibit growth in some of the rural and island communities. I think that the challenges are likely to be different, they are not likely to be substantially more. Issues around settlement patterns, which are very different in the more rural areas where we have these dispersed settlement patterns against the more compact villages that you see. I think that the planning process has some people's expectations. One of the comments that I made at the round table event in 1692, the population of Glencoe was over 500. That is the number counted at the point at which the Glencoe massacre took place. It is about 350. How do we imagine the landowner in Glencoe and the planning authority to react if we said we would like to build another 50 or 100 houses to bring this population back up to where it was 300 years ago? I think it would not be a positive conversation. That is about thinking about what do we mean by repopulating our rural and island communities, and what does that mean for the way we direct a housing investment? It was a historic population that peaked at 15,000 two centuries ago, and now it is now at 3,500, so I understand that point. I am moving on to Andy Wightman, but I want to mop up a question that I apologise for Mr Cain, but it is of relevance to you, and it is to give you the opportunity to put something on the record. There is a lower subsidy benchmark for councils in relation to subsidy grants to new-build properties compared to registered social landlords. As a general rule, there is no hard-and-fast, specific grant, and there are flexibilities and local discretions. Why might there be an issue for councils or why do you think that there is a lower subsidy benchmark? It is historical from the current round of discussions that we have had around benchmarks. I looked back at the papers and I was involved in the first subsidy review group that agreed subsidy levels, including differentials. I do not think that there was any clear rationale for it at that time, but from a local authority point of view, bear in mind that, up until that point, we had not been eligible for subsidy at all. We were just very happy to be getting back into the process of building houses and that we were going to get some money. I said last year that Alacio is not making a big issue of this through this round of investment. I am aware that a number of local authorities have their own concerns and have expressed to them. The question that we asked last year is why is it fair that council tenants pay a higher proportion of the cost of each new affordable house than housing association tenants, but we think that that is a matter for the conversation when the general issue of grant rates is reopened as it will need to be in the run-up to the next programme. I might want to come in on that. It does not make it true, but it is often said that one of the reasons that might not explain the full differential between local authorities and the housing association movement is that housing associations that are having to purchase land with local authorities may have the land in existence or that group of staff to deal with a lot of the technical aspects of house building, whereas housing associations have to contract and purchase in a lot of that expertise. I am not saying that that explains the differentials, but I am just wondering if Mr Stewart would like to comment on any of that. I certainly think that it is the case that associations generally have to buy land and access to land on the cost of land. It probably is one of the bigger challenges around delivering the 50,000 homes programme, so that would arguably be a reason for the benchmarks, but I cannot comment on the cost of that. Do you have both the opportunity to do something on the record if you wish? That was all. The other point about the benchmarks is that the biggest differential is between councils developing remote rural areas and housing associations developing remote rural areas, and that is the biggest differential in those grants. That is probably the one area that we are at just now. It is quite harsh, and I have to say that we have some concerns about grant levels in relation to particular needs of housing, but we have not included it in our evidence here. We think that where we are with that is okay for now. We will want to have another conversation about it when the issue of grant levels more generally is reopened. That is very helpful. We will move on to another section. Thank you very much, convener. I want to talk about the 50,000 target. In SFHA evidence, we talk about a Government commitment to build 50,000 affordable homes. I think that we have it on the record that it is about delivering. It will not all be built. We had the minister give us evidence saying that, in terms of the programme, he made it very clear that if councils are unable to spend the resources that they are given, he would have no qualms about moving it. The First Minister at her party conference said that, if you do not use all your allocations to deliver new housing, we will take back the balance and give it to one that can. If you do not use it, you will lose it. I am sure that, if you can give us any reflections on what you think lies behind that, whether it is appropriate, what kind of timescales might that operate on, given that I assume that some councils and housing organisations will find it easier to get up to speed and get building early, because they have plans in place and land available. Others will not. Is that a threat, if you like, or an intention that you see being implemented over the whole programme or very early on? Yes, I was aware of those comments and I suppose it could be that. I think that it has always been the case that where a programme might be slightly underspent in one area, then if there is capacity, say, in Edinburgh and the Lothians or in the Highlands to spend more, then some of that money will be shifted to make sure that it is spent and maybe the overall targets for building affordable homes is met. Having said that, I think that is maybe reasonable if you are not talking about huge sums of money or numbers. I think it is important, while the 50,000 homes is a great opportunity, it is obviously important that homes are then built where there is identified areas of needs rather than just simply where it is easiest to build them. I suppose that goes back a little to the comments that I made about making sure that there are enough homes for older people or people with particular needs, or maybe needing to look to see if enough homes are being built in rural and remote areas. I confess that I was slightly baffled when I heard those comments from the First Minister, if only because it has always been the case that if one local authority underspends on its affordable housing programme at some point during the year there would be a conversation about whether we needed to get shifted to another authority that was capable of spending it. It is not a change in position, it is not new. To the extent that the statement focuses the minds of everybody in housing delivery and councils that they need to get on and deliver, then perhaps it is helpful, but it is not new. It has not changed the rules within which we work. Okay, so you see it as a sort of a political statement get moving rather than anything substantially changed? I'm not about to try and understand the First Minister's motivation in making the statement. What I'm saying is that it wasn't telling us anything that we didn't know, and if we were going to take anything from it, it probably should be that you need to get on and deliver. But what it maybe reflects is the annual nature of the budget, and perhaps that's the thing that's unhelpful and being clearer about some of the longer term issues might help us with that. Nobody I spoke to in the local forestry sector reacted to that statement in anything other than, yeah, so that's how it works, it always has done. Next step, Mr Cain. Mr Bateman, do you want to follow up? Okay, that's very helpful. What are the sort of key problems or difficulties that councils and housing associations are finding in delivering new affordable homes? I just note from the completions under the affordable homes programme to the year 1 April 2016 to June 2017 that just two thirds were actually new builds, so over a third are actually existing homes that are being acquired or refurbished. What are the kind of problems or issues that are being faced that we possibly need to be aware of? I would say that when we speak to members about delivering new homes, the main issues are probably about the availability of land and the cost of it, then other infrastructures actually in place to allow them to build on the land. And there's also a bit of an issue, I would say, just with human resources, whether that's housing associations have the development staff to build new homes, whether that's local authorities. Going back to one of Tony's earlier comments, having the management staff in place to support programmes or actually it could be about planning departments, building control officers or even just about skilled workers being able to build homes. And I think that that goes back to the fact that the 50,000 programmes are a big increase in target that comes on the back of when there had been cuts and a substantial slowdown in building. So it's then a bit of a challenge and that actually would take time for people to get back up to speed to increase delivery, I would say. Okay. Yeah, I mean, just to say, Eilatio has always taken the view that acquisition of houses on the second hand market or completed units by developers that are unsold is appropriate and should form a significant part of the programme. It's a sensible way of going about our business, allows a great deal of flexibility apart from anything else. But I don't think the challenges in delivering are any different now than they were five years ago. The scale is obviously an issue and there's been some loss of resources during the period when the programme was wound down. Land can be challenging, planning environment, community relations can be challenging, consultation. Particularly, this may be an issue that we face in the local authority sector more so than our colleagues in the housing associations, but it's not unusual for communities to be concerned about council housing being built in their area where there hasn't previously been any council housing and I've had those conversations with any number of communities in rural and urban areas and that takes time and it adds to the length of the process. But these are not new challenges. The land issue is not a new issue in that sense. Building the scale set-up has been. Thank you very much. Mr Wightman, you can move on to Graham Simpson. Thanks. I've got a specific line of questioning, but I'm just going to follow up on the land issue because SFHA mentioned this in your written submission. Wei said that city deals should give greater priority to unlocking land and be more transparent. That's something that committee has been looking at, so I wonder if you could expand on that. No, you could all probably chip in on that if you want. It's really just that we see city deals as a great opportunity. Obviously, they're providing funding that could be used to provide infrastructure to unlock land. Having written the submission, I noticed that you had evidence from the City of Edinburgh Council where they're prioritising social housing and putting quite a lot of the focus of their city deal on to providing new social housing, which is good. The comment was just that, given that there's an opportunity to look at investing in infrastructure and boosting local economies, we felt that there maybe could be more emphasis generally given in some of the city deals to housing and to looking to unlock sites. Any else? Mr Kane, you're based in North Lanarkshire, aren't you? No, I'm based in Stirling, but one of our objectives is to better understand and engage with the Scottish City Alliance and the city deal, and that's been a very positive conversation for us. I think it's for the city alliance themselves to work through the extent to which they think housing is a priority for them, but the city deal doesn't include how the Westminster version of city deal doesn't have a housing element to it because it's a devolved function. It would always be within city deal a bit of shoehorning, but Edinburgh is a really good example of the way in which you manage that, and the strong commitment that the City Council has made to affordable housing within its city growth plan is very, very positive. What about you? Of course, get my item to come in at any point. There are whole host of questions for you. You have to take my word for that, Mr Ferguson. I want to make reference to the Glasgow regional city deal, because I think that my view is that political priorities have been around infrastructure and transport in that deal, and whilst we welcome new money coming into local government, because that's a new thing in itself in a sense, investment, but I think that I would have liked to have seen more community-based projects being incorporated into such a social housing, and I think that we would have welcomed that. I think that it would have helped to mitigate some of the issues that we're facing in local government if there was a flexibility. I don't know if there is a flexibility to do it within it, but if there is, I would have preferred to have seen more community-based projects rather than the big infrastructure. Whilst I accept the infrastructure projects, I will boost the local economy. I'm not going to counter that argument, but I think that if more money can be used to invest in our communities, I think that we'd have been better off in our communities for that. That's useful, but it's not really what we're here to question you on today, but it is an area that we've been looking at. If I can ask about the adaptations budget now, and again, anyone can answer this, but Mr Cain, you mentioned that in your written evidence. You were critical of the lack of leadership over the adaptations budget, and you said that the Scottish Government hasn't increased it for five years. You say, as a result, that demand has outstripped supply, so I wonder if you can give any examples of where problems have occurred. You also say, and this is something that Mr Stewart might want to comment on, that RSL tenants are getting a less effective service with some waiting for months. So, again, for Mr Cain first, can you provide evidence for that? Yeah, I think that some housing association tenants is what I said, and I stand by that. It's patchy in a way that it shouldn't be. There are three principal funding streams for adaptations in the cross housing, two of which rests with local government, so one is money from the housing revenue account, the other is general fund money to support adaptations in the private sector, and there is a third stream of money that is held by the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government took a decision that those pots held by local authorities should be transferred to IJBs, Scottish Government money is held by the Scottish Government. The report, and I quoted in my submission, said very clearly, for 2012 adapting for change reports, said very clearly that leadership on adaptations should rest very clearly with the strategic housing authority. The minister took a decision to transfer local authority funding and therefore an element of leadership to IJBs. I think that that leaves us with inconsistency in the way in which funds are being directed and managed and a lack of clarity about leadership, but also lack of clarity about the Scottish Government's purpose in this. The Scottish Government has committed to implementing fully the recommendations of the 2012 adapting for change report, but it has already undermined the principle, the leading recommendation about leadership by transferring responsibility to the IJBs. I am not objecting to it being transferred to the IJBs. What I am saying is that we haven't moved on in five years in improving the way in which we deliver adaptations, and this is now pretty much the only area of housing association performance where local authorities consistently perform better. I am not saying that local authorities are as good as they should be either, but in terms of evidence of that, I haven't mined the ARC reports to come up with horror stories, but I do know of one association that recently changed management, new management came in and identified a 500-day plus average weight for an adaptation, a year and a half average weight in one housing association. That is now fixed, but it wasn't unusual, and you wouldn't find that in the local authority sector. We have had a long conversation about adaptations. It hasn't moved substantially in the last three or four years. The Scottish Government has made commitments about this, and we have struggled to move them on. I am aware that some of those conversations are now opening up, and the officials are now talking to others, particularly around the improvement service on adaptations and the IHUB, but we haven't made progress. The budget hasn't—I think that it is longer than five years. It might be eight years since the Scottish Government's budget was raised. It is certainly five years. Forgive me, can you think of any other area of activity where demand has stayed so constant that you could have left the budget stable with an aging population for five years and it not had an impact on outcomes? It has to have had an impact. Adaptations has come up as an issue that is of concern for some of our members. The way that funding for it works is that, for the more expensive ones, associations receive a grant annually to fund them. That sometimes leads to not being enough funding to carry out all of the adaptations that might be required. It is a challenge that we are aware of. One of my colleagues has had some discussions with the Scottish Government about the funding of adaptations and the possibility of moving to a more neutral approach. It is something that is being looked at, but, as Tony said, the global amount of funding has not gone out over the past few years. Given that it is good for people to remain in their own home and given that the population is aging, that is something that needs to be looked at. Mr Cain said in his written evidence that some RSL tenants are waiting months rather than weeks for adaptations. Is that purely down to funding? I believe that it is, at least from the ones that I have had speak to me. We had a workshop at a conference earlier this year looking at adaptations and there were some associations where they might spend their grant in the first few months of the year and then there would be a wait before they could grant to fund further adaptations. It seems to be something that varies from different areas as to the level of priority that is given to it. It is on the issue more rather than adaptations on new-built housing for groups that would suit them better. On that issue, the equality statement accompanying last year's budget, the Scottish Government specifically indicated that they expected the housing investment to benefit a range of key groups, including disabled people and lone parents. On that note, Mr Stewart, on page 13 of your submission paragraph 310, you mentioned the fact that the housing subsidy review group had a number of recommendations that were accepted, but one that was not accepted was ring fence funding to support the supply of new-built housing for older people and people with particular needs, presumably alone parents etc. Can you expand a bit further on that? Why do you think that that was not accepted? I think that the decision that was taken at the time by the minister was that rather than having a ring fence fund that would recognise that building that sort of housing was more expensive, that there would be flexibility given when associations or local authorities were applying for funding. I suppose that my view on that would be something that maybe needs to be constantly reviewed and monitored to see whether there are enough homes coming through in the ships and then being delivered. SFHA and Shelter have funded some research looking at what is proposed on the strategic housing investment plans being delivered across Scotland. An idea of that was partly to look at progress towards the 50,000 homes, but also to explore specific provision, whether it is in rural areas or whether it is for particular needs. I would say that it is something that we need to monitor to see if there is enough being built as part of the programme. It was a housing subsidy review group convened by the Scottish Government that recommended it. Do you have a view on whether that recommendation should have been taken on board? I think that we felt at the time that it should have been. Can I ask Mr Cain that same question then? What do you think? I think that it was a recommendation of the group. I was not involved at that time. The group felt that it was important and that it was a way of protecting that investment. I think that it would have helped to focus minds whether or not it is the entire solution is another matter. Housing has highly adapted housing for people with very significant needs. It is usually built on a bespoke basis. You will include that type of house in a development where you know that there is someone who needs it. Building on a speculative basis is a bit of a risk. You are talking about substantial additional amounts of cash, and then the difficulty of having a property left empty if there is not a client with the level of particular needs required to occupy it. In general terms, the evidence is that the supply of housing adapted for people with disabilities is not sufficient and that many people with disabilities are living in houses that do not meet their needs. There is plenty of evidence to support that statement, so it would probably have helped to focus the programme. You might not be able to, but could you give any information given that it was in the equality statement company in the budget last year about the loan parent issue? Has there been any progress with regard to increasing social rented housing provision for loan parents? Do you know that, or is that not something that you can comment on? I am not aware of any specific change in the way in which allocations policies generally work in relation to loan parents. Councils and housing associations allocate on a needs basis, so a loan parent with a housing need will be a priority. Very often, that group is housed through the homelessness route, as often as it is otherwise. I think that you have struggled to find evidence of a change in practice and allocations to target accommodation at loan parents. In terms of the last year's equality statement and the housing subsidy review, it might be something that the committee might want to look into a little bit further with the minister. Absolutely. We are not aware of the road of allocations policies, but we are here for the rest of the week, if we were to do that. The final question on adaptions, and I have one final set of questions that Mr Stewart will take us home on in relation to housing. I will get a suite of questions in relation to the units and written evidence. Just a very small supplementary in relation to the adaptions. I think that Mr Cain mentioned integrating joint boards and hoping that that would drive change in relation to how adaptions were managed within the housing sector. I am just wondering whether there is any evidence of some of that. A lot of meeting money in the system transfer from healthcare to social care in relation to integration funds. Half of that was to meet social care pay commitments, but I wonder if some of that would be identifying, be it a registered social landlord or a local authority, identifying that getting an adaption on quickly and speedily could get a person out of hospital two, three or four weeks earlier than otherwise would have to be in hospital and accessing those IJB funds above the £10 million adaptions budget that exists for RSLs. That was the point of having the integration was the more clever and cute use of those monies to better meet the needs of those needing those adaptions and actually save money in the long term as well. Is there any evidence of any of that starting to happen? The pilot projects that we have run around adapting for change have produced some quite strong evidence about the way in which the adaptation process needs to change and what better looks like. We have some tests of change there that will be very useful when it comes to driving improvement. We did a survey of our members last year. Nobody came back and said that the IJB was committing its own resources to support the adaptation process. I am not aware of IJBs putting money into adapted kitchens and bathrooms in the housing sector or other. Equipment is funded differently and I am not in any sense able to talk about that. However, physical adaptations to houses are not aware of IJBs directing their own resources to that. We can raise that with the minister, Mr Stewart. I don't know if there's anything you want to add to that. I'm not aware of funding going in that way but I agree that it would make a lot of sense to commit money to save the health board money in hospital beds and to have better outcomes for individuals. There's probably a particular conversation required about adaptations to the private rented sector as well, which we haven't really touched on, but there are still some practical problems around ensuring that private tenants where they need an adaptation can get that particularly in shared accommodation. There's been some work done on that, shared ownership situations. There's been some work done on that but I don't know that we've made the progress that we need to do around that either. I know from my own constituency case work on the rockipars needing to submit a substantial investment to their properties that they can't quite afford which could enable them to stay in those properties in just a more flexible approach to how that can be funded would certainly be beneficial from my constituency case work. That's an important thing to put on the record. Improvements to owners homes always raises concerns about the use of public money. Opportunities to how equity states can be taken or whatever, I suppose, very helpful. Last set of questions on housing and then we'll move on to our other evidence, Mr Stewart. In the submission, it makes a reference to the funding of other housing-related services. The pressures that we've faced in local authority, for example in homelessness or in private landlord registration, how can the £18-19 budget address those pressures? The answer is where the Scottish Government has specific ambitions for more to be done or things to be done differently that it properly costs that activity and provides the resources. I make the point again in my submission that the landlord registration fee hasn't risen since the system was introduced in 2006. That's quite a long time and there has to be a question about whether or not that fee remains appropriate. There is an ambition for local authorities to be more effective in controlling the private rented sector at what cost money, and we have the new legislation coming in now in force. Lots of conversations about rent pressure zones taking place will not be straightforward to achieve and there will be a cost in doing that. If the Scottish Government wants things to be done differently, it seems to me not unreasonable to say that you probably need to think about what that is going to cost and where the money is going to come from, because if you don't provide it, then it has to come from somebody else or it doesn't get done. I don't feel obliged to come in on this, but any additional supplementary comments on that? The scope, therefore, for improving the value for money from the home's fund, and, for example, commissioning the whole talk about procurement, how well can local authorities and their partners achieve that? There has been an enormous amount of work over the past 10 years and more in improving public sector procurement and local authority procurement in particular. There are a number of framework contracts now available, so the landscape has changed quite dramatically around that, focused largely on efficiency effectiveness on value for money and demonstrating value for money. We are getting better at it. I suspect that people aren't going to claim that we're as good as we possibly can be, but we are getting better at that. There is a strong focus on it, and that is supported by the work that the Scottish Government has done as well. Can I just check on procurement? I'm dragging the depth of my memory here. The housing paper was firm foundations. Does that ring a nodding heads there? Yes, I remember it back 2007-2008. One of the issues over procurement for small register social landlords was about the bundling together of contracts, so two, three, four housing associations doing 20 to 30, 40 unit developments rather than going out into the marketplace to procure. You could contract the one architect for all three, four developments and bundle together the contracts and drive efficiencies into the system. I know that firm foundations are now a thing of the past and things have moved on, but is that now a standard practice within the housing association movement? There's been quite a lot of work on improving procurement. Scotland Excel has been funded by the Scottish Government to carry out procurement capability assessments to support associations on their practice. We ourselves have been able to employ a procurement adviser who gives advice, runs free training courses. When I've spoken to members about building the 50,000 homes, as I said earlier, there's been a drop in the number of homes being built due to cuts in funding previously. What's happening quite often now is an association that may have expertise in development will actually do the new housing development for other associations. For example, Kingdom Housing Association and Fife do the development for what's called the Fife Alliance, a group of four associations. Link Housing Association do development for a number of partner organisations. I would say that things have moved on since then and that is becoming increasingly common. Before I pass the deputy committee to open up a new line in questioning, I put on record that it would be quite difficult to get panels of witnesses together where we've got two quite discreet themes. We're trying to explore an evidence, so thank you to the patients of Mr Black and Mr Ferguson in relation to this, but it was the only way we could really get you in on the evidence sessions to put the panel together in this format. Thank you very much, Elaine Smith. Thank you for coming along. Obviously, your evidence is important to us because it's your members who are delivering on the ground the services that we're talking about in facing the cuts associated with reductions. I know that, at the weekend, some of your evidence was picked up in the Herald last Saturday. First of all, if we look at your written evidence, you talk about the budgets that have been substantially cut and are far from adequate to meet the demand from citizens. Could you talk to us about how you feel about the inadequacy of the current settlements? You specifically said last year's budget announcement in particular lack clarity, and it's hoped that this year there would be less spin. To put that another way, could you perhaps talk to us about how you view the transparency of how the funding settlement is approached? We remember that. Quite often, in the last budget round, what was happening was that the Government was talking about ring-fence monies and putting that out, as there's additional money going into the local government. The announcements that were made and the funding that was made available, we didn't feel met the demands that were required. What we're saying is that it was a new investment with new priorities, so it wasn't investment coming into the local government to run the day-to-day revenue, the day-to-day services that we need. That's what we mean by spin, that we need to be something more clear coming across in the budget, that it's around what funding is available for local government for the day-to-day services. What we have seen is that we're coming to an end of the salami slicing of the services. We're going to end up at a stage where local authorities in our view are going to be providing statutory functions only. I think that that would be a sorry day for Scotland and Scotland's communities if we end up at that stage. The salami slicing up to date has amounted to 30,000 job losses in the last 10 years in the local government alone. That is nine out of 10 jobs in the public sector that I've gone to. What we're saying is that, yes, there has been additional pockets of money being announced, but there have been ring-fence monies for specific purposes. Therefore, it's not available to be used in the general revenue. I don't think that there's any doubt that revenue has gone down quite substantially over the last decade. We feel with it. Our members are struggling to cope because there has been salami slicing of services, so we're still trying to provide a high level of service. We are very much reduced workforce, so I think that that needs to be addressed, and we need to see new revenue coming in. I want to say something about the priorities, because there have been areas of the public services that have been protected. Low government is not one of them. What we view is that we need to go back to basics about what people's basic needs are in their communities. That is a home, a decent home, a good education, social care for our elderly, and all the things that are underpinned by good youth services to help to prevent the need for the other services that have been provided in the public service—the demand there—that, if we get it right at the start, we'll no need as much at the higher-end cost of the services later on. We would like to be honest around the budget in terms of what's happening. We are happy to have a conversation with the Scottish Government unison and behalf of our members about how we achieve that, but we need to see increased investment. It's fair to say that the committee last year asked for more clarity on the way that the figures were produced and what they exactly meant, so we were also asking for that last year in terms of transparency. There was a briefing this morning—a breakfast briefing—on those issues. Some figures were produced then. On revenue, if I remember rightly, the figure that was mentioned was that the Scottish Government has seen a cut of 1.5 per cent in revenue, but the cut to local government revenue has been out over 4 per cent—4.5 per cent, I think, was mentioned. Do you have figures on that when you're talking about looking at things in a different way? Do you have your own figures on that? I think that you're absolutely right. This is an issue and an argument that we have used for quite a long time now. That is that local government has suffered differentially than other parts of the public sector. If you look at the fact that local government is in this non-protected budget basis, as far as the Government is concerned, we have seen cuts of between 9 per cent to local government, which can only impact on the services that are provided in local authorities. It is the day-to-day services. It is the day-to-day services, the jobs of our members and the pay of our members that are funded out of that revenue budget. There has been a huge decrease over the past eight, nine, ten years that has impacted quite severely and leaves us in a situation that we are in just now. Do you have those figures available? Yes. We produced those figures. They came from the Fraser Valander Institute, and they are contained within our submission to the committee. At the breakfast briefing, I suppose that part of the evidence that we were hearing from the academics that were there was that, in the end, it might be services for—I think that you have mentioned that, Mr Ferguson—in the end, it might be residual services of last resort, if you want to call it that. We know that services for the poor are often poor services, so how can we reverse that and stop it? Again, when you looked at some of the evidence this morning, the pro-rich provision might be called had been cut less, and there can be reasons for that than the very pro-poor services. What would your view be on stopping that from going on? It is an investment. The core of it is about the money that is made available to provide services. I am not quite sure about the poor services element that you are saying, but from our point of view, if you look at our communities, if you look at what is happening, we have been taking a lot of information from our branches around 32 local authorities. Every one of them responds saying that their community—the feeling of the community is different now, because our open spaces are not being able to be maintained. People might not necessarily think that those services are important, but they are about the attitude and the ability of a community to come together is often done by what it sees its local authority doing and its community. You have seen wee pockets of the public responding on a voluntary basis, but that is not a long-term solution and that is not an answer. From our point of view, the key services that we are providing to the local government if they go, like the youth services, because they are almost decimated and we are seeing police reporting some youth crimes up. We are seeing more people attending accident emergency at the weekend, particularly young people, alcoholism, etc. We believe that that is from the foundation from the community. If we had more community services being provided, those services would not be hit on. If we are going to build community cohesion, we have to ensure that the local provided services are well funded. We are seeing changes to recycle collection, for instance. That is a huge impact. Bins are lying outside people's houses for longer periods of time that are attracting vermin. I am at my background in this housing and I work in an area of high deprivation in Ferrisley Park. The investment to Ferrisley Park did help, in a sense, to the community cohesion. It did not address all the issues by a mile and there are still many issues, but, certainly from the community's point of view, it brought them together. Something was misbuilding on that. However, if we keep cutting and cutting, our analysis is that there is nowhere else to go but the front line in local authorities. That is what we have tried to protect. We have seen that in local authorities, some to protect the front line. However, that is the next place to go. I know that my colleagues want to come in, so my final point would be that if our local authorities are able to mitigate that with rises in council tax and increases in charges, has there got to be an answer from central government? My view would be a central government. The ability for councils to look at their own area was right. I do not believe that the council tax is free. Everybody benefits from that because services were cut. I think that the ability for councils to make decisions about their local area and the needs within that is certainly welcomed in each authority will need to do that in its own merits. I think that the answer is central funding. When you increase your charges, you see a decrease in demand. I do not know that that balances out. I have not seen any evidence from local authority submissions. We have seen that the increase in charges has increased the revenue substantially to address the issues that we face. If I could supplement that, I will be very brief. It is going back to the point about council tax and the percentage amount that council tax comes into the local authority, which is only something in the region of 14-15 per cent. Even by raising council tax by 3 per cent, there is now a 3 per cent cap there, that is actually not generating a hugely significant amount of money into the local coffers. That has to be taken into account, although the headline is the removal of the council tax freeze, the reality of how much money that generates is quite different. Over the past 8, 9 or 10 years, local authorities have tried very hard to mitigate the budget cuts that they have suffered. Our evidence suggests that charges for local authority services are up somewhere in the region of 13 per cent over that particular period of time. A few of us want to come in on this before we move on to the next evidence session. Can I just check? You mentioned council tax there now. If every local authority has increased their council tax by 3 per cent, I think it would have been £70 million extra to local authorities, but eight local authorities did not, and that means that there is 21 million pounds less in the system than there would have been. If you look at the council tax multiplier that applies, that is an additional £110 million a year. Potentially, in the last financial year, there is up to an additional £180 million in the system outwith the local authority revenue grant, which is separate from that. Has that helped to mitigate some of the issues? Any money in the system always helps to mitigate, but from our perspective, the council tax rise in the ability to raise the council tax by up to 3 per cent does not go far enough. We are talking about the holistic amount of money that council tax raises within the whole of the local government budget. A £180 million would not be chicken feed, and £21 million has been spent in specific local projects can still make real differences. Do you notice that the eight local authorities that did not increase their council tax were wrong to do that? I cannot speak for individual local authorities. They have to base their budget decisions based on what is best for their particular needs, but I think that you will find that unison has consistently argued against the council tax freeze for the length of period it was in place. I find that confusing because this is all taxpayers' money. The Scottish Government gets a bloc grant and then can tax and spend, and part of that spending is the revenue support grant to local authorities. With the council tax freeze lifted, local authorities can do the exact same thing. If unison's rationale is that the Scottish Government has lifted the council tax freeze and should be giving more money to local authorities, then how can you not take a view on the eight local authorities that have not increased their council tax? Surely you cannot argue to have a cap lifted on the council tax. If the council tax freeze argued that that is the wrong thing, then when it comes in and you come here and you argue about the blight of financial support to local authorities, say that you have no view on the eight local authorities that decide to continue to freeze their council tax, that just does not add up. I said that it was an individual view for those local authorities, the same way as it has been an individual view for each of the other local authorities in Scotland to raise their council tax by 1 per cent, 2 per cent or 3 per cent according to their needs. Does unison have a view? Unison's view is that we did not support the council tax freeze, therefore local authorities would have the opportunity to raise the council tax as they so wished. Does unison have local branches in each local authority? They do. Does unison in each local authority take a view? I do not have that information to hand, so I could not sit here honestly and give you that view. Do you think that that would be a pretty important bit of information to bring to committee, Mr Black? That would be your view, convener. It certainly would be. Let's look at some other figures that you raise. You are focusing on the revenue grant, and you are right that that has put under a lot of pressure, but your numbers do not include, over the lifetime of this Parliament, an additional £750 million for the school attainment funding. In the last financial year, the people equity funding part of that would be £120 million direct to school head teachers. Do you accept that that will mitigate pressures on education? Could you make a big deal about education in rightly so? We focused on the revenue budget because that is what pays for the day-to-day services, and that has been cut substantially. Even in the figures that were just discussed, we do get a bit black there. Can I ask you about your views on the money that is going to education through the pupil equity fund? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? That will employ teaching assistants across the country for the next four or five years. Low-paid workers are doing valuable jobs. Any money that is given in for the money from the attainment of course is welcomed, and we hope that we will make a difference. If the money is targeted at the right places that money is used properly and is targeted towards teachers, I am not sure that that is necessarily where it is all going. What I would say is that any new money that is given in is obviously welcomed. However, if there is a suggestion that the local government finances have not been cut, I am sorry that I do not agree with that. Mr Ferg, it is important not to put words into my mouth because that is not what I am suggesting. I will have the exact same conversation with the Scottish Government when they appear in front of the committee as well. The point that I am making is that we look at one part of local authority funding as part of our budget scrutiny, but this committee is trying to get a lot more new on its budget scrutiny. We appreciate that ring-fence money is targeted at different parts of local authority services, giving a much more increased dynamic spending power in local authorities than the revenue budget would suggest. I also accept incidentally that that means that there is less flexibility because that is a type of ring-fencing. I accept both those things. However, we have to get some information on the record to show that the revenue budget might not be the whole story. Let us look again at other monies that Unison would not include. We have transferred £250 million from the health budget through to integrity joint boards, half of which is going to pay the living wage to social care workers. Do you think that that is an additional mitigation of pressures on local authorities or not? We welcome the Scottish living wage for social care. We made it very clear at the time when we certainly were calling for that. The money that is coming from the IGV is unfortunately not enough for the social care provision and the demand on social care. We have a social care crisis. Our members tell us that in all the evidence that we get in providing the social care services that are required. People are being released from hospital into the community, and it is the social care that has to pick up that. Yes, there has been some additional funding that has come through finally from the health budget towards social care, but it does not meet the needs of the services that are required. I am not seeking to challenge that either. I am trying to get to a point of view where, if Unison is looking at the revenue budget and there are wider monies at play, we have to scrutinise the revenue budget but also the wider monies as well. I will take one more final thing from your evidence, because you mentioned the attainment funding and your evidence. You mentioned health service budgets and your evidence. You also mentioned the doubling of free childcare and other specific commitments outwith the local authority revenue budget and flexibilities. Child care is one of the huge delivery mechanisms in local authorities. We saw something in the news the other month about local authorities and partnership nurseries in the business of employing additional 11,000 childcare workers by 2021. Is there a good news story to say at any point in local authority services that childcare is one of the good things that is happening? In terms of the increase in hours, the 1140 hours for childcare, of course, we are welcoming new jobs coming in. If they are real jobs and their jobs are at a high level in terms of the quality that is provided, we have childcare provision in local authorities. What we do not want to see happening is new tiers below the current rates or the current qualifications that workers are being brought in to provide those services. I also note that the Scottish Government has not given a commitment until 2020 on the provision of the living wage for a lot of those workers that are going to be undertaking those duties. Clearly, we would expect to see that from the commencement of employment. That is helpful, because I will check on that. Those workers will be employed by local authorities, not by the Scottish Government. It is technically not in the Scottish Government's gift, but the Scottish Government has got a significant influence over local authorities to see the delivery of that, and social care workers would be the example of that. Would you accept that? Yes, I would accept that, but what I am saying to you is that it goes back to the other point on the housing about the needs. When the ring fence money comes in for a specific purpose, local authorities are unable to determine how that money is spent other than the priorities that have been set for it. It goes back to your point earlier, chair, when you said that you need to undertake a needs analysis. I think that what we would like to see is that those additional monies coming to local authorities for them to decide under local democratic accountability how it should be spent across all those issues. What we are saying is that there is nothing here that protects local government. We do not see a protection for local government only on the Scottish Government's priorities. I think that that is the issue that goes back to my earlier point. We need to be able to provide the basics for our communities in order to help to ease the pressure on the other services further down the line, so that we do not see that happening. Can I ask a final question? A couple of colleagues will close the evidence session. Will the unison position be—I do not want to put words in your mouth—just to reverse the scrutinise the minister when he appears in front of the committee as well, I can assure you. Will the unison position be that the £750 million from the school attainment fund over the lifetime of the Parliament, the £250 million baseline per year health and social care funds into transferring from the NHS and any money in terms of childcare? Would your preference be that that money gets pumped into the core revenue grant of local authorities and they can just do what they like with it? I do not like to do what they like with it. I think that local authorities have to make a needs analysis of what the requirements for their communities are, and I think that if they had more flexibility around some of those monies, they could make improvements across a wider range of the community. I am not saying that the Scottish Government should only set priorities, but when you set priorities and you ring-fence the money for those priorities, I think that that is where it mismatches, because the need might be different across the board. Okay, let me rephrase that, and I apologise for phrasing it in such a way that it was not mutually phrased. The attainment fund moneys, the integration fund moneys and any new moneys for childcare, would Unison's preference be that that was put in the revenue budget of local authorities and local authorities decided what their local priorities were, rather than having national priorities in those areas? We do not have a policy position as such on it, but my own view would be that I think that there should be more flexibility for local authorities to decide on the money that comes, whereas there are priorities. I do not think that the priorities should be set against an amount of money. I do not think that that is the best use of public money anyway to do that. I am not really sure how, in such circumstances, a Government could deliver its manifesto, but I want to go on to the Unison submission. I actually thought that it was a really excellent submission in terms of looking forensically at the issues that local government faces in terms of resourcing it, but the reason that was puzzled by it was because, after four pages of such information, the conclusion, I thought, was modest to put it mildly. What you have said, and I quote, is that no matter what the UK Government decides on its budget, which I think is a big caveat, the Scottish Government needs to use its full powers to ensure adequate funding to double these essential services and decent pay for the workers that the services rely on. However, there is nothing in the submission that says what you mean by adequate. I am not sure how you will know what the budget is now, which is a £239 million real-terms resource reduction for the Scottish budget. However, how would the Scottish Government be able to deliver, regardless of what the UK budget had said? Can you tell us what adequate means? We are talking about funding a little Government, and how much do we need to fund it? I think that the point that has been made here is that we understand that the UK Government has made cuts that have bad consequentials in those cuts of company Scotland. However, how those cuts have then disseminated within the public services have been disproportionate, because each budget since the cuts have been happening, we have seen a low cut disproportionately more than the cut that has come from the UK Government. That is the point that we are making. We want to see adequate funding to provide the essential services that the local government is providing, and that is what we mean by that. In your submission, you are saying that between 9 and 14 per cent has been the reduction to local government. The Scottish Government will say that its resource budget has been cut by 8.1 per cent over the same time period with 500 million cuts before that by the outgoing Labour Government. Therefore, if we are going to fund local government adequately, although we do not specify how much that sum might be, does that mean that we should reduce money to the NHS? Or how would we use the full powers, as you suggest? The Scottish Government must, by law, unlike Westminster, balance its budget every single year. We do not have control over VAT, excise duty, national insurance, dividends, all of which are reserved, so that effectively means that we have to raise taxes or switch resources from other parts of the Scottish budget. How would Unison fund the adequate settlement that it calls for, and how much would we have to put either taxes up or switch money from other areas of the Scottish Government budget? Excuse me. There is no doubt that the Government will argue that they have to set priorities in the allocation of budgets to the various different parts of the public sector in Scotland. I am not going to sit here and tell you how to raw Peter to pay Paul as such. I think that what we are saying is that there are areas that the Government could look at. There might not be short-term, there might be much more longer term. The whole issue of a reform of local taxation, for instance. We have a firm belief that a new local taxation that introduced the local property charges with proper re-evaluation of bandings would place local communities in a much more stable position. You have to also look at the commitments that I expect the Government to give on low-paid workers elsewhere in the public sector. I take the point that was made previously. Local Government pay is not in the give of the Scottish Government. That is a separate negotiation with COSLA, but part of the funding for local government, in our view, should be about fair funding for local government workers. In local government terms, those workers have fallen probably some 15 per cent below inflation over the past eight, nine or ten years. However, as far as local government is concerned, we need to get back to a full baseline funding where we are not continually dropping that baseline to a level that, quite frankly, is not sustainable any longer. As Mark has already said, we have had the salami slice and that has been going on and on. We are at the stage now and our evidence in our paper to you has shown you some of the comments that have been made by people who work in those services. It is quite dangerous comments in some areas when you consider the impact that those services have. We have to get to a position where that cannot happen. However, we do that, we have to get to a position where that cannot happen. I agree with a lot of that, convener. My concern is that we might all support local government reform. Mr Ferguson talked about new revenue coming in in the future. The draft budget is in eight days. Given that the detail that was put into the unison submission about reductions in funding, you are not making any financial suggestions about next week. You are not saying that this is what tax should go up by or that this is what should be switched from other budgets. That is how much local government needs to fund, for example inflationary pay rises and new pressures. I am concerned that you have come here with telling us in great detail what the problem is, but we are not really getting any solution other than that one sentence about we need to use full powers and deliver adequate funding. It is not really given as anything to work on, no matter how sympathetic the panel is. We really need to know how much extra local government should get and where it should come from. I understand that COSLA has said that, to maintain service level at the current level, it is calling for £500 million to so far £500 million. That is what we need to provide services at the current level, so that is a starting figure for you. I believe that it is about priorities. I have said before that we are looking at the public services and the uniform services. In no way would I suggest that you cut them, but what I am saying is that I think that there is a bigger issue. I would like to see a budget that goes back to the basic core issues within our communities and the key issues that our communities need and for the workers to be adequately paid and resourced to provide those services. We have cut youth services. Substantially they would be one of the hardest hit in local authorities. It is no wonder that we are seeing children hanging about play areas in various other places and we have seen and there have been reports of crime up. We have heard from our colleagues in health who have said that accident emergencies are under extreme pressure because the children in our community, the aspiration has been taken away from them because we do not have the services at the level that we used to have before. I think that you make a passionate case very well. I think that the frustration of the committee, but it is with everyone who gives evidence to this committee that we have to look at the number that will be for us next week and look to see how those numbers might or might not change. That is our frustrations. That is why we pick away at that. When we picked away at the cause list submission about the funding gap, the standstill position included a 2.8 per cent revenue increase for services and a 3 per cent pay increase to staff. We were not sure whether they were including the £250 million integration monies. That causal is a bit of a scrutiny with the numbers that they were coming up with. We still have a little bit of a work to do ourselves before we take a view on the cause list. Is there one final question before we move to our next panel for evidence, Mr Simpson? Well, thanks very much. You have been given a bit of a hard time here. You may feel that. However, the message is, as I am hearing it, that your on-your budgets for councils have gone down. You are paired to the bone. If I can assist you on council tax, would you agree that the decision on whether or not to raise council tax—giving you the power to increase council tax—does not mean the same as you must increase council tax? It is up to each individual council. If a council decides not to, that does not mean that it is not getting less money from central government. Would you agree with that? Fair. Thank you for the patience of other committee members, but I have indulged myself with a line of questioning as well. I thank all the witnesses in relation to their time this morning. Please do follow up our final evidence sessions. You will see a theme coming up where the Government will be asked very similar questions about how they present their numbers and how robust those numbers are and what we think they should or shouldn't do going forward. There is a consistency there, and we are line of questioning. It was quite difficult putting the panel together, but we wanted to give both sets of stakeholders the opportunity to put your views on the record and you have done that. Thank you very much. We will suspend briefly just to be moved to the next panel. Welcome back everyone. We are still in agenda item 1. We moved to our second panel on draft budgets 2018-19. As we continue to take evidence on the Scottish Government's draft budgets, I welcome Robert Emmett, director of finance and corporate resources at Ellen Sarr council. He bottles out of the full pronunciation. I apologise. I also apologise to Alison MacArthur, head of finance, Renfrewshire council. A second apology for the length of wait. Those evidence sessions are very much of their own dynamic. They would have been discourteous not to allow that particular evidence session beforehand to run its course, but it means that we are significantly late for yourself. Our apologies in relation to that will move straight to questions with your permission and will move to Graeme Simpson. Thanks for coming. You have heard the previous evidence sessions following on from that straightforward question. Do you think that the amount of money coming to councils is enough? The funding that we are expecting to receive for the quarter next year is not sufficient to continue to provide the same level of service that we are providing at the moment. We are within what we are expecting and what we are expecting to achieve with inefficiencies for the next year. If we have a 3 per cent reduction in local government funding next year, for example, that leaves us as a council with 3 per cent savings to find through service reduction. That is after finding a similar sum through efficiencies and things that we have already put in place that are going to happen. It is not enough to continue to provide the same services if it continues like that. Perhaps just to say what are the difficulties that we have is that we do not know or we will not know until next week what the settlement will be for next year. We are working—we have some information—in the absence of any figures either for next year or for subsequent years. I echo what Robert Scott said about having visibility over the medium term. It is something that I think that all Scotland has provided a comment on in every audit report over recent years that councils must endeavour to provide medium term financial planning figures. It is not impossible to do, but it is more difficult to do in an environment in which your settlement, your main source of funding, is allocated on a single year basis. On your original question, the totality of service delivery and the quality of service delivery that councils are able to achieve, undoubtedly, there is going to be an impact in terms of future settlements and the future level of income that councils can expect to receive over the medium term. That is something that every council will be planning to manage either three efficiencies or other measures to try and achieve a balanced budget position. I appreciate that you are working blind as you are every year. You have not seen the draft Scottish budget yet, but all councils will make guesses of what is coming. They will provide councillors with a range of options ahead of the budget. You have probably done that already. I wonder if, in each of your councils, you give us an idea of the sort of range of, that sort of forecast range of cuts that you have been working with and the kind of services that you think may have to go. We produce a projection that looks forward and we have a fan chart that says what are the range of probabilities that we are working to. In our central case, we will have a shortfall of about £6.7 million next year if you take all the things that we know into account. That is looking at assuming that pay is at 2 per cent, assuming a 4 per cent reduction in grant funding and that inflation continues to run at 2 per cent, as well as new pressures that are coming through from changes, for example in things such as universal credit and how we might expect that to affect us. That is our base case. We think that that can go up. If you put another percentage point on pay, that will obviously push it upwards. If the grant settlement is more favourable, then that will bring it down. We have a range that goes forward. If we continue on the same trajectory as we have for the last couple of years, then we are looking at saving something like £12 million, and that is about 12 per cent of our budget over the next two years. That is the planning horizon that we are looking at. What have we done? We have looked at doing everything that we can to reduce loan charges, to continue to seek efficiency. If you look back, we have realised something like that. Of the £35 million that we have had to save over the last period to balance the budget, about £19 million of it has been through doing things more efficiently. Sometimes you can have a question about whether it is rationalising two skills into one efficiency or a reduction in service is a point that you could debate. However, through things that have not diminished the outcomes that we are trying to achieve, and the balance has been achieved, a relatively smaller sum over the historically has been achieved through service reductions, but those have been in some cases quite high. Profile removal of the Barab and Becula service has been one of the ones that has perhaps attracted most of the attention, but we are spending less on roads maintenance, we have removed itinerant teachers, so there are discrete things that have gone in the past. Looking forward, because there is so much uncertainty about where the figures are going to be, we have not started a public consultation exercise as to what that might be because I think it is very difficult to have a public consultation exercise about whether you are talking about a 5 per cent saving or a 10 per cent saving, but the reality is that with a working assumption that the teachers continue to be protected and the IJB continues to be protected and the funding for new initiatives and loans fund are fixed, we are looking at making savings of about 8 per cent out of about 40 per cent of the budget. The bits of the budget that will suffer will be in the leisure services in the roads, in non-teaching education, those services that can be affected. They are probably services that people are going to feel most strongly about and are going to be difficult decisions. Public transport, I should have mentioned. I managed a brief look at the spice briefing, which looked at who the balance of services affected. Increasingly, that is going to be because most of our services are towards the I think pro-poir, is the way it is, the adjective they use. Service is increasingly going to be an impact on those services. Just perhaps you were talking about housing in the earlier session. Increasingly, there is a risk of supporting, particularly where we are, rural communities. Transport, for example, which is one of the discretionary services, is vital to keeping people living in rural and remote communities, but it is one of the services that we are going to have to look at. We have done some good work. We did a very successful piece of work on participatory budgeting the year before last, where we reduced the budget and we got people involved in redesigning the service. In the very remote areas and the very remote islands, which I think some of you will be familiar with, reducing services becomes more and more difficult. When you are providing a minimum service at an optimum level, then the only changes to do it are to withdraw it or to shrink it. Where we provide a leisure facility on barra and we have a swimming pool on barra, then you have a fixed cost to providing that more or less. If you are going to make a saving out of it, it is going to be open less or it is not going to continue. That is some of the challenge that we are going to come up against in the next period. You cannot get into that level of discussion on options like that until you know exactly what you are talking about. Are you going to have a very difficult community engagement process? I hope that that has answered your question, chef. No, that is very good. Mr MacArthur. Okay. I again echo much of what Robert said in terms of the information that we provide to elected members to allow them to have a visibility of what the council's financial position is. Again, that is framed on a range of assumptions and broadly the assumptions that we have around the key elements of the budget. In terms of pay award, we are framing that on our central assumption of a 2 per cent pay award for next year. A 4 per cent cut in revenue grant is our central assumption for the coming year. An inflation continuing at its current small CPI is running at 3 per cent. That will be reduced slightly over the coming years, in line with the Bank of England forecast. Again, in terms of the areas of efficiency that have been targeted, the areas that are not necessarily targeted, but the areas that you can look to deliver efficiencies from, I managed a very quick read of the key messages from the spice briefing that was issued this morning. A large element of the areas of efficiency have come from the back office. That has been a key strand, certainly, of where Renfrewshire has been over the past number of years. The vast majority of savings have come out. We have tried to avoid having any impact on the front line, but we are reaching a stage where inevitably there will be some impact on front line services and whether that is in quality terms or quantity terms. That is yet to be determined. We are forecasting over the coming years that financial outlook will be presented to members. Next week, our leadership board will outline a forecast gap that has remained broadly similar over the past year or two of round-about savings requirements in the order of £20 million per annum over the medium term. Are you getting to the point where you are thinking of cutting statutory services or is it still non-statutory? We would always focus on non-statutory. Council has an obligation, obviously, to deliver a range of services that we would not look to, which leaves a smaller rumble. I think that that has been alluded to in previous evidence sessions that the areas of council service that are either non-protector or non-statutory are the areas that have been increasingly targeted. However, our ability to drive efficiencies out of those particular areas without having an impact on, as I mentioned earlier, the quantity or the quality of those services is really starting to get impacted. You both took a different decision last year on whether to raise council tax or not. Renfrewshire did not change the rate in Bandy, but Western Isle—I cannot pronounce it in Gaelic, unfortunately—decided to levy the full 3 per cent. Can you tell me why you took those decisions? The increase in council taxes is largely a political decision that was taken by the administration at the time. The administration had a commitment to not raising council tax in their view that that was directly impacting on residents of Renfrewshire who were already hard-pressed in terms of other financial demands. That was the rationale for their decision at that point. I suppose again a political decision, but in the previous years, when the leader and I had been around communities consulting on what they thought we should do without the budget, there was a regular question about why you are not raising council tax. Having had a period of a freeze, the view of the council was that this was an opportunity. You have to look at it in context. Council tax is less than 10 per cent of our income, so a 3 per cent rise is £300,000. That is not a huge sum of money. In our case, the amount of money—because, by and large, our properties are in the lower bands, the amount raised from the statutory change was about half, I think, of what was raised through the decision to raise an additional 3 per cent on council tax. Together, that was an additional half a million pounds or so towards a challenging budget for the council, and it was in the position to take that. Has there been any kickback from the public? We have not had any negative feedback. I am not aware of any responses in relation to council tax in that respect in the last year. No supplementary on that. We will brief supplementary, Mr Gibson. How much did the renterisher forgo by not raising council tax in the election year? Each 1 per cent raising council tax generates about £700,000, so if we had taken the full 3 per cent, that would have been just over £2 million. We will move on now to Elaine Smith. Thank you very much for joining us and for waiting to do so. How well do you think that councils are evaluating the impact that budget reductions have on specific communities, for example vulnerable groups? If you are happy with me to go first through the chair, all of our budget choices, as we call them, decisions that go forward are subject to quality impact assessments, so we have a process. If you wanted to go online, you could go and have a look for them and see them where we try to identify what the impacts are of anything that we are doing, and if necessary, come back and revisit it. It is fair to say that, because officers are mindful of the duties that they have in terms of equalities, the proposals come forward usually with that in mind. When we do the work, it does not usually highlight anything, but there is a robust process that makes sure that any change that we are making is properly assessed and that is documented for members when they are making the decisions. What issues have been identified with the equality impact approach and how they have been addressed as a consequence of that? Can you give us examples? I do not think that our process has ever brought up anything where we have had to make a specific adjustment to the proposal that has come forward on a coin or something that has come up through the assessment. As I said, that is because officers have been mindful of that when they have been developing proposals to seek to protect the most vulnerable in the work that we are doing. Your equality impact assessments have not thrown up any particular issues? No, nothing. That is interesting. Mr MacArthur, do you have a similar assessment? Yes, I think that the approach that went for sure is similar. We would undertake equality impact assessments on all the budget decisions that are undertaken. As I mentioned earlier, much of the efficiencies that have been made to date and the savings that have been made to date have been targeted at services that are not front-line delivery services. In terms of impact on any particular constituency, again, that is similar to Colin Yellenshire. We have not experienced any significant impact on one particular area or vulnerable group that would demand that we would adjust the efficiencies decisions that have been taken to date. In terms of equality impact assessments, if you are looking at protected characteristics, we heard in previous evidence that Unison raised that they thought that a lot of youth community services had been affected by cuts. Age, of course, is a protected characteristic. Would that be something that has been affected in your area? It is not something that I have experienced or not something that I have knowledge of in terms of the savings decisions that have been undertaken over the past years and that they have been particularly targeted at that age group. I would suggest that, if anything, the work that we have undertaken through our tackling poverty programme has actually directed additional resources to younger people in terms of the tackling poverty programme that has been rolled out and addressing, for example, costs of the school day and supporting a family's first approach to avoiding and mitigating areas of demand that the council sees further down the line. As I think we outlined in our submission, the council has had a clear focus on early intervention as a way to reduce demand and costs. So, can I just be clear here? Are you saying the same as Western Isles that no particular issues with the quality impact assessments have been identified? Are you saying that or that they have been identified and they have been addressed? I am not aware of any significant issues that have been raised in terms of the savings proposals that have been generated. Okay, interesting. Okay, okay. Any more follow-up on that? Well, I think that Alexander Stewart has a specific thought, and then I have more questions. Nothing yourself? No, okay. Alexander Stewart. Can I just do a supplementary on that? Obviously, when you have your budget review group, you would look at the efficiency savings that you would have, and you would potentially look at the knock-on effect that that would have to the services that you used to apply with the supply and demand of whatever that service may be. You have indicated today that you feel that that has not had a massive impact on the supply and demand and the service quality. Is that the case across the board or just within specific areas? Sorry, I can just clarify. I would not suggest that the savings that have been agreed to date have not had any impact. There has obviously been an impact in terms of the operation of the council. However, the savings that have been generated to date have targeted, as far as possible, back-office and non-front-line services. That has been potentially redeployment of staff. Staff management processes are within efficiency to technology or something of that nature so that, in reality, the front-line service has not been dramatically affected. I would suggest—I think that the spice briefing that was issued this morning would hopefully echo that in terms of the areas of saving that we have been targeting, have largely been back-office. However, as I mentioned earlier on, we are coming to a position where, in the very near future, that is not simply not going to be a sustainable approach and we are going to have to make some very difficult decisions. Our elected members will need to make a little bit of a decision. Within your financial planning, you would have a short-term, a medium-term and a long-term solutions to some of the situations that you are looking at. You will also be looking at the potential of forward planning with potential budgets for the next years coming ahead. You have identified now that that is where the problems are going to arise even more than it is today. I would not suggest that we have solutions but we have forecasts on what the potential position could be, assuming that a range of assumptions hold through in terms of some of those key areas around pay award and the level of grant support that we received from the Scottish Government and around council tax, which are key levers in terms of addressing the financial position now over the medium term. With all local government, it is the political decision at the end. Do you make a recommendation or do you make a suggestion? Yes, we can arrive at a range of options that elected members should have. You have given them an option menu and it is up to the political administration to make those decisions on your assumptions. Yes. Thank you. Mr Emett, do you want to add anything? Do not feel the need to just before it goes back in. I suppose just to be clear, I think that over the period since the financial crisis, about 10% of our cuts are saving, sorry, have been through service reductions. It will be wrong to say that there is not any impact. There has not been any identified impact on any particular groups as a consequence of that. There will have been an impact. I think that, as a council, our aspiration is to minimise the impact and to do the best job that we can with the resources available, but there is no doubt that, for example, if we are spending £1 million a year less maintaining the road in the long term, the condition of the roads will deteriorate. People probably are not yet at the stage where that necessarily is a feeling of impact. We have had an awful lot of discussion about the removal of itinerant teachers and specialist music teachers and, although we are looking at different ways of delivering that service, there still is an impact to the people who were previously dealing with those. We have done a lot more on efficiency in the period behind us. I think that the challenge going forward is that the balance is going to shift to being much more on impact on those services rather than on efficiency. That leads us into, again, the whole service redesign, the impact on staff and the quality of services that they are able to provide. I would specifically like to ask Mr MacArthur on that. Your evidence talks about a decision to shift to a digital first model and approach to customer service. In doing that, how does that then impact on more vulnerable groups who find that difficult—the digital first approach? We absolutely recognise that a digital first approach will not work for everyone. The council agreed a customer service strategy only last month, and that absolutely recognises that a digital first approach will not work for everyone, which is why councils always have options, in terms of telephone support or front office. Customer service centres across the county will remain available for members of the public who do not find that a digital first approach is the best approach for them. In which case on that specific issue, if you equality assess that, have you put in additional monies for vulnerable groups? In terms of the changes that we have made to date, in terms of trying to implement a customer portal, for example, and encouraging, for example, planning applications or changes in address or applications for a council tax reduction and so on, we have absolutely, in terms of putting those plans in place, we do recognise within the changes that we are making that a digital first approach will not work for everyone and we will always have routes available for members of the public to contact us to make those changes if required. Presumably, that allows you to downsize staff taking a digital first approach. Is that where your savings would be made? That is one area where savings have been generated in the past. On the wider issue, can I just ask whether councils then, for both of you, whether councils see increasing fees and charges as a way of offsetting budgetary pressure? Is that something that they think that they can do? Not significantly, chair. Equine, perhaps what Unison was saying, where we are, we are a low wage economy. The fees and charges principally come through services, if you start putting up the fees and charges. One of our single biggest things is our leisure facility membership scheme. If we put the charge up on that, we will lose people out of it and wider health benefits. In the scheme of can we fix our budget gap by putting up fees and charges? No, that is not our solution. In fact, we have done a bit of work on car parking for example this year, which demonstrated that we are perhaps even on a tipping point in terms of people avoiding paying car parking charges and changing their parking habits, if I put that up, and that is a relatively small measure. People are mindful of it, and I think that I am mindful that we are in a low-GDP economy. There is not the capacity to raise significant additional money from citizens. You mentioned health there, so there are cross-cutting issues, because if you do that and you impact on people's health, that would have a corresponding impact on the health budget. The council is very mindful of that. We introduced our strategy of our scheme five years ago now. We were moving from everyone's pages as they came into a standard membership, and we were not sure at the time exactly how it would work out. It was highly successful in terms of the take-up and participation in sport, particularly for young people. That is something that the members are very mindful of in terms of their wider strategy. Mr McArthur, do you want to add anything to that? Again, similarly to what Robert said, there are fees and charges. It is not going to present a solution for us in terms of the size of the funding challenges that we have. In total, fees and charges to organisations and members of the public, locally and around the infrastructure, raises something like £10 million. It is not raising that way. A couple of representatives are not going to address the size of the challenges that we are facing. The fees and charges also impact on the business sector. We have been raising charges higher than inflation is in relation to pay and harbour dues. That puts pressure on businesses who are using those pay and harbours. There is a balance there. The capacity for businesses to absorb increases in prices, not just individuals as a point of making, is limited when we are trying to support the whole economy. The observant, Mr Wightman, had to leave committee to go to another committee for duties that he has there. I know that Mr Wightman and Mr Gibson had a number of issues that they were keen to raise. Mr Gibson, do you want to take some of those forward? I have a couple of questions that Mr Wightman asked me to ask on his behalf, but I will just ask a couple of myself first, if that is okay. It was interesting that Mr McArthur talked about £10 million raised in Renfisher through fees and charges. By forgoing a 3 per cent council tax equivalent to about 20 per cent of that? Arathmedigly, yes. Housing, you have said in your submission, Mr McArthur under question 8, you have said that the subsidy councils receive for new build almost £57,000, however our area sales receive £70,000, an increase in subsidy to match that, however our area sales would have a significant impact on the level of new build housing councils can deliver. I am just wondering what sort of impact that would have in Renfisher. That is not a figure that I would have to hand. I need to consult with my colleagues within the housing department, but in terms of our strategic housing investment plan, my understanding is that if the level of subsidy was increased, then that would obviously reduce the demand for council resource to fund and council resource within the rules around HRA investment, and that being balanced in its own right from rental incomes, then I think that that would increase the number of houses that Renfisher could produce, could build over the coming period, but in terms of the exact numbers, I could consult with my council housing colleagues and provide that to the committee. Could the decision be some projects going ahead or not? I think that it is not an area that I am particularly close to, but it is something that I can absolutely take back and provide a response to the committee once I have consulted with that. You have basically said that you welcome the allocation of resources for housing and believe that this is an essential component, particularly in rural areas, for retaining population and jobs. You consider that it is essential that housing funding is permitted to be used flexibly to prevent the significant higher cost of building, housing and island locations, acting as a barrier to development and consequently population retention. I notice that funding in terms of the resource planning assumptions is going to increase from £7.533 million next financial year to £9.092 million at 20 per cent. I am just wondering what impact that will have, and what you mean by flexibility in terms of that? I suppose that the biggest challenge for us is being able to develop in the rural areas. I know that you talked earlier about the difficulties about having land available. Traditionally, it has been easier to get land and to get sites and to get development to happen in and around Stonaway than in some of the remote places. Down in the southern isles, you are looking at something like 50 per cent more to build a house than anyone else, but you are not just looking at that, you are looking at difficulty getting people to come and build houses. The ship is a balance between being able to deliver things that we know that we can deliver to get the houses delivered and trying to achieve the council's objective. Yesterday, we were talking about this very much around trying to get houses into remote and rural island communities. I know that there are benchmarks around what the cost contribution is, and the Government has been very supportive of looking at being flexible about what is the contribution that makes this scheme work. I think that there are still opportunities to look at more inventive ways of supporting people who want to live in communities. There is a particular challenge where the cost of building the property will exceed the value of the property when it is built. If it costs £180,000 to build a house but you could not sell it for that when it is being built, then you have a difficulty with someone coming in and trying to buy it. The council has been involved at a small scale with small places where there is a person, Harris for example, building a house that they are going to live in. That is what we want, rather than people who are going to build houses and holiday cottages. Finding innovative solutions and, to be fair and tidy to the Government, there is a lot of support for the work that we are trying to do is important, but that does not get you your numbers. If you are looking for a big number of houses to build in a short period of time, it takes longer and it is more expensive to deliver a smaller number of houses, and that is the conundrum that we are up about. We are very much, and I hope that the Government is, about trying to keep people in communities. If there are not houses, that will be the first step. If there are not services, so if you have not got broadband as well as your house, for example, you are going to really struggle to get a family to move in there to live there. You can use that money, for example, to refurbish rather than rebuild, because certainly that allows not just the perhaps reductions in the cost but to maintain some of the kind of traditional look of some of the houses and villages rather than perhaps looking at something that could be in, you know. Sharon, I think that that is all in the mix. The cost and availability of the housing is that we took the step of using the power to introduce a double council tax on empty homes, particularly to try and bring more of them back into use. That has had some success, but there is still a number of properties, for example, with people who are in care, where it is a challenge working out how to get those properties into use and not to deteriorate in condition. That is my question. I was just wondering if I could ask a question about short-term nature of funding, if that is okay. In his absence, for example, in Mr Emman's submission, you said that the budget review group, medium and long-term financial plans for all sets would help councils in strategic planning, and you expressed concern that the notification of single settlements in mid-December reduces the opportunity for meaningful engagement with communities. I am just wondering what impact that has on your ability to plan ahead, and perhaps you could also answer that question, as we are almost in MacArthur. I think that, as a council, we have always worked hard to try and work within the funding that we have got and to do our best. However, if we are uncertain about what is coming, then we cannot plan for the best use of resources. If we look at it, we have to set our budget. We will meet to set our budget in February. I know that we have technically a little longer than that. However, if you only learn in December what your settlement is going to be, and if it is only for one year, you are conducting a single-year exercise in a short period of time to try and agree what you are going to do. If you are in a period of growth—if you cast your minds back to when we had the first three, a settlement and 5 per cent growth some considerable period ago, it feels then that is not such a challenge. However, when you are in a period of service reductions, you do not want to be having a conversation with a community that our budget is reducing this year and then going back to the next year and saying, I would like to reduce some more next year because you really want to redesign the service. I have been working with our council to try and say, can we plan for the whole term of the council? Can we plan a budget that decides what we are going to do so that we do not go back every year and talk about cuts, but we decide what we are going to do and we do it and then we focus on the positive things. Now, there are some positive things, as you will know. There are things that we are doing with East Scotland, with education, where we are really trying to say, there is a different way of delivering services that can be better. However, I think that the process would be better if we had some indication that our settlement for the next period was there. Now, I think that my own view is that there is a capacity to do that. The UK Government had set out four-year plans when it came into office, but that did not translate through into longer-term plans within Scotland, accepting that they could change and that there is a series of commitments that the Government has made through its manifesto that it is committed to delivering. I know that you talked a little bit earlier about transparency. Being clear about the funding coming in for expanding preschool education, that means that there is a consequent impact on whether it is coming from local government and where it is coming from. Having clarity across the piece as to what we are expecting and how it is being funded would help. I suppose that everybody would buy into it. I accept that it is for the Government and for the council to make their own choices about what those priorities are. However, as officers working within the scheme to know the framework that you have got, I think that we would make better decisions if we had clarity about what we were doing, chair. I do not have anything more particular to add over what Robert outlined there. I think that it would help councils enormously, particularly in an environment where overall resources are reducing if we had a better visibility of just to what extent those resources might be reducing by. The councils can plan, in conjunction with their communities and their community planning partners, to address those challenges in a much more structured way than is the case that we are able to do at the moment. That would allow us to potentially invest in areas of transformation that would potentially deliver over a much longer period, but we would have visibility over how we would bridge that gap in the shorter term. It would be enormously helpful to have that visibility. Although, of course, the Scottish Government does not always know its own budget until the chancellor stands up at the dispatch box, which makes it difficult from their perspective. Thank you, Diolch yn fawr. More questions in that area. Given the fact that you have had quite a significant weight, we are about to close this particular evidence session. Is there any particular comments that either of you would like to put on the record before we formally close this particular evidence session? I think that the only thing that I would add to the chair is that it is at one of the areas where, in an island community, if you think that there is an opportunity to look at the single island authority type of model, there is not the opportunity for shared collaboration across councils, perhaps in the same way as there might be an airshare or somewhere where you have a number of councils who can collaborate. We think that the best public sector economy is through an area or a place-based collaboration around the islands. Going forward, that is where there is an opportunity potentially. There are some potential efficiencies, but not just that, but the opportunity to make sure that the services are best designed for the citizens. As an opportunity going forward, that is perhaps worth having in mind, Chair. Can you hold on to your thoughts, Mr MacArthur, because Mr Giffiths has made a late bid to ask a statement here? Yes, thank you very much to let me in. It is just on the basis of that. Obviously, one of the things about western islands is that there are 20,000 people when you have a health board, a local authority and a gracing job. It would not be better if it was all within one structure. That is very much the chorus position. There is a real opportunity there. There are challenges because of the way in particular the NHS and the different organisations work, but the chorus view would be that there is an opportunity there to look at how we best provide services for, as you say, a small population and a huge geographic area. Mr MacArthur, your opportunity for any closing comments? I suppose that, in a similar vein, it is something that, within Renfrewshire, we have been attempting to do over the past couple of years, has moved forward in a much more structured way with our community planning partners in arriving at. I consolidate a view about what the total resources are available within the Renfrewshire area and how we can best use those resources to address the issues that the local communities have. It is not the same as a single organisation, but we deliver public services as what Robert has suggested. However, in terms of a wider, much more community planning-based approach, rather than each individual public sector organisation doing its own thing and planning in isolation, that is something that we are certainly trying to overcome. Okay, well thank you for putting that on the record. I think that the committee is very conscious that both of yourself as witnesses work within an environment where you are driven by not just the numbers, but the policies of the administrations of which you have to forward plan on that basis. Their questions, hopefully, reflected how you have to work their way through that process irrespective of the numbers that flow from Scottish Government, so thank you for giving evidence to our committee to help us to understand that process better. Thank you very much for attending that end agenda item 1 and we'll suspend for a short comfort break before moving to agenda item 2. We now move to agenda item 2, where we're joined with the Commission for Ethol Standards and Public Life in Scotland for the annual report on accounts 2016-17. The committee will take evidence on the commissioners' annual report and accounts. As members will be aware, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee will also take evidence from the commissioners' annual report and accounts at its meeting next week. I welcome Bill Thomas and the Commission for Ethol Standards and Public Life in Scotland, as well as Clare Gilmore, senior investigating officer and Ian Bruce, public appointments manager of the Commission for Ethol Standards and Public Life in Scotland. I understand that there's no opening statement. I thank you for that, Mr Trobb. It's worth straight to questions and I think that we'll give him Simpson to kick us off. Yes, thanks a lot, convener. You've spent in one year £949,000, dealt with 224 complaints, only 18 of those were found to breach any sort of code. That's less than one in 10. If you do a crude breakdown based on what you've spent to those 18 cases, that's about £53,000 per case that ends up as a breach. The vast majority of cases that you dealt with were not a breach. Do you know what things are the colossal waste of money? That's a dramatic question to open up an evidence session. Mr Simpson, who would you like to respond in terms of value for money of the office? I've been asked a question of this nature before. I pointed out that one third of my budget is not even spent on conduct complaints, so I'm disappointed that that wasn't registered. Even on the crude calculation, the figures are wrong, and it implies behind it that there's an implication that the complaints that don't go forward as breaches are valueless. I'm not sure that the people who submitted those complaints would agree with that. The point that I'm making is that, not just this year, every year you'll deal with hundreds of complaints, but a tiny amount will end up as a finding of a breach. Surely, you'd have to accept that a large percentage of those complaints are simply spurious. You're looking puzzled, but the biggest number are under the category of disrespect. Disrespect can mean all sorts of things, but it could be a mild insult. I could mildly insult Mr Gibson here to my right, and he could issue a complaint that you'd have to deal with. That's costing the taxpayer money, but it would be an entirely spurious complaint. My point is, aren't we wasting a lot of money dealing with the complaints that are frankly of a trivial nature when we end up with only 18 out of 224, where you've found that there is a breach? That's in that, Mr Thomson. I think it won't be quite helpful for the committee to know, Mr Simpson, whether or not—anyone can make a complaint—it's whether there's a filtering and gatekeeping process that decides how quickly some complaints are processed and investigated, the ones that are not actioned or investigated in any greater detail. Is there a sifting system that you go through as part of that? Mr Simpson is talking about potentially spurious complaints. Is that quite helpful to know, I think, with Mr Simpson as well? Yes, convener. I mentioned last year that we had introduced a process that I called initial office assessment, and we still run that process. That is the initial assessment when the complaint comes in. Some are entirely outside my jurisdiction, they may not even relate to councillors, they may relate to things that are entirely outside the role of councillors and therefore are not covered by the code. Disrespect, I agree, can cover a very broad range of things, some of which are certainly trivial. I'm not sure that I would call them spurious. I think that if somebody goes to the trouble of making a complaint, they rarely regard it as spurious. Some of those end up with the councillor against whom the complaint has been made being suspended. I would suggest that those are not in any way trivial or spurious, but I can see that if the political will of the Parliament is that time shouldn't be spent on that, that's an option that you have in terms of legislation. We might come on to that, but there might be supplementaries. Thanks very much. It just occurred to me during that line of questioning, Bill, and thank you for coming to join us, but it occurred to me to ask you whether—I wasn't sure if there's any in your report and I don't think there was—you have got any ability to deal with particularly vexatious, vindictive, politically motivated complaints? Is there any way you have of dealing with that if you notice that that's what it is or you came to that conclusion? I don't, in terms of the legislation. I did come to the predecessor committee a couple of years back and suggest that there might be some sort of order of priority of cases, which would allow some not to be followed through. It didn't find favour with the committee, I think, it's fair to say. At the moment, I'm in a position where I'm required to investigate all complaints that come to me, regardless of the motivation. On average, over five years, 80 per cent of the complaints come from members of the public. That doesn't mean that they're all unconnected to the political process, but the complaints—we're talking about councillor complaints here—the complaints that come from councillors over that period average about 19 per cent of the total. Some of those are very clearly politically motivated and some of them may well be tit for tat. It doesn't mean, of course, that the subject of the complaint is irrelevant, spurious or trivial. It may actually be quite serious. No, I wasn't even asking about that, because what some people might consider irrelevant or trivial would consider extremely serious. However, I suppose that I'm trying to explore the issue of the more vexatious ones and whether or not there would be any recourse. Is there some way of putting people off making those kinds of complaints? I guess that's what I'm exploring. If that were to be done, I think that I would need some authority to do so, and as things stand, I don't. What I can say is that I don't have a number of regular complainers. Over the years, there have been some elected members who have put in quite a number of complaints. There tends to be also a number of complaints against those same individuals, it seems to be a way of working. I'm not in that position at the moment. It's not like petitions to the Parliament in the early days when there were people who would read the newspapers and decide, oh, I must put in a petition about this or that, and you'd get 20. We're not in that position at all. Mr Thomson, there's something you mentioned. I apologise, actually, clerking, that drew it to my attention, so I'm sorry that I missed it. One of your replies you mentioned about if you sought to prioritise or have a hierarchy of complaints—I'm not sure what the terminology would be—that that's not something in your power. You have reached each individual complaint in the same way through the same process and the same mechanism. Would you be seeking the ability to prioritise different categories of complaints in different ways? I'm just wondering. At the time I made the suggestion, the number of complaints was going up almost inexorably, and I was concerned that it wouldn't be possible to handle them all without either significant additional expenditure or else limiting those that were looked into. I think that I have a general statutory power to decide whether or not to investigate a complaint, but of course I'm covered by the general administrative law, so if I act unreasonably I would be subject to, rightly, potentially judicial review of decisions. Now, I accept that that would be an extreme position to adopt, but I don't want the office to be in a position where it's been legally challenged all the time and spending a lot of effort and money defending or responding to legal challenges, rather than what we do at the moment, which is filtering complaints and only investigating those that appear to have substance. That's helpful. I've got a couple of questions I want to ask, but I can hold them back. Other committee members want to ask any questions at this point, Mr Gibson. About credibility and consistency, two MSPs sitting next to each other both fail to declare an interest, somebody watching on telly at home decides to raise a complaint about one of those members not declaring an interest, but doesn't raise the issue about the other one who's also failed to declare an interest perhaps on the same issue. I've corresponded to you with this, as you know, and you will investigate the person where there's a complaint being made about it, but if the other person has not been complained about, even though that person has failed allegedly not to declare an interest as well, that just doesn't even get considered. Where's the consistency? How's the credibility of the system and such a thing? Surely you investigate all cases where this is supposed to have happened, or none, rather than just, well, maybe complained about that person, so they can just, you know, no bother declaring an interest, whereas somebody complained about you, so we will investigate it. By the way, we'll take eight or nine months to do it. And I was in my case, yeah, and I'm really... I'm serious, I'm really, really embittered about it, actually, to be perfectly honest with you, actually about the whole process. Right. You know, but I will not get into any detail, but that's the crux of it, you know, two people do the same thing, but one gets investigated and one doesn't. So, Mr Thomson, reflections on that? First, a lawyer's answer. The second person allegedly did the same thing. It may not have been investigated to the point where it's been established. And I think it's probably the case with most regulatory systems outside totalitarian states that it is the thing which come to the... things which come to the attention of the regulator which are investigated. I don't... If you wished my role or somebody else completely different to be to go around investigating any potential breach, they would have to operate in a completely different way. I'm obviously familiar with Mr Gibson's circumstances, and I'm not going to go into the detail of that. I understand the reason why he's irritated by it. But I think it's quite a step from the system that we have at the moment where anybody can make a complaint, which I appreciate may mean some are spurious to use, Mr Simpson's word, to one where the regulator effectively goes looking for trouble and investigates things. I mean, to be blunt about this, there is nothing stopping somebody in the position that Mr Gibson felt himself to be in making a complaint about the other person. Can I, Mr Gibson? I actually have a supplement I'd like to ask on this specific question, but it's very personal to you. Would you like to explore this further? I'm just... I'm sorry, but I wouldn't be prepared to make a complaint about someone that I don't feel is worthy of investing huge amounts of public money. And particularly given that these things happen in the chamber, you know, at least once a week, sometimes more than once a day, and the president officer says that's a matter for the individual member. You know, so there's no way I would complain about a member, given that that's the circumstances when it happens in the chamber, frankly. If others agree with that, why would there be any expectation that I or some successor to me would investigate it? My view there wasn't. So I just wondered, can we take it to the general away from the specific? Let's assume one of us in here is asking a line of questioning and there's a direct interest we have that we don't declare, maybe deliberately, maybe just oversight, and a complaint comes in. You would then have a duty to investigate why that wasn't declared. But there could have been, there's now five members left at this committee just now, and three of the five of us could have done the same thing at the same meeting. I'm just wondering in terms of consistency, Mr Thomson, whether there could be a permissive power given to yourself to make sure that the environment that you actually investigate the general context of that debate to see if there is more than one person. So you actually investigate the conduct of all members at that particular meeting. There must be a way of getting a general context to this rather than one person being singled out for specific targeting. So that's probably a crazy idea that I have suggested, but the expression I did use was more permissive powers to investigate more widely. In other words, if a complaint doesn't come in and it comes to your attention in the course of an investigation that there was four or five elected representatives that didn't declare interests for whatever reasons, surely for consistency purposes, you should look at that in the round rather than focus on one individual. We could maybe get an answer to that one, and then you could come back. It's not a power that I am seeking. It would cost money. That's a pretty short answer, so we're definitely going to come in and ask it differently. Can I ask it differently? If you were then investigating that one person, but in the course of your investigation, you were aware that the other four had done the same thing, would that then reflect on the way that you dealt with the complaint? I think that that would be a circumstance that I would narrate when I'm reporting. Remember, I don't make the decisions, ultimately. If we're talking about MSPs, I report to the SPPA committee of this Parliament, and I would expect if that had come out and if I had reported it, which I think I would have to do, I would expect that to be taken into account by the committee when looking at it. When we're dealing with councillors, I have actually been in the situation where I've encountered something investigating one complaint. In the particular circumstances, the actual complaint wasn't substantiated, but something else had happened, so I reported on the other thing that was uncovered in the course of the complaint. Even though the person wasn't complained about in relation to that? Well, they were complained about, and I'm behind to say that it wasn't hugely welcome when I did. So, if someone makes a complaint against me for pronouncing the Gaelic for Western Isles wrongly today and you go, oh, that's just ridiculous, really out of order, aha, but that Doris one in the general research into relation to that, I've found something else he's done, that would then go forward. I'm not sure what you mean by that. I misled you, convener. It wasn't as wide as that. It was more like to take your example mispronouncing some other word. It was a related issue. Yes. I think what we're trying to tease out is the consistency aspect of it, and that's incredibly difficult. Before we move on to other lines of questioning, anyone else want to come in relation to this? The types of complaint you get then, because they have changed a bit. In general, they seem to be going down, but in particular, looking at complaints by category, in relation to miscontact on individual applications, which I'd like to explain a little bit more about those types of cases, it would appear that that continues to show significant decline from 2013-14-97 down to, in the last, well, 2016-17 anyway, just 15. So, some comments on the types of cases you're getting and why you think the pattern of trend change may be altering. 2016-17, I think, saw what I hope was the final blossoming of complaints about disrespect. They reached their highest level at that point. They've gone back down this year, this year to date. The percentage of complaints about failure to register or declare an interest remains fairly constant. From time to time, there are complaints about breach of confidentiality. There tends to be a handful of these each year. They can be quite serious, because it can be information about sensitive personal information, or in another case, the Standards Commission themselves decided that it wasn't serious at all. It was information in a board paper, which was going to be public after the weekend, although it was confidential at the time. Misconduct on individual applications has involved, recently, counsellors making representations on their own behalf in relation to either their own planning application or a planning application that had a direct impact on them, which, of course, is wholly inappropriate. That has significantly fallen, then? That's the thing, Stan. Do you think that this is how we get beneath the figures? In one respect, you could say that it's a good thing that complaints are falling. That could mean that elected representatives are getting it right and more consistent in their approach to public life. It could mean that there are less fixations complaints coming in, or it could mean that there is less awareness of the complaints mechanism and therefore people aren't exercising their rights to make complaints. I suppose that I would be keen to know what your explanation of that trend would be. That is a guess, and it feeds back to the initial line of questioning. I think that the disrespect complaints—the blossoming of them, as I put it—was down to the impending local government election and, for that matter, Scottish Parliament election. Out of the almost 100 disrespect complaints over the last four years, 57 of them relate to things that have been said in meetings. Those are people taking exception to what has been said by, in almost all cases, another councillor at a meeting. The next biggest category was on social media. Generally, there was a mixture between councillors and councillors and members of the public. In misconduct in applications, there have been a couple of councillors who have chosen to make their position very clear in advance of a decision being made and who have then gone on to take part in the decision. With regulatory applications, that is against the code. I am presuming that they did so for political reasons in order to represent their constituents, but it is not the way that the code is drawn up and they find themselves in trouble. I am going to return to both of you in relation to the disrespect aspect, so let's sit in the course of a council meeting or a parliamentary meeting or our online Twitter feed or Facebook discussion. If there is more than one elected representative in that forum and let's just say for lack of a better expression that they are all given as good as they get, but only one complaint comes in about one, should you not really have the power to investigate all of them in that context, would it not be seen as odd that you didn't do that? Maybe this is cowardice on my part. I have no desire whatsoever to plough through three or four hours of a council meeting and make pronouncements on the appropriateness or otherwise of all of the interventions made. I think that has to be self-policed. I accept that, but by definition it's not been self-policed if one person in the public gallery says, Mr Doris, Mr Simpson, Mr Gibson, never Mr Stewart of course or Ms Smith was acting in a marillous unbecomming of an MSP, they are getting reported, but actually there was a, absolutely, and I would encourage to go back to the back catalogue of committee meetings and investigate them also at the same time, but the point I'm making is that it would seem odd that if in the course of looking at the conduct in that meeting, this was a heated meeting, they were all giving it a bit of a welly, quite frankly, Mr Thomson, but they completely only came in about one person, therefore we're only investigating one person. The circumstances you're describing probably would not be reported as a breach, so those which are reported as a breach are circumstances in which somebody has stood out. And I can't believe I used expression, they're all giving it a bit of a welly, I do apologise, Mr Simpson, do you want to continue on some of this? So I was going to go on to speak about the code of conduct, but I think Mr Gibson might want to... Yeah, I was just going to ask about the street focus, and how would you... To define disrespect, because what is disrespect to one person might be just a robust exchange of views of other, if you're not threatening someone, you're not swearing at someone, you know, how do you really define that? It's a fair question and it's quite difficult to answer, and it's made further complicated by the enhanced right of freedom of expression on matters to do with politics and public administration under article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which comes up in these cases. So there's no straightforward answer. I don't really want to go into specific examples, because I feel I would be picking individuals unfairly, but there have been very bad taste attempts at humour. There's no straightforward answer to this. There's one European case in which the person who accused the mayor of a town of embezzlement was held by the court to be within their rights under article 10. So it can even be accusations of criminal behaviour, which may be within the limits of freedom of expression. So the ones which I have reported tend to be personal, clearly abusive or in extremely bad taste for some specific reason. But it's subjective rather than objective? Of course it's subjective, and thankfully it's not just my judgment, because I'm reporting to the Standards Commission who don't always agree with me, but then I think that's a strength in the system, albeit there's a cost involved in it. Thank you very much for that, Mr Simpson. Yeah, so you mentioned counsellors who have publicly expressed a view on, I'm presuming, planning applications, and who then go on to take a decision on that. This is at the heart of the code of conduct for counsellors, which I understand is being potentially revised. So have you had any discussions with the Scottish Government around that? The Scottish Government sought my views on one particular proposal, which was to relax, I'm sorry, it's a particularly tricky thing, but there's a dispensation for counsellors appointed to certain other public bodies when they're considering things that might affect the council itself. So I was consulting about that. My views were that if they were commenting on a regulatory matter in which the council had an interest, the dispensation should not allow them to participate. I think that we have been talking about declarations of interest. As I understand the code, one of its objectives is transparency and making sure that people who have a vested interest in a decision are not then participating in taking it. That's the way that law is at the moment. If you go back to the original thing that I mentioned, where counsellors will express a view on a planning application, why should that debar them from then going on to vote? It's always mystified me this about code of conduct. The theory, the law, requires that decisions on planning applications for that matter, other regulatory applications such as houses and multiple occupation, taxi licensing or whatever, should be based on all of the relevant facts and should not take account of any matters or considerations that are not material. So a counsellor representing views from his or her constituency in advance of being addressed on the subjects that are material may well be reaching a view based on one side of the story. If they then carry that forward into the decision making process and vote on that basis, they may have failed to take account of some material facts. Or may not have. You could express a view, let's say a couple of months out, when an application is first made, you express your initial view. That then debars you from changing that view when it comes to a meeting. It's an absolutely absurd situation. But in any case, the discussions that you've had with the Government is up here to be have been quite narrow. That suggests to me that they are not looking at a wholesale review of the code of conduct. Would I be right in thinking that? That's my understanding, convener. Do you think that they should? Do you think that it's time for a refresh? There are parts of it that I think could be improved. I have said that before. I don't want to take too much time. The particular problems seem to me to be paragraph 314 and 315, which relate to confidentiality, which are not very well expressed. They are causing quite a lot of difficulties. In part 5, which is on declarations of interest, there are circumstances—well, there's a thing called the objective test, which I'm sure Mr Simpson is familiar with—which is supposed to apply when councillors are deciding whether or not they have to declare an interest. It appears, I can't remember quite how many times, but it's five or six times in part 5 of the code and it's expressed differently on some occasions, which I think is not at all helpful. Although I haven't been asked this, I do think that part 5 is quite difficult. It's becoming more difficult as councillors are involved in other bodies where there may be conflicts of interest, for example integration, joint boards. There was one error in the code. It referred to being reminded annually about declaring interests, whereas the regulation requires it done within a month. I believe that's one change that is going to be made. I have an issue about the key principles appearing up front. The statute requires them to be there, I accept that, but they are given a prominence by being at the front. A problem that we had certainly when I started in office was that a very large percentage of the complaints just related to the key principles, and therefore weren't specific to any of the rules that can be broken. You cannot contravene the key principles in terms of the code, and I think that's probably right. Under the initial office assessment process, if somebody simply makes a complaint that councillor so-and-so has failed to show respect under the key principles, we will ask them for the detail of it so that we can then decide whether it might or might not be a breach of a specific rule, so we don't just leave it there and reject it. We do actually explore it. The revised code will come before this committee, so it sounds from what you're saying as perhaps we ought to be looking at the code as a whole, rather than just focusing on one narrow area. In an ideal world. That's our job. If particularly directed is to one part of the code that you think would require specific attention if that's something that we were to do, which might be helpful as well. Two parts. That's the convener, part three, a couple of paragraphs there, and part five. The most complicated bit is probably part seven, which is the thing Mr Simpson was referring to in terms of the obligations on councillors in relation to planning. That is quite difficult. Another area of difficulty which is of interest particularly to councillor officials is an XC to the code, which deals with the relationship between councillors and officials. There's a particular paragraph in there, paragraph 20, which says that councillors must not comment in public on the conduct or capability of officials, which as it stands, if you take it literally, is nonsense because it means you can't say for example that Jane Williams has done a wonderful job in doing such and such. We can see that, we can see it on the record right now. You can do so. It's not in the MSP code, but it is in the councillor's code, so it's interpreted as being councillors should not publicly criticise officials. That of course becomes difficult to reconcile with the scrutiny role of councillors and also with article 10 of the CHR, so that's a bit of a problem area. Write it, for example, restrict councillor's ability to scrutinise and analyse certain key documents that the council has produced because of the fact that you could be suggesting that the quality of the document produced wasn't up to a standard and didn't stand scrutiny. Could it restrict that element? There are people who think that it could. I don't think legally that it can because of article 10, but I think that it's problematic. That would certainly be worried. Mr Simpson, is there anything else that you want to add to that? Alexander Stewart. With the recent focus that we've seen on harassment, bullying and harassment of a section nature, where are you in this process and how do you think that you're going to be affected in the way that people may make complaints and the role that you will have going forward to ensure that the commission has a piece of work to do with this process? Do you see yourself actively being involved in this or are some views and opinions to be useful? Okay. The initial office assessment would identify whether the complaint appeared to be of a nature that it could be a breach of the criminal law. In those circumstances, we would refer it directly to the appropriate authorities, so we wouldn't be involved in that kind of a complaint at that stage, but we could be involved again after any criminal process, whatever that might be, has been concluded. It would be possible for there to be circumstances where there was an absence of proof beyond reasonable doubt, which is the criminal standard, but it could still be considered to be a complaint to be taken forward on the civil standard on a balance of probabilities, so it is theoretically possible that we would be involved. The basis for any involvement, despite the comments that have been made about it so far, would be the requirement to treat people with respect. I wasn't wanting to go there before, but that is an area of disrespect, if I can put it that way, which could develop. Going back to comments and questions that have been made earlier about things being spurious or trivial, attitudes to conduct of that nature are changing for the better. Things that might have been viewed as trivial or even spurious some time back would not now. That is a good thing. It is possible that, if a complaint of that nature could come forward, there has been one public hearing in which the nature of the disrespect was an attempt at humour that involves sexual innuendo, and the cancer in that case was suspended. That is unusual in my experience to date, but does that give you a flavour of where I think it might go? As I say, in the current climate, there are bound to be issues that come forward. I have no doubt that you may have to deal with that in your capacity, depending on how that is perceived. When you talk about bullying and the officer level and the counciller level, how information is given out, there needs to be that co-operation between the councillor and the official about what information they require to have to fulfil their role, and sometimes that can get quite heated depending on the political nature of sometimes it becomes, depending on if that sort of meeting or that sort of group and where exchanges take place. I think that, because the floodgates have opened in some respects in other professions, there may be some more coming in our direction and in this direction because of the nature of the job that they are involved in. That will have an implication potentially for you going forward. I agree. It was something that would have been inappropriate for the committee not to raise given recent events over weeks and months now. We are just seeking clarity that it is not missed by yourself, your following events, your making sure that your office is prepared to act as it should, should there be an increasing complaints in this area and that you are sensitive to it. We do not expect to hear anything other than, yes, of course you are, but it is an opportunity for you to put some of that on the public record this afternoon, really. Yes, of course. I hear my office are following things carefully. I should say that our role is to investigate, assess and report. We have no counselling skills. That is the only caveat that I would make at this stage. I am not quite clear what you mean by that and taking it forward, but what I wanted to ask was councils are quite macho places. In your report, you talked about representation on boards and, quite rightly, that is something that we discussed in Parliament last week and it is something that we can have some degree of control and influence on. However, in terms of representation in councils at elected member level, that is something that political parties, for instance, have to take on board. However, because of that, I think, there may be, with this now being highlighted, a cultural shift, if you want to call it that. You mentioned earlier that you would refer things directly to the police, but that would be in terms of sexual harassment that was criminal behaviour. However, there is, of course, sexual harassment behaviour that is not criminal. When you say that you are not involved in counselling, I am not quite sure what you mean by that. I would also like a bit more clarification. I can give an example. Myself, as a trade union rep a number of years ago, I had to raise an issue with someone about a calendar in their office. The way that I raised that was that I refused to partake of the meeting that I was invited to until the calendar was removed, at which point I would then come back. However, I take it that it would be something that could be referred to that would not be criminal behaviour, but it would be something that you might deal with if someone complained about something like that. When you say that you are counselling, what did you mean? Well, it depends. I am simply stating that the role that I understand my office is to play is to investigate and to do so impartially. I was asked previously what support that we give to people who make complaints. There is a difficulty if you are meant to be an independent investigator if you are perceived or attempting to give support to one side in the process. Although we will investigate to the best of our ability, that is all that we can do. Can I follow up on that? Can you give impartial advice on signposting everyone to different organisations? Is that possible? You can maybe get around it that way. Almost out of time, just final couple of questions in relation to this particular issue. I am absolutely right, Mr Thomas, that it is an appropriate and investigatory role that you have in an independent one of that. Counselling is not part of that, but would you seek to develop links with those agencies that provide that kind of thing to signpost individuals, both complainers and complainants? That might be something that would be appropriate or perhaps all. I am checking if someone is giving a statement to one of your team, they would have the ability to have someone supporting them and advocating for them in the room at that point, in terms of that process. A bit of light and shade to maybe the earlier answer might be quite helpful just before we end this particular line of questioning. We have already started to consider which bodies of individuals we might think of having some link with in order to be able to refer people if appropriate. People can be supported if we are interviewing them. That is already the position, and we state that if we make contact with people. I suspected that that would be the case, Mr Thomas. I wanted to give the opportunity to put that on the public record here this afternoon. Are there any other questions? Are there any additional comments or observations, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Thomas, before we close this evidence session? No, thank you. I thank you and your team for coming along here this afternoon also for your weight, but we now move to agenda item 3, which is draft budget, excuse me, 2018-2019, which we have previously agreed to take in private, so we now move to private session.