 Rwy'n ar draws ond, rydym ni i gael y ddigital format och chi'n ddweud i fynd i gael y MiG inni agorol i gael i gael i fynd i fblwysig yn ddau dyma i anghydddiadiaeth. Mi'n gael i fynd i gael i fynd i gael i fynd i'r uniformiad a'r unrhyw o ddweud i fynd i fusidol i'r uniformiad a'r uniformiad. Rwy'n ar draws ond i gael i fynd i fynd i fynd i'r uniformiad a'r uniformiad y mae pam byddai yourbwyllnol yn dientyr i gael i fynd i hyn yn ei gael i fyny i gael i agenda item 1, which is the decision to take business in private. Can I invite the committee to agree whether to take item 5 consideration of an afflator to local authorities regarding their strategic housing investment plans in private? Are we agreed? I thank members for that. We move to agenda item 2, which is local government in Scotland performance and challenges 2017. The committee will take evidence from the Accounts Commission on its 2017 report on the performance of local authorities. I welcome Ronnie Hines, the acting chair. I welcome Fraser McKinley, director of performance, audit and best value, and Mark McCabe, senior manager of performance, audit and best value accounts commission. I thank all of you for coming along here this morning. It's appreciated. I invite Ronnie Hines to make any opening remarks that Mr Hines would wish to make. I would like to start by expressing our appreciation for the opportunity. We had, I think, productive engagements some months ago when we looked at the sister report to the one that we were here to consider this morning, the financial overview. I hope that that was too in your side of the table as much as it was ours, so we welcome the opportunity to come along today and talk about this particular report. The fact that there are two reports is probably a significant point to make in itself. You'll be aware that a previous practice has been to cover quite a lot of ground in a single overview report on local government each year. We felt a year ago that trying to split those down would be more helpful, and we're still casting around in our minds whether, in fact, that was the better thing to do, so I'd certainly be interested in any feedback from the committee in that regard. In addition to that, perhaps there are only three points that I want to highlight from the report. It covers still quite a lot of ground and I'm sure there will be questions from a range of perspectives, but the three that I perhaps want to highlight would be, first, that because we have split them there's more opportunity in this report to get into a more substantial analysis of some of the aspects of performance in local government than we were able to do previously. You can see sections in the report where we're delving into that and a bit more detail to do with comparative performance between councils, unit costs and so on, so that would be one point to highlight for me. A second would be that we're beginning to detect perhaps a bit of a trend in relation to the decisions that are made in local government in the light of the spending pressures that they're under, and that would be that the degree of protection that's been understood that we afforded to the two key services or the two bigger services, I should probably say, education and social work, does have consequences for the relatively non-protected services, and that's an issue that we've got a growing interest in and we touch on that in this report, so that's probably worth highlighting as well, I think. And the third and final point that for me is related to that is that the commission has deliberated quite hard and listened carefully to local government and others about the stance that we take in relation to the duty of best value and the requirement for continuous improvement that underpins that. We've responded to the critique or the question which is how realistic is that expectation in the light of an on-going reduction over a long period of time in the resources that are available to local government, so you'll see in the report that what we're saying is what we want to see is that there are clear priorities set by councils, that they align their plans, their strategies, their workforce, their resources behind that, and that they give a clear account of how they've reached those decisions to themselves, obviously, but also to the people who live in those areas. And that's an acknowledgement that perhaps to simply insist on continuous improvement for every service all the time is too demanding and ask at this point in time. And again, we'd be interested in the committee's views on that. So I think those are the three things that I would highlight, but as I say, it's a wide-ranging report. I'm sure that members will have questions from a range of perspectives. We'll do our best to answer them. That's very helpful, Mr Hines. Thank you very much. I'm conscious that this is a different way of doing things. So we've had a cut at the numbers underlying strategic performance. The financial overview has been there. This is very much about how local authorities are managing the financial position going forward in a strategic way. You do know real terms cuts to local authorities in terms of the revenue grant, but you also mentioned in your opening statement there social work and education. One of the things that this committee has been quite keen to look at is the overall spending power of local authorities, not just the revenue grant, but other areas. For example, you mentioned social work. Of course, there's now the integrated joint boards. For example, when we were doing our budget scrutiny, Councillor McAfee to the former leader of Glasgow City Council noted £33 million that was going to Glasgow City Council to ease pressures on social work services. That wouldn't feature in the revenue grant. Obviously, there's been lots of publicity in relation to education and attainment challenge and attainment funds. The figure of £120 million is used in relation to that. Again, that doesn't feature in the revenue grant support, but the Government often quotes those figures and gives a different set of numbers. When you talk about protected services in terms of social work and education, are you referring to those types of monies that I am mentioning or are you talking about ring-fence monies separate from that in local authority settlements? In that context, could you give us a better understanding of when we are looking at real terms cuts? I don't want to play the numbers game, but I want to get a context to it. Are we talking real terms cuts in terms of the overall totality of the spend of local authorities? Are we talking specifically about the revenue grant and how do you distinguish between those when looking at local authority performance? I will ask for a remark to respond on the specifics of the different funds that you have referred to. My opening remarks were intended to be all-embracing, so I am talking about the totality of funding that is available. I am going to talk about relative protection for education and social services in particular. It is a reflection of the fact that those are high priority services. There are clear policy priorities that the Scottish Government and local government share in relation to them, so, over and above any protected funding streams, there will be a sense that, when it comes to budget decisions, anything that can be spared in terms of not asking for savings or cuts in those services will tend to be a priority for most councils, and the consequence of that will be that other services will bear the brunt of it. That was the thirst of that remark. In relation to the funding streams, I will raise a remark and give us more information. I am happy to pick that up. We had a good discussion about this when we were here last time round. The work of the committee through the budget review group and then on the back of your report, the cabinet secretary has said that they will try and bring more clarity and transparency to the whole area this time round for the next budget cycle, which I think will be enormously helpful. I think that that will make a big difference. I mean, our starting point is a reasonably straightforward one, which is we can follow the money in terms of which budget line does it go into. That is our starting point. As you know, the integration money officially in technical terms goes into the health budget, so we do not include it specifically in here. Exhibit 2 in the report covers all the different bits of funding in the notes and explains how we have got to that position. We are absolutely aware, though, that there is other money in the system. We talked about city deal money last time we were here, as well as being an increasingly important part of the jigsaw. Similarly, service charges and income from other places and increasing appetite and interest for what councils would call a more commercial approach to generating income. There is absolutely no doubt that the complexity of the financing landscape in local government is moving on a pace. We need to keep pace with that. Very briefly, convener, for our part, you will remember last time round that we committed to the committee to see what we could do at our end to try and make more consistent with some other bodies and colleagues on how we report on that. We have done some really good work with the Parliament's financial scrutiny unit in Spice to the point that we now have a shared approach, a shared methodology, if you like, for particularly the time series reporting. You will remember that there has been some discussion about how we account for police and fire and that. We have now reached a position with Spice colleagues that we are using the same approach. Hopefully, at least between us and the independent commentators, we are trying to get to a place of at least what we are presenting on the same basis. With your work and our work, we are heading in the right direction to try and get better transparency and more clarity about how that works. That is very helpful. It puts a context to those discussions, but irrespective of the number, there are obviously challenging situations for local authorities out there. We want to look at how they are managing some of that, and we will now move on in relation to that. Can I bring in Elaine Smith, MSP? I wonder if you could outline for us some of the barriers that councils are facing when it comes to adapting to the challenging circumstances that the convener mentioned. Some of that is mentioned in the report. The complexity of the environment in which councils are having to work clearly constitutes a challenge in relation to the performance in their core duty to deliver our services and deliver them to best value. We set that out in some respects in the Exhibit 5 in the report. It could easily be read as a series of excuses, and I hope that it does not read that away because that is not the intention, but I think that we have to be fair, honest and realistic when we are looking at what councils are being asked to do. That set of challenges, the legislative and policy changes and the various other things that they have to contend with, would be part of it. The response to some of those, perhaps a key response, is to work in partnership with other bodies and that is something that we have always taken an interest in. In fact, we are taking an increasing interest in going forward. That itself brings challenges. It is not because we think that local councils are insular and do not want to work in partnership far from it, but working in partnership is a different modus operandi compared to being responsible for things that you are on hand. Some of the challenges that you face become bigger because the organisations with which you are working in partnership have their own challenges and their own priorities, and they will not always coincide with yours. That would be my first take at an answer to the question. The environment is complex and dealing with it is not easy either. I could just stop you for a further question. Is that what you mean when you say evaluate options for change and safety design, including options for investing to save? It sounds a bit strange to talk about investing to save in the current climate when actually there are cuts to budgets? No, that is not what I meant, but I think that it is a fair point to make in relation to the first question. Investing to save would, for me, partly mean that you have capital and revenue expenditure. If you have scoping your capital budget, which councils quite often do, then it would be wise in the current climate to be prioritising projects or programmes that are likely to deliver reduced running costs going forward. We see quite a lot of evidence that that does happen, so that is mainly the kind of thing that we mean when we talk about investing to save. Okay, thanks. Do you want to add anything else on the first part of the question that I asked about the barriers? Not in my own account, but perhaps the others. Well, councils are certainly facing challenges from all the demographic change that we have outlined in the report. That has got particular implications for its big services in terms of social work and education, so balancing that alongside all the demands in terms of the legislative and policy changes or things that the council needs to weigh up alongside all its local priorities. As Ronny said, it is a really complex picture. Much of the work that councils do—I should say that I was employed for 10 years in local government, but much of the work that they do is carried out by staff, by people. It is a service sector, if you want to call it that. In your report in the Exhibit 6, you say that in 2011 there were 213,200 employees, but by 2016 that is down to 198,100. I suppose that when we look at that, we also look at the increase in the amount of funding that is being ringfenced or reserved, if you like, for spending on education and social work. The question that arises is whether or not the increases in council tax that are now allowable and perhaps the increase in fees for services, is all of that going to be sustainable in the longer term? We make the point in the report that even if councils were to take full advantage of the freedom that they now have to raise council tax without any grant penalty, it would not make a huge difference in any given year to the total funding available to them. It is related to Exhibit 6, which was mentioned in your question. We have been criticising councils for some time now that, in the light of the challenges that they face and the reductions that they are having to make in their budget, because so much of their budget is staff costs, they have been reducing their workforce, but we do not always see a good workforce plan to go with that. We give an example in the report, which is a material illustration of why we say that, because when you do reach a stage where you are asking yourself, can you do things differently? Can you take on a different approach to how the work could be done? You need to have the skills to do that. There are now instances that are coming up, not just in the overview report, but in our bedrock reports, where we see that councils are struggling to do that because they have let go a lot of expertise that they now could quite happily use. A strategy at the earliest stage is easy with hindsight. I recognise that, but a strategy that tries to recognise over the foreseeable future the skills that you might need to retain in order to respond to the challenges that you are not going to face is exactly what we think councils should be doing. However, in the long term, we have grown in demand for services. We look at the demographics of the population. We have increasing cuts to staff, etc. Is that sustainable? Is local government sustainable? Is increasing cuts, or are we going to have to start looking at whether or not more investment has to get into local government? One of the points that we are also making in the report is that a reduction in resources does not have to coincide with a reduction in the quality or the level of service. There is still scope for basic things such as good management, service reviews and so on, and for bigger approaches to transforming the way services are delivered. We are nowhere near the stage where we are able to say that there is a question about sustainability in terms of local government services. It was really to follow on from the staffing angle. I was very interested to read in the report the wide variation of sickness absences in councils. For the record, I can just read out some of the figures. We have, for example, an average of 8.8 days a year of sick in Aberdeenshire to 14.8 days a year in the western Isles. If you just take teachers, 4.2 days in Midlothian to 8.7 days in Perth and Cynros. In some councils, you are talking about the equivalent of over two weeks of sick on average a year, which is quite an awful lot. What are the best councils doing that the worst councils aren't? Clearly, if the worst councils could meet the performance of the best, that would save an awful lot of money and potentially improve services. I can make a start and then I'll ask Fraser to come in on that. One of the things that I said in my opening remarks is that we're delving a bit deeper into those comparative analyses. We did look at that particular issue in last year's report as well. That was dipping our toe in the water, if you like. The reason we chose that example just to put it in that wider context is because it's relatively free from some of the complexity. If you try to look at comparative performance in other areas, such as educational attainment, you can't ignore some of the socio-economic factors that clearly have an impact there. When it comes to managing staff absence, that's relatively irrelevant. It really is a management issue by and large, so we picked that because it's less controversial, and if you like floats, the idea that the publicity of those variances is its self-esteem-list improvement, which is what we're trying to do here. Now, to answer the question directly, we don't have a good answer to why it is that in some areas they're better at this than others. I'm pretty sure that if we looked at it over time, we'd find that that has changed, that some councils that used to have bigger levels or higher levels of staff absence now have lower ones. I would like to think, but we can't demonstrate that just yet, that that's because they themselves are working collaboratively with each other in family groups and saying, why is it that your level of sickness absence is so much lower than ours? What are you doing that we are not doing? We think, as a commission, that's an important role for us to play to encourage that kind of framework, that kind of engagement between councils. It's their responsibility to manage sickness absence and not ours, so our contribution here is to publicise how they're doing and the disparities between them. I can say a little bit more, convener, about the kinds of things that we see in the councils that are doing it well. Ronnie is absolutely right. I think that the starting point is having good data, so understanding what your levels of sickness are, the nature of that sickness absence, does it tend to be stress-related, different kinds of absence, knowing who those people are in particular, is it long-term sick, is it short-term sick? Understanding the nature of the problem is absolutely key, first of all. Beyond that, in the places that we've seen it reduce, as Ronnie has just described, it's partly a question of focus, so it's partly about really focusing on the issue, ensuring that the reporting mechanisms are right, ensuring that the monitoring is there, ensuring that the support is in place to get people back into work appropriately, as quickly as you possibly can. It tends to be that the longer people are off work, the harder it is to get them back to work, if you know what I mean. More broadly, if you look at what's happening in the world of HR and organisation development, a much stronger focus on wellbeing of staff and of your people rather than just dealing with it as a sickness absence issue, so taking a wider approach to colleagues' wellbeing is where the agenda is now at. Those are the kinds of things that we can see the better councils doing. As the chair said, having those conversations between the best councils and the ones that need to improve is absolutely the starting point. I really don't think that it's your job to drill down further and see what exactly the best councils are doing. I was struck by this figure. If all councils met the best-performing figure, that would be the equivalent of 650 full-time employees across Scotland. Members, could you point out which part of the figure is the best? I'm very sorry, so it's on page 20 in your report, and it's paragraph 31 and 32. It's very helpful, thanks. So 650 full-time employees, and if you just take teachers, 160 full-time teachers. I was a councillor for 10 years, and I was continually banging on about this, so very little improvement in the council where I was. Do you think that it's just enough to highlight the differences, or should we be doing more? I hope that I didn't say that it didn't think that it was our responsibility to drill any further. One of the questions that I posed at the beginning was where we might take this kind of analysis in the future and would be interested in the committee's views on that. What I did say is that it's primarily the responsibility of the councils, they're the employing organisations, they're the ones with the policies, the practices at their disposal, so you have to ask what contribution can you best make. My view is that, as a commission, it's a useful contribution to publicise this kind of performance, particularly in those relative or comparative terms, because I know that, if you're on the other side of that within a council, and you're one of the ones who doesn't look terribly good in this regard or some other, that it's going to be some stimulus to do something about it, so publicity does help in that regard. Beyond that, if we identify good practices that Fraser described, then we will highlight that. We don't have an example of sickness management absence in this report, but we do have other examples where councils have good practice, so if we find good practice, we will certainly make it our business to illuminate that, and that would apply to sickness absence as much as anything else. Can I just check in relation to staff absence? I hear anecdotally about various departments in Glasgow City Council and various levels of staff absence. I'm sure that it's the same across local authority when you're just thinking about teaching and non-teaching within the council commission, but if one local authority has a particularly high level of staff absence in one department, does that not suggest that there's something amiss in terms of how they've invested in it, or a management culture, or does it not really suggest that there's something there that needs to be actioned, a step has to be taken, and would you ever flag up to specific local authorities that are outliers, if you like, that they really have to have a close look at this? Mark McDonald might want to come in and say a bit more, because I think that that takes us into the level of audits of individual councils. My opening comment would be to agree with that. One of the things that we're doing at a strategic level within the commission is in our new approach to best value. I'm having a closer alignment between the periodic every five years or so exercise in a council of looking for best value in accordance with the statute. On the one hand, or on the other hand, the annual audit that takes place every year. Because of that, we'll be in a stronger position if we discover the kind of issue that you've just described within an individual council to flag that up, not just in the annual audit report but within the best value report that council will receive as well. I wouldn't expect this to be covering that in a report like this. It's covering all 32 councils in Scotland, but when we get into, in that case, Glasgow City Council, if that were apparent to us, I would expect to see that mentioned in the audit report. I should point out, before Mr McCabe comes in, that I'm not targeting Glasgow City Council. I merely make the point here anecdotally about varying levels of absence in various departments. You have to then cross over and go, well, does that tell you something about how one department needs improved in relation to the other one and should that flag something in the management systems of any local authority, not just Glasgow, to take appropriate steps to investigate and scrutinise that? Sorry, Mr McCabe. As Ronnie said, the data that's available nationally doesn't get broken down by departments. We only have it at a council level and it's by teachers and then other employees, so it's difficult to take forward and investigate some of those anecdotal things. As Ronnie said, we would be assuring ourselves when we looked at individual councils as part of our best value audit that councils actually understood where the absences were. I guess what we hear anecdotally ourselves is that departments like social work is where there's a lot of pressure and that's where absence tends to be higher and I think that's a problem across all councils, but a big part of our best value audit is actually seeing that councils understand where the sickness absences are, assuring themselves that they have the best practices in place or comparing what they do with others. What they don't highlight is where some of those councils may have outsourced services, so they're not necessarily always comparing light with light, because if councils deliver more services in-house, then there's a higher risk that they'll have a higher absence level compared to those that contract services out. That's helpful, thank you. Mr Whiteman. Thank you, convener. From your work, what impression do you have of the extent to which local authorities are learning from each other about their performance in light of your work, of course, the reports that you produce, but also in light of the services that are available to them, for example improvement service? My general impression is that they are learning. You would hope and expect that to be the case, given the pressures under which they're operating. I can point to things like the benchmarking framework, which is referred to in the report. That's a collective enterprise run by local councils for their own benefit, in which we take a very keen interest as a commission, not least because we've in effect devolved the responsibility to councils to come up with the indicators of measures by which their effectiveness will be measured. We've got a statutory duty to report on that, but we think that it's better if they come up with the measures that are meaningful rather than us. We've got a key stake in that particular game, and we take an interest in what they're doing. On the basis of what I know from that, I know that that's a very vibrant context in which that kind of learning takes place. I also know that they make increasing use of the improvement service. There will be some common or generic themes that pretty much every council will ask the improvement service to help them with. There will be some others that are particular to the council itself. One of the stimuli for that can be a critical report from the Accounts Commission, and we do see a fair bit of evidence of that. One of the things that we try to do when we've issued the report—good, bad or otherwise—is to meet with the council itself, with the political and the management leadership, and to have an honest conversation and confidence about what they're going to do in response to that report and how they feel about the way that the audit was conducted. Pretty much all the time, what we'll find is that they will certainly be looking to their own resources, in the first instance, to address the areas where we have been critical of them, but they'll also be looking outside to the improvement service and also to other councils. We see more evidence of that too. There's quite a lot of evidence now of councils having same management meetings where the senior management of another council will be invited periodically to come along and present on what it is that we are doing because that has been seen to be something that represents good practice that the councillor in question would be interested in. That gives you a flavour of the kind of things that we do see in our work that councils are doing. As I said, I'm to begin with, you would hope and expect that that is the case, because if you think that you can contend with what they've had to deal with over the last six, seven, eight years and what is in prospect over the foreseeable future, if they think that they can contend with that simply from their own devices, then I think that they are heading for more difficult than they need. Okay, thank you. That's very useful. I've got another question around education and social work. I mean, this, as you noted in the report, takes up 71 per cent of councils' budgets, but we're seeing in both fields of education and social work increasing reforms taking place, stimulated by Parliament and government, both in terms of governance, for example, the governance review and education, and in terms of funding. You give an example of Inverclyde council, which, if it makes 5 per cent savings in education, social work and other protected budgets, will need to potentially make savings of over 40 per cent in other budgets. Given that, for local people, trading standards, environmental health, housing, planning, leisure are all very, very important things for which people expect good services, and yet they have less control over those as a consequence of the fact that the Government and this Parliament is making demands on those big services. Is there a case for looking at the governance and performance of local authorities for education and social work as one and the rest as another? So, I mean, the point is absolutely well made, Mr Wightman. I think that there's no doubt that, as the chair mentioned in his opening remarks, the more that the big services are relatively speaking protected, the bigger the impact on other things. That's why we urge councils to think differently and out the box and to do good options appraisals as to how these things can be delivered better and more efficiently. We don't subscribe to the notion that we are in the business of managed decline here. I don't think that's what the commission would say at all. I think that we are rightly and appropriately demanding of councils to say, well, if you, for example, look at some of the performance evidence that's in here in terms of the variation, both in terms of unit cost and performance, if everyone was performing as well and as efficiently as the best council on the land, that would go a long way to helping this solution or to finding a solution. Alongside that, we see more evidence now of councils, some of the stuff that we've captured in Exhibit 7, doing some more innovative things in terms of how things are organised. That's a long way round of saying that they absolutely need to figure that out. They need to be talking to other councils in their area, so you'll be aware that there's the Northern Alliance, which is a combination of several councils in the north and northeast which recognise and had initially started with a shared problem around teacher recruitment, and it's blossomed from there. So there is good stuff happening out there about councils talking to each other and pulling together to ensure that they're grappling with the big issues that they face. The three Ayrshire councils joining up increasingly on various things. We can see regional models developing already, notwithstanding the more formal governance reviews that are around. We will be seeing more of that. What's really important from our perspective is that those decisions are taken well. The information is good for councillors to take those kinds of decisions and that decisions are based on good solid evidence as to how this thing is going to move forward. Let me just add two points to that. First would be that, whether or not some further degree of separation of those higher priority and bigger services from the rest of local government services would be of any benefit. It depends, for me, at least partly, on the funding arrangements that would go with it, because it's a funding issue that, fundamentally, I think, is driving some of the service and performance matters that we highlight in the report. You would need to look at that as well. You could get to a situation conceivably where the remaining services were further starved of the resources and that wouldn't have served any purpose in making them more sustainable. Beyond that, there's also an issue—I mentioned partnership earlier—that the other side of that is that the partnerships that councils are working with now are a reflection of the fact that the outcomes that people are entitled to expect from public services and the spending that goes with them are complex, interrelated and can't by and large be identified for a particular sector, not even one as wide as local government, so there would be risks, I think, in achieving some of those outcomes if we had yet more balkanisation and complexity than we already have within the public sector as a whole. I would counsel caution about that and our work. We think hard about the environment in which councils in particular have to work. That makes me reflective about solutions that look clear because they're structural, but might not necessarily have the result that was intended. I was quite interested in some of your answers. In fact, Mr McKinley said that we're moving towards regional models. I wonder what your opinion is on the fact that we had regional models right up until the 1990s. We had regional models, regional councils that dealt with education and social work, and we had district councils that dealt with other issues. Given that we have outlined that there's a squeeze on the other services, because of the big services that are taking up to 80 per cent in your report, is it now the time to look again at the whole structure of local government? Is it time to make those regional models perhaps more to put them on a different footing? Do we need to reorganise local government? You mentioned Fraser's comments. I wonder if he wanted to explain himself. I can simply comment afterwards. It's a really important question. I think that the balance is always between the thing that I was describing, which is councils themselves, on some topics and in some areas, thinking that this is the best way to deliver services. That's the kind of thing that we are seeing developing on a regional basis. It's not everything all the time. It's on specific things, whether it's roads or teachers or individual things. I think that that's quite a different thing to a more top-down, we're going to go through a big local government reorganisation. I think the reason there has been very little appetite for that in local government and up to this point in Scottish government is the amount of time and effort and energy that it takes to reorganise any public service, but councils in particular probably take away the focus and the energy from councils trying to deliver the services that they need to deliver. That's where they are. The Government has committed to doing a review of local government or local governance, and it's committed to bringing forward a local democracy bill at some point. That's very early days, I think, but I would expect that those kinds of things would be the vehicles where exactly that kind of question would come up. Do you think that, overall, there is a willingness this year for councils to collaborate not only with other councils, but also with their communities and their areas to try and do things differently? On the whole, I think that there definitely is. We've mentioned the challenges that that poses, but I should also balance the books, if you like, by saying that we recognise a lot of effort going into the work that's needed to work in that fashion collaboratively with others. We're going to do a piece of work with some of the other scrutiny bodies over the next year to 18 months that will look in the framework of the Community Empowerment Act 2020 at what is being done at a very local level to give substance to that, and I think that that will be an interesting piece of work, because that, if you like, is where the action now is in that regard. Just to come back to your previous question, I'm not going to give you a direct answer about whether, I think, some form of reorganisation is important or not, but what I'm going to say is that the evidence in our report suggests that there's quite a lot of mileage still in working within the system that we have. The variances in performance, the variances in cost are in some cases still quite striking, and if everybody was operating at the level of the best in both those regards, things would be in a much better footing across the board than they are now. That, for me, is the productive way to look at this at the moment. That's where the action ought to be if we're going to maintain and hopefully improve the level of services that the public expects from councils. We'll go to Jenna Gareth now. I just want to start by asking quite a general question. Mr Hynes, you said at the start of the session that the commission wants local authorities to identify their priorities clearly, and they want that to be communicated effectively to the public. I wonder what your view is on councils' ability to resource effective long-term financial strategies and planning. We've covered in the financial overview for the past two years now the difficulty that councils face when funding so much of it coming from the Scottish Government is on a one-year basis, so I think that it would be right to acknowledge in the first instance that that isn't as helpful as it could be, and we've said as much. We've also said that despite that, a number of councils are producing viable long-term plans, so you have to make perhaps more assumptions than you would do if you had the figures clearly in front of you. You have to look at a wider range of scenarios, but those are all skills and good things to be doing in any event. Even if you had more certainty over the long term about the funding, the other imponderables would still be there. What are the demographic changes going to be? What are the other issues that we're going to face at a local level that might be unique to us as opposed to generic for Scotland as a whole? Also, all those things factor into good long-term planning, and therefore we've got no hesitation in saying that councils need to be good at that and get that on to a solid footing, and it starts with clarity about priorities. That brings me back to the point that I made in my opening remarks, which is that I'm not saying that we as a commission will be entirely neglectful of an area that doesn't seem to be very well handled in a council, it's not performing very well just because the council has said that that's not a priority for us. It might not be as high a priority as something else, but it remains a responsibility of the council, so we expect to see reasoning behind the decisions that are made, and we expect to see resources following that vision, that thinking, those strategies. If that has been done, we will look differently to an area that perhaps isn't performing as well as it could do. That's not to say that we won't be critical of it, but we'll be doing it hopefully with our understanding eye. Just to drill down on a couple of key points there, one of the biggest issues with regard to long-term planning is workforce planning. I note that the report notes that half of Scotland's councils do not have organisation-wide workforce plans in place, and therefore one of your recommendations is that that is brought in. One of the examples that I'm going to give is from teaching. Mr Hynes, you may well be acquainted with Fife Council's approach to teaching recruitment. In my experience as a principal teacher, I was involved in a generic recruitment process this time two years ago. What the authority does in Fife is that they don't identify where the vacancies are, they put out a generic application process, and then, after I think June, very late on in the day, they then appoint members of staff to jobs, so it's retrospective, and it's reactive as opposed to proactive when they know, I suppose, kids do their course choices in February, so they actually are well aware of what kind of numbers are going to look like in terms of their staffing requirements earlier in their year. In my experience in Fife Council, the authority there were not very good at their workforce planning, so I just wonder then if more than half of authorities at the moment don't have workforce plans in place, do you think that there's capacity in the system just now for the others to catch up? I think that the short answer to that would be yes. I think that they do need to. I think that what we see, and as you know, the absence of a workforce plan can affect all bits of your people management, including recruitment, but I think that what we've been seeing, and this is the point that we make in part 2 of the report, is that councils have been reducing the number of staff that they have overall, and up until this point, too many councils have been doing that in the absence of a good workforce plan, so lots of councils have put out a general call for voluntary redundancy, and I can understand why they did that because they had to save money quite quickly. The risk of that, though, is that you've got people leaving the organisation that, actually, one or two years down the line, you really would rather not have lost. In the absence of that good workforce plan, about looking three, five, ten years ahead about what shape of the workforce do we need, what skills do we need, how are we going to build our social care workforce into the future, without those good strategies and plans in place, it feels a little bit like councils are operating blind. That's why the commission has been very clear on it here. We will then be following that up in all of our audits of individual councils because, obviously, the picture varies across the piece. That is something that we will be turning the volume up a little bit, I think, over the next few weeks, because it's such an important part of councils being fit for the future. Very quick. You mentioned redundancies. A number of councils have had and continue to have a policy of no compulsory redundancies. Do you think that that is hampering their ability to plan their workforces? We haven't seen any evidence of that to date. I don't think that that's the problem. I don't think that the no compulsory redundancies that are entirely legitimate policy choices for a council to make is the issue. Apart from anything else, you can target voluntary redundancy schemes on specific bits of the workforce if you want to. It doesn't have to be an open-ended thing. As we see that councils have been prudent with their finances and reserves, generally speaking, are in not a bad place, so they can afford to invest in those things. The short answer, Mr Simpson, is no. I don't think that we have seen any evidence of the no compulsory redundancy policies getting in the way of this. Gentleman, you've talked about the challenges that many councils face, and there is no doubt that there are many, and you've touched on some of them. When we talk about reporting and performance, that's how you're gauging how well a councillor and many people's perceptions of how well a council's managing is gauged on its reporting and its performance. Can I ask about whether, when there's a need for cultural change and strategic improvement, whether that is taking place through the performance process? That answer would be yes, but not universally and not to the same extent everywhere. It's quite a complex area. Obviously, we're talking about leadership and culture. Maybe an example would help, because it's really difficult to give a general comment across the board on this. We're just publishing today, I think, the commission's findings along with the controller's report on Inverclyde Council, which is the first of the 32 councils in our new best value. One of the things that we're saying in there is that we do detect a cultural shift within that organisation since 10 years ago, when the previous best value report was done on them, where they were subjected to quite a lot of criticism. Things like culture are pretty amorphous, they're hard to define, but whatever it is, it takes quite a long time to change. And what we think we're seeing over a 10-year period is significant change in the culture of that particular organisation. So use it as an illustration. How does it come about? We think it comes about because maybe a bit of a shock to the system didn't do any harm in the first instance, but there was a positive response to that. There was clear leadership, both at the political and at the managerial level. There was a shared set of priorities, and that might strike me as being something to take for granted, but I wouldn't necessarily say that. That is the case and a focus on what needs to change. That then drives out into the organisation over a period of time, and it leaves us now 10 years later in a position where we're confident that we can comment favourably on a cultural shift within that organisation. So there's an illustration of what it might mean in practice for one organisation, and we're hoping that through reports like that, which all councils I know will read, that anything that they think that they could usefully take from that, they will. When it's talked about prioritising, because councils now have to prioritise, you talked about managing change or decline and all of that, but it's all about how you prioritise your time, your resources and your money to ensure that you get the best value that you can for the assets or the employment of whatever you're trying to manage and what you're wearing trying to perform in the process. Looking at all of that, how do councils ensure that they are capturing all of that in making it the best that they can for all of their employees, for all of their communities that they're representing? Because they cannot give them everything. They have to be strategic, they have to talk about long-term, short-term planning, but they also have to prioritise what can and can happen, and expectations come into all of that as well. It's trying to get that whole mix together, and it would be quite good to hear your views on that. So, as you know better than I do, it's not easy, I suppose, is the first thing to say, but I think the ingredients should be well understood, which is about a clarity of direction and priority, and that, as the chair said earlier, doesn't mean that other things aren't important, it just means that some things are more important than others. It's then about ensuring that your people, your money, your buildings, your information are aligned and ready to support those priorities. I think that it's really important to come back to the question that was mentioned earlier. This is where the community engagement bit is absolutely critical, because, as you say, people will have different views about what's important. It's really important that, if the council is having to invest in some areas and potentially disinvest in others, the community needs to understand why that is the case and be part of that whole process. And I think that if there's one area of real development for councils, I would say it's that, it's about that community engagement bit and the decision making process, that really now needs to go beyond a kind of broad brush consultation, this is what we're doing, what do you think, kind of question. It has to be more bought in much earlier on. So, I think those would be the things that I would recognise. I mean, we've managed to get this far convenient without mentioning the elections, but we have a great opportunity, I think, that we have 32 new councils in place, and one thing that the commission is reminding everyone of is that the duty of best value rests with the council. So, regardless of the entirely legitimate political activity that has been going on, and I'm sure we'll continue over the next few months, our point is that all the things you've just described are the responsibility of every single member in that council, and that's the basis on which we'll be doing our work. And that has to be audited and scrutinised as well by everyone within that council. They take on that role and responsibility, whether they're in administration or in opposition, as to what can be achieved, and I think it's that balance that you're trying to get, and that if that can be achieved, then there can be real progress. Yep. So that cycle of performance has to include effective scrutiny, both at the official level but really importantly with councillors, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Can I maybe ask a little bit more about Alayna questioning that a few members have raised, and that's in relation to driving performance improvement consistent across all local authorities and benchmarking exercises? Like Mr Simpson quite rightly was asking about how we improve staff absence levels in education and non-education, but just look at the report again, things are actually technically improving in terms of staff absence that is reducing. So not a wonderful story to tell, but a reasonable story to tell, but still inequalities between various councils. So if we were to look elsewhere within the report, exhibit 12 is a real stand out in relation to the cost of council tax collection, and I know that there doesn't seem to be any correlation between the unit cost of collecting council tax and the level of collection rates. I picked a couple of examples, so approximately it would appear in Glasgow or North Lanarkshire that it costs about £11 or £12 per council tax pair to collect council tax, but it's about £4 or so in five. That seems a dramatic difference. Same defence of Glasgow, because I note that you say in the report that they've actually dramatically reduced it from over £18 per unit to just under £11 per unit. There's still a reasonable reduction, but there's still a massive difference in terms of the cost. So I'm just wondering how do we drive change in this year, because it would seem unacceptable to myself that there is such a variation? So how do we drive this change forward? I think that that's a really important question. It partly contains the answer within itself, because you're right to point out that Glasgow has already improved significantly in that regard. We would like to think that one of the benefits of exposing this comparison in that fashion is to raise sights about, if you like, the art of the possible. It would be easy—and I don't think that a second Glasgow would do this—to be self-congratulatory and say, well, it used to be 18 quid and now it's 11 quid, so we're doing really well. But if you look at this, you realise that others might be doing better still. So I think that that is the first point that I would make. That's one way to drive improvement, highlight that something better might be getting done elsewhere. Beyond that, I think—and this is now something for us as a commission—Council tax is a bit unlike sickness absence. I made the point earlier that that's relatively immune, if you like, to the socioeconomic context within which a council operates. I don't think that I would see council tax collection in the same light, because clearly it does make a difference whether you're trying to collect council tax in areas to the east end of Glasgow, compared to, say, St Andrew's, just to use the comparison with Fife. So you have to bring that relevant context into account somehow. The wrong way to do it is to say that it's just that much harder in Glasgow, therefore this is the best that you can do. The right way to do it is to get into the bones of what it is that's actually distinguishing your performance from somebody else's over and above the environment in which you unavoidably have to work. For us as a commission, we think that that's maybe the next chapter in this story. We would like to get into the detail of this a little bit more. We know councils are doing it and to understand better where the limitations are in terms of how good performance could get. Just to give an example of why I say that, some preliminary analysis that's been done by the improvement service that looks at education, as an area suggests in its annual benchmarking report, that you could broadly say that about half of the difference that you can see—the variation between councils in Scotland and their educational attainment—about half of it you can explain by relevance, by reference rather, to the socio-economic context in which children are being educated. What about the other half? Where's the difference about the other half? That looks as though it's got something to do with performance, so that's for me the next area to look at in terms of driving improvement. Is that the kind of thing that the council commission would look at? Do it do it? I focush report specifically on council tax collection and produce exemplars of best practice and then build relationships with local authorities to drive that change. I'm conscious that you don't run local authorities. What you do is look at the performance of them and make some general recommendations when you do this overview report. Where would you take that forward? You want to get into the meat of this a little bit more. How would that be taken forward? At least in two areas. One, which we already do, if you look to the report that we did on Rose Maintenance last year, you'll find a flavour of what you've just described in that report, so we are looking increasingly at how it varies from one part of the country to another, so on a thematic basis, if you like, or a service basis, and we will always do that. In relation to future iterations of this report, I would expect to see at least—we'll examine the possibility of getting into that in a bit more detail. I don't underestimate the challenges involved, and it's a lot of data, a lot of analysis, and some of it will be quite complex, but I think that as a contribution to public debate on this, it's the obvious place to want to get to, and that's the second place in which I would expect to see us taking forward. Okay, and final question in relation to benchmarking performance. I don't know my Deputy Commander wants to come in as well. Exhibit 13, which I find quite difficult to understand, but it says more about myself than the exhibit. It's in relation to the cost of including our streets, effectively, across local authorities, and a cleanliness score, so it's performance-improving or decreasing in relation to that. I think that it's clear to see from that one of the areas that local authorities are either cut financial investment or have sought to do service reform to do efficiency savings. You pay your money, you take your choice on how you want to frame that, has been in terms of street cleaning, with quite dramatic cuts in local authorities across Scotland, with a consequential dip in performance that would appear. One or two local authorities might have managed to make a substantial cut and a slight improvement, so for example, if I'm reading this correctly, 31, 32 per cent cut in Falkirk, but a modest increase in performance, that would seem to be quite a commendable achievement when you look at the cuts across the board and other local authorities and a fairly directly corresponding diminution in how clean our streets are in local authorities. So what did Falkirk do well that others didn't, and how do we promote that going forward? Okay, well, if you're not the only one who has some difficulty reading this, I had to confess to my colleagues when we were waiting to come in that it only was done on me last night that those representations meant to be the map of Scotland. I didn't know. You're well ahead of me thinking here, because it took me a while to realise that, but I would probably contest one of the things that you said. I don't think it does demonstrate there's a very clear correlation between reductions in expenditure and reductions in service. It's much more mixed than that, which is why I said earlier that there clearly is the possibility of reducing expenditure and, at the very least, maintaining performance. You're right to pick Falkirk as a conspicuous example of just that, but you can also see that there are examples where, even though councils have increased expenditure, they haven't necessarily got a big enough bang for another buck. Some of them have improved the service as a consequence, maybe as a consequence, but they haven't improved it as much as they've increased the expenditure, so the correlation doesn't seem to be that clear. In terms of how, then, to use this as a stimulus for improvement, come back to what I've said before. If even one council—let's take Falkirk in that example—has managed to find a way of keeping the streets at least as clean as they were before but reduced the budget for that significantly, then I think that every other council in Scotland should be asking Falkirk how they did that, and I'm pretty sure that those conversations will be taking place, not just for street clearing on this but for other things that I know they're comparing. I suppose I'm pleased that I understood the table half correctly. I'll settle for that. You would assume that those conversations will take place. Do we assume they take place, or does there have to be a structured child approach to that, or do we just let our local authorities get on with it? I'm sure they will want to do it. Why wouldn't they want to do it? But what role would the Accounts Commission have in relation to driving some of that forward? We will report, as I've said, in those terms for future overview reports and perhaps in greater depth. We also have an on-going engagement with the improvement service who underpin this benchmarking and other work. The expectations that we have as a commission are clear to them and they know that. The fact that we are reporting it is testimony to those expectations. I'd like to be in a position in future reports to be able to say something more about the nature of the work that we believe is taking place behind the scenes where councils are looking at each other's performance and costs and asking how they do that. We haven't got substantive evidence of that at the moment to put into this report, but it would be one of the things that we'd like to be able to do to provide that assurance going forward. I'm guessing that some of the exhibits in this report may inform future thematic work that might take place. You mentioned roads previously, so we can maybe anticipate in the years ahead doing specific work streams around some of the more interesting findings in this report. Any ideas on what is likely to be next? I would want to say that we think that the risk that is posed to the services that have a lesser degree of protection is a significant public interest issue. I can't give a commitment at this stage because it's still part of our planning process, but I think that our attention has been drawn increasingly to those areas, so there's a whole range of them. If we leave education, social work to one side, street cleanliness would be an example. There's many others and I think we'd be doing a public service if we looked at some of those areas in a greater degree of scrutiny. That's very helpful. Elaine Smith. We're reaching the end of the session, but I would quite like to go back to the beginning of your report and your chair's introduction. For my colleague's benefit, it's page 4, paragraph 3, that I want to specifically look at. The context of what I want to ask you is that also in your report you say that between 2016-17 and 2017-18, total revenue funding from the Scottish Government will reduce by about £216 million in real terms. In the chair's introduction, Douglas Sinclair says that councils are increasingly relying on use of reserves to bridge projected funding gaps. Moreover, recent best value audits have highlighted the dependency on incremental changes to services, increasing charges and reducing employee numbers in order to make savings. Those are neither sufficient nor sustainable solutions for the scale of the challenge facing councils. Are you actually saying that alternative forms of service delivery in working together—the things that you've been talking about during this session—is the answer, rather than increased central funding or, indeed, just less cuts? I don't think that there's any one answer, but I think that different ways of delivering services must be part of it just because of the comments that you've drawn our attention to. If there's no end in sight to the trend of reductions in resources, I think that it would be foolish to carry on just responding to that incrementally year on year. You have to try and get ahead of the game a little bit, so that's what we intend when we enjoin councils in that fashion to think differently and to look at some hard and radical options about different ways of delivering services, but that's not a silver bullet to use the cliché. There are various other things that councils can and do particularly well that help with this regard. I mentioned that in Vocly because it's the report that's out today. If you look at that report, you'll see that without having a kind of magical approach to transformative change, they have managed to turn that organisation around very well just by doing some of the things that Fraser described earlier. That also, on-going service reviews, is a clear idea about what you want to do, what your priorities are and putting your resources into those things. All of those basic elements of good management are also part of the answer here, too, so we wouldn't say that there's any one thing to which there would be a solution to the difficulty that councils face, but we also think that carrying on as if nothing had really changed seven or eight years ago and things were going to somehow reverse in the next five or six years is a mistake. There's no indication that that is the case, so we want councils to recognise that and to respond accordingly by and large they're doing it. I do understand that, but is there a point where you're actually allowed to say that all of those reserves have been taken into account, changes have been made, but at this point we have to say in the report, are you allowed to say that actually the cuts are having a huge impact? Well, I think that we are saying that there's no doubt that the cuts are having an impact. The use of reserves is something that we draw attention to in all our reports and the main point that I'd want to reiterate there is that if you use them simply as a means of tidying yourself over for another year or two, you're not going to be responding in the right way to the challenges that you face. If you use them strategically and intelligently as a means of investment in order to change how you deliver services, that's the right response and that's what we expect councils to do. Thank you. Time is almost upon us. If any of our witnesses want to add anything before we close this particular session, there's a few moments. I thank all three of you for coming along this morning. We appreciate the time we've taken. It's been an interesting session and we'll suspend briefly until we prepare for the next agenda item. Welcome back, everyone. When I moved to agenda item three, which is post-legislative scrutiny of the Disabled Persons Park and Places Scotland Act 2009, the committee will take evidence from Jackie Baillie, MSP, on its post-legislative scrutiny of the act. Jackie Baillie was the member responsible for interesting the bill in 2008. I think I sat in the local government committee at that time, Ms Baillie. I welcome you here this morning. Thank you for coming along and giving you the opportunity to make some opening remarks. Thank you very much, convener, and thank you for the invitation. I'm very pleased that the committee is doing post-legislative scrutiny in this area. You will forgive me, of course, because eight years ago was a long time, so some of the fine detail may escape me. Let me give you some of the background to why I engaged with the process in the first place. It started with a constituency case, probably about a decade ago, which seems a long time indeed in it, arose as a result of a neighbour dispute, where, frankly, the next door neighbour to the constituent that came to me persistently parked in his disabled parking bay outside his home. The nature of his disability was that if that happened, he couldn't literally get out of his car and get to his front door and into his home. What I did, as you would expect any MSP to do, is I contacted the police. The police told me they couldn't enforce it because it was an advisory disabled parking bay. I contacted the council that put in the bay. The council couldn't do anything either. I went so far as to put the neighbour on the front page of my local newspaper in the hope that that might embarrass him into better behaviour. Unfortunately, that didn't work. I contacted, in my area, the Western Barchonshire Access Panel, who were very helpful in suggesting that what we now needed to do was to consider whether legislation was suitable. I commenced a two-year journey in investigating whether this was something that would be subject to the private member's bill and, indeed, was pleased that the act passed in 2009. You have taken wide-ranging evidence. It might be helpful, and I will certainly, in response to questions, indicate that the act itself and the bill that we brought forward is actually very narrowly focused. It does a couple of things. Firstly, it takes all the advisory bays in Scotland and it makes them enforceable. It does that through a process of engagement by local authorities. Secondly, it is to look at all off-street parking in private premises, private businesses, and encourage them to do likewise. The bill skirted between areas that are devolved and reserved. I think that we tried to manage the balance pretty well. At the end of the day, for me, it is about how we ensure that disabled people get access to their homes, shops and retail facilities in the same way that the rest of us enjoy. I hope that the bill has contributed to doing just a little bit of that. Thank you very much, Ms Bailey. We will move to questioning. Graham Simpson, MSP. Thank you. You have given us the background. Do you think that the act—you have heard all the evidence that we have heard—has achieved its objectives in practice? It is an interesting question and absolutely the right one to ask, because my belief is yes on balance it has. When you consider what the act was trying to do, which essentially was to make all advisory bays enforceable, it has actually achieved that. The evidence that you have taken shows, I think, quite interesting variations in enforcement activity. If I can focus on that just now, and obviously develop it with other questioning, but if you look at local authorities at the time where we were considering the on-street parking provisions, six out of the 32, or thereabouts, actually had decriminalised their own parking, the rest relied on police enforcement. That position has now changed to 16 out of 32 local authorities having decriminalised their parking, and another two I understand being in the pipeline. The reality with that is local authorities will therefore employ wardens. Those wardens can be directed, and as a response to parliamentary questions I laid previously, what is fascinating is that the majority of local authorities don't just cover their costs, they actually generate a surplus, which many put back into the general funds and it applied to other useful things that the local authority do. I do accept in areas where the police still enforce fixed penalty notices for car parking, it's not a top priority for them. The enforcement tends to be reactive rather than proactive, and particularly in town centres it's much more proactive because there's a density of parking there, but in residential areas it is reactive enforcement. In the situation that my constituent was in, the police would have been able to act, but I think the expectation of the police being in those areas is probably a bit much when there are other priorities and there are resource constraints. That's one aspect of it. In terms of off-street parking that's there in private businesses and out-of-town shopping centres, the interesting thing is that area is reserved. We can't legislate to compel private business owners to do anything, but the minister at the time actually was very helpful in saying that there are requirements placed on them by the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995, and as part of that this bill served to emphasise their duties in that regard, particularly in terms of making reasonable access for customers and for users of this service. On the one hand you had some obvious areas for enforcement where we had responsibility on the on-street parking and in the off-street parking where we didn't have legislative competence to actually force people to do this, we tried to encourage and we tried to use local authorities as an exemplar in their own area who understood what was going on to do so. On balance I would say if you're looking at trying to improve the rights of disabled people and in a very small focused way trying to ensure that parking is enforceable then I think the bill has been successful. Is there anything now that you would change? There's always the benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing. I think what we tried to do with the bill and I remember discussions with the bill team is to future proof it. What we didn't do is specify in the bill what the transport regulations that needed to be followed would be or indeed what enforcement measures needed to be followed. What the bill did was said whatever the traffic signs and regulations are at that point in time and in the future would be applied to the bill so whatever the changes are to the other pieces of legislation the bill still stands so I'm pleased we did that because obviously this is an area that does move on. I think with the benefit of hindsight I think local authorities are finding the duties placed on them slightly onerous and in some of the evidence from the supermarkets and the private carpark owners that you had in here they're clearly doing a lot already that is positive about enforcement of the bays. I think the difference is they're choosing to do it themselves rather than having local authorities do it for them. I think the Fife example, Fife was mentioned earlier today is actually proportionate and sufficiently proactive because they don't write to everybody every two years. They have a constant website that's refreshed. They took care of their in-house parking first so they dealt with if you like their own facilities on and off street then they looked at other public bodies like health centres and hospitals and then they've engaged in conversations with supermarkets and other and as part of planning and development they talk to people about new development so that these things are built in from the start. The fact that it's not local authorities providing that isn't for me the test of success. If they are doing it and using other means of enforcement then that to me is a success of the bill but I do recognise that some local authorities might find it onerous and therefore I would suggest the sharing of good practice which I understand the minister is about to do. Does it really matter whether councils write out to private car park operators if those private car park operators have already made improvements? If they're already operating regimes then and we're aware of it then I don't see the need to constantly do that. We want prescriptive about you need to write to them we simply said contact needs to be established now you know I think Fife's way of doing it is certainly proportionate so you know I welcome the fact that there will be different experiences across different local authorities and Humza Yousaf the minister is bringing together a stakeholder group of parking managers. I would encourage him in that stakeholder group to perhaps include some of the private sector but also organisations representing disabled people too. We've talked about inconsistencies in enforcement and when we had some of the groups here they talked about a national campaign they felt there should be some kind of public awareness campaign to try and educate and inform the public about where we are what are your views on that and did you think about that when you were putting the bill together? Yeah we did and in fact in evidence to your predecessor committee they raised the need for a public awareness and information campaign. The majority of us are actually quite law abiding and we tend to avoid you know committing offences particularly like parking in disabled parking spaces but it had the benefit the bill being taken forward of raising awareness not just in here but across the country. I was sent a variety of photographs which I won't share with the committee of leading lawyers parking in disabled parking bays using their mother's blue badge to access parking outside Glasgow Sheriff Court pictures of police cars parked in disabled parking bays you name it so it raised awareness and what we asked the minister at the time Stuart Stevenson to do was consider a public awareness campaign perhaps led by Transport Scotland or the police or whoever that drove home some of those messages because there were some really powerful messages coming from disabled people that the catchphrase I always remember is you know if you want my disabled parking place please have my disability too and it led people to understand the consequences for somebody who was disabled of actually parking in a disabled space if you understand that the majority of people do change their behaviours so I thought at the time a public awareness campaign was essential it shouldn't always be left to the voluntary sector to do these things government should step up to the plate I'm disappointed because I don't think there was one but it's never too late and it's something I would actively encourage the transport minister to consider and I'd agree I think that you hit the nail on the head because if if we can get that message over and use lots of examples then the public will look at it differently and I think that's vitally important and may well become a recommendation as we progress thank you oh steady what mr sure will show to discuss that may well know mr whiteman thanks convener I mean first of all how how is your constituent um they have subsequently passed away I'm sorry to it has been 10 years 10 years good good you mentioned that the bill navigated reserved and devolved functions and had to do that um there have been changes subsequently um signage is now devolved and we've heard views principally from disabled groups about and indeed from councils about whether signage should always be required and sometimes it's a bit of a hindrance abusive for your comments on that and also we've heard evidence from Glasgow and Aberdeen that they would like to be able to create enforceable disabled parking places without need for designation order um I'm not clear if that's a devolved thing or not but maybe you could comment on that as well um let me take the last one first because at the time the reason we had all these advisory bays something like 85 percent of all bays in scotland were advisory was because the whole process of the traffic regulation order was so complicated so long and costly and what was happening is instead of doing them in large batches local authorities were doing them in in ones and twos so it wasn't a very efficient system but actually the whole process of TRs was quite onerous I'm not sure whether that's devolved or not but I do know that the signage element is devolved and in relation to TRs right at the start of this um I think the self same local authorities echoed by others said if you could just fix this process then we wouldn't use or see the need to use advisory bays because the process would be simpler okay um in terms of the traffic regulations you're absolutely right um they were devolved to the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament on the 23rd of May 2016 um we haven't changed anything about them so far that that power has yet to be used but at the same time across the UK current traffic sign requirements were changed in 2016 and the UK Department for Transport published a circular on new regulations and if I can read them out this might be helpful because the placing of upright parking signs in combination with bay markings is no longer required instead it is for traffic authorities to determine the appropriate signage and marking combination needed to convey to drivers any waiting loading and parking controls contained in an underpinning traffic order so already whether you follow the UK regulations now local authorities have the power to do this I suspect that they are waiting until they get clarity and guidance from the Scottish Government now that the power is devolved but the the legal contention is they could actually use these powers just now to do away with the requirement for signage it does mean we need to make sure that the bays are marked appropriately and you know painting is refreshed um from time to time but you can do away with the expensive signage that local authorities have to put in place and I think that would undoubtedly be helpful and again I would encourage the Scottish Government to look at this doesn't change my bill because my bill is adapted to whatever regulation is in place at any given time okay that's useful for now I'll come back later okay thank you we heard a lot about off-shoot parking in private landry as you know Ms Bailey we had a representative of one of the large supermarkets here and one of the private car park providers an evidence that appeared quite patchy whether local authorities were actually necessarily meeting their obligations in terms of contacting such organisations at least every every two years and when they did do that some local authorities would write out to all the kind of main players in their local authority area others would put a notice in a newspaper or what have you I'm just wondering on the reflection if you think there's been appropriate buy-in from local authorities in relation to that or indeed are any buying at all from the private sector and if there's a maybe an opportunity to improve things in this area okay let me deal with the private sector first because I think what was unusual at the very start of the bill process is that with the awareness being raised suddenly there was a queue of supermarkets there was a queue of out-of-town retail centres all competing with each other to talk about their disabled bay enforcement practice and what was interesting is you know when you delved beneath that at the time to understand what was going on asda for example had surveyed their customers and 93% which is staggering of their customer base said they wanted disabled bays enforced outside asda so for them it became not just an issue about disabled people and their spending power but it became an issue about all of their customers caring about this now asda and there are other supermarkets but asda at the time used the fines quite imaginatively to then pass on any profit they made to local community groups and voluntary sector organisations in their patch and I'm sure the convener having one on his patch will have probably presented some of those checks in the past so they used it as a means of improving customer service to all customers and paying something back into the community Tesco's I know you took evidence from they engage at the time I think it was marshals that would enforce now what they're doing is using new technology and handheld operation that leaves most of the enforcement with the supermarket and you also took evidence from ncp who seem to be very proactively enforcing their disabled parking bays within their own provision so I think the private sector that understand that this is a customer service issue have actually as a consequence of the bill never mind the act taken measures already and I do know that local authorities have been proactive where there are planning applications come in particularly from you know out of town or town centre retail or indeed from supermarkets have worked with them to ensure that there is a sufficiency of disabled parking bays where the difference lies that I touched on earlier is that actually most of these companies prefer to have control of enforcement themselves because it gives them the opportunity to cancel fines if they feel it's appropriate to do so without prolonged appeals process it gives them the opportunity to be flexible in how they respond to particular issues so I would say that if there is a lack in the private sector it is those existing businesses that are perhaps smaller that perhaps you know on our high streets that really don't understand the need for this but on high streets I would look to local authorities to ensure that there is ample provision and that it's enforceable turning to local authorities I mean as with everything there has been a variable response some have embraced this and seen this as a disability rights issue and have been very proactive in trying to ensure that there is both capacity and that that capacity is enforced I think you'll find the issues about parking enforcement in general um and lots of people will be in our constituency surgeries saying you know this street has got double yellow lines but people park on it all the time or you know these these areas aren't currently enforced um or somebody's parking over my driveway that is a problem that local authorities grapple with my contention is that certainly in terms of promoting off-street parking um encouraging the private sector to do this keeping awareness and pressure up I think it's really important because at the end of the day if you're balancing you know the needs of business as they perceive it and the rights of disabled people I think getting the balance right relies on people reminding businesses exactly what's required by the disability discrimination act um in ensuring access to their premises to services and ensuring that people with a disability are able to move around you know and go to the shops go to their town centres in the same way as the rest of us are that's very helpful Ms Bail I'm just wondering in terms of fines that may or may not be imposed by by supermarkets um it's often asserted that it's a very grey area where those fines are actually legally enforceable or not so is there a is there a weakness in in in self enforcement regimes by by supermarkets for example yeah um that there has been comment in the past as to whether these these are enforceable my understanding is is that they are um but I'm not a lawyer so you would need to to check with somebody more qualified than I am certainly the majority of people who get fined at supermarkets pay their fines um and it has had a deterrent effect so you know the the examples I gave when taking this bill through of people reporting to me um young men driving up in their their flash cars parking in the disabled bay and saying it's okay I'm only here for a minute I'm just in to get a loaf of bread or a pint of milk or whatever it is and the disabled person being stranded that kind of thing is I would say happening less because people are more aware and because see when you've been fined a couple of times um if you're not a persistent offender you you will stop engaging in that kind of behaviour because it's expensive um so you know as to whether these are legally acceptable they're certainly in place they've certainly been you know running for some time now um and if there is a challenge to them then you know I would expect the courts to to resolve that okay thank you I'm just wondering one of the the concerns about um I suppose supermarkets we'll stick with supermarkets the most self-evident one that I think all of our constituents will will see on a daily basis perhaps is that there will be varying degrees of standards enforcement across various supermarket chains and actually within those supermarket chains in terms of layout of car parks the amount of disabled parking bays there are how vigorous will they enforce those parking bays how confident staff feel in terms of asking a customer to to move because you can enforce after the event Miss Bailey but then the disabled person doesn't get their parking bay this is really about just occasionally someone saying right get your car shifted you can't park there that's really what we'd like to see in the large supermarkets should perhaps be moving towards uh whether statutory or otherwise an agreed set of minimum standards across supermarkets which perhaps they could sign up to with local authorities in a proactive way much the same way they were when you first took your bill through where supermarkets were falling over each other to to to be the the exemplar of best practice perhaps we have to return to that and reinvigorate that somehow yeah and I couldn't agree more I think minimum standards of what should be expected across the board whether you're in you know Tesco or Aster or Morrison's or indeed anywhere like that um would be a good thing um at the moment my appreciation of it is that in some supermarkets they bundle together say two or three nearby stores and that they share enforcement between them so you would have a warden or a marshal who would appear from time to time um certainly in others and with the advent of new technology with Tesco the ability to have in-store staff do that takes exactly the point that you're making which is not after the event but as it's happening being able to provide evidence but also encourage staff members to challenge people engaged in that behaviour most of the supermarkets I know gave training in customer service um a lot of the private car parks for example gave quite a lot of training to their operatives to make sure they were approaching people in the right way and they viewed it not just about really realising a fine or a profit from it but about education so that that person didn't do it again the fine is there if all else fails um and I think supermarkets have been quite proactive in doing that but you're right there are variations it would be good to have minimum standards across the board and for supermarkets to do what they do best which is exceed them I suppose uh Miss Bailey what I'm trying to get at is whether it would be a much more dynamic conversation if local authorities were to set those minimum standards or national minimum standards and then duties were placed I mean I'd much rather be voluntary to be honest but voluntary doesn't always work whether duties should be placed on the sector or not to conform perhaps they could help co-produce what those minimum standards look like but at the moment it does seem that the requirement to contact uh off-sheet parking providers and private provider supermarkets in particular is has been a little bit of a waste of time because it's kind of happening it's kind of not happening when it does happen no one's responding so there's a bit in the legislation which is really well intentioned and could deliver improvement and change but it's just kind of sitting there not really been used so how do we transform the debate around that any suggestions the the problem you've got with imposing minimum standards is we don't have the legislative responsibility for doing so so that's why the bill skirts as it does around the issue and uses encouragement and voluntary approaches to try and create change but we also recognise that that for some because of the nature of the parking provision in their area it's going to be really difficult to do but we rely on local authorities as part of their planning duties not their parking management duties but their planning duties to ensure that you know the disability discrimination act is is applied there are sufficient spaces and at that point it is the point to encourage um now there is variation in what local authorities have done in terms of embracing this the five example I thought was very proportionate and very sensible about the approach they took if somebody writes to you once every two years and that's the only contact you have um then you're not going to be encouraged to do this you're not going to understand why it's such a good thing to do you maybe haven't heard of the bay watch survey or the capability scotland survey that looked at you know mystery shoppers and how they reacted and just the sheer scale of the abuse and the impact it then had on the retail provider so actually making the business case to some of these retailers who aren't currently engaged I think is the way forward you could adopt an approach of minimum standards I think you would butt up against the reservation in law but but I think certainly some local authorities would benefit from the sharing of good practice which takes me back again to the minister's stakeholder group it is something to to be welcomed I understand the minister is also consulting if I'm right on opportunities there are to deal with the misuse of advisory disabled off-street parking bays so perhaps that government intervention and bringing people together which you know I would have welcomed at the beginning is certainly something to be welcomed now good but just for the record you're certainly open miss Bailey to reframing the discussion with shop with the private sector to put whether it's the issues around what is reserved or not reserved and always the issue of dictating what minimum standards look like but some kind of best practice standard that the private sector could sign up to I think I think the British Parking Association may indeed have that already but yes I think anything that promotes the increase of one enforceable disabled parking bays and two the actual enforcement is to be welcomed in whatever sector it is okay thank you very much Elaine Smith thanks continue the morning jack thanks for joining us it's just to take this slightly further because I think there might be some confusion about the on-going duty Edinburgh City Council have basically said they've done the exercise four times and they feel it's labour intensive and resource intensive and costs I think they're saying up to 12,000 every two years and they're not getting very many positive responses and they then go on to say that actually it seems to them that once businesses establish their responsible for the costs associated with the the lines and signs they then decide not to proceed so do you think that can there be a different approach I mean it would seem to me that they're they're taking it very literally from the legislation whereas from what you're saying Fife are approaching it in a different way so is there leeway for looking differently at the legislation my understanding of the legislation as we wrote it is that there needs to be contact every two years right how you do that contact um you know provided it's regular it's frequent it's on a two-yearly cycle I think is best left to to local authorities now there is undoubtedly a difference between cities and you know less urban local authorities and they they have different scales of responsibility in that regard but already we're hearing that that you don't have a requirement for signs anymore that actually we're talking about painting a bay the enforcement would be undertaken by the local authority where it's decriminalised parking or by the police actually being able to transfer that responsibility to somebody else I would have thought would be in the interests of the private sector so I'm not sure that the cost necessarily is such a barrier once you understand the benefit it is to your business in terms of customer service so um I'm not convinced that that those local authorities who are saying it's far to onerous actually are thinking that creatively about it and again it comes down to a balance between you know the duties placed on local authorities to enhance their local area and the opportunities for disabled people and the rights of disabled people and I know on which side of the balance I come down on okay thanks moving on then and to both sides of this one is the private car parking side but the other is also the way councils are approaching the on-street parking and maybe they're and maybe what they have to put in place in terms of the cost to them so on the off off-street parking the private car parking I just wondered if you've thought about any unintended consequences and one of the ones that springs to mind is some of the operators that operate in these car parks um and this comes from Constantine's case work previously are actually issuing fines to disabled drivers who perhaps have their badges upside down or maybe slipped on to the seat they're not on the dashboard so that's one thing that maybe has been an unintended consequence for disabled drivers but the second or do you want to talk about that first of all I move on to what the second one might be you can do them both okay thanks so the second one might be to do with councils and I can only look at my own area and issues that have been raised with me and the issue is that there's been you know I've had a number of cases where people have been refused blue badges and we're talking about older folk like elderly folk with you know waiting on hip replacements they've got osteoarthritis people with dementia and they're being refused blue badges and I'm trying to get to the bottom of why this might be the case with cases I would say obviously should be given blue badges um and I wonder if is there any unintended consequences of the legislation and that does the issue you know if more people have blue badges does that put more cost on the councils under the legislation to then be providing more disabled spaces in towns um let me deal with the last one first because I too have come across people that you would think would get a blue badge that haven't received one um it is entirely separate legislation um and the blue badge regulations were I think revised in fact it might well have been a member's bill um but they certainly were revised and different criteria were applied and actually across Scotland that I think there are minimum standards but but every local authority interprets it slightly differently um that said you know if you create a provision that says you have to have enforceable parking then it could potentially enter somebody's mind that you don't want to administer quite so many blue badges but I have to say in my local authority they're entirely separate departments so you know that crossover in thinking wouldn't happen so a blue badge would typically be issued by I think social work um whereas the enforcement and provision of disabled bays um is a matter for the road section so there are those kind of Chinese walls whether they're intended or otherwise that operate so I haven't picked up locally that there has been a consequence of the legislation in terms of the number of of blue badges because it is um dealt with separately. In terms of enforcement um you're absolutely right in the sense that um we didn't set the standards for enforcement we simply said whatever regime applies applies in in the context of this bill so if there are enforcement problems already those enforcement problems will continue um and it is the case that in some you know retail settings I've seen enforcement carried out with a degree of vigor um that probably is about you know a target for the number of fixed penalty notices you you issue um rather than a process of education and if education fails then enforcement um so I think that would likely happen in any case but yes you're absolutely right there are occasions where you know blue badges will fall off the dashboard um in cases where I know supermarkets administer that they take the view that they will cancel usually those those items of enforcement because they care about them as customers it's a very reasonable excuse to have and therefore supermarkets exercise that responsibility I think quite sensibly um but it is about them having control okay any other members want to come in at this point just to follow up the your observations about the larger off street um premises where often a customer relationship is doing doing this job anyway um but the lack of awareness on smaller off street premises um I think you're not minded to have much sympathy with Edinburgh and Glasgow wanted to get rid of the duty to to engage but what more could be done to focus on these smaller premises um that are visited presumably just as often if not more often than larger retail premises by disabled people um you're absolutely right it is about access to the whole high street so if you're in in my area then the council already provides in terms of capacity sufficient disabled bays that are enforceable that you would be able to access most of the shops in in in my high street I think the way to do it isn't necessarily a letter that just gets put to one side because it's not part of somebody's core business but actually more meaningful engagement that is time consuming but there are already lots of access panels that exist across the country who are happy to do this kind of work who actually um would welcome the likes of a public awareness campaign that would coincide with some of this so it wouldn't be beyond us to organise or the Scottish Government a public awareness campaign that's backed up then by local authorities perhaps engaging with the Federation of Small Business with the Scottish Chambers of Commerce the networks that exist out there where they promote to their own members good practice as well as engaging with individual businesses but you know there are I think something like a million people in Scotland who identify themselves as in some way disabled of that there's 230 000 blue badge holders at the point I introduced my bill you know there's an army of people out there with a pound in their pocket wanting to spend businesses understand that let's also make them understand the challenges for disabled people in accessing their shops um that's preventing them from engaging in you know spending that pound in their premises and I think you'll find that people do wake up so it is for me an issue of disability rights but it's also a good business issue and we should be taking that out to those shops who haven't yet realised that this is for them too and just a further question I mean your evidence seems to suggest that the bill has been um quite successful in achieving its aims that there's probably no need for any further legislation specifically in relation to the objectives of this bill but that other activity like just mentioned like the transport minister stakeholder group like perhaps some action on signage if and when there's a legislative opportunity those could all enhance the objectives of the bill but the bill itself is um doing a decent job and and um you're happy that it remains on the statute book for as long as it's needed I will always bow to this committee's view as to whether the bill needs improvement um but but yeah we it was a very tightly defined bill I was guided at the beginning and I think it was good advice that if you try as a as an individual member to to bite off too much you will not succeed so we ignored the temptation to do blue badges we ignored the temptation to do um parking you know on on pavements all of that was placed on our plate and we said no we will stick very clearly to a very focused bit legislation that takes these 85 percent of all disabled parking bays that were advisory and made them enforceable now the bill doesn't cover enforcement um the perennial problem remains can we enforce these things where are the police when you want them to enforce your disabled parking bay um you know there are even some debates between people as to whether there are sufficient disabled parking bays and they feel one should be for them my bill doesn't deal with any of that um the issue for me and the one I think is worth is worth thinking through is the other bits of legislation that would make this work better whether there's the opportunity as the convener said for voluntary codes um to be adopted but actually for local authorities and others to embrace this because we can make a transformational change on the ground and we need to keep pushing at it it's not just a question of ticking the box and and moving away so of course the bill should be kept under review but actually for me it's also about implementation and our history is littered not just with members bills but with other bills of things that we've passed in statute that haven't quite been implemented on the ground in in the way we would like so I think keeping that under constant review is something to be welcomed thank you okay can I ask miss bale I was just looking at my notes there and I couldn't actually find information I was looking for so my apologies that I don't know the answer to this but it's my understanding that there's still a number of on-street parking bays at local authorities have yet to make enforceable and some local authorities may not have started that process as yet but it's patchy is the point I would make my my understanding is most of them have done it okay so so typically what we ask them to do is go and look at survey all the advisory bays you have identify whether they're still needed if they're still needed promote one traffic regulation order to actually make them all enforceable now annual reports are produced and so we should be able to track progress some of them have moved at different speeds to others I certainly know Glasgow identified and had a list of all their advisory bays quite early on other areas didn't even begin to have a list and would physically require to go out and and look so that was the first stage of the process but the majority I think have and the process that most engage in now is if there is a new application for a disabled bay then what would happen is they would get an advisory bay whilst they were waiting for the traffic regulation order to be taken forward so the bulk should be covered but I mean I'm happy to like you search for the information and bring that back to the committee because I wish to have had it in front of us here and I couldn't I couldn't find it but I suppose what would ask then if there's any local authorities with any long standing and this may not be the case but any long standing advisory bays that have yet to be subject to a TRO that would be unacceptable to be a priority to get to those enforceable as soon as possible eight years on that's frankly completely unacceptable and let's not set that here running but I thought there were anecdotally terrible that that could be the case but any new bays that whole issue about an advisory bay and then a TRO you would agree changing the regulations so that a TRO is just not required to make a bay enforceable and that can be done if that's possible to do then that that would make it much easier yeah absolutely members any other questions at this point okay we seem to be all out of questions miss Bailey any opportunity you wish to make any final comments would be would be most welcome no can I thank the convener and the committee for their courtesy today and I hope you do improve the bill or at least get the Scottish Government to help with some of the implementation of it well all the rest of these things thank you once again for for attending and we will Mr Stewart's already thinking about possible recommendations in relation to the evidence we've heard but we will we will certainly consider it and certainly contact the Scottish Government in relation to any ways the bill could be could be let's say in hands rather than prove miss Bailey okay thank you very thank you that ends agenda item three and we now move into private session for agenda item four thank you