 Public Audit Cymru in 2016. First of all, I will ask all those present to ensure that the electronic items are switched to flight mode so that they do not affect the work of the committee. Colleys, can we move to agenda item number one, which is a decision in taking business and private? The question is that we take agenda item number seven in private, I will agree. Now move to agenda item number two, which is evidence on the joint EGS report and the Accounts Commission report, entitled the Community Planning and Update. I would like to welcome our panel of witnesses. We have Carline Gardner, the Auditor General for Scotland, Douglas Sinclair, the chair of the Accounts Committee and Anthony Clark, the assistant general director of Audit Scotland. I understand that the Auditor General would like to make a short opening statement. You may remember that the chair of the Accounts Commission and I gave evidence to this committee in December last year on our report, Improving Community Planning, Sending Ambition into Action. Today's report provides an update on progress since then and gives a sense of the direction of travel for community planning in the context of the statement of ambition. As you will see in part 1 of the report, there have been significant changes to the policy landscape since our last report. Those include the Community Empowerment Bill becoming an act, the integration of health and social care and the introduction of the Community Justice Scotland Bill. Those all have important implications to the community planning that we cover in the report. Overall, we found that progress on community planning is being made both locally and nationally, but it is still not delivering the ambitious changes in the way public services are delivered that were set out in the statement of ambition. We make a number of recommendations in the report for the Scottish Government, COSLA and community planning partnerships themselves. Community planning partnerships are building on the positive progress we reported in 2014. In particular, they are using data to set clearer priorities and they are continuing to implement a range of projects targeted at specific groups or communities, but we have yet to see community planning partners sharing their resources in significantly different ways and on a large enough scale to deliver their priorities. We found that there is also a need to streamline national performance management frameworks to allow community planning partnerships to more clearly focus on outcome improvements that are relevant to their communities, again, as set out in the statement of ambition. Critically, this should mean placing the views of local communities at the heart of measuring success in public services. We would like to see greater leadership at a national level by the Scottish Government and COSLA through a strong authoritative national forum that can address the barriers to effective community planning and ensure that partnerships get the support they need to flourish. We would also like to see leadership at the local level driving forward public service reform. Partnerships should ensure that local communities are given a strong voice in planning, delivering and assessing their own public services. Finally, the report recommends that the Scottish Government and COSLA must set out a clear route map for improving community planning with short, medium and long-term steps to be taken both nationally and locally. They should work with the improvement service and others to establish a locally tailored programme of improvement support. convener, as always, my colleagues and I are happy to answer the committee's questions. I would like to draw your attention to appendix 1 of the report and you advise that the national community planning group has not met or had not met since December 2014. I understand that you have received the response from the Scottish Government, but did that concern you? Here is a significant part of the context of the strategy that should be taken forward that the group cannot even meet on a regular basis. It is a matter of concern, convener. As we say in key message 5 in the report, we do think that stronger national leadership is needed. Community planning is intended to be right at the heart of public service reform to manage both the financial pressures that public services face and the move towards prevention, which is a core part of the Scottish Government's policy. We do think that there is a real need for that strong national forum that can provide leadership and can tackle some of the problems that get in the way of that happening. The Scottish Government says that it is reviewing how to provide that leadership in the future, but the fact that it has only met once since our last report is a matter of concern. The explanation as to why the meeting was not reconvened after December 2014. I think that that is a better question for the Government, but our understanding is that it is reviewing the way in which that leadership is provided across the piece. Obviously, if it cannot arrange regular meetings such as that to ensure that strategies are taken forward and no one is organising that, then it creates a picture of monitoring and having proper records kept over the meetings and ensuring that action points are taken forward. If there cannot be regular meetings taken place, then how can the organisation be taken forward? I can only agree that strong national leadership is needed given the scale of the reform that is required here. I think that it was not just a matter of drift. The Government has told us that it is reviewing whether to stand that group down and put in its place some other forum. That forum is not yet in place, and we think that that is slowing down the pace of change. Just to clarify the record, so what specific department would be responsible for that within the Government? There is not a department in quite that way, due to the way in which the Scottish Government structures itself. The Accountable Officer will be the director general for communities. The director general of communities should have ensured that such meetings are progressed and actioned. That is where you would expect a leadership to derive. It would be at this point that you would expect leadership to be taken forward. That is where the responsibility for leadership is. The fact that we cannot hold the meeting is something that you have audited. Obviously, you are concerned. Has there been one recently or has there just not been one? There was one in the report immediately after our report in 2014 was published. Since then, the Government has been looking at how to take forward the other recommendations and the requirements of things such as the Community Empowerment Act and the new community justice bill. The audit engagement that we have had told us that it is planning how best to take that forward in future. That said, there has been no meeting since that initial one after our November 2014 report. Can I just say finally on that? It just seems to be another example of highly-paid public officials who have a significant responsibility to carry out the basics. That would be ensuring that there is a plan to take forward and show leadership has not actually happened. If they cannot get that basic right, then it does question some of the other basics that have to be taken forward, given some of the challenges that you have set out in the community planning document. I think that all I can do is restate what is in the report, convener, that, for reform on this scale, strong national leadership is needed, and we have not seen enough of that in the period since the last report. I think that we seem to have been talking about community planning since 1999. I think that all parties were signed up to it. Having read the Christie commission at the time, which colleagues will remember, it seemed to be the answer to the future delivery of public services, which seemed to be unsustainable working in silos. I have three reports in front of me today. I know that you have done more than that, but this one is March 2013. I quote from the report, 10 years after community planning was given a statutory basis, CPPs are not able to show that they have had a significant impact on delivering improved outcomes, not clear about their priorities. Too often, everything seemed to be a priority and nothing is a priority. There are no consequences for not participating. That is report number one. You would think that, after that fairly hard-hitting report, the next report might be better. That is November 2014. There is little evidence that CPP boards are yet demonstrating the levels of leadership and challenge set out in the statement of ambition. Many still do not set out the improvements that CPPs are aiming to achieve. The lack of focus on how community planning will improve outcomes for specific communities, and so, importantly, especially for this Government, and reduce the gaps in outcomes between the most and the least deprived. That is my huge concern that they are not in any shape or form tackling inequalities across Scotland. I come on to the final one, if I may convener, so that takes us up to March 2016. Of course, I would like being an optimistic person thinking that they have seen all the problems, they have addressed it. It seems to me that we are no further forward. March 2016 not yet delivering the ambitious change in which public services are organised that were envisaged in the statement of ambition. We have yet to see CPP partners sharing a lining or deploying their resources, and, again, stronger leadership required. Paragraph 44, the failure of the Scottish Government and COSLA to clarify performances of CPPs is a significant issue. We are looking at 13 years after community planning partnerships, and I have to say, Auditor General, if I may, the huge amount of work that Audit Scotland has done on this issue, the fact that community planning partnership has the support of 129 MSPs. That is a significant failure, and it is laid at the door of the Scottish Government for lack of leadership. Am I right? I understand your frustration, Ms Scanlon. Paragraph 44 sets out the previous work that we have done in this area, and there has been a lot over the past few years. There have been efforts to move community planning forward, and, as we have reported, as you have highlighted, that has not resulted in the pace or scale of change that is needed, particularly given the position that is put forward for community planning by the Government at the heart of its reform agenda. We will, I think, be reviewing our own plans for further audit work in this area, given the sense that it simply is not having the desired effect. The chair of the commission may want to say something more about that, to reflect the fact that the cabinet secretary asked the commission to take on responsibility for auditing this important policy area back in 2012, on the back of the statement of ambition. I can well understand your frustration. You have been here before as well. You have heard it all. Indeed. I think that it is not quite right to lay all the blame at the door of the Scottish Government. I quoted from the report. Yes, but there is equally an issue for COSLA as well, as the national leadership was a shared one, given the commitment that both parties had to make sure that community planning was a success. I think that one of the difficulties has always been the statement of ambition, because, in many ways, it was overambitious. It suggested, for example, that community planning partnerships should have all the characteristics of boards and their boundary partnerships. They are not statutory bodies. There is also a sense that everything, including the kitchen sink, was the responsibility of community planning partnerships, rather than being more precise about the areas where they could make a difference, where there are cross-cutting budgets between, for example, health and local government. I think that there has been a process of refinement in trying to focus on where community planning can make a difference. It has taken longer than one would like to think, but we do identify in the report that there is paragraph 2 that there is progress. They are improving leadership in scrutiny, but, at the same time, we are saying that there is still a strong need for national leadership to ensure that local delivery is as effective as possible. I think that the existence of a group of national leadership is important, because it signifies a statement of commitment by Government. The very existence of having a group of that kind representing all the key stakeholders demonstrates and underlines the commitment by the Government. The absence of a group runs the danger of sending a very country message. I think that we need to talk about everything about the kitchen sink. I cannot quite find it, but I did note that the list of participants in community planning had actually been extended. I am sorry that I cannot find the actual page that it is on. If you are complaining about everybody about the kitchen sink, we have even got more now. No, I think that it is good that all the partners around the table, who should be around the table, one of the problems in the past, has been a variability of representation on the community planning partnership. There is no excuse for all the partners who are required to be there. If there was a fault, they tried to be overambitious in what they could do. There has been a process whereby they have focused on the areas where partners have a common interest, such as drugs, alcohol and areas where they can add value, because they have overlapping budgets. We have heard the same issues. I was on the first health committee, along with Richard Simpson, in 1999, when we were doing the three personal care community care bill. We were constantly being told that health and social work did not really talk to each other. 17 years later, we had to bring in legislation to make them work together. That is pretty serious in a country of 5 million people. Do we need to legislate to make community partners work? I have one other question after that. Do you think that it requires legislation, given the lack of progress? One of the concerns that the committee and I share is that we now have two sets of legislation about community planning. We have the community planning act from 2003 and we now have the new community empowerment bill, which shares the responsibility for leading it. As you have said, it increases the number of partners who are statutory partners. My view is that legislation can take you so far, but it is really not going to make the difference in terms of people's genuine willingness and ability to have a shared vision for their area, to bring together their resources, not just money but people and communities and everything else, to focus on where they get to. The legislation is not the problem, it is how you use that and how you align your performance management frameworks, your accountability arrangements and your incentives to make it happen in practice. It is interesting that no community planning partnership has used the legislation to become an incorporated body, to become a statutory body. That is my first point. My second point is to raise the question. In the complexity of the public service landscape in Scotland, would there be enough space for two statutory partnerships, such as the health and social care partnership and the community planning partnership? I think that that is a real issue. I thought that it was worth asking. If I may finish on some smaller points that I picked up. Paragraph 37, you use the example of Murray, which is quite a nice coterminous council area. Are you using that example because it is the exception to the rule? Is there best practice in Murray that we could perhaps learn from? If I may convener, I will throw in my other questions. Paragraph 58, I did not quite understand what was meant by the 14-day delayed discharge target as an example of a performance measure creating unintended consequences that run counter to the Government's commitment to be preventive. I did not quite understand that, and I wonder if I could ask for clarity from Caroline or Anthony. My final question, convener, is paragraph 61. We found that the Scottish Government's commitment to maintain police officer numbers and no compulsory redundancies for police staff was limiting the SPA and Police Scotland's flexibility to deliver savings. It is just left there, and I would very much appreciate some clarity on those points. I will pick up the latter two, if I may, and then ask Anthony to pick up Murray. I think that that is the best approach. On delayed discharges, we make the point that we have made in previous reports on the NHS and health and social care. There are good reasons for, first of all, measuring how long critical parts of people's journey through health and social care matter. In some instances, as you have heard from the Accountable Officer, having targets to tackle bottlenecks and particular problems. The reason for including delayed discharges is the concern that we have reported before, that the target came down from 28 days to 14 days without a proper understanding of whether the resources were in place consistently across Scotland to make that a reality, to ensure that the whole system was working in balance, rather than focusing on one number in isolation. In our overview report on the NHS last year, we highlighted the fact that we have a whole range of targets at different points in people's journey, a journey, any elective treatment through to delayed discharge. It is not clear that the whole system is in balance to make sure that works properly. Sorry, if I may convener. What were the unintended consequences and how does that work counter to preventative care? The unintended consequences are that, if people are managing particular points of the system rather than that system is a whole, you may end up getting decisions that are made that help you to hit 14 days for a delayed discharge target, but make it more likely perhaps that people are discharged slightly before they are ready or without the ideal package of care being in place that increases the chance of them being readmitted later. That is what we are looking at. The wider concern in this report is that people who are running individual public bodies, such as health boards or councils, are being held to count much more rigorously for the targets that affect their body, such as delayed discharges for an NHS chief exec, than they are for the overall working of the health and social care system in their area. The targets come before the working of the system as a whole, and that is the risk. Before the patient's wellbeing, if they are being discharged inappropriately, when perhaps the whole care package is not in place, but the NHS has met a target. Patients are obviously better served by the system as a whole work. Yes, I understand. That is what we are hoping to see on the police reform. Again, in my report on police reform in November 2013, I highlighted that the Government's target of maintaining police numbers at a minimum of 17,234 due to the commitment to an additional 1,000 officers was an entirely appropriate policy choice to make, but it made it harder for the SPA and Police Scotland to manage the financial pressures that they are facing. We do not yet have a financial strategy for the SPA and Police Scotland, so we do not know how they are looking to reconcile that. Still no financial strategy, because it is a straightforward consequence of the choice that is there. In terms of the question that you asked about Murray on paragraph 38, that was an example that we found when we were doing our audit work of a partnership working together to develop an approach for community engagement, so rather than individual partners consulting and engaging with communities doing it across the piece, it is one of the many examples that we found when we were doing our audit work of CPPs working well together to do things that make sense for their communities, and they fell into five different categories. We found lots of examples of people focusing on early years and prevention, lots of examples of people doing work on community safety and youth offending, and quite a few good examples of what you might call community-led projects, where the partners have identified assets like an unused pub in their area, that the community is then taking over and using to run youth groups or evening classes and so on and so forth, so it is one of those examples of really good projects that are working well in communities. That is good. Thank you for that. Just as Thomas has promised me, he has got two thirty things. I have a point on the police issue. You said that it was an appropriate policy. It is obviously up to the Government to decide what their policy is, but if the consequences of their policy, in that respect, of determining the numbers in any given area, if the consequence of that is increased inefficiency and, in fact, in the case of the police, is dangerous because the call centre staff now have police in it who are not trained and we have seen the effects in my constituency on the case on the M90 but others as well. Are you able to comment on the effects and make comparisons to other jurisdictions where the crime rate has gone down just as much in England as it has in Scotland, but police numbers have gone down substantially in England, so it has not had the negative effect on the crime rates, and yet the cost in Scotland is huge? At this stage, I am not able to comment on that. I am specifically precluded from commenting on the merits of policy and it is a Government policy choice to make. That is absolutely an appropriate thing for Government to do, as I said in my 2013 report. A consequence of that is that there is less flexibility in ways of making the financial savings that are required. I do have the powers to come along once we have seen the changes that are being made, once the financial strategy is in place, to assess the value for money that that achieves. I am not in a position to do that at the moment. You do not have the power to do that. I can make comparisons to help me with my assessment of value for money. Value for money? Absolutely, but I am not in a position to do it at the moment. No, no, I understand. I welcome the positive aspects of this report. It is good to see that there is some progress coming through there. You have, however, said that progress is incremental rather than the radical results that everybody is looking for. Worrying that you have looked at seven other countries which have had exactly that experience, that the improvements have been incremental rather than radical. What are we learning from that? Do you think that that is an ominous portent of what is going to come? I think that, as we say in the report and you quite rightly identify, there is experience of other Governments trying to tackle similar problems in similar ways and their experience has been similar in that the change that they have achieved has been incremental rather than transformational. I think that that tells us that this is very hard, but there are no easy answers and that certainly we have not come across one that we think the Government should be doing. Given the central place that community planning has in the Government's policy agenda around both meeting the financial challenges that I ahead and moving upstream to prevention rather than dealing with the effects of problems, we need to up the pace and scale of change. We think that there is room to do that further by, for example, putting in place the national co-ordinating mechanism that is needed to co-ordinate policy, deal with problems and monitor progress by doing some of the things that we suggested around performance frameworks and the targets and outcomes that people are held to account for. We are very clear that there is no magic wand that would suddenly make this have all of the desired impact that has been around for a while. I do not know how deeply you looked at the seven countries involved, but is there anything that we can learn from that? Are some doing better than others? Are there examples of good practice that could perhaps be transported over here? As Caroline says, we did not find an example of a silver bullet that can make everything perfect around partnership working and community planning. What we did find was that, in these other countries, the challenges that Scotland faces in the complexities of governance and the resourcing pressures have been hindrances in those countries as they have been in Scotland. Having looked across the piece, we did not find another country that sets such high expectations of community planning, which I think is an important point to put on the record. One thing that I would like to pick up on is that, several times in the report there, there is talk of question of leadership and national leadership, particularly around the NCPG, which has not met since 2014. I am very curious about that because, obviously, there is a concern if there is not national leadership, but, on the other hand, in paragraph 48, you have said that the lack of leadership does not appear to have hindered progress in CPPs, so I am just wondering how that ties up. One of the reasons that Douglas and I are here is that we think that national leadership needs to come both from the Scottish Government and from the Scottish Local Government, and Douglas may want to comment in a moment. We go on in paragraph 48 to say that, although there is local progress being made, it is incremental in small scale and that that is not enough to tackle either the scale of the challenges that communities across Scotland are facing for a whole range of reasons and achieve their potential or to fulfil the very central role in policy that the Scottish Government has given it since the 2012 statement of ambition. Yes, progress is being made, but we think that stronger national leadership could help that progress to be faster and wider reaching. There are recommendations about the importance of a well-coordinated national programme of support that reflects good practice and is tailored to meet the needs of individual CPPs. That is an identical replica of the recommendation that we made in our last report, and, as we recognise, there is a lot of work going on by the improvement service and by other bodies that work in Scotland. The absence of the overall co-ordination of those initiatives by the Scottish Government remains an outstanding issue. We make the point in our report that CPPs are making progress at different rates. If we can close that gap, that is in everyone's interest. I was looking at paragraph 44 where it says that the statement of ambition is being interpreted in different ways and that there are different views about what community planning is for. That seems pretty fundamental. Is there really a huge divergence in approaches here? I come back to the point that I made earlier. We have made that point in previous reports that, if anything, the statement of ambition was over-ambitious, it makes reference, as I said, to community planning partnerships, voluntary bodies acting with all the authority and attributes of a board. To be fair to the NCPG, one of the last things that it did was to refocus down the priorities that it saw for community planning partnerships, focus on outcomes and reducing inequalities and better community engagement. I think that it is slimming down the expectations to a more realistic level and will continue to be important. There is a real opportunity to do that through the statutory guidance that is planned to accompany the community empowerment act. We have not yet seen that in detail. Throughout the report, that guidance is a real opportunity to tackle some of the things that we think are slowing down progress or stopping it from being as fast as it could be. Getting that guidance right and making sure that it really takes the intentions of the bill and makes it some real will be a key step forward. To what extent is a reluctance at local level to pull resources and pull, if I want to put it better, about responsibility holding things up? Is that a key issue? I think that there are probably a couple of issues, and Douglas will want to come in on that. In order for community planning partnerships to really fulfil the ambition that is set out for them, they will need to pull not just budgets but people and planning and all of the things they do around their key priorities, the communities that are most disadvantaged and the outcomes they most want to shift. That is difficult to do in any case for a whole range of reasons, but particularly difficult at a time when budgets are being cut for reasons that we all understand. Thinking through what that means for actually being able to get that really joined up working, which should be at the heart of community planning partnerships, and taking away as many of the barriers as possible feels to us key. That is why this focus on different performance targets or performance indicators in different bodies does not help, because people are being pulled in two directions. They are thinking about the partnership, but they are also thinking about what, for example, waiting times for elective treatment look like, rather than being able to say what are the most important things for this area. Did you find any good examples where there are positive aspects in a CPP where they have actually been successful in some regard of pulling the resources and so forth? Anthony, I am sure that you have got a couple of examples that we can point you towards on that. Glasgow was an obvious example for us where Glasgow City Council, police and other partners, including the Housing Association, have made great strides in terms of targeting resources into disadvantaged communities. They have also made great progress in terms of using fire and rescue in quite innovative ways to support people in residential care homes and in other social housing facilities. North Ayrshire is a great example of police working collaboratively with the council to address youth offending and to address fear of crime and to tidy up the local environment. In Scottish Borders, there are some very interesting projects where, across the partnership, they have been looking at unused assets and trying to work with communities to make better use of buildings that are currently dilapidated that might have a community use. There are quite a few more that I could list for you, but we have found many examples in all eight of the CPPs that we have done work at. So, did each constitute the incremental improvements that you were talking about? Absolutely. They are all good projects in their own right, but they are not, as Caroline said earlier in Douglas, a whole-scale systems change. They are things that make a real difference to communities, but they are not necessarily affecting the whole of the way in which public resources are used across the whole system. They are about perhaps capacity. Caroline has touched on the difficult financial environment in which public bodies are operating. I think that there is an issue about capacity to support community planning partnerships. One of the positive things about the community empowerment act is that it shifts the leadership from simply the council to all the partners. It is a collective leadership, and it requires all the partners to have a duty to commit staff resources to support the partnership. That is all well and good, but the act is lightened on what happens if they do not do that. That is point number one. Secondly, I think that there is an issue of a lot of the people who will be involved in councils, health boards and others, councils and health boards in particular, supporting community planning partnerships, will be the same people who are supporting the introduction and development of the integrated joint boards. There is an issue in there about the scale and depth of capacity to manage and support both partnerships. Just finally, has the Scottish Government accepted your recommendations on that? I think that that would be a useful thing for the committee to confirm, having considered the report today. Thank you, convener. Page 7 of the report, community planning partnerships should ensure that local communities have a strong voice in planning, delivering and assessing local public services. How engaged are local communities? Is their voice really listened to in their views? Because my experience not only as a local councillor, but it is the last five years as an MSP, is a lot of the time that their views are not listened to. It is a really good question. I think that we say in the report that there are lots of examples of communities being consulted on specific issues or projects or policies, but not yet signs that the whole way in which public services are planned and managed and assessed is being turned on its head to start with what people want. I guess that Douglas and Anthony may want to colour that in a little bit more. I think that I echo Caroline's comments about the status that we see at the moment, but what we would observe is a real commitment among the CPPs to try and do this. Our sense is that the community empowerment legislation has been welcomed by many CPPs. They recognise the value of trying to design services that are more community focused, but also recognise that there are difficulties there in terms of Douglas's point around capacity, do we have the staff with the skills and the time to do this kind of stuff, and also the rigidity in terms of how can we change our services? The services have been provided in a particular way for good reason, changing them isn't always an easy thing to do, so this is quite difficult stuff for the CPPs to do, but we do get a sense that there is an appetite to try and move that agenda forward. I want to ask a couple of questions. The first one is about looking at areas where things have not worked. For example, Stirling and Clackmannanshire endeavoured to try to share significant services. They were doing what Christy really wanted them to do until this budget, when the Stirling officials reported to their councillors that they were subsidising the neighbouring council to the extent of £400,000 a year and the services have now been split. That seems to me to be in terms of where we are trying to get to. That is a very clear backward step, but an understandable one if you are a politician and you are saying that your taxpayers are subsidising somebody else to that extent in two relatively small councils. Do you have the opportunity to look at the CPP failure in Glasgow, the regional plan that Sir John O'Bathnut was engaged in and trying to get all the councils in the Clyde valley to co-ordinate and share, which does not seem to have progressed at all? There have been some quite significant major projects of the sort of radical sort that you seem to be saying that we need to look at, but for the large part, any of the radical things seem to have failed. I am just a little surprised that I did not see that in your report. It is a slightly different agenda that touches on community planning, but what you are talking about is more of the relationship between council to council rather than community planning partnership. Let me try to address the point that you are making, particularly the sterling-click money one. If there is criticism that I would make of that, the input is a judgment about money and saving. Does that share service deliver better outcomes in terms of education? I do not know what evidence the two councils have for a small council-like money being involved in a partnership that might have access to a wider set of resources. Do you think that that would deliver better outcomes for children? Presumably, that was the point in doing it at the beginning. It does underline the point that in-shared services and the partners need to be very clear about the outcomes that they are trying to achieve. On the second point, in terms of your right to refer to Sir John McBurton's report, I think that one of the difficulties that happened there is that there was, whilst there was an initial enthusiasm for it, in many cases it came down to a question of, well, I am not prepared to give up my jobs in Hamilton to go to Glasgow. There was a defensiveness in relation to that. The commission has no view as to whether shared services are a good or a bad thing. The important thing is to have a very clear business case that sets out the outcomes and the benefits of it. However, there are significant steps for councils to take well before shared services. The dangerous shared services has been the panacea, the answer to everything. There is still a huge amount of scope in the commission's views for councils to look at their processes and procedures. The process, for example, of paying a bill, an invoice by a council, to look at how that council compares with the best-in-class. If, for example, a clackmaning council costs them £5 to pay a council tax and another council can do it for £2, what we would want them to do is to drill down and find out why that council can do it for £2, as opposed to their £5. A message in there about councils simplifying their procedures, standardising their procedures, and only if there is a business case to share services should they do that. I think that there is a huge amount of scope for councils to look at their individual costs in comparison with other councils and become more efficient. I think that that is the thing when I was on the health committee. I banged on about endlessly over most of the 13 years as the variation, and we could narrow the variation point that you made earlier. Is there the dataset? In the integrated joint boards, we now have the IRF, the integrated resource framework, and we have the new framework on top of that, of additional information, which is going to be looked at later today. Do we have that similarly for the CPP so that they can look at things of the sort that you have talked about, the variation in costs and saying, how do we actually deal with the best practice? That fits into my second main question, which is, in the health side, we have health improvement Scotland. I am not saying that they are perfect, but at least they do try on a non-mandatory basis to try and get good practice identified and spread, but in backing up the IJBs in their extended role, are we going to just simply have the HIS doing a little bit of it again, or is the structure nationally in terms of pushing the IJBs alongside the CPPs, because that landscape is now going to be cluttered, picking up best practice and spreading it? Who is going to be responsible in Government for that? Is there going to be an identifiable clear source? I can go to a website and say, that council is doing that, why are we not doing it? If I am a councillor, I can pick it up and question my officials on it. Let me just pick up the point on data information. Firstly, by councils, there is the national benchmarking information, and we encourage councils to drill down and look at their performance and see if they can improve in relation to the particular family of councils they are in. I know that work is being undertaken to develop indicators for community planning partnerships. I think that the point that I would make about IJBs is exactly the same point as we have made about community planning partnerships, the importance of a co-ordinated programme by local government and national government to ensure that improvement activity is well co-ordinated. That has been the lesson of CPPs. I think that it is very clear that many of the issues and lessons that have applied to CPPs will be exactly the same for IJBs. I think that is exactly right. We say around paragraph 74 of this report that although there are lots of bits of improvement support available, it is still not co-ordinated to really get that critical mass and capacity in place and then be able to tailor it to what individual partnerships need. I would agree entirely with Douglas that many of the issues are likely to be similar with the IJBs and the criminal justice field when that bill comes into legislation as well. We need to make sure that that improvement support and all of the things that go around it, like what works in Scotland, really are being used once to best effect rather than being replicated on a smaller scale and potentially diluting the effect that they have. The last question is on Exhibit 2, which is the one about indicators versus outcomes. I cannot read it now because my classes are too small, but the last one, anyway, is short, medium and long term. How does that compare with your previous examination? If we are all agreed that we have been far too focused on processes and that targets, whilst very valuable, are particularly in health, have been hugely important in driving the system forward to a point, I would not recognise as a doctor in 1997 where we are now. It is just a fantastic change, but they are now getting in the way because they are not nuanced. How much of a switch from indicators to outcomes to medium, long term instead of short term, are you perceiving or is it relatively stuck? Probably the most important statement about that issue that we are making in the report is at the end of paragraph 56, where we say that the review group that was looking at this concluded that the need for change was well understood and accepted, but there was not an agreement about what change was needed and how to achieve it. I think that there has been progress in so far as there is now a recognition of the problem and that something must be done. What we have not got is much evidence so far of streamlining all of the indicators and targets and frameworks that you pointed to in Exhibit 2 of this report. Still some very large numbers of indicators particularly around and still focusing much more towards inputs rather than to outcomes. That is not to say that it is easy. I do not want to give the impression that it could be fixed overnight but I think that you are right that it is very important in making a reality of this. That is something that our legacy report needs to reflect, that things need to be outcomes driven rather than process driven to a greater extent than it is. We will never get rid of targets. Targets are politicians, delight, opposition and government, but, if they are not nuanced, they are in my view dangerous. The 12-week legal guarantee, 100 per cent, for example, is that I have attacked that on many occasions. You cannot have a 100 per cent guarantee and the legal guarantee that has been broken for 32,000 Scots since it came in is disrespectful to the law, frankly. I am not asking you to comment on that, but I really worry about the legal guarantee of that sort affecting clinical priorities within the health system. It is one of the worst examples of targets actually being counterproductive in terms of both costs but, more importantly, patient outcomes. Thank you, convener. Good morning, colleagues. I would like to carry on where Dr Richard Simpson has been going. If I could start with the well understood phenomenon of leaders working in silos, that is because of their perceived responsibilities to those who employ them or govern them. I am left with the impression that those who are in public service, and let me say the police and the court service just to get two together, could easily work together because they are responsible to the Government. I get the impression, however, that those who are elected, and clearly in this context that is local councillors, always feel that they are looking over their shoulders, always have a very territorial responsibility, and as it was once upon a time, I recognise that. I am just wondering whether there is any way around that that you have seen, either in good practice or elsewhere, that will enable, as I perceive it, particularly elected members to get outside their territorial responsibilities and actually do the collective thing over a wider area, or are we just stuck with that? Could you maybe expand a little bit on that? I am left with the perception, and I do not want to personalise this at any stage at all, that the leader of a local authority council is going to find it very difficult to sit on a joint board with other local councils and a health board, which will have a wider area, and actually really commit his council's resources to the wider area. I think that it comes back to this point about authorities working together. It is just an instinct that I am the guardian of those for my people, because they are my people. They elected me with constituents. The MSPs will recognise this phenomenon completely. I think that it is actually very difficult for councillors to sanction anything that looks like we are giving some resources to somebody else. Well, I would like to think that the motivation for the council leaders, not territorial, but what is in the best interests of his or her constituents. There are examples of that city deal, for example, where councils have come together and, in a sense, seen the potential of councils working together to improve the economy in the areas. Aberdeinshire most recently has come together in a city deal in Glasgow, the Clyde valley. I think that there is a willingness to look more widely than simply the territory of an individual council and to think of the potential of generating wealth in that area, which can benefit all constituents, including the leaders' own constituent. Can I perhaps challenge that in the sense that that is about other money coming in? That is additional money, and I think that councillors, under that circumstance, would have personalised it to Aberdeinshire. However, if Aberdein city sees that it is getting 30 per cent and Aberdeinshire is getting 70 per cent on making up the numbers, if it is new money, well, I am getting 30 per cent of the new money and actually will benefit from the rest of it. That is okay. It is very easy to be generous at that stage. When you are actually looking at your core budget and it is a shrinking budget, to actually say, well, I will do anything at all that might actually mean some of that budget goes somewhere else, seems to me to be quite difficult. I think that is actually when we see examples. I think that it is less about money going somewhere else, as opposed to saying, can we get better outcomes collectively by sharing our budget, by putting our budget together, if, for example, there are scarce resources, it may be in the interests of a council, for example, to share specialised resources like, say, procurement, educational psychologists. You get a better service for the public by sharing resources. I think that many council leaders would look to saying that the motivation would be how can we get better outcomes for our citizens and there are opportunities for councils to share where there is a business case so to do. You would be able to point to examples where that has been done on a substantial scale. I mean, I think that in Aberdeen Aberdeenshire, for example, sharing on procurement, they are doing more work on sharing on finance functions, internal audit, for example, where the resources have declined. There are quite a lot of examples across Scotland where councils are doing that because they see the benefit in so doing. I think that the key issue, always for leaders and for councils, is that the public want to know that there is a clear line of accountability. Who is accountable if you have a service like that? Where is the accountability line? That is an important factor as well. I think that it will be interesting as resources continue to be constrained, whether there is more in appetite within local government to work more in partnerships, where that adds demonstrable value and where there is a business case to support it. I wonder if I could move on, convener. I won't be the first official report that's got, quote, what gets measured, gets done. I'm going to do it again, and I've just done it, and exhibit two to which, again, Dr Richardson just previously referred. I think that it's a hugely useful infographic, and I really am in favour of these things. Thank you for it. Clearly, the vast majority of the measures are the input-output performance short-term. That's very clearly what it's intended to demonstrate. Can I put it to you, Senator General, that that may not necessarily be a bad thing, because it might well be that if there are 20 things that can go wrong, you need to have 20 numbers to know whether they're going wrong, whereas actually, if life's okay, you might need one or two measures to demonstrate that it's okay. So can I just ask, whilst I understand what you're trying to demonstrate there, what does need to change in order to get people to focus on the outcomes? Does it? Do they just need more outcome measures? I think the first thing to say is you're absolutely right. We're not saying you can just measure outcomes and everything else goes by the board, not least because most outcomes will take a generation to fix and keeping our fingers crossed for 20 years probably isn't a very sensible strategy. What we are keen to make sure is that the measures that underpin the outcomes are the ones that will genuinely take you in the direction that you want for changing and improving your outcomes over time. We've talked previously about some of the unintended consequences of input or activity measures on the outcomes that you're looking for. There's also something quite subtle about taking a measure and turning it into a target. As Dr Simpson said, it can have a very powerful effect on a priority or a bottleneck or something that you're trying to fix. Equally, I think that it can also have an unintended effect. One of the examples that we've reported on before is that the four-hour A&E target is an important target that matters to people and has seen a huge improvement over the life of this Parliament, no question about it. Those figures are now reported weekly and receive a lot of attention, a lot of public focus, a lot of media focus. I challenge most people in this room to give any indication of what the equivalent might be for people waiting for a care package in the communities. That's just as important in some ways. The fact of the focus on A&E drives people's attention and efforts and resources towards that in a way that not only neglects the rest of the system but potentially distorts away from it. That's the easiest example to point to, but I think that the conclusions of the work that's been done by the boards set up by the Scottish Government and COSLA to do this are that there are other examples of that sort of approach where taking one part of the system either potentially ignores important things or even drives the wrong outcomes elsewhere. It's really that streamlining with appropriate mapping of different measures at different levels and short, medium and long term as well. You said earlier that it's the whole system approach that is required, and of course I think we endorse that and understand it. Could I just lastly turn, though, to the issue of IJBs, integration joint boards and community planning partnerships. IJBs now have a timetable, which is actually pretty close. Given, as Mr Sinclair has previously commented, that in many places it will be the same people trying to worry about both partnerships. If IJBs have a timetable and CPPs have managed to wait this long, is there any real prospect that they will be the focus of people's attention? Yes, because they are statutory bodies. That's the difference. They have an accountability to ministers to report annually on the outcomes specified by Government and the progress that they are making in relation to that. It's a different beast altogether. That will drive it much more effectively. Could I just return to a point that you made about sharing, because it did make me reflect on the fact that councils are not that good at sharing? I can think in my time in my career of at least a couple of examples where the director of finance and the health board resigned and the council offered to take over that responsibility and provide a shared service for the health board and for the council. In both cases, that was turned down by the health department. So you said that your town should be clarified? That was at Orkney. It was just to clarify for the record. The bit about sharing is wider than just a criticism of councils. There is a general attitude that sometimes an attitude in central government is unwillingness to share what might seem something that would give benefit and save money. I don't want to get too territorial or too personal, but councils not a very million miles away from where I have been over my career have totally failed to join up even the back room services, the accounting bits. If they can't manage to do that, essentially for territorial it's mine reasons as I perceive it, then I don't think it's much prospect that they're ever going to join up with the sharp end. Forgive my cynicism. Colin Kear. Thanks, convener. Good morning. I'm actually quite a lot of what I've got noted here has come in particularly in the first part of Nigel Donne's questioning. It really is from my background coming from local authority into Parliament that virtually everything that Nigel Donne, and to an extent Richard Simpson, Colin Beattie, have already said that it is perfectly true and shared services are absolutely, there's nothing new in the idea of shared services. I remember having discussions some years ago on this. So it takes us really down to the fact that we know that it's incremental and why is it incremental? Why is it not? Why are the changes happening that way? Might I suggest that, you know, there are obvious sort of things in the political climates that we all live in. There's strains between the Scottish Government and COSLA. There's strains between COSLA and local government. And of course you try and take the power from any partner into a sort of general pot. You will automatically get to the point where somebody will fight for that. It cannot be easy and understand these are all the problems and I think some of the questioning has been there. So it takes us down to the fact, if we really want to speed things up, how do we get these four elements altogether? Scottish Government, COSLA, local authorities, I know they are the same sort of, the same thing, but there is a clear difference between them, the clear arguments and also this idea of partnership because if you are a councillor going to your Monday night surgery and you get somebody coming up to the door and saying, can you help me with this councillor? And he's sitting there going or she's sitting there and going, well I can but it's not really the council's business but it's a council that's providing it perhaps on behalf of a partner and this accountability that we seem to be sort of waving over a little bit. How do we actually get the public to understand that there is not statutory but pretty close to it shared services in here? How do we get it moving and how do we get the public to understand that because if you go outside the chances are member of the public will not understand what a community planning partnership is? I think that that's absolutely right and I'm sure Douglas will want to come in. I'll kick off by saying I think the way we convince the public that shared services are a thing in our importance by delivering with shared services so you don't end up with people sort of passing responsibility or concerns backwards and forwards and I recognise all of the things in the environment at the moment that you highlight as making this more difficult than it otherwise would be. All of that is true and it's still the case that the community planning is a central part of the government's reform agenda. If Government and COSLA were to conclude that actually in that context doing this is overambitious it's not possible then I think what we'd be looking to see as a plan B that says in that case how are we going to manage the continuing constrained money for the next few years and the policy commitment to move towards prevention at the moment community planning and the things related to it are the main thrust to achieving that if that's not the case and then what's the alternative to doing that you're right though it's a very difficult set of challenges both for individual councillors and for the public bodies involved to tackle. I think that the case for community planning still exists if you say the police are responsible for crime the causes of crime are out with the control of the police that could be bad housing lack of employment opportunities poor education what have you so the need for bodies to come together and design services around the individual and around communities in a joined up way is critically important and the public expects services to be joined up you know that's that was the whole point of the the Christy commission and indeed it's the driver in the integrated joint boards as well I think we come back to the point in our in our report that if this is a flagship policy for the government then the importance of national leadership but both the level of the Scottish government and COSLA in terms of a coordinated support framework in terms of an effective performance management framework these are the bodies that can will the means to make this more effective in your contribution Mr Sinclair you mentioned what you posed the question that was certainly my interpretation of what you said just regarding the need for both the HSCPs and also the CPPs am I correct and picking up from you what I was suggesting and I think I answered the question if you put community planning partnerships on a statutory basis is there space within Scotland in a very complex public sector landscape to have two statutory bodies two statutory partnerships I think I think you know where is one stop and the other one start might be an issue I think I think I think I think that's something we need to think about very carefully okay so because later on you highlighted the point regarding the capacity to support the CPPs and also maybe it may well be that some of the same individuals are attempting to do both yeah okay and I think we are finding in our in our audit work particularly in small councils as councils reduce their workforce and through voluntary redundancy the danger the danger one of the dangers is that in specialised areas that small councils begin to lose really important staff to do you know pretty important jobs in the report on page 26 exhibit 2 regarding the statutory versus non statutory now it may well be a policy question so you may you probably won't want to answer but in terms of the 20% versus 80% ratio do you think what is your opinion that those percentages need to need to be altered in some shape or form so that there so that the statutory element actually is an increase on the 20% to to try to provide a maybe kind of a more so I think the phrase that I hear on a regular basis in the chamber is for a more kind of consistent approach in terms of service delivery across the country but the difficulty that I always have with that is is that then looked upon that that central government dictating to local authorities what they should and should not do is ultimately people at local authority level and organisations with the living service within local authorities within the local authority areas the other ones who who best know that particular area as compared to whichever parties in power at central government level I think my concern is less about whether the measures are statutory or non statutory than about whether they are pointing you towards the longer term outcomes that you're looking to improve we touched on that discussion earlier there may be some measures that government thinks are so important it wants to set into statute obviously the argument against that is that things change over time and that what's very important this year may look quite different in five years time but it's less my what I think is interesting about this exhibit is less at any one of the individual things you could pull out from it but whether it looks like a coherent picture over all for achieving the national outcomes with every public body and communities across Scotland playing their part in doing it the statutory non statutory dimension is one but it's not the most important from my perspective I think just add to that one of the one of the confusions around the statement of ambition was whether it was simply community planning partnerships delivering on national outcomes and whether it was sufficient space within community planning partnerships to deliver on local priorities as well and getting that balance rate seems to me to be quite important I just going to mention that one of the issues that the senior officer group identified when looking at this exhibit themselves was in the 20% 80% statutory non statutory the fact that 80% of the measures are non statutory arguably identify scope for a bit of decluttering of the landscape because they're not underpinned by primary legislation that's a very good point because I think the example I was going to come on to which was touched upon earlier was that the bench marking tool was in terms of local authorities now that's not a statutory a statutory tool and it's also a tool with a level of flexibility that indicators can change on an annual basis also based upon exactly what you said there Caroline in terms of the landscape can change within a short space of time so I think certainly in terms of the in terms of that particular tool could that be looked at in terms of in terms of a measurement tool for not solely for local authorities but is that something that could be looked upon maybe as an additional type of tool for community planning partnerships or for other kind of joint operations to allow that flexibility without having the need to have a statutory element that action's already taking place so the improvement service has been working with a number of cpps to develop a benchmarking data set that they can use for identifying how well they're moving how quickly they're moving towards delivering the outcomes that they're all committed to there's also quite a lot of interesting work going on within government to try and make sure that the data that cpps might need to plan and understand local needs and all sorts of targets for improvement is available at very local level so they can really focus on the needs of specific communities that's an agenda that people are moving forward on. It's not quite right to say the national performance framework, it's not a statutory tool. That derives from the fact that the statutory responsibility for specifying performance information lies with the commission. The commission a few years ago decided that it wanted local government to take much more ownership of performance and performance information and that's why we've allowed the development through SOLIS and COSLA of the national performance information but we're very clear in our direction that we expect councils to use that to drill down and to look at their performance in comparison with other councils. That's the asset test to learn from the information that's made available. Exactly, I used to be a member of the local government regeneration committee and I was there at the time when the benchmarking tool came into being and certainly that was the ethos. I'm very much supportive of that whole idea because it's exactly right that there will be very good examples of work that are taking place and I'm sure everyone will want it to be a success. I've got a brief additional question from Mary Scanlon. Yes, we've looked at the report today and scrutinised that but I really just wanted to look at your final words in paragraph 82 which to be honest are neither hopeful or optimistic for the future and if I may read what is clear is that continuing on the current path of delivering local improvements is unlikely to deliver the system-wide transformational change outlined in the statement of ambition. Given the historic events that I've outlined today I appreciate that you would never write anything that was less than honest but it doesn't fill me with confidence that the questions that have been raised by colleagues today, the issues that have been raised and the contents of all your reports, it doesn't give me much confidence that things are going to change in future and we are going to deliver the outcomes that we hoped. Am I misinterpreting this or is that your final point? Thank you. I think that you're not misinterpreting it. I think that the strong messages that's been coming through our evidence this morning is that community planning is, as Douglas has said, a flagship policy of the Government, a key part of the response to the Christie commission and the challenges of tight financial resources and moving towards prevention. And the progress that we're seeing so far is real but it is small-scale and incremental and it's not leading to the sort of transformational change that was envisaged when the statement of ambition was agreed between the Government and COSLA. If it's going to continue holding that place in policy terms then much more strong national leadership is needed as we say in the report. I have no doubt that future audit committees will come back to it. Okay, any other questions from colleagues? Okay, I thank the Auditor General for what will be our final report before this parliamentary session. Can I take this opportunity to thank the Auditor General and our staff for the support given to the committee over this parliamentary session and we wish you the very best for the future? Thank you very much, convener. It's a pleasure and a privilege for us all to support this committee. We're pleased to have been able to do it through this session of Parliament and we're very much looking forward to working with the new Parliament in the future and best wishes to everybody. Thank you. Colleagues, can we move to agenda item number three, which is a response from the Scottish Government to the committee's request for further specific information relating to the Auditor General's report entitled NHS in Scotland 2015? Can I ask colleagues for comments or actions? It's very interesting that this backlog maintenance issue, that their target is now a 2020 target. The previous target was a 2015 target, which they didn't meet and I certainly wasn't aware for one that there was a new target of 2020 of £100 per square metre of the estate and 10 per cent of that only to be high risk. This is a completely different set of targets to the one previously, which was a target defined in the number of millions of pounds, so I'm slightly concerned that we've got these new targets. Even if you take what they say in the letter, the figures are £181 per square metre and 47 per cent of high risk, that is a huge amount. It seems to me that what might be useful for us to go back and say is not that we will not get much further information, but I think that this is pretty obfuscating. The transparency is really rather lacking, but what is important is that in that high risk element, how much is clinically important and how much is not clinically important. If I can give you an example of clinically important, the sewage running down the walls of the southern general in the last couple of weeks, which is a problem that has occurred on a number of occasions over the last few years, seems to me to be such high risk that it should have been dealt with. I just think that the system, the next committee, is going to have to ask God at Scotland to look into this in far greater depth and produce stuff that is meaningful and helpful. I really do not know if it is worthwhile going back and asking further for intermediate targets at least. If the target of 2020 is 100, what are they going to do about the high risk stuff? My other concern is what is low risk today if it is clinically important and might become high risk tomorrow? It gives the impression that there is a sort of fixed feast in this. Things are going to come on to the agenda as being risk, and they are going to be things that are going on to the agenda from low risk to high risk. It is actually seeing that process—I just feel that the whole thing is just very, very, very obscure—and I am really concerned that the Government has set targets for 2015-16, and they have missed those targets and have missed them quite a long way because the boards have not delivered on the existing high risk, as far as I can see. The only question that we might go back to is how much of the high risk that was defined in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 has gone off the agenda, and how much of that has been met in each of those years. If the high risk from 2012 has not been met now, what is the point of defining it as high risk? I do not disagree with what Richard Simpson says. One thing that I am curious about is that, in the past information that we have received from the Government, there has been an indication that a proportion of that backlog would be dealt with by a way of, for example, new builds and so on, as opposed to maintenance in the building. They did at one point give a percentage on that, and I am surprised that it did not come forward again. That would be interesting because, 181 per square metre, it could be that, if we understood what was going to be replaced, that that could come down substantially and maybe answer some of the questions that Richard Simpson has got. However, it is probably a question to ask, but it is probably for the next committee now. I appreciate it for the next committee, convener, but for those of us that have been on this committee for most of the session, it has been an on-going issue. It is not the first time that we have seen the Government, if they cannot change the target, they change the date, but quite a significant change of date, which is very disappointing. I also want to say to Richard Simpson that we asked for a definition of high risk. High risk is fairly detrimental to health and safety to staff and patients. It is an issue that we have been looking at over the five years. I agree with Richard Simpson that it is something for our legacy paper for the next committee. It is a very serious issue. On Colin Beattie's point, we have been given more explicit information in the past, which has helped us to understand that, if an old hospital is not meeting the standards and a new one is being built, we can help to understand moving on. We have been given less information and are shifting a way out in the horizon of a target that could not be met. I just want to extend the discussion, if I may, and make the point that that this is not a continuum, but a discrete building, some of which are quite big, some of which will probably be underused. We would all recognise that, if a building is old and the roof needs to be replaced, the whole building would be regarded as being at the worst end. It might be that it is not even being used or that the ground floor alone is being used, and it might well be that it will be replaced in a year and a half time. Therefore, no sensible person would actually be expecting you to do anything with it other than get the next one built. We need to be able to extract our successes or pop to the health committee, because I am not sure that it is necessarily us. We need to be able to extract the big numbers down from the big numbers to the individual segments of that to understand what is going on. I suggest that the average numbers do not help us. I agree with the comments from my colleagues, but I think that it would be useful for the next committee in the next session to still get that information in terms of the breakdown of what is planned, because it is something that the committee has discussed before. I think that it is very relevant to go to the future health committee, but also for the committee to obtain that information too. I have one final comment on that. Of course, there is much criticism of what was originally PPP, then PFI and now NPD. They are all the same, they are all privately funded, but they include a maintenance contract. I think that it should be recognised, and our successor committee should recognise, that those are maintained buildings. The contract requires the contractor to maintain them for the 30-year lifespan. That is a fantastic saving to the health service in terms of going forward. I would suggest, if colleagues are agreeable, that again in the legacy paper that the future audit committee or health committee should be invited to look at the savings that are accruing in this area. We have been up to £1 million of backlog of £2.5 million, £2.5 million or £300 million of high risk. You do not have any in the maintenance of NPD. Can we just pull together to clarify that we do the option to respond to the correspondence and ask for a response within the two-week period before Parliament dissolves? We can ask for further information. The second option is that we are not on record what has been said today and pass that to the successor audit committee. We can do both. We can see what information can be brought forward before, within the two weeks, and then, whatever else is to be sought, we can suggest that to our future committee. We asked the high risk that was in 12, 13, 14 and 15 that was not going to be about replacement of buildings, because Nigel's points are absolutely right about the discrepancy of the continuum. If we ask about the things that take out the ones that are scheduled to be replaced, which are not being used—in other words, it is a sort of general safety issue—and say, could they provide us with a list of the high-risk things that have or have not been met, that were clinically being used and are important? Can I suggest that we are already meeting the legacy documents that we just need to be? Can I suggest that we are returning back to the correspondence with Mr Gray? Some of the points that we made today request a response within the two-week framework. I think that there is a general point here, and we are going to come to it again. We need to be careful to make sure that we are asking for things of significance, so that there always needs to be some kind of deminimus. I do not know how you said that, I am sure, in correspondence that can be organised, but we do not want that to come down to the smallest building of 10 square metres in the corner, which is not relevant. It needs to be relevant and stuff, whereas we are asking people to do unnecessary work. I think that we can ask for common sense to prevail, but I am interested in opening this. Can you move to agenda item number 4, which is a response from the Scottish Government to four points arising from the committee's consideration of the AGS report entitled health and social care integration? Do you have comments from colleagues? I think that the offer that is made is one that we would have been carrying on, probably taken up. However, I think that, clearly at this point, there is no time for that. Is this something that we can carry forward for the next committee? We cannot put it in a legacy document now, but we can ask for it to be on the record. I think that that would be useful. Can you move to agenda item number 5, which is a response from the Scottish Government regarding the AGS report entitled implementing the Scotland Act 2012, an update? The committee has asked the Scottish Government whether it accepted the report's findings and recommendations. Is the committee content to note the responses that it received? Is that a good colleagues? Can you move to agenda item number 6, which is the committee's annual report? In line with previous years, this is simply a facture report on the work of the committee for the last year. Are members content to agree the draft report and for us to allay with the clerks to bring forward a publication date? I do not know whether it is relevant to highlight this or not, but when I read this, when we got to the final paragraph of 25, we were going to make 21 times in this parliamentary year. Also, all of these meetings took place here in Parliament. It struck me that the other committees have undertaken various meetings outside of the Parliament across the country, and this committee has not done so. I know that we already have... NHS Highland? Sorry, it is okay. You are there? No, I was not at that one. Sorry, sorry. I stand corrected, but I think that in terms of the external activities of other committees, clearly they have been out of the Parliament a lot more, and I just need to get it on record in terms of the next committee of this Parliament. Okay, I think that is a fair point that has been raised in the work of the audit committee, something of the public interest, so it is something that hopefully the future committee can keep in mind. I just point out to colleagues that this will be our final meeting before this solution, and I can just mention that before we move into private session. I wanted to put on record the thanks of the committee to Audit Scotland and to the Audit General for their hard-working professionalism over the past five years. The reports and evidence that they have supported and provided to us has been, and I am sure that all members will agree, invaluable. I am sure that our successors will be as grateful as we are for their good work during that period. I would also like to thank our clerking team, led by Ann Pete. I think that it goes without saying that without the team we would be lost and we would not be able to bring forward the committee's agenda and the various other supporting elements. I would also like to thank the other staff who have supported us, the media team, the official reporters and sound engineers who ensure that the good work of the committee is able to take forward. I would also like to put on record my thanks to our deputy convener, Mary Scanlon, Dr Simpson and Colin Keir, who understand that I will not be seeking a re-election to the Scottish Parliament. I think that we hope that you will have a long, healthy retirement and we wish you the very best for the future. My experience in the committee has been that we have worked together as a committee despite our political differences. There has never been any divisions, despite the fact that there is a Government majority built into the committee, and I think that that is a credit to all members of the committee who have worked together, and I think that that will still be in which the parliamentary committees should operate in ensuring that we can work together in the common agenda. Just any brief comments before we close? I wonder if I could make a brief comment. When I came here in 1999, David McLeachie was my leader and he said that the committee offered me health, and I said that I do not know much about it. I got the doctor once a year, and he said that he wanted to do that. I would like to go in the audit committee and he said that there is a tick-box exercise, and nobody pays any attention to that. He is wasting your time on that committee. It is a committee that we have not heard of much. I have to say, convener, until this last session of Parliament. I would like to thank Hugh Henry. I think that he gave me the courage to be a bit more feisty in committee. I would like to thank Ian Gray. Most of all, convener, I think that this is the first committee that you have convened. I would like to thank you, because I think that you have chaired this committee in a thoroughly professional manner. You have taken each and every one of us with you, both in public and private sessions. It is only my humble opinion, which is not worth much. However, I used to watch Margaret Hodge at Westminster, and I think that that is a really good public accounts committee. Maybe we should be a bit more like that. I think, convener, that each and every one of us round the table under your leadership and with the help of John Doyle and a few other characters along the way. I think that, with the forensic questioning of Tavish Scott, the longer-standing committee members and our resident auditor here, Colin Beattie, myself and you, I think that we have brought this committee on a level pretty close to the public accounts committee at Westminster. I know that, out there, people looked at John Doyle and thought, I do not want to be there. I think that they might be paying a little bit more attention to the handouts that they take, and they might even check their contracts for IT systems in future before signing them. However, convener, your measured, thoughtful, consensual and thoroughly professional approach, I would like to comment on that. It has been a privilege working with you, and it has been a great privilege working on this committee. Again, I would like to thank the auditor general and her staff. I would like to join in your sentiments. I thank the auditor general and her team, the clerks and everyone else who is involved, the members round the table and yourself as convener and Mary as vice-convener. I think that this committee has generally operated in the best example of a parliamentary committee. I think that we have been quite collegiate as a group across party, and I welcome that. I personally have enjoyed my five years here. We will see what the dice roll next year to see where we all end up next time. Okay, Richard Simpson. It is late to come on to this committee. I have thoroughly enjoyed my brief time on it, but over the 13 years that I have been in the Parliament, the Audit Scotland roll has been phenomenally important in every committee that I have sat on, which is mainly health, although I was on finance at the beginning as well. Without its reports, I think that we would not be providing the sort of scrutiny that we have been able to provide, and it has been a great pleasure these last few months to serve on this committee and feel that there has been the most collegiate committee that I have served on since the first Parliament, in fact. In that respect, I commend colleagues for that. First of all, I thank you for your comments. I totally agree with the comments in relation to the Auditor General and the staff's support. Of course, to my fellow members, of course, a couple of us are not coming back, so we have the privilege of looking back. Perhaps, as most other people see, originally seeing audit is a bit of a dry subject to be in, but what we have actually come across is some of the most important situations, events, and calling people to account that this Parliament has. It is not like any other committee, and I welcome the consensus, and it has been an honour and privilege to serve on it. I thank you very much for the best of luck for the future. I agree with the comments that we have made so far. The thing that really struck me about this committee in this session has really been about the collegiate fashion that members have undertaken their duties. It is unfortunate to be on committees where that has happened on a regular basis but not in its entirety. However, with this committee with the members on it, we have tried to work together as a team, and I think that everyone deserves some credit for that. It shows that, when the politicians from the various parties can come together, we can get a good job done, and we certainly have done that. My final point is that a former member of this Parliament and committee was Andrew Welsh. Andrew always, in the last session when I joined the audit committee at the very beginning of the session in 2007, said to me that the audit committee is a fabulous committee to be on. Audit Scotland provides you with the bullets, and it is up to you to fire the gun. He said that to me on a regular basis. However, Audit Scotland provides valuable information and a huge amount of assistance. I think that the members of the committee in this session have undertaken their duties with that information to hand. I thank you very much to Audit Scotland and the re-enactored about Andrew Welsh. It is something that will always stick with me in this place. Colleagues, before there is any disagreement, just finally, we have apologies from Taviescot and can now move the committee into private session.