 Good morning and welcome to the 23rd meeting of the committee in 2014. Everyone present is asked to switch off mobile phones and other electronic devices as they affect the broadcasting system. Some committee members may consult tablets during the meeting. This is because we provide papers in a digital format. Agenda item 1 is to consider whether to take item 6 in private. Are we all agreed? Agenda item 2 is consideration of two negative instruments. They are the town and country planning fees for applications and deemed applications Scotland regulations 2014. That is SSI 2014 slash 214. The building Scotland amendment regulations 2014, SSI 2014 slash 219. Members have a paper from the clerk setting out the purpose of the instruments. The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee considered these instruments and had no comments to make in them. Do members have any comments to make on these instruments? Are we agreed not to make any recommendation to the Parliament on either of these instruments? Agenda item 3 is our first oral evidence session as part of stage 1 scrutiny of the Community Empowerment Scotland Bill. We have decided to start this process by holding a round table session with key stakeholders to set the scene for this work. As many of you may know, the committee has used its work programme over the last two years to examine key policy areas relevant to this very important piece of legislation. Those have included examining public services reform, local elections, non-domestic rates, the community planning system, land use planning, public procurement, community regeneration policy and, most recently, flexibility and autonomy in local government. We have also undertaken a wide programme of public and community engagement, visiting all parts of Scotland. In the last three years, the committee has undertaken 10 visits and meetings outside Edinburgh, from Shetland to the Scottish borders and from Ayrshire to Aberdeen. I invite those witnesses around the table today to introduce themselves, and we will then move on to the discussion on the bill. If we could start with you, Mr Samuel, please. Sure. Eric Samuel is Senior Policy and Learning Manager with the Big Lottery Fund in Scotland. Elma Murray, Chief Executive of North Ayrshire Council and Representing Solice. I'm Ian Cook, I'm the Director of the Development Trust Association Scotland. David Aneill, President of COSLA. Harry McGwigan, North Lanarkshire councillor and the COSLA spokesperson. Annette Hastings, Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. I'm Angus Hardy, Director of the Scottish Community Alliance. Pauline Douglas, Head of Operations in Scotland for the Coalfield Regeneration Trust. Callum Irving, Chief Executive of Voluntary Action Scotland. Felix Spithall, Policy Officer at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. Bair Macaulick, Senior Policy Advisor at the Federation of Small Businesses. Thank you. You're all very welcome. If I can maybe start off, the minister has said that legislation will not be enough in itself to deliver community empowerment. I've always been of the opinion that sometimes you cannot legislate for things and sometimes a bit of gumption, a bit of common sense is required. One of the things that we are keen to ensure is that as many people as possible are engaged in processes. Professor Hastings, if I can maybe start with you because you've done a fair bit of work with disadvantaged communities and engagement, how can we ensure that the legislation and hopefully the common sense that goes behind it will ensure that folks in disadvantaged communities have their say? A first step is to recognise that there is a problem in the legislation as an issue and to explicitly state that this legislation, an unintended consequence of this legislation should not be to empower those who already are advantaged and empowered in society. A symbolic statement in the legislation would give an important steer to suggest that that shouldn't happen. I have concerns that there are insufficient safeguards in what is proposed to ensure that additional support and positive discrimination is afforded to more disadvantaged groups. There is considerable body research evidence, which is growing all the time, that more affluent social groups have the necessary skills and cultural and social capital to take advantage of opportunities that are put before them. There is a clear case for suggesting that we need to take deliberate strategic action to ensure that more disadvantaged groups can avail themselves of the opportunities that are undoubtedly present in the bill. A symbolic statement, you mean a statement of intent rather than something symbolic. Does anybody else have any other comments in terms of ensuring that we engage folks from more disadvantaged communities? That was all last Thursday, and it was also replicated in disadvantaged communities. I mean albeit that the turnout was slightly lower in disadvantaged communities. We did still get a massive increase. We must take advantage of the fact that people did engage in that process, and it would be a real shame if we were to just let that advantage, that engagement that we did see last week, if we let that slip away. Anyone else? Callum, please. I think that one of the things that would build on what David has just said is that one of the reasons why we saw that big turnout and an increase in citizen activism is the feeling that they could have an influence in that vote. I think that that would be, for me, one of the key targets in terms of writing that into the bill. Expectations not just on outcomes but expectations that can be assessed against how people have been involved, has there been a way in which the statutory sector has led to greater involvement? One of the things that we have said about the bill is that it should not conflate in a casual way the third sector and much more empowering citizen-based processes. That is a disservice to both communities and the third sector. Both need to be clarified and separated out in the bill, and capacity building is particularly focused on engagement and participation. Angus, please. As the minister said, the bill in itself was not going to be enough. In order to avoid the kind of syndrome of sharp elbows where the more able, higher capacity communities are the ones that are advantaged most from the bill, we are going to make sure that there are resources allocated fairly soon to build capacity in those communities. I do not mean that. In the past, the Government has invested a lot in capacity building, and it has not, frankly, worked. We have got to look at how we can change our approach towards building capacity in the most disadvantaged communities so that it makes an impact, and it changes the normal pattern, which is that those communities are the last to really benefit. I think that we need to change our approach in relation to capacity building. The phrase that I used was, they do not know what they do not know, so we have to help the communities understand that they can be involved and that they will be listened to and point them in the direction and offer that help and support. I think that I am just reiterating what everybody else has said. How can we help those communities, the more disadvantaged people in the communities, to become involved and take part? We have obviously seen over the past few weeks and months, as David has rightly said, a rebirth of things such as town hall meetings and the establishment of grass roots groups, which happened on both sides of the referendum debate. I think that maybe we have some hope there that if we grasp that and continue on with that, we may go somewhere out steered. I am very confused by my throat, everyone. Just two very brief points. The first one to Councillor O'Neill. I am very much aware that, in some of the more disadvantaged communities, last week turnouts were a lot higher, compared with some of the more affluent or middle-class areas, but I set my question for Mr Hardy. In terms of Mr Hardy's comments a moment ago, what suggestions does he have or his organisation actually have to really take those issues forward? This is a very complicated area. In terms of approach, we could do much more around peer support. In other words, communities that have already developed their own capacity could be harnessed much more effectively in supporting other communities. Traditionally, what we do is to come in a kind of top-down fashion into communities and deliver programmes of capacity building. My feeling is that those generally miss the mark, so I think that we should be looking much more around peer support, peer mentoring, or at least begin to try that, because that does not happen at the moment. Eric, please. In the committee, we give you a submission about, attached to our submission, details of our place initiative, which I think that you are aware of, we are in the second phase of that. Under both phases, we put support contractors in. This time, we are taking very much an asset-based development approach to this. It is building on the assets, and that is what the support contractors will be able to build on the assets that those communities already have. We discovered from round 1 that we initially thought it would be a two-year process. It turned into a three-year process, so in our place, we are leaving those people in the effort even longer for five years, and the first phase will be very much to work with those communities, not just to leave them, but to think about the vision that those communities come up with in working towards that in the second phase. It can be done, but it takes time and it takes resources. We talk about community capacity. In my constituency, there is a huge amount going on within the community. What we sometimes mean by community capacity is professional expertise that exists in that community. For example, in some of the more affluent areas, you are more likely to have people be able to call upon solicitors or other professionals that are less available in our more disadvantaged communities to support the community organisations that exist. Is it as much about getting communities to build that capacity in terms of activism, because I detect in the areas that I represent that that activism of community is alive, or is it about having a support base there for those community groups and organisations that already exist? If so, how do we supplant that into those communities where the people to fill those roles do not exist within the communities themselves? Whereas I agree very much with the suggestions around building capacity from the bottom up, I think that there is also a role for thinking about more top-down solutions to this problem as well. I have a particular concern that when community bodies come forward requesting improvements in outcomes in relation to their service, particularly in the era of austerity with resources being particularly tight, outcomes could be improved for one community at the direct expense of another community. I would like to suggest that the right to request participation is that the process that is developed makes a requirement on public bodies to consider displacement effects on other communities resulting from improving the outcomes for one community. I will reflect on three examples to help the committee's deliberations on that. I agree fully with the comments around asset-based approaches. A lot of that is about building local community confidence in people's confidence in being able to step up and bring forward their own ideas, their own solutions and being able to articulate the case for why they require that support to get a lot of our communities to that position, and the people in those communities to that position. As Professor Hastings has suggested, it is required to provide them with some upfront support. I would not call it necessarily top-down as going in and working with them and providing them with that excess capacity. We have done that in a number of communities across Scotland and it is very much about the asset-based approach, so I would agree with that. That is one example of that that the committee could use quite helpfully. I also think that we should be using opportunities as they present themselves to us. If you take, for example, the significant success that Scotland has had this year with Commonwealth Games and the number of communities across Scotland that got involved in the Commonwealth Games, perhaps through the Queen's Baton really as it was going through their particular community, where they were organising and empowering themselves to have particular celebrations of local heroes and local events and thinking about what the Commonwealth Games meant for them in their local area. Again, I found that to be hugely important in building that community, that sense of community empowerment and people's confidence about what they can do for themselves. The other example that I thought I would just mention to the committee today is again a lot of work is going on across Scotland on parenting approaches. This is not about bringing people in with a lot of professional skills, but it is about picking almost their own word, but finding people who are prepared to come forward as community and local champions, who are prepared to work with other people who perhaps have just a wee bit less confidence than they have in their own community and to help them to feel that they are able to do things that a few months or a couple of years ago they had no actual understanding that they could achieve and to completely change their level of aspiration and ambition within their local community. I will come back to you a bit. Can I take in Felix and then Angus? First, please. One of the phrases that stood out for me from one of the early sessions was that communities need expertise on tap, not on top, so it is that idea that communities need a bit of technical expertise, a bit of organisational support at a very specific time, and they need different levels of support at different stages in their process as they empower themselves. There is a big argument to be made for building capacity directly into the organisations that communities have identified to take forward their own priorities, their own ambitions. The strengthening communities programme that the Scottish Government is undertaking at the moment is a good pilot of that approach, but that needs to be widened out and offered to a lot more communities so that they have the capacity within the organisations that they have chosen, and that is the way that they have chosen to take forward the priorities in their area. Thank you. Angus, please. Just in response to the issue about how we respond to communities that do not have perhaps those middle-class capacities, those skill sets that other communities might have, I think that the distinction is that we should be investing in local leadership, the local activists, and giving them the confidence to bring in on their own terms those skills. That is a quite significant difference from them being delivered in a top-down or up-front fashion to a community. If it is coming in on the community's terms, I think that that is absolutely fine, and that is what those communities need. However, as Felix says, it is on their own terms at the time when they need it along that pathway of empowerment. Mark Ruskell, then I will come to Harry and Ian. Often, communities can find that the pathways for support, if you will, are very complicated, and often there are hurdles that they have to overcome. For example, in order to access funding to develop business cases, sometimes that funding needs to be match funding, and for some communities that is easier to achieve than for others. Often, local authorities can put up barriers for communities in terms of support from their aspects because they can perceive where, for example, the community wishes to take over as a local authority asset, there can be a perception of a conflict of interest, and often local communities can find that there are barriers put up, some of which might be genuine and some of which might be artificial. Is there a means by which the landscape for communities, particularly those communities, who do not know the places to go, can be made much simpler and much more streamlined, so that they know exactly where they can go for the relevant support and we can remove any barriers that might exist that would prevent communities from accessing the support that is out there? I will take in Harry first of all, please. Maybe I could just relate a little the experience that I had a number of years ago, and I think that we can all learn from it. I certainly learned from it, I hope. It was an occasion where there were major issues in a particular housing estate in the area that I represented. I went about my business talking to the police, community development officers, social work, all sorts of different people who knew, the professionals who knew how to go about social planning and social reconstruction. We looked at all the problems and we held a major public meeting in one of the local schools that very well attended. Inside five minutes of me standing up to introduce it, I could see some of the heads already shaking. After 10 minutes, a quarter of an hour, I could see lots of the heads going down and shaking. We invited a discussion then because that was clearly an expression that was coming, it was a voice, if you like, that was coming from the audience there. But we realised, or at least I realised quite quickly, that this was because we had consulted with all of the experts and some of the very influential community groups that operated in that particular area, but we hadn't consulted with the real experts and the real experts for the people who were living in that community, who were experiencing what life really was like in that community. There were people who had skills, they had understandings, they had knowledge and they had a desire to make a change in their community, but I had forgotten to include that voice, that very, very important voice. I think that this is what the empowerment bill should be about. I am not surprised at the huge turnout for the referendum on Thursday, because of the realisation that it was a fairly simple statement that some people wanted to make, and there are certainly people that were coming out to the polling stations that I had never seen before, and they were saying, I am going in this particular way for a particular reason, I want to see things change, I want to be involved, I want my voice, they weren't saying this individually, but I think collectively there was a statement set that was saying, we want our voice to be heard, we want people to help us hear those voices and understand where we are coming from, and I think we've got the expertise to do that, but what we don't do, and somebody mentioned the pathways, we have to be careful that we don't construct a whole set of pathways, that look good to the experts, but they may not be relevant, appropriate or consistent with what's being felt out there in our communities. Ian, please. I think that if we're discussing community capacity building, it seems to me that what's quite critical, because it's a very wide concept really, is that we're clear about whose capacity we're talking about building and for what purpose, and I think that's the fundamental question that often doesn't precede the discussion really. So linking that back to the bill and what the bill is trying to achieve, I suppose coming from a sort of DTA Scotland point of view, what our particular interest is and what I understand to be part of the rationale for the bill is how we further community-led regeneration in Scotland. So I think what we're talking about primarily is the idea of building community anchor organisations, so we're talking about community capacity building that builds organisational capacity, and I think that Felix touched on that, and I've got examples of where that happens. And linking that back to disadvantaged communities, it does seem to me that we have got some great examples of disadvantaged communities that have got strong community anchor organisations, and I think the point that was made over there about quite often disadvantaged communities have a plethora of small community organisations. The question is how do we work with them, bring them together to create that kind of strategic community anchor organisation, and that's the task in hand quite often. So I think that there are examples, and we can use the sort of peer support that Angus referred to earlier on, but we're also, I think, going back to the original question, as well as capacity building, we've also got to look at the funding and resources which are going to help support the sort of activity that's promoted within the bill. Thank you. I wonder, Barry, obviously the FSB has a huge role in helping businesses become more empowered. Do you think that we could learn anything from the business community in terms of empowerment? Yeah, I think that actually the FSB, as a business organisation, comes at this issue from a completely different perspective, and the general point that we would make at this stage is that small local businesses constitute a key part of their communities, and that shouldn't be forgotten, and that the skills and expertise that they have can help the wider efforts to regenerate communities. Calum, please. Yeah, just a quick point to say that when it comes to the third sector and whatever kind of third sector we mean, the third sector interfaces are partly trying to do that job of building the capacity of third sector organisations and to connect them to public policy and help them find the way into influencing local decision making, be it with local authority, health and social care partnerships and so on, but one of the challenges that I think that needs to be considered by this committee is the variable accessibility of the system to that, so it is possible to connect disparate parts of the third sector, but then what influence can that actually have on the system? We find that that varies massively right across the country. Before I bring in Cameron, I'm going to play devil's advocate here because we've heard the expressions community anchor organisations, third sector interfaces. Over the years, there have been so many different terminologies that have been used when it has come to these things. Going back to my own time as the chair of a social inclusion partnership, I actually banned some of the gobbledygook phrases. Do you think that the kind of things and the kind of discussion that we're having here often puts folk off from becoming involved in their communities because they come, they listen to us sometimes and think, what the hell is that all about? I see nods. Ian? I accept that point having used the term community anchor and brought it up in the conversation. In our experience, it's a convenient shorthand to describe the sort of organisations that we're trying to create without being too prescriptive about what they are. In our experience, what helps local people to understand what it's about is going to visit other communities who are actually doing that, speaking to them, discussing what the common issues are, the common problems, how they've been addressed, what's worked, what's not worked, et cetera. To facilitate that, cross community learning does not cost a lot of money. At the moment, we've got a small grant fund for development trust or aspiring development trust to do that. However, if that was widened out to include all sorts of community organisations, I think that that's how we get around that problem. I agree with a lot of what Ian's just said and accept the points that you've made, convener. I think that it's easy for us to look at how we would want to organise communities so that we can best engage with them. I think that that's part of the point that you're trying to make, and that's probably not how communities would wish. Do you think that maybe we have a difficulty in the fact that it may be others that want to organise communities rather than communities organising themselves into areas of work that they want to deal with rather than being pushed into a box? I think that for reasons of convenience, we probably try to do that so that we can marshal our resources. I'm not saying that that's acceptable, I'm just saying that I see that that's what happens quite often. What I was going to go on to say is that there is a requirement for us to make sure that we marshal the resources that we can make available to assist and support and help communities without a doubt. A lot of that can be much better provided in my experience through a significant amount of building trust with communities. Even if the structures that we have in place or the organisation that we have in place to help them or the pathways in some of the words that we've used this morning, if communities trust us, they will ask questions and we will be able to help them find their way through all of that. A lot of that for me is about how we engage with them, building that trust and also being clear about that and doing a lot of regular and authentic consultation with them as well about that. David, please. A number of points, chair. If we are going to deal with inequalities, particularly within our disadvantaged communities, that does mean that we are going to have to disadvantage some other communities who are currently doing okay. I first became aware through the indices of multiple deprivation, the difference in life expectancy within North Ayrshire some years ago and at that time it was 14 years from our most deprived to our least deprived community. In the intervening period, the community with the longest life expectancy has changed, the community with the shortest life expectancy has remained the same. Instead of being 14 years, it's 24 years. That's inequality going in the wrong direction. We need to be willing to tackle that. We also need to be willing to have a messy approach. We cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to the solutions within our communities. Communities in many instances share problems, but in many other instances have unique problems. You cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to that. As Harry said earlier, the best folk to tell you what the solution is are probably the people who actually live there. We can help a wee bit with that and put in some structure into what the solutions are, but by and large it's the people in the communities that know what the solutions are. In terms of language, you're absolutely right, chair. We do use language, which excludes people from the discussion. As part of the work in the commission for strengthening local democracy, we did a poll. Polls are very popular, as you know. One of the things that the polls told us was that government is remote from communities, and what they meant by government was national government and local government. That's partly down to the language that we use. I just wanted to say, following on from what the convener and Mr Booghiggan says, we shouldn't be using fancy words for those things, because it does disadvantage people. My real question is, how would you prioritise Scotland's poorest communities? That is the key to that suggestion, but we shouldn't be using fancy words. Annette, Pauline and then Alec. Can I augment points that I have already made by drawing a distinction, which I think the bill is trying to deliver to distinctive things. It is trying to strengthen what is already there in relation to community engagement and community anchor organisations and trying to make them more substantial, so things like making it easier to transfer assets would be an indicator of that. It falls short on the strengthening what is already there agenda by not committing to more substantial resources for capacity building with those communities, which have their voice heard to an extent but could do with more support to make it heard more effectively. That is one intention of the bill. There is a separate intention, which is to open up new routes and possibilities for people who do not currently have their voice said. I guess that this would be Councillor McWiggans' point. There is a pent-up demand within disadvantaged areas for routes to have voices heard. I am not sure that the bill delivers that at all. I think that what it does deliver on is additional routes for the more disadvantaged groups to have their voice heard. It could be at the expense of more disadvantaged groups. The Coffetry Generation Trust has been involved with our place programme that Eric Spokane spoke about. We were also involved with Aisha 21. We have a programme of our own that is all about the asset-based approach, which we found to be a fabulous way of working in communities. However, I would say that the key area of our work is that of a facilitator. I do not live in all those communities. My staff do not live in those communities. It is really about trying to get the people in the communities who live there to take forward their ideas and to do the work. It is about us trying to facilitate that and making sure that they know where to go and all the different things that have to make things happen in their community. Highland Council, for example, has raised the admission of community councils in the bill. If we are talking about government being remote, the committee recently looked at local government across Europe, and local government in many parts of Europe is far, far more closer to communities than the 32 authorities in Scotland are. One might argue that whether or not community councils in their current form are successful or not, some are, some are more than others, you possibly have the structure there for a fourth theory Government that way real powers and budgets devolved into that area would generate interest across communities. I will throw that in. If it is not community councils, what is it, and what is the question about the remoteness? The other point that I wanted to pick up on is this point about consultation. People talked about the turnout last week, but in terms of consultation, many people have gone along to consultation meetings, held in their local authorities and thought it was a waste of time and were put off ever going back again. It is this question that is raised by the community development centre about engagement and empowerment and the difference between those two. I will give you a real practical example. In Versaith, in Macon City, there is a housing estate which, when built, somebody had the idea that they would plant all these trees in the grass panels, but they probably put their own kind of tree in and now these trees are massive, so in the summertime the people basically do not have any light coming in their windows, and in the wintertime on wet days, like we have had this week, it is dangerous with the leaves for the people slitting. It seems common sense to me that the majority of people are saying to me that we need to deal with this, but along comes the treesers and says that they are perfectly healthy trees and council policy is that you do not take them out. For the life of me, I cannot understand why in an estate, if you were truly in power in that estate, and that was an issue in that estate. The danger with the bill is that it is fully a lot of rhetoric, but it has little teeth to empower anybody to do anything about the issues that bother them and their local community. My final point is just back to this issue about substantial resources that Annette mentions, particularly in poorer communities. All the evidence would suggest that poverty and social deprivation are a major barrier to people being able to engage. Is there more that we could build into the bill to address that? I do not apologise for shifting resources to the areas that are greatest need. Indeed, if we do not do that, that is why we have seen inequality continue to rise over the past number of years. I will throw those points in. I will take Harry, but if you could indicate if you want to answer any of the points that were made. Harry, please. It probably interfaces with some of what Alec has just said. We sometimes assume that the well-intending organisations within our communities are indeed reaching and reflecting the needs and aspirations of the communities that they speak for. Sadly, that is not always the case. I have situations in which I go to—I certainly can think of three local organisations that I attend. It is the same faces that are at those meetings. They are good people, but if you were to ask in some of the areas in my constituency who those people were, who did they represent, they are not known to the wider community at all. I think that what is going to be the hard business here is important to differentiate between engagement and empowerment. Engagement can happen in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it can be very hollow, but sometimes it can be very fruitful. The empowerment part is the difficult bit. Getting into the communities and connecting with those communities is going to be very tough, but we should not shy away from it. We can find ways and means, I think, of improving. Indeed, representing the Congress of Municipalities has been appointed as a rapporteur to look and learn from what is happening here in Scotland, in the UK and across Europe in terms of further devolution of power, if you like, and communitarianism—how it works in different parts of Europe. That is work that I will be reporting at the first stage of that work on 17 November, but I hope that that will be fruitful and helpful. However, we can learn from looking at what happens in other places. We should not be afraid of small areas having some power and some control over the factors that affect the areas. David made a very valid point about prioritisation. Of course, we have always got to prioritise, but we have to remember that, in every community, we will find opportunities to enable that community to feel more satisfied with itself because it is being listened to, and that is something that we have to try to reach. I support what Councillor Neill said about the nature of community empowerment and communities in general being messy. We need to view the notion of community empowerment not in any way as a one-size-fits-all. In our evidence, we suggested that we should try to frame the bill around some first principles that we could use as a kind of framework to have a look at the impact of the bill once it is on the books. Those principles are around subsidiarity and local people being in control around assets. If we did that, we would begin to see community empowerment in the round rather than in some kind of prescription that we can use to sort out the most disadvantaged communities. On the other point about the remoteness of Government and the way in which Government is perceived by communities, you could argue that the bill is, in some ways, a compensatory measure for the absence of real localised Government. A risk that the bill is running is that it fits within the vacuum of local democracy. If we had real local democracy as was touched on by the commission's report, not that the bill would not be needed, but it might be different. The measures might be different within it. We need to see it in that context, so that it is landing in a kind of vacuum of local democracy. I link that with the engagement route. One of the things that is missing, particularly from the bill, is participatory budgeting and other participatory approaches such as injuries and so on. That approach has the potential to solve a lot of those problems, involving people in poor communities in meaningful consultation or participatory events. It would help to address those disadvantaged communities who are experiencing and to make that engagement more meaningful and start to get to the heart of the Christy commission recommendations about building public services around people in communities, given the real say in the decisions about how public services are delivered and where their money is spent. The commission on local democracy recommended a much greater increase in the establishment of a participation unit in Scotland. The bill could assist that process by legislating for participatory approaches, particularly participatory budgeting. I accept the point that there are many small businesses in the communities that we are discussing here this morning. Do you see a greater role for the FSB and even larger companies in communities to facilitate and help the communities as compared to just being based there, but potentially not actually having the workforce who come from that particular community? Business can play in local communities, but I do not think that we can be prescriptive about it. The influence of involvement that businesses may wish to choose is defined by scale, size, sector and geography. It is very difficult to say that A and other businesses will choose to involve, but I definitely agree that the skills and expertise that they have could contribute to the community approach that we have here. Can I take us now on to the national performance framework aspect of it and the national outcomes? Currently, I am intrigued by what Councillor Neil had mentioned earlier about the increase in poverty as opposed to the decrease after the work had been done. In what ways does the Scottish Performance and the National Performance Framework currently inform your work? First of all, I would say that, at a local authority level and a community planning partnership level, the national performance framework and the outcomes from the national performance framework feed directly through to single outcome agreements. There is something there, but I absolutely accept that that is still quite removed from individual communities in the way that we have been discussing them this morning. There is a link through to community planning partnerships. What I would then go on to say to try and then link what we do at community planning partnership level with our local communities is that that needs to improve. That is starting to improve. Most community planning partnerships now have a very well-defined and clear view of each of their neighbourhoods and localities in their community planning area overall and the needs of those localities. We know where our most disadvantaged areas are, whether it is an area of geography or whether it is an area of need that might not be linked specifically to the geography but might be to particular vulnerabilities for individuals within our communities. We understand that clearly or more clearly than we used to. The other way that I was going to reflect on how that all links up is that every area in Scotland is in the process of implementing a new integrated health and social care partnership. We are all doing a lot of locality planning at the moment to ensure, again, that the needs of specific communities and particularly the health needs of specific communities are properly reflected in the way in which we prioritise both our financial and our people resources to properly target those individuals and communities. I hope that that is helpful. We have had a focus over the years on national targets, and it is not something that any one political party has been guilty of. We have all done it. What that has meant is that we have tried a one-size-fits-all approach for communities, and communities are different. We are sitting here today with local government, the health service, focused on targets that might not be appropriate for certain communities. We need to get away from that national approach to target and make it very specific to what communities actually need. I do not think that the bill probably goes far enough to do that, but the bill, in terms of direction of travel, is going in the right direction. Perhaps that is something that your committee would like to suggest. Community planning partnerships have a long way to go in some areas and in other areas, but they are certainly one of the brightest opportunities to make a difference, to utilise the strengths and competencies and institutions that are in your area, to utilise that to the very best effect. However, it cannot be driven by local government alone. There has to be a realisation that the rest of the public sector has a very important role and very important sets of responsibilities. Sometimes that is not always quite as realised to the extent that it should be, but I do think that we are moving in the right direction of travel. We still require some cultural change in public bodies and community bodies in order to make those processes work a little better than they currently do. Do you think that the bill will help to address some of the cultural change that is required? I certainly hope that it will. I am not so sure that it necessarily will. One of the things that I would certainly like to see in the bill is a realisation that local government has a very important and crucial role to play in that, and yet local government does not have any statutory status at all in terms of what would be considered to be required status by the European Charter. We are moving in the right way, but local government has to learn that it has to ensure that the voices are being heard at every level. I hear people talk about the failure to listen to third sector, voluntary sector, and the mechanisms for representation at CPPs, or the messages that are getting through to the CPPs, are not as good as they should be. That has to change it. Within the public sector, within the third sector, there is no one who has experienced anything other than a centralisation project. I emphasise the point once again that this is not for any one political party. It goes way beyond the lifetime of any Parliament and any one party being involved in it. All the parties have been guilty of it. There is a culture, there is a mindset that it is better to do things centralised, get it into the centre. We see that most recently with fire and police. Again, three of the four major political parties had that within their manifesto, so it is not a criticism of any one party. However, there is this culture that says that you get more efficiency if you centralise. You might get more financial efficiency, but you get poorer results within our communities doing it that way. Let's get back down to communities, get into the heart of communities and if that looks messy, so be it if we get better results for our communities. Harry mentioned the point about the European Charter of Local Self-Government. Thank you, Harry. If I had gone back to Cosler without that getting mentioned, I would have been kicked up and done Princess Street. That is something that we asked the minister to include within the bill. The minister's response at that time was subject to a yes vote that there would be a written constitution. Local government would be protected within that. We know what the result of the referendum was, so an opportunity now exists to revisit that and put it within the bill, within the act. Why do I say that? Because, within living memory, we have seen local government—a whole system of local government—effectively abolished at the whim of a Prime Minister who thought that the Strathclyde region had the temerity to stop the privatisation of Scottish water. Her solution to that was to abolish a whole system of local government. There is no suggestion in what I am saying here that anybody is thinking about doing that now. There has not been a single hint about that, but it could happen unless local government is actually enshrined within law. I have three committee members on my list next. If you want to intervene in any of them, please let us know. John, please. It is really just to follow up on Ms Murray's comments about the health inequalities and the work that has been done jointly with the health boards. What I picked up from that and the other comment from Councillor McWigan about institutions is that the work that is being done with those communities is to develop those services, because what I picked up from what Ms Murray said is that the health boards, local authorities and other agencies are still developing strategies from a top-down position. What we are trying to do, hopefully, through this community impairment Scotland Bill, is to develop strategies that are inclusive, listen to and act upon the wishes and aspirations of communities. If we are still talking about strategies while the bill is going through the process, about the top-down approach to delivering services, then surely we are still stuck in a groove that we need to jump out of because we need to make sure that what we are doing, and the best way to deliver services and have a number of years of experience of working in deprived communities, is to engage fully with those communities and ask those communities what they need, not what they think they deserve or should get. It is about what they want and how they interact. There are issues that come out of that in relation to accountability of the people that you are engaging with, but that is another issue for local authorities and other agencies to take on board as they develop those strategies. Could someone give me an assurance that things are moving forward and that we are not stuck in the same groove that says that we will continue to make policy at the top level and expect people to accept it at the grass roots? I apologise to Mr Wilson. I might have left him with perhaps a bit of a wrong impression, but I will explain a bit more why that is the case. What we are doing with communities, not two communities but with communities just now, is not new. How we are doing it is new. The local authority will always have worked with a range of local stakeholders, local interest groups with particular representative individuals from some of those groups to define and identify how we would be providing services for them in their areas. Sometimes it is with and sometimes it is forward, depending on their needs. The health board would also be doing that. What is new and different is that we are now doing that together. In effect, what we were saying earlier on today is that communities can be messy because they are all coming from different places with different needs and different representatives and that sometimes we try to organise them a bit to make it easier for us to help them. What I am saying is that we have organised ourselves a bit now through the integrated health and social care partnership so that we are now organising ourselves to work with our communities accepting that they are coming from a place that would welcome us being a bit more structured in how we approach them so that they do not need to deal with the health board separately, they do not need to deal with councils separately, but they are working with us jointly. I cannot speak for what is happening across Scotland with the integrated health and social care partnerships, but we are prescribed through the legislation to have integration boards that take into account a whole range of interests from our local area. Within North Ayrshire, the integrated health and social care partnership board has eight members who are from the council and the health board and the other 16 members. It is a board that is made up of 24 members and the other 16 members come from a whole range of different representatives from both across the community but also from staff who are providing those services as well. Very often our staff understands exactly what people need and want because they are working with them day in and day out. I am sorry if I am cutting in on John. I heart back to a number of years ago where a community that I represented in the council at that time put their health priority, number one health priority, being down as mental health. When the health board and the council, their main priority was to stop smoking. The reality is that many of those folks would find it very difficult to stop smoking unless some of the mental health problems that they had were gone. John was driving at how communities managed to get across their priority rather than the priority of the local authority or the health board or sometimes well-meaning front-line staff who can quite get to grips with what the real difficulties are. What are the ends for communities? I hear those issues as well, convener, in terms of are we determining our priorities from a top-down or a bottom-up approach? At the moment, I guess this link links back to some of the points that were made earlier on about the performance management framework that we have in Scotland to provide us with more local flexibility to be able to take into account what communities are saying that they want to be their priorities. Certainly, the communities that we work with, they tell us what they want and we listen to that and we work with them to make those decisions about what we prioritise. It is an interesting end to that response, convener, in terms of whether we work with the communities to prioritise. Surely what we are trying to do through the community empowerment bill is to try to get the communities' priorities top of the agenda. They were acting on what the convener highlighted, the mental health issue, vis-à-vis smoking, and to understand where that argument comes from. If we tackle the mental health issue, there would be less need for people to smoke. It is about trying to ensure that the bill has come around as a consequence of the failure of agencies—and that might be the Scottish Government, UK Government, local authorities, health boards and others—to listen to and act upon the priorities of communities. Many deprived communities may not be priority to run a community facility. Their priority may be to make sure that every house in the area is up to a tolerable standard and that the neighbours next to them are behaving themselves and are not causing any social behaviour. How do we get that turnaround in the thinking of the agencies, authorities and Governments to ensure that what we are doing is addressing the issues of communities, not addressing the issues that they think communities have in trying to get them to work around their priorities rather than the priorities of the communities themselves? That makes a good point. There has been a frustration, I think. Certainly, in the early days, as far as the CPPs are concerned, because there was not always the solidarity of purpose within the CPPs that there should have been and there needs to be. That bill will at least insist upon the members of the CPPs—health boards, SPS—as far as safe communities are concerned. However, coming together and being required to undertake the same type of consultation, listening and learning as local authorities try to do, there is a greater insistence here that we will and we can work together and work better and know that the agenda that we are setting and the outcomes that we are working towards and those outcomes are being set nationally—that is one of the proposals in the bill—that those outcomes are being set and they are being properly addressed by all of the partners, not just one or two of the partners, all of the partners. There has to be some real insistence on that, so I think it will improve as a consequence of this bill. If it is not improving, then questions need to be asked.