 Good morning, and welcome to the 24th meeting in 2014 of the Finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament. Can I please remind everyone present to turn off any mobile phones, tablets or other electronic devices? We have not received any apologies, although Gavin Brown is not yet here, hopefully he will turn up soon. Our first item of business this morning is to take evidence on the Scottish Government's draft budget 2015-16. The session will focus on outcomes and performance budgeting. I would like to welcome to the meeting Colin Mayer of the Improvement Service, Gareth Davis of Seatford and Fraser McKinley of Audit Scotland. Members have copies of the written submissions received in advance of today's meeting, so we will move straight to questions from the committee, and Gavin Brown has just joined us. As you probably know, I usually start off with a few questions and then open out the session to colleagues around the table, so that's what I propose to do on this occasion. Thank you very much for the submissions. Colin Mayer, we will start with you. We have an XB that is under your section 2, Profusion and Prolixity. I want it to come up very often. Under section 2, you say that, bluntly, there is a huge amount of it in terms of the different kind of frameworks to support or look at outcomes, but we never seem to have proceeded by accretion without deletion. You go on to say that your focus on outcomes seems often to have been retrofitted to services of sectoral performance frameworks. I sense an element of frustration there, Colin. You know that you feel as if the more and more people are coming up with ideas about how we look at outcomes, but it never seems to be rationalised into something that can be delivered more effectively. You go on to the next part, and you have to say that it is often unclear who the end-users of such frameworks intend to be, who they are for and what they are for. I wonder if you can expand on your thoughts on that for the committee. Thank you very much indeed for the question. I suppose that our sense reviewing all of the performance frameworks that we can identify at national level in Scotland, we then move on to identify all the local ones and we will pull all of that together into a final report looking at what we are doing around performance. I depended two or three overhead shots to my submission just summarising some of the mapping work we have been doing. As you will see, there is a staggering amount going on, a huge number of overlapping performance frameworks. For me, this was less a critique of anybody and more that frameworks have evolved at different points in time for different purposes, and then we add a new purpose on and fit something else to them. The most recent arrival in the scene has been an outcome focus, but I think we have often posed the question the wrong way round. We have said of services what are our outcomes, as opposed to saying what outcomes do we want for the Scottish population and how does this service contribute to that. We have begun to create silos round outcomes, even though the whole idea of an outcome focus was to help us break out of the silos we started from. I think two points around me, clearly a lot of any performance framework in a major public service will be those indicators you need to run that public service well, and there is clearly a lot of both political and public interest in just basically running public services competently and well. Are we meeting service standards that we have committed to? Are we using the resources available as efficiently as we could? An awful lot of the performance armory we have is focused at that level. There is nothing wrong with that. Public services are massive businesses that need run competently as massive businesses. I guess our sense is, out of all the audiences for performance measurement, the one that wants the holistic overview, as you seem to do in this committee just now, is probably still the weakest voice. The sectoral or service voice remains much, much stronger, and the business management voice remains very strong indeed in the way we go about performance measurement and management. I suspect even at a parliamentary level, whereas the finance committee may want an integrated and holistic view of outcomes, other committees of Parliament will be distinctively interested in particular indicators relating to health, particular indicators relating to education and children. In a way, at the same time as we all want to come together, we all want to look down particular lines of sight as well. I think that what you get there for in performance management is a compromise between those things. Just a final point of response to your question. The Community Employment and Renewal Bill, which is being scrutinised elsewhere just now in Parliament, will place a common duty on public bodies to work together to improve outcomes. Once that duty is in place in law, I think that it will put some dynamic behind getting to a collective view of what outcomes are we trying to improve and what measures are we going to use to show that we have actually improved those outcomes. I think that I was not intending section 1 as a critique particularly. It is simply an honest recognition of where we are, that the business management interest remains very powerful around public services and properly. Those who want an holistic view of what are we achieving over all the Scottish population are probably not the strongest voice, frankly, in performance management at the moment. Colin, you are going on to say in paragraph 3 that outcomes are often defined in service terms as you have touched on rather than independently in terms of the life chances, life outcomes and quality of life of people and communities. Do you think that it is a kind of can't see the wood for the trees approach sometimes in terms of outcomes? I think that it is a very natural service orientation if you are running a health and social care partnership. It is very tempting to say what outcomes are ours, and we will then build them into our performance frameworks separate from everybody else. We will operate to that. The trouble is that health and care outcomes are massively influenced by a very wide range of social and economic factors. They are not solely influenced by the organisation of health and care services, and therefore we begin to try and narrow the thing down. Rather than if we are serious, this is about improving life for people in Scotland and particularly those who are suffering the greatest inequalities in Scotland, then we need a much better integrated overall focus. Community planning is in part supposed to provide that. I think that we have not quite got to the point where the collective discipline community planning could bring is fully being brought to bear. Audit Scotland are really interesting. Audits as you will know of community planning partnerships, and one of the issues is how do you pull it all together against a simple set of outcomes for the local population and then show that we are moving forward to achieve that? Do other witnesses wish to comment on this particular issue? I agree with everything that Colin has said. Our view in Audit Scotland as the outcomes approach is a good thing, and we should not lose sight of that. It is difficult to imagine a world now without it. I think that it has become certainly at the most senior levels in the public sector in Scotland, the way that public services are talked about and viewed. Our observation from all the audit work that we have done in community planning, policy areas and individual bodies, is that the national performance framework and everything that is set out around that is the tip of an iceberg, and the rest of the iceberg is not quite in place to support that outcomes-based approach. In particular, we have a very close interest in the money. Colin mentioned the audit work that we are doing around community planning partnerships. The Accounts Commission North to General will be publishing another national community planning report later this year. Community planning partnerships are still at very early stages of figuring out how they use their combined money people assets to progress and to deliver better outcomes for the communities. If I was to pick one single thing, I think that that is the single thing that is still needing to be pushed forward and we need to crack if we are going to make a real difference to that whole outcomes-based approach. I would certainly echo and agree with the comments that we have made so far. From my perspective and understanding, outcomes to me are a consequence or result of action, or in some cases, arguably, in action. Out and put in the framework of governance, particularly the international framework for good governance in the public sector, has one of its key principles as defining outcomes in terms of sustainable economic, social and environmental benefits. To my mind, an outcomes-focused organisation should be doing outcome budgeting in that sense. Outcome budgeting could be seen as evidence that there is an outcomes focus for your organisation, so I would tend to tie that into the overall governance of an organisation or of public money generally. I agree totally what was said earlier that it is a holistic impact on society as a whole, which matters. The final bit of point out there is that outcomes do not just affect the individuals or service recipients. It is maybe an awareness on the part of the organisation of the consequence of its actions on all stakeholders, whether that is in other parts of the public sector, third-party suppliers such as voluntary sector or employees. It is an awareness of the consequence of the actions as a whole and how they reverberate out through society rail. Fraser, in your Scotland's paper in paragraph 7, you say that there is scope for the Scottish Government to demonstrate a more systemic approach to implementing the outcomes approach. Can you expand it? You go on and talk about modern apprenticeship, so I just want to expand a bit more on how you feel that can be delivered. Yes, sure. The example in modern apprenticeships is a good one, because it is where we see some tensions between when a policy is set out and, particularly in terms of outcomes around the national performance framework, it is very outcome-focused. The challenge is that once we get into the nitty-gritty of the delivery of those outcomes, a lot of the indicators that are used are not outcome-based. We use the modern apprenticeships as an example, because the headline target is 25,000 new modern apprenticeships. That is a good thing. We are not saying that that is a wrong thing. We are not even saying that that should not be a target or an objective, but what it does not do is measure the outcome of what those 25,000 new modern apprentices are going to do for their communities and for the economy as a whole. We see a disconnect there and in other places where we grapple with an overall outcomes-based approach, which tends to be longer-term, tends to be a bit more diffuse, tends to be, if we are honest, a bit more difficult to explain in political terms, with targets that tend to talk about numbers of things, whether they are teachers or police officers or whatever it is. There is a real tension there, I think, between the outcomes-based approach and the kind of measurement and performance information in the whole system of performance management and performance information that is then designed to support it. We, as you can imagine, convener, have constructive and robust discussions with the Scottish Government as we go through our audit process. We come from quite a simple place, really, which is, if you have got—I can think of some policy areas such as self-directed support or reshaping care for older people reports that we have published recently, which are longish-term 10 years plus policy outcomes. We were looking at those relatively early on three years in, and we got a bit of challenge back from the Scottish Government about the fact that we are looking at it too early. Our question is a simple one, which is, how do you know in a long-term outcomes-based approach that you are making the right progress and the things that you are doing and the money that you are spending is actually making the difference that you need to do? In summary, convener, that is where we would see the focus needing now to really make real and make more meaningful the outcomes-based approach in a very practical sense. Colin, do you want to add to that? I would endorse the phrases that I think we are often stuck with measures, even when they look like outcome measures. I think that we have alluded in our submission to how we measure children's educational attainment and therefore inequalities in educational attainment, which is S4 and S5 tariff score. Those were scoring systems produced by UCAS, the university admission people, so there are nuttally selective understanding of educational achievement and accomplishment. They are both salient to a university and not what isn't. For that reason, they don't include vocational qualifications, even though Government and Parliament have recently committed very strongly to massively strengthening and valuing up vocational qualifications in Scotland, and yet we are still measuring in essence what used to be standard grades in S4 and S5, and then hires and advanced tiers, and we are saying that is how you measure the achievement of children. Many children leave school after the fourth year, go to a college, do a vocation, and it just vanishes off the face of the earth as part of our assessment of educational outcomes. We then get a positive destinations outcome, which more or less means that you are not in prison, you are not detained under mental health legislation, and you are not unemployed, so you could be in a zero hours contract. Is that the positive destination that we sought for children through the education system? An awful lot of our measures at the very best, proxy measures, are not actually telling us. What I would say is that I think that a lot of our concern about educational attainment is frankly that inequalities in education is because of how we measure it. We don't measure things. The kids we're worried about suffering inequalities can't tend to do and measure only those things that tend to suit the more academic stream of children within the system. If you're not measuring it effectively, you're not going to be targeting that specific area in order to achieve the outcomes that society would want to see. Or worse than the cynical view that what's measured is what matters, that people become driven by the particular measure that we are using just now. We lose sight of the outcome because these targets now exist. We want to show our school or our council is doing well in those targets, so a big drive goes on behind that. Whether that's the right thing for children, the right thing for the future economy, the right thing for their communities and society, it's probably a different proposition. I guess that I would support one of the challenges to work back from policy and say, what outcome is it that we're achieving? That's the whole range of outcomes that Gareth alluded to. Are we using our total resource intelligently to enable us to achieve that outcome, whether that's a local partnership or whether that's the Government itself taking the overview at national level? No discrimination from me. I'm maybe going to allude to something that was in Audit Scotland's written evidence. It might be too early to mention the logic map. I think that that's a key part of what we're talking about here, because what we're really trying to establish to a certain extent is how your output targets, if you like, contribute towards the outcomes. Logic mapping would help you to build that. More important is the evidence or assumptions underlying that. If somebody produces a logic map, you can start to say what evidence or assumptions are supporting the relationships between the achievement of your output and the actual outcome that you want to see. More to the point, as Fraser said, the earlier you are aware of whether or not that is succeeding, the better, and then you can rearrange your resources or your activities to achieve your outcomes better, because it might turn out that you could spend a lot of time going down the road towards an output that you set a long time ago, which is no longer going to be relevant or no longer going to help you to produce the outcome that you want. Being able to look at the evidence and assumptions that underlie the logic of the output measures is a key thing. I'll go to you first this time. Audit Scotland, under paragraph 13 of Fraser's submission, says that the Scottish Government should map the pathways that connect each portfolio's contribution to the national outcomes, which is a kind of issue that you're just touching on, but what should we do less of in terms of that, because Colin and his submission touched on the fact that there is a creation but not deletion. What do you think in terms of outcomes measurement to get much more effective assessment of outcomes by removing some that perhaps are not as effective? I think that the way to identify what is effective is to challenge or question what the evidence is for that output in the first place. That's where I would probably start looking at what are the different outputs that people have. I suspect that most people here would probably accept that this is not going to be up. We will solve everything overnight and there might be steps towards it. One thing that obviously the committee picked up on earlier and Audit Scotland referenced was the use of incremental budgeting. To be honest, that does not tend to lend itself in many respects in a changing environment towards a challenge or rethink about where the resources are going to some extent. I think that looking at the budget process from the point of view of what is the actual underlying assumption that the budget model that you are using is incremental budgeting or should be moved to priority-based budgeting, in an era of change and financial pressure, then moving towards priority-based or zero-based budgeting is where we should go. One example of that would be Shetland Islands Council. It has significantly looked at and reviewed its operations to decide whether it is reflecting the actual priorities with its budget. It has gone through a zero-based budgeting exercise to restate where it wants its resources to go. On that, is there much sharing of best practice in terms of outcomes? No, I guess not as much as we would like, convener. We did a report a wee while back around just earlier this year in fact on developing financial reporting, which looked at some of this. We touched on issues of priority-based budgeting or zero-based budgeting. There are some places to do that. Aberdeen is another example that I have been doing that for quite a while. There has been quite a lot of activity in calling them. We could say a little bit more about some of the work that the improvement service and others have been in looking at outcome budgeting in particular. The thing to say is that it is really difficult. It is not an easy thing to do. If it were an easy thing to do, we would have done it a long time ago. It is difficult in very practical sense if you take something like money spent on housing. Housing is one of those things that touches on virtually every other outcome that there is. Good quality housing is absolutely fundamental. Everyone recognises that it is absolutely fundamental to good health, good employment opportunities and everything else that goes with it in terms of managing and equality and other things. How do you attribute the spend on housing to the other many outcomes that you are trying to achieve? This is not a straightforward exercise. There is always going to be an inherent tension from the likes of me in Audit Scotland, who will continue to be interested in the money that individual organisations have to spend being spent well and properly and efficiently. I make no apology for that. How do you resolve that view of the world with a view of the world that has to be much more about aligning resources and thinking about how resources are being directed towards budgets? Our sense, convener, is to be hopeful about it. People, particularly through the community planning work, are now grappling with the issue in a way that I do not think that we have seen until the last couple of years, the letter that Mr Swinney and Mr Neil and the president of COSLA and the chair of the national community planning group sent a year ago. Setting out very clearly the expectations around community planning partnerships in terms of their use of resources and thinking about the use of the totality of the resource available to those public sector partners has really galvanised action and we can see lots of activity out there as people try to get their heads around that, but it is tricky. It is tough. After Colin has spoken, I will open out the session to colleagues around the table. I was just to pick up on a latter point that Fraser made. I think that this is about the use of resources, not just budgets. I think that people have sought to share every single budget line with each other. The net effect has been a staggering amount of time has been taken up. Not very much light has been generated, even if a fair amount of heat. We need to be honest. We are going to continue to run core, large-scale, expensive public assets and services. In local government, about 50 per cent of the budget is education and of that about 47 per cent is going directly to run schools. You are talking about a huge proportion of the total budgetary resource goes straight into the school system. Understandably, the public are deeply concerned that schools are maintained in the school in their area, are of quality, have the right teaching, staff compliments and so on. The question may not be are we going to take budget away from the school and do something else with it? It might be are we going to use the resources of the school constitutes in different ways with local communities so that we get more value towards outcomes out of what we do? Just at this stage in the discussion, I think that if we go straight into budgets, which has often seemed to be the numbers around financial flows and so on, the most spectacular achievements I see, we work with a number of neighbourhood projects, neighbourhood community planning projects across Scotland. Are people just used to resources imaginative and creative and flexible ways with each other at very local levels? They are getting on with it with a community to do things differently for that community and with that community. There is probably no change to the formal budgets of these organisations, it is just people using resources in a smarter way. I guess my final point is one of the biggest resources the public service has in Scotland. It employs about 25 per cent of the total labour force. It is overwhelmingly the major procurer of goods and services within the Scottish economy and it has the largest asset base. There is an interesting question. If you have those capacities, are you using those to create the outcomes that you say you want? We are often putting community benefit clauses into procurements saying that we want you to create modern apprenticeships, employ people from deprived areas and so on. It is worth saying, well, does the health board that is putting that clause in actually do that itself or not? Does it employ people from very deprived areas within its community? If not, why is that? Are we intending to address that as part of how we go forward? What we do know is communities having better economic opportunities is a significant step towards those communities also having better health, their children achieving better in the education system and so on. I encourage you to think about resources and not just finances here, albeit your role is to scrutinise the Scottish budget. Although you said that we talked about public services in paragraph 8, examining both international and Scottish data, we can find no systemic evidence at the organisation and quality of public services is the key and main determinant of the pattern of outcomes in any society. There is no question that the pattern of economic outcomes is driven more directly by a macroeconomic and fiscal strategy than it is driven by how you organise your local public services. If you look at the whole range of literature, it is reinforced by research as a conclusion. It is not to say that public services cannot have an impact. I think that they can and they should have more of an impact in creating opportunities for people who currently lack them. A very good example is that the new Scottish Police Service is about to locate its new headquarters in Del Mar, in Glasgow, in the Clyde Gateway. The fact that the police have been willing to do that has now opened up a site that will become hyperactive with other private investors coming in, precisely because the police constitutes an anchor. Once some big public body shows confidence in this place, the private sector starts to show confidence in the background. I think that that is just a really intelligent use of the capacity of the Scottish Police. They need a headquarters where they are going to base it, answer, pick an area of deprivation for ones rather than an area and the more pucker parts of town, and then create an economy around your headquarters because cafes, shops and so on grow up to service the office workers coming in. If that then gives confidence to the private sector in the place, you start to have incredibly positive investment flows into a part of Glasgow that was frankly being written down 20 years ago as going nowhere at all that was just contaminated land. I do think that how we use our asset power is a really important part of how we stimulate economies to give people opportunities that will then support their health and wellbeing within their communities. In terms of why we are now at the session, the first person to ask questions will be Jamie to be followed by Jeane. Thank you, convener. It is just a couple of questions. The first relates to Mr McKinlay's paper and in your paper you say that there is evidence of greater focus on outcomes both nationally and locally. Earlier in your paper you specifically said that your audit work has demonstrated the impact of the national performance framework on aligning resources and action across different parts of the public sector and some policy areas. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about that and cite those positive examples. If Mr Davis and Mr Mayer want to comment on it as well, that would be useful. Sure. As I said at the start, the national performance framework, the outcome approach, is a good thing and it is a really important first step. It is embedded in many ways in how public services are thought about and run particularly at the most senior levels. We mentioned in the submission that one of the good examples was renewable energy. We did a report on that a year or so ago and it was very clear evidence that if you were to look at the overall policy objective right through to how all the different organisations involved in renewable energy had reflected that policy objective and the outcomes that were trying to be delivered was a very good example of how that clarity and consistency approach could be seen right the way through the piece. I think that that is one of the examples that we have cited there. Locally, if I think of some of the recent community planning reports that we have done in places such as Glasgow, we reported on the way in which Glasgow has coalesced their community planning partnership around three priorities, which I am not going to remember right now, but one of which was alcohol, in-work poverty and something else, which escapes me just now, which is a real achievement. That is not to say that they are ignoring everything else. Clearly, everything else, the community planning partnership and public services in the city of Glasgow are having to deal with, remain important. However, what they had said was that based on an understanding of the communities of Glasgow, and based on an understanding of the data of the different communities, they also had an interesting approach to tackling different things in different parts of the city, recognising that Glasgow is not just one homogenous place. They had got themselves round the table and they had agreed that those three things were the three things that were most likely to make the biggest impact in terms of inequality and outcomes in the city. Now, there is an awful long way to go in terms of them actually making that deliverable and making the difference there, but in terms of an approach where we say that there are good examples locally of an outcomes approach, that would be one that is by no means the only one. The missing bits of the jigsaw now are all the supporting bits to do with the money, so they are at the early stages of, as all community planning partnerships are, figuring out how they target the combined resource in Glasgow to those priorities and how they are spending their collective money and how they are using their buildings and how they are using their people to achieve those outcomes, and all the performance management to pick up Gareth at a good point early about governance, how the partnership is governing all of that. There is still a very long way to go. I guess that that is what we mean that it feels like when we did the last national community planning report, which is now getting on from maybe 18 months to two years ago, we talked about a kind of opportunity to deliver a step change, that there was a real sense that people were genuinely committing to this approach, and I think that the real challenge now is to put in the infrastructure to support it. From what you are saying, it seems to me that the prioritisation of outcomes is important. That might relate to Mr Mears' point that the proliferation of too many outcomes is maybe a bad thing, and you have to be really quite focused if you are going to take forward an outcomes-based approach. It is a really interesting question that, because another one that we had at the Kent's commission last week was West Lothian. It is a long-established history, as you will know, of very strong partnership, working really great examples of co-location of public services and other things. They are taking a different view. They are taking quite a broad front in terms of outcomes. They have not narrowed down on two or three key priorities, and we have highlighted a challenge to them or a risk to them that, while that is entirely up to them to decide to do it that way, they do need to figure out how they are going to use their scarce resource to make progress on a wide range of fronts. I am a wee bit cautious to say that one model is better than the other model. I think that what is important is that people have a model and they have a plan for how they are going to implement those, and in particular they understand how they are going to organise themselves and the people in their building and their money to deliver the outcomes that they have set for themselves. Do you think that Mr Mears or Mr Davies have a perspective? I will be very brief just to say that I think that I would agree with what has been said. To my mind, the key thing about that is the role of the CPPs in locality. That means locality or total place or community budgeting that it is sometimes referred to, which is being able to say how much public service money is being spent in a particular place. As Colin said, it does not stop at the pound signs. That is the resources that are being used, and are they being used to best effect? That also takes you in to where the CPPs should be a duty of best value for an area in terms of saying that those are the resources in the area. Are we getting the best for the area? It also clearly comes back to what Fraser was saying, which is how well-attuned is any CPP or equivalent body to the needs of the area. That engagement is a key thing. I know that the Improvement Service has just done some engagement. My sense is that three really positive things are happening at local level. One is that most of the community planning partnerships in Scotland have got to a smaller number of outcomes they are seeing a priority and massively fewer performance indicators. If we are about, in the words of the statement of ambition of last year, demonstrably improving lives, let's have half a dozen indicators that tell us whether people's lives are moving on or not. The second thing that has happened is that there is now more targeting. There is a recognition that some of our communities are living very good lives, have excellent outcomes. They are largely self-sustaining around those outcomes. They use public services when they want to, but there is no sense dependent on them. There are other communities who are far higher need for properly organised, responsive public services. I think that there is now more of a focus in saying, let's identify communities where, across a whole range of outcomes, people are not doing well, and let's commit to helping those communities to move on by working with them in new, more flexible and in different ways. There is often measurement around that. That is the total place approach that Gareth was referring to. The third thing is that we have not quite stopped, but we have almost stopped using the national performance framework as cake icing—whatever it is that you are just supposed to slap a dod of national performance framework on it. There was a cynical referencing on a lot of the time of the national performance. I mean, looking at some papers that go up to Parliament, the amount of references from the civil service to the national performance framework is now liturgical rather than real, I suspect, that you have got to see this kind of thing. I think we need to move away from that and actually focus on outcomes. We are truly committed to and truly intend to change, but I think that localism that both Fraser and Gareth emphasised is really important here, because it is when you get down to the level of community and engaging with communities in different ways. You begin to see new routes to achieving outcomes, you begin to see new capacities that communities can bring to the table, and that is part of the resourcing question as to how we take outcomes forward. I mean, you have all mentioned there that you have talked about community partnerships, you have talked about localism and engagement. I mean, surely, those outcomes will only mean something for people if they feel they are relevant to them. So, how involved do you think, particularly at a community level, how involved do you think people on the ground are in terms of saying, well, these are the outcomes that we would like to see for our community, for us, for our children and for everyone who lives in this area? More so, I think that the interesting relationship is between engagement and empowerment. How empowered are some of these communities to drive forward and force people to prioritise the outcomes that they see as important for their communities? I think that engagement has got a huge amount better. There is a lot of time and effort and energy spent at a local level, to engage with communities that I was through in an all-day event with a neighbourhood in Fife yesterday, and there was a lot of effort and energy and the community was fantastically active and constructive in its engagement around what were outcome priorities for their local area, not for the whole of Fife but for their local area in Fife. I think that it is that localism combined with the willingness to be open in engagement that makes the difference. If you ask people in a bit of Kerkodi, what do you think about the whole of Fife, perfectly reasonably not a lot, they are interested in what happens in their bit of Kerkodi, quite frankly, and quite rightly so. In that sense, localism allows people to engage more, I think. The more you ask big abstract questions, you know, the classical fashion budget consultation, we've got to save 20 million, here are 86 options, tick them, that is an engagement at all, I don't think. That is a tick the box exercise. I think that as we get down and much more local with communities, we're getting a far higher quality of engagement now than we were in the past. I think that yes, engagement obviously is an issue or a prime topic at the moment because I was at an event yesterday, which was about tenant participation with the HRA, and some of the ideas coming across with that were very interesting. In particular, what was being emphasised really was that it's a head to toe for an organisation, it should be a head to toe culture for engagement. You don't just need formal panels or whatever, front line service delivery staff are obviously the first people to get feedback from people about how happy they are, what their aspirations are, as you are saying. It's a question of how does that information flow through the organisation and then actually lead into service delivery and service planning decisions. A large part of client engagement can actually come from the front, and there again you come down to a certain extent what is a governance or what is the culture of the organisation that you've got. One final question, mate. You'll probably be all aware and it follows on when we're talking about community engagement. The Scottish Government has a community empowerment bill and one of the things that it talks about is placing a duty in Ministers to publish a report regularly on the progressive national outcomes for Scotland. Do you welcome this? Do you think that this is something that should happen? Do you think that it'll actually be a positive thing? I think it will be positive. I think we have a national performance framework just now, but it's not used as national performance management. So I've noted in my piece we want to be fairer, but I have no idea how much fairer we want to be and by when. Therefore, from the point of view of driving the system, it may be more interesting if national government is clearer about its level of ambition, the timescales and its expectations as to how the public service should deliver in Scotland, because I think that would provide a degree of dynamic within the system. Just now, we have a framework of outcomes. We will be fairer, smarter and so on over time. Well, if we said by 220, how much smarter would you like us to be? That might be a helpful feed into the system and that can then be linked down to local level as well. I will welcome it, but I think it may need some tweaking of the framework itself and some focusing of it to make that useful, frankly. The principle of having enshrining the outcomes approach in legislation is a good one. From our point of view, as we would expect, we are very interested in how that is going to work. What is the governance around that? What are the accountability arrangements around that? If people aren't seen to be fulfilling that duty in terms of outcomes, what happens if ministers of any Government in the future set out with a whole bunch of input, targets and measures and not outcome measures? What does that mean? I think that one of the questions that we raised in the last community planning national report is the sense of what is the accountability framework for partnership and community planning in Scotland. At the moment, we are in between a couple of stools where we are saying that our national outcome is a national approach, but it is all about place. There is a real tension inherent in that that I do not think we have bottomed out. It is a good and useful step and we will be very interested in seeing how it plays out in practice. One thing that also bears relation to planning going forward as well is the spending review period that Treasury tends to set. It creates a challenge for organisations if they are not sure or there is a lot of uncertainty about funding going forward. I do not think that, in the best of worlds, there will never be certainty about funding, so to some extent there will be a sense of encouragement to plan for the medium and long term through that uncertainty rather than to prevent you from doing anything. There is importance on service planning for that to achieve outcomes, because otherwise it is probably always going to be a year-on-year basis to a certain extent. I want to ask about the national performance framework. In round-table discussions that we have had with economists, they cited it as a progressive development and that it was being recognised internationally as something to be revered. I wonder if you concur with that view, if you see it, as a really progressive and groundbreaking and for whom? I am sensing a bit of a drumroll here as I answer this question. It is interesting that the Scottish model of government is now a phrase, and people recognise it and welcome it. It will be really interesting to see what happens at the next Holyrood elections as to whether the approach in broad terms is embedded almost regardless of who the Government of the day is, because, as I said earlier, it feels like it has become embedded. To be fair, even before 2007, the whole notion of outcomes and single outcome agreements and all that had been around. It is not an approach that is uniquely tied to any Government or political party, and there is lots of international interest and research being done around it. I concur that it is a very good and progressive model, and it is difficult to see how you could ever go back to a model that is not outcomes-based. As I have said already, there is an awful long way to go to realise the potential of that framework. We get quite a lot of pushback in the work that we do, because obviously our job is to hold Government primarily to account in terms of how they are doing these things and quite often in committee or in other places to say, but this is all really difficult. We say, well, yes, we know what it is, but this is what you have decided to do. Having started down this path of outcomes and an outcomes approach to delivering public services, you need to continue down that path all the way to making sure that what is happening within individual organisations and in places and in towns all makes sense and all stacks up to deliver that outcomes approach. It is not enough just to have the national performance framework in Scotland that performs as good as that is. We really need the infrastructure in how public services are run day to day, including resources and budgeting to really make it fly. That would be my sense of it. I will add one point. I think that one of the models for Scotland performance were models being adopted by American states. Virginia performs being an underlying model for the Scottish system. What is interesting in the states is that they do not take Virginia performs as a measure of the performance of the Virginia state government. They take it quite literally because they are skeptical about governments doing anything for the economy or anything else in America, so they are simply saying, this is how well Virginia is doing. It is often pitched at international inward investors and so on. They are saying that this is the kind of place you might like to be because we are not very unequal or health fairly decent or kids are well educated or labour markets flexible or whatever. A lot of the indicators are not there for taking to be measures of the performance of public services. They are simply saying, this is how this place is doing. At one level, I think that might be a running checklist that you would definitely want about Scotland. How is the place doing? If it is not doing well in areas that we wish we were doing well, the public services then have to think, how can they contribute more and better to making it the way we would like the place to be? I think that there is a genuine tension that runs through much of the discussion about outcomes, which is are there simply statements about the world of our country, our society, our economy and so on? That is fine. We should have such statements and they should be accurately measured, but it is not a judgment of any sort on the performance of public services. The most recent PISA data, for example, which was reported to Parliament on kids' educational performance in Scotland in comparison to other OECD countries, one of the points they made was that the variation in Scotland is disproportionately within a single school rather than between schools, whereas in other countries, if there are inequalities of achievement, there is one school doing really well, systematic another school doing really badly. In Scotland, with our big secondary schools, actually all of the variations occurring between different people using exactly the same school resource, and some people are using the school resource in getting fabulous results by any international standards, and other people are using the same resource in falling off a cliff by any international standards. The point may well be that the factors that are shaping outcomes in Scotland are not just or even predominantly the public services, but we should have a statement for ourselves about how we are in Virginia. That includes public attitudes data as well. Are Virginians less hateful people than they were, say, 20 years ago? Are there attitudes more progressive, more egalitarian now than they were? There is a whole series of things stuck up, and it is just telling the rest of the world that this is what our place is like, here is how we are doing, here are the key trends. I do not think that we are sure with the national performance framework. Is it a Virginia performance, or is it actually a performance management tool for public services? I am not sure that we have ever bottomed out on that. I think that one of the issues that that tends to indicate is the difficulty of separate correlation from causation. Really, to be honest, at the moment, the national performance framework is widely admired, and it tries to measure Scotland, in a sense, as a society on the important fronts. Out of that, it is very difficult to say, as Colin was indicating, which elements are actually down to public sector performance and which are maybe due to other factors. One of the key things and steps going forward is probably to come back to that idea of a logic map, to try and establish much more about what is the actual causation, rather than just what is some correlation. I think that it is establishing that causation, which will, in the long term, lead to the transformation of public services. It was you, Mr Davis, who mentioned Shetland Islands Council, who was looking—I do not think that you said this—in light of reducing budgets and so on, having to prioritise perhaps, as well as it being a good exercise to do. However, how does that fit just across the board with single outcome agreements? Again, relating that to the community planning partnerships, is there clear understanding always, or are there rules followed in terms of those priorities? What that is hinging on to, to a large extent, is just how environment-aware, if you like, is an organisation that is making changes. Are they considering all the consequences and impacts of their actions? One point that I would say, though, is that Shetland is maybe a particular case given its level of reserves, but they are trying to find financial stability to protect them going forward. Financial pressures on other areas are driving people to say that the incremental budgeting process is not suitable for us now. It may have been in the past in periods of more stability, but when there is significant financial pressure, you probably have to examine more fundamentally what is happening. However, the point about liaising with partners, with CPPs and single outcome agreements, is that it is a case of having the consequences of any action or in action of somebody's thinking about changing service provision. Have they been figured through into the service planning and how much has that been considered? If somebody has just thought that our target is to save money and that is what they are doing, then fine, they may save money, but it might just push another burden on to the health service or something, and that is not desirable really from a public money point of view. A point on that, I think again this question, are we prioritising services when we look at tight budgets or are we prioritising outcomes? You will be aware that all public authorities are now in the middle of a three-year planning exercise that in many cases is going to take out very, very substantial sums of money from public budgets. As you see within a council, what you tend to do is to say that education is an evident priority, it is about children, it is a national priority and so on. Social care and its relationship with health is clearly a priority, so we can prioritise services. One danger of that is environmental and land maintenance. Those are the parts of councils with absolutely the best track record of creating entry-level employment and then absolutely the best track record of social mobility that people who come in at entry-level are actually advanced through the system and 15 years later are running quite complex public service businesses. They did not come in as graduates at all, they just came in the entry-level route. If one of the outcomes of free community planning partnership in Scotland is to create a better flow of entry-level employment and get people from unemployment into employment, so if you are prioritising that way you might actually see preserving things like land maintenance, facilities management, catering, cleaning, etc. These are areas where we can actually help people in whereas we will in reality, I suspect, end up prioritising areas that are largely graduate and professional employment and so on because these are the ones that in service terms are seen to be hard. So there is a really complicated juggling act people need to do here between services and outcomes and public and political expectations around services and outcomes. I was once challenged by a Scottish Government minister, write me an outcome-based manifesto, and I tried to do it, it came out as complete mince. I wouldn't have voted for it, but it was one of these things where who's not going as a party to want Scotland to be smarter, who's not going to want it to be healthier and so on. So once you get it to that level, nobody's disagreeing, elections then tend to be fought locally and nationally about we'll keep your local school open, we'll make sure there's a classroom, pupil-teacher ratio of 26 to 1, whatever, because people get that. The outcome thing is much harder to turn into attractable politics, I think, so my sense is this is really complicated and some of the judgment should make about outcomes if you're prioritising them will be quite different than the typical priority judgments we make about services. That is absolutely true in, as Colin's examples are, I think, very clearly demonstrated in councils. It's even more complicated when you get into community planning because increasingly now, with the exception of the clinical terminus places like Fife and Dumfries and Galloway, the council is now virtually the only genuinely local body sitting round that community planning table, with the exception probably the third sector and any private sector interest. So health boards, colleges, police, fire, are all now regional or national bodies and there's a really strong tension in there if you're greater Glasgow health board sitting on eight or whatever it is, eight-ish community planning partnerships, how does that health board balance their requirement to deliver their heat targets and to do the thing that they need to do for the whole of Glasgow and also contribute meaningfully to eight single outcome agreements across the very diverse communities that there are in the greater Glasgow and Clyde areas. So I think that Colin's really helpful example of that kind of prioritising services or outcomes is even more complicated when you get into the community planning partnership arena than it is just in councils. And just finally Colin Mayor you talked at one point about the local communities doing things anyway kind of you know how does that measure up if we if the national performance framework is the is the pinnacle is the the the tip of the iceberg I think you called it are we talking about that level of action in local communities and it seems to me in in certainly in the region that I represent that's where the real progress and action is an exciting work has been done as people literally decide that they can build houses that they can run a renewable energy scheme small hydro scheme small and so on and and look to earn some money for their own communities how does that then fit in to the to the all in every sector of the of the way up to the national performance framework I think it's built into a loft of the focus on local place now but if I look at the national performance framework and the literature that goes with it there was a strong commitment to Scotland having active communities and I think one of the more exciting developments certainly across the last five years from my point of view is that communities are working in a much more empowered way with public authorities but some of the time they're just saying we don't need to actually if the public authorities just keep out the way we can go on and do things for ourselves so I think it's it feeds into national outcomes communities are active that feeling control of their lives and feel they can achieve things in them are also more likely to have better mental health better economic participation etc the one thing I would say is if you look at the the picture of that type of community activity across scotland it is often uneven and in some of the areas you'd most want to wish to see it we need to do some work to help those communities organise to feel empowered and to feel we can take control of things so I think one danger of a model that simply says hand things over to communities let them go on with it is some communities are very well situated to do that just now and other communities are not and we need to be careful that there is a proper pattern of support for participation engagement and empowerment of communities where that's necessary I thought to that which is I think one of things that maybe reflects is you know the focus of an organisation in terms of internal are we very focused on how we provide services are we very focused on how you measure services or are we are we actually interested in measuring how our communities are doing and what the impact of what we do actually is an example that you might take in terms of trying to assess you know what the actual needs are and what the outcomes are would be escort the adult social care outcomes toolkit which is basically designed to say to an individual how are you doing in these different dimensions there might be 10 different dimensions that is trying to measure to get an idea of what the impact is and over time they can come back and could they can see the impact of that and that I would regard as being external because there you're actually getting some feedback from the client as it were all the community if you measure internally and say well we saw so many cases in this number of hours so that's very internally focused measure and I think that may be part of what's coming forward there as well in terms of are you community focused and what are you trying to measure okay thank you jeane uh john before by michael thank you convener um I mean following on maybe some of the things that have been said already and I was interested particularly call mayor in your kind of example of you know the outcomes but how do you sell that to the electorate because you know it can't be measured very easily and the electorate is more interested in how many nurses are there in the hospital or is that hospital still open or is it still closed and I mean I just wonder listening to all this I mean is when we talk about outcomes is it just so vague and so general that we can all kind of sign up to it but in practice we need to keep it in the background and focus on inputs and outputs well no because I think that would focus us back into our organisations again and if the public sector historically has been open to accusation the accusation that tended to vanish within itself rather than focus on the people it served has probably been one of the most powerful accusations over time so I think one good thing about an outcome focus as it says the point of what you do is that people's lives are better out there I think we are getting towards saying well in what ways do we want them to be better and what's our likely contribution towards that as public services it's not a total contribution so decisions if they were implemented that were announced at a party conference yesterday would make some communities in Scotland poor. Now you can agree or disagree with that but it would do that and that will have some impacts within those communities so there's other aspects of fiscal policy macroeconomic and just global economic pressures that are going to have an impact in Scottish communities as they will in other communities across Europe and elsewhere in the world so I suppose as long as we don't assume public services create the pattern of outcomes in and of themselves because they don't and all the evidence I think it's a good thing however to say well you know if you have a disadvantaged community if the kids are not attending school do we just conclude that says something about those kids or do we ask a much harder question how are we running a five billion education system in Scotland that's off-putting to maybe 20% of its users if you were a private business that was off-putting to 20% of your market you wouldn't be unduly happy about it so can we run schools in different ways that make them more engaging and now that would then we just to look quite hard when do kids seem to become disengaged at what point of life it doesn't seem to be at primary so it seems to be in the transition from secondary is that transition well enough managed are we offering some children the learning opportunities they actually want as opposed to forcing a standard set of learning opportunities on them etc so I think if you start off with the outcome focus and you take it quite seriously you do ask quite hard questions then that you could have been asking if we just do this inputs outputs you'd be taking that outcomes based I mean is it just at the parliament level should the council be doing that should the head teacher be doing that the whole way through for me I mean and I do think actually the more local you get the more genuinely people both get and are committed to outcomes they're real for them they're about people they mix with day in day out they're not abstractions they're not performance measures they are real people you're encountering in your day-to-day work whether it's in education social care or whatever so in a way I think the local probably in many ways gets it better but talks about it less and the national gets it less well but talks about it a hell of a lot you know that's maybe the way you'd want it because what happens locally will most materially impact on the quality of people's lives the quality of opportunity they get so for me and the outcome thing is not about just political accountability it is actually about managing services in new and different ways and working with communities in new and different ways and if anything I think that's more important frankly than the political accountability bit of this people are empowered and are very focused and I do think there is a real change taking place we very prematurely abandon an outcome focus if we abandon it now I think it's actually growing legs at the present moment and is beginning to motor if that's not a completely mangled metaphor for which I apologise instantly but I do think we often abandon things in the public service just when they're about to pee off well I do totally agree with that yes I mean can I just press you on this I mean how I'm just thinking of a headteacher I've had a headteacher say to me in one of my local schools it's like having two separate schools which ties in with I think what you were saying earlier that the same resources can produce quite different results I'm just wondering you know I mean both the council and herself then are wanting to measure that school we're wanting to look at higher results we're wanting to look at you know all sorts of things all the freedom the headteacher seems to have to me is exactly how many periods no they've I think I decided how many periods they have but they can actually move them around a bit within the week I mean should we therefore be giving if we push more freedom and decision making down to that level and ask them to take an outcomes based approach does that not become impossibly hard to measure for everybody else well for some kids I think you will properly measure their educational progress and the progress they want by standard grades or n5s and hires and advanced hires and so on for other kids and this is about how empowered leadership at school level is able to be should we be offering vocational qualifications from secondary to onwards if that's what kids want to do what's our problem with that so you have to do Spanish but you can't do absolutely fail to comprehend why that would be a sensible judgment to make if part of the school wants that sort of opportunity now if we value those things up I don't think you'd find 10 teachers would want to stand in the way of developments of that sort but I think just now what we're saying is you almost have to go through the whole of four years and then you can escape to the vocational education you always wanted that does not fit with what parliament and government have said about their commitments to vocational education in Scotland so in a way I would hope head teachers would be looking if I feel I've got two schools if I'm only catering for one of them then I'm failing and I have a duty to look at how I cater then for the other school that I've got here and make sure that our educational offerings are actually attractive and positive from the point of view of the whole range of pupils I have attending this school but I think you're right we're very locked into a certain way of thinking about educational performance and that gets imposed downwards on people I would prefer greater empowerment to actually tailor the education to suit the kid that's what from curriculum for excellence says philosophically speaking we now have to deliver that in practice that this will be an education fitted to the child not the child being fitted to an education we already decided upon Mr Davis you used the word awareness I think earlier on and that suggested to me that as long as the all the like the schools and all the other organizations were aware of the outcomes the national outcomes that that would be kind of enough I mean is that enough or do we need to pin them down more a difficult question to answer in many respects if we go back to previous surface submission round about government there's a recognition that there may be differences between the national priorities and national level of service that people want to see across Scotland as a bare minimum and maybe local variations in that I think what we've suggested before is effectively that you know if there's going to be local variation then there should be a clear reason for that variation and it should be justifiable and people should be able to come back and justify to central government for instance like for instance you know why that variation has occurred and why it's appropriate for the for the locality I certainly take from your initial question you know that outcomes are always going to be I think seen as a bit nebulous there's always going to be that quality aspect to it which somebody's going to turn around and see you can't always measure that so I think it's the balance between you know it's like the awareness and to a certain extent of you know the analogy to Mouching was used earlier who's driving I mean when somebody's driving a car they generally speaking are looking out and they're not looking at the dashboard all the time so you know that may be a weak analogy but actually to be honest you know that that's you know strikes me is having a bit of truth to it and the question is to what extent do you want people to be driving what's happening locally is maybe the question yeah I mean I think you also mentioned that that you accept that the causation was difficult between the linkage between spending and outcomes and I mean this has come up certainly in all the budgets that I've been here since 2011 you know can we link the actual spending which I guess is looking at the dashboard with the outcome as to what's out there the bigger picture I mean do we just have to accept that these are pretty loose a lot of the time I think nirvana would be we would have perfect information and perfectly be able to measure outcomes in a way that let us say you know that's what we've got I think the best that we'll get certainly in the short term is proxy measures and for me it's all about challenging how good is that proxy measure you know and really to be honest there is I suspect going to be that gap but it's narrowing that gap that's the the important thing that came up in somewhere else as well I think with the schools I mean because is it inevitable an organisation like a school or hospital will then start bending their performance to meet the proxy measure rather than the outcome and we therefore need to keep changing the proxy measures to kind of pin them down that has certainly been suggested in one publication that's in draft from SIFA there actually you know the the company's actually made that some organisations have actually changed the output measures partly as they go as they respond to seeing what causation is and partly to to prevent an overly output focused or output measure focus you know that actually detracts from what you're trying to achieve so I think trying to say to people yeah the output measures that you've got you know are not the be all and end all of what you're doing because that can drive distorted behaviour either innocent distorted behaviour or sometimes actually underhand if you like as distorted behaviour in terms of for instance there's an example in England where in order to reduce waiting times and to get people into what they call beds they took the wheels off all the trolleys and said that's a bed you know that does not that doesn't exactly seem to be going in the right direction but that's an example of being output measure focused rather than outcomes focused and I think that's the example okay Mr McKinlay did you want to say something and I've got another question strikes me as a good example of innovative thinking that we should probably try and harness I think there's so to come to your original question Mr Mason I think from where I think one of the things we've found is that when people talk about the outcomes approach the kind of the mindset is therefore it doesn't matter what we do to get there and that's a challenge that I've heard repeatedly from from people in councils and in health boards and other places about the end result is all and therefore why why are we the auditors interested in the inputs and the outputs well we're always going to be because the outcomes approach is about all of those things and you can only look at the outcomes without thinking about the inputs and the outputs and the activity that's actually driving the outcome so for me it's about having that overall whole system view of the world and this is going to sound a bit kind of flippant and trite and I apologise for that but it is a mindset thing so to continue the school example we're not suggesting I don't think anyone's suggesting that a community planning partnership is going to take over the running of a school but I think what isn't what is reasonable and legitimate is that everyone in knows everyone that's working in that school thinks about their job in terms of outcomes so if you work in a school canteen your job isn't just to hand over the food to the kids as they come through and get their lunch every day you have a different kind of outlook about how does that read Johnny look today has he been here for a couple of days you know there's a kind of there's a wider approach a wider mindset I think for everyone in the public services that means you still need to deliver the service to come to Colin's point but you're doing that in the context of a wider set of outcomes and what we're all ultimately trying to achieve so so that's where I would say that the kind of real it's that kind of cultural thing and the measurement thing is really tough it's something that we're grappling with how do you audit some of the stuff how do you audit a culture of outcomes and good partnership working it's not as straightforward as it used to be but I think we need to find the measures that capture those kind of softer cultural aspects which are actually the things that are going to make the difference to people's lives I reckon and if that's a challenge for you as the auditors it's also a challenge for us absolutely both as a finance committee and as the whole parliament as to how do we kind of oversee this all of this and make any kind of measurements because it's very easy to say well there's a waiting list of x and we all do that kind of thing but it's much harder to have you got an answer for us then I think the scrutiny that we apply and obviously we report to parliament and I think the job for the parliamentary committees is in a sense to be challenging the people that are running the place to figure that out themselves partly I mean I think the bit the bit that we all struggle with is what are the measures in the first place that's really going to help us do this stuff and that's not my job it's not necessarily a your job in the committee that's the people who are running the system's job to figure out what the sensible and and nuanced and you know sophisticated measurement approaches that we that we can that we can develop and there are examples out there and we're seeing it in some in some places and I think the work that this committee's been doing I think will continue to apply that scrutiny and it is striking that when you look at the budget papers there's lots of good stuff in there and there's lots of detail and lots of it is pretty transparent and the numbers bit remains almost entirely disconnected from the activity and outcome bit okay when you look at those papers I mean the other day I just want to ask you about what you've mentioned already was community planning partnerships now I mean I remain pretty sceptical about them as to whether they really are just talking shops sure and the police and everybody else turns up and they talk about a theme but they just go away and do whatever they're going to do anyway with a little bit of cake icing as I think Mr Mayor said earlier I mean the councils I mean if people understand a council they elect a councillor something goes wrong with the roads they go to their councillor shout at them whatever and and maybe get sorted community planning partnerships I think are just such vague animals and who are they accountable to well the council bit we still understand because they've got an input but I mean you know the health secretary cannot oversee the input of 32 bits of the health service and assess as far as I'm concerned are they having good local input in Clackmannanshire and in Glasgow and in Orkney and all these places can they well to be fair to Scottish Government they've been pretty clear that the Scottish Government bits so including health and indeed all the agencies and enter like the enterprise agencies and SNH and others they have been pretty clear that all those organisations will contribute meaningfully to community planning and that's part of for example on health boards the local delivery plans and that's all part of that accountability process so the way that the system is designed to work is as well as in within the partnership people holding each other to account the individual bodies will themselves be held to account for the contribution to the partnerships now that's the theory Mr Mason so on this point I think we probably agree is that I don't think we're there yet I mean we saw some examples in the in the cpp audits not that long ago where the health board just weren't even turned up half the team to the community planning partnership so that's the point I was making earlier on which is what is the accountability mechanism for that and for partnership something something needs to happen to make that better just one remark there I think in a way cpps have evolved over some period of time there by no means I think the finished article from md this end of the tables point of view however they are progressing and I think what everybody's agreed is we need something that pulls together across public agencies a common focus and outcomes at local level so if you don't call it a cpp I don't really care what you would call it but if nothing's there then we are back in our boxes doing our own thing down our service lines and so on so it would seem to me a shame to lose what's actually been a genuine progression across the last period where I think in the best partnerships they are now quite hard nosed they were very small number of priorities they are very clear how they're going to achieve them and so on and we need to capture some of that practice and roll it out around the system I think rather than doing community planning partnerships just now I think there may have been a talking phase in community planning but frankly to create a basis of trust when you could then do anything now that may seem a bit luxurious in retrospect but I think there was a necessary period where people did actually get together and talk in a more flexible way so they could get then to planning together so I'm actually possibly more positive I think that there's a lot more clarity in the community planning partnerships around Scotland I think their meetings are much more purposeful I think this year there will be a lot of emphasis on sharing information about how we're using resources and what impacts these may have on outcomes and on different services etc so I actually think we are getting somewhere with them at the present moment. I was just going to add very briefly I can't necessarily talk so much about CPPs but where there's a structure and incentives to co-operate I think that co-operation can happen between bodies and I'm thinking particularly of the Clyde Valley city deal you know whereas I understand it was a lot of effort went in to building that together to agree the governance structures and arrangements and actually move ahead with it fairly quickly so you know that's an example where different organisations you know are covering one geographical area can actually pull together and work together and I think that the challenge is therefore for the CPPs really how do we get a structure that achieves that same objective. Okay thanks so much. Okay thank you Michael to be followed by Gazam