 Good morning and welcome to the 31st meeting in 2022 of the local government housing and planning committee. I would ask all members and witnesses to ensure that all their devices are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take items four, five, six, seven and eight in private. Our members agreed. We're all agreed. Thank you. We now turn to agenda item two, which is to take evidence on the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman's annual report 2021 to 2022, and we're joined today by Rosemary Agnew, who is our ombudsman, Nicky McLean, who's a director, and Andrew Sheridan, head of improvement standards and engagement, both at the Scottish Public Service Ombudsman. I welcome our witnesses this morning, and before we turn to questions from members, I invite Rosemary to make a short opening statement. Thank you very much, and thank you for bringing this forward from normally much later in the year. I think it helps with the context of being earlier. Just a few of the things that I want to highlight that we will probably be covering later in the session. I think most fundamentally it's how we're doing in terms of Covid recovery. We sent you an update a short while ago, particularly on the backlog of cases that we had. We're seeing quick improvements now that we have all our staffing in place, and hopefully some encouraging news on that. Wider than ourselves, we're still seeing some sectors, most notably health, struggling to an extent, partly with coming out of Covid, but also with other things like staffing levels, demands on their service, and this is having a knock-on effect on us as well, because they're not always able to respond to our inquiries as quickly as we would like. We're actively engaged in developing our child-friendly complaints. This is not something that is statutory yet. It's in anticipation of it becoming statutory through the UNCRC incorporation, and we've been given extra resources for that by the Scottish Government. Over and above that, one of the most strategically impactful things at the moment is the increasing complex policy and legislative landscape. There are a number of quite significant pieces of legislation coming through the national care service agent, patient safety commissioner, human rights bill, and there are other reviews also on the review that Dame Sue Bruce is doing on the scrutiny landscape for care. What we are finding with those is that they are all looking at different things in relation to complaints. We are very much focused on accessibility at the first stage, and we welcome that focus. However, there is increasingly a concern that this is becoming even more labyrinthine for service users to pick their way through as well. There is also some possibility within some of the legislative changes that some of the additional powers that we've mentioned before may be enacted through other acts. At the moment, we've paused our report on the further powers just to give it a few more weeks to see where that works going. We haven't just been doing complaints, but we do lots of other things, too. We've completely redesigned and relaunched the complaints handling training that we provide, and Andrew will probably tell us a bit more about that later. We've moved to an online delivery method, which so far seems to be going well. We also are conscious that, as digital services develop, it's really important to be on top of your data. We have a very ambitious data project under way that started towards the end of last year, and this is about leveraging greater value from our data, but we are also able to engage more meaningfully with other groups such as the sharing intelligence for health and care group. With our Scottish welfare fund team, they were impacted a lot during the reporting year because of self-isolation support grants, but we are now facing different issues as that grant has been stopped, and we are working through the tail end of those cases. This is related to the cost of living crisis. There is increased demand for crisis grants, and this is coupled with out-of-date Government guidance, which is making processing of them more complex than it should be. This is particularly in relation to how to calculate need. Again, we can touch on that further. My final point comes back to where we started with resources. We have welcomed the additional resource from the SPCB to help us with the Covid recovery, and it has enabled us to really positively address that, but it has also enabled us to do other work as well, such as tackling our really oldest cases. We have worked through those, and we are very much on top of that work compared to where we were at the end of the reporting year and the end of the year before that. We can see that volumes of complaints have received our rising, and by the end of the year, we anticipate them being at pre-Covid levels again. During Covid lockdown and before lockdown, we were already putting efficiency changes in place. We were already changing some of our processes. We do not know, for certain, how effective they will be post Covid when we are in normal running, if you like. At the moment, things are looking promising, I think that it is there to say. That has touched on most of the things that we are likely to pick up and I am happy to take any questions about them. Thank you very much, Rosemary. It was good to hear your opening statement and have you flag up a few things, like the increasing complexity of legislation and what workloads might come out of that. I would like to begin, because you were closing there with the piece about complaints, and it is good to hear that you do more than work on complaints. I would like to focus on complaints. I think that the committee would be interested to hear that we note in our papers that public service complaints received by the ombudsman increased by 17 per cent between 2020 to 2021 and 2021 to 2022, and you touched on that a little bit. Could you expand on what the reasons for this increase are and have any new trends being identified in the recent case figures? I would say that the increase is probably not due to increased demand overall. I think that it is more of a reflection of a decrease in demand during the first year of lockdown. What we found was that, in the previous year, the number of complaints that the first year of lockdown went down quite a lot. Our demand during that year fell. In 2021, for example, we saw fewer health-related cases. They began to pick up in 2021-22, and they continue to pick up. I think that it is probably a combination of some increased demand, but also demand going back to where it was pre-Covid. Some of that will be a reflection on public bodies themselves working through their complaints. I think that that is most likely, if you want to add anything to that, Nikki. I was just going to add that the parliamentary health services ombudsman carried out some research around this. The research showed that people were more reluctant to complain particularly about health service during Covid. That gives us a clear indicator that that is, as Rosemary says, partially the picture here. That makes sense, does it not? The context made that change. I now like to move on to waiting times. When we met in March, you told the committee that too many people are still waiting too long to have their complaints looked at. I would be interested to hear from you what has changed since March, given that the SPSO website still warns of a nine-month delay. What impact is there still having on people's willingness to progress complaints? It is a positive move. I think that just summarising from the end of March, we had 800, 804 cases waiting for allocation, and the waiting time at that point was 11 months. I have to stress that that was not the waiting time for every single complaint. Cases get triaged so we identify those where there is a particularly vulnerable person or an on-going health issue, for example, or whether there is a significant public interest because it might impact on more than just the complainer. They go through a more fast-tracked route. They are currently taking up to 12 weeks, but are likely to have had some work done on them before they are allocated. In terms of the cases that do not get fast-tracked in that way, it is a bit frustrating. If we had been appearing at the end of the week, we would have been able to say eight months, because there are one or two cases that are probably going to be allocated this week from that. We now have 384 cases in our allocation pool compared to the 800-odd that we started with. As of yesterday, it was nine months, almost eight. Our oldest case, once they are allocated, is said that we have also been working on older cases as well. We have only got one that is over two years old now. That one is relatively near its conclusion. Part of what we have been doing, as well as clearing as far as we can our old cases, which has freed up investigator time to take allocation of new cases, we have the additional resource that is focusing on our project for the allocation. It has dealt with 367 cases, because, obviously, there are still things coming in. We have found that, over the past six weeks, since we last wrote to you at the end of October, because we have the whole team in and trained, we are beginning to get through them much quicker and get them allocated. I say all other things being equal at this point. I cannot ever say something that it will definitely be, but if nothing else major hits us during the winter, we are quite confident that, with our additional resources, we will be on top of that. The resources are only for a finite time, so we have that for a year, over two reporting years, but we are confident that we will... I feel like we have it under control, but I am confident that it will be as good as clear by the end of this reporting year. The one thing that I think is worth emphasising, though, relates to our performance indicators. Our key performance indicator for our oldest cases is that we aim to do close 85 per cent of complaints in 260 working days, which is a year, effectively. Last year, we only achieved 31 per cent. This year, we anticipate still not meeting that, but that, if you like, is a planned thing, because we have been focusing on these older cases. It is not ideal. I am very grateful to people for their patience when we explain what the delays are and why they have occurred with our older decisions. The direction of travel is good. We have done lots on the unallocated cases and the times are coming down. They seem to be coming down roughly a month for each month, which is good news. There certainly is good news, and I definitely agree with you that it is the right direction of travel. One of the things that, as a committee, we were wondering about is that the website has the... That is where we discovered last week it was 10 months, this week it is nine, and if we were at the end of this week, as you are saying, it would be eight months. We were wondering about that. People arrive on the website and they see that the waiting time is nine months or eight months. Could that be a deterrent for people wanting to engage in complaints? I wonder if there is a way to actually parse that out a bit more so that people can understand, or is there something on the website where people can understand that you have this fast-tracking process that, in a good number of cases, can be 12 weeks? We do have information about tell us if there is something that you think we need to look at sooner. We also ask people to tell us if something changes. I think that it probably does put some people off, but the other thing that I have been aware of is more correspondence from constituency MSPs asking about this very thing. We are quite open about why we are there, what we are doing and what we advise them to advise their constituents is to make the complaint so that we can look at it, because sometimes the complaint will come to us and it perhaps needs to go back to the public body first, or it might actually be out of jurisdiction. Those sort of cases we would process quite quickly. It is the ones that go through all the jurisdictional tests that remain unallocated. I think that it might be naive to say that it does not affect some people, because I think that it does, but we, in all our communication and our communication with representatives, try to encourage people to do these complaints. The other important thing I think for encouraging people is that it enables us to spot some of the trends, like are we getting more complaints about a particular sector? Are we getting more complaints about a particular issue? I am sure to answer that yes, it probably does, but we are doing our best to communicate to as many parties as we can about it. Great, thanks for that. I am now going to move on to bringing in my colleagues and questions from, oh sorry, Willie Coffey's got a quick supplementary. Thanks very much, convener. Good morning, Rose-Marie and your colleagues. I just wonder if you could clarify something for me. We have been discussing that it could take nine months to begin an assessment process of a complaint, is that right? Is that the period of time that takes until you begin to assess? No, it is at a particular stage. When complaints come into the office, about 45 per cent of them are actually handled at an initial assessment, so we will make sure that they have already complained to the appropriate public body. We will look at any jurisdictional issues, are they out of time? Should they be going through a different route or to a different organisation? The assessment has often started or starts at that point. We often have made some initial inquiries to get some additional information, like if we haven't got the response from the public body to their stage 2 complaints, so it's not the first time it's looked at. Of course, at the end of this initial assessment, we are triaging cases as well to make sure that those that really should be fast tracked are identified. They have had some work done on them, but we have reached a point where, if they are in jurisdiction, they are not classified as a priority. Obviously, all cases are a priority, but in comparison and relatively, they are not in the priority cases. Who does the nine months then mean? It means from, basically, when we get the complaint, it's at that assessment point to when we then allocate it. I'm sorry, it must be me up. Sorry, if I complain to you today about something, what does the nine months mean? It won't be looked at for nine months? It means from the point that we've initially assessed it and said it's for us, and it goes into that pool of unallocated cases. That was where the nine months is. We will already have done some work on it before then, so some cases actually are being handled very quickly, but from the point that we say, I'm sorry, it's going to be unallocated and it won't be allocated for up to nine months, but we tell people right at the outset when they come to us that there is a delay, so if it's sooner, that's a bonus. Could I just clarify? The clock starts as soon as someone brings the complaint. For cases that you will take forward and investigate, that's what this applies to. For cases that are out with the scope, which is quite a substantial number of the complaint you get, do those folk get an early indication that you're not taking it forward? They don't have to wait nine months to be told you're not taking something forward, do you? Those are told pretty much within, usually within a few weeks, because it seems inherently unfair to keep something for nine months and then tell somebody you're not going to look at it. I'm sorry, one further clarification. It's not necessarily the case with some of these cases that are also resolved. We achieve resolution for individuals as well, even at that early stage, so it's not necessarily always we can't do anything for you. It may be that we've secured a resolution for someone as well. It might be that my team would be involved with the body that the complainants came from, so there will be somebody involved in that case. Although we're not taking it through to an investigation, so there will still be some work going on with the body to maybe that there's not enough information or there's some learning that needs to be done or some support that's put in, so it's quite a... We triage our cases the same as we expect bodies to do it as well, so there's a bit of give-and-take there and we will continue to work. It's just the ones that require that complex investigation. There can be up to nine months before it's allocated. That clears that up. Thanks very much. Thanks Willie for getting that detail. I just want to point out that we've heard that in a few days time it will be eight months and month on month hopefully it's going to be less and less over time as you have the additional resource to take on the work. Now we're going to move to questions from Marie McNair. Thank you. Good morning panel. I'm just going to target my questions relating to staff. I'm not from the annual report of 2021. I recorded the total staff absent days of 1100 across the total of 90 staff. This comes out of an average of 12.2 sick days per staff member and it's obviously almost double the rate in 2020-21. Why is this and how does this compare with other Scottish public bodies and have sickness levels improved? The short answer is we had some long-term sick but I'm a bit wholesome going to us and I'm sure she wouldn't mind. Yes so it's exactly that. It's just simply that we had a small number of long-term absences but if you look at our sickness absence rates for non-long-term absences it's lower than the public sector average. Thank you for clarifying that. My next question obviously is about turnover of staff employed was like 13.8 in 2021 and do you know how that compares to other public bodies as well as how it compares over the previous years? I don't think we have specific numbers for it but what I have observed through talking with public bodies because staffing is a real issue across the public sector and in conversations with other ombudsmen as well. What we have seen is a shift in the labour market I think particularly during lockdown we saw for example lifestyle choices. I want to change what I'm doing, complete lifestyle choices. We've seen more people take early retirement or change their working patterns because I think work-life balance really came under the spotlight. We tend to, I would say lose because I feel like it's a loss, lose people to better jobs so some of our staff go off to get promotion better jobs in other places and it's a combination of all of those but I would say fundamentally like other areas of the public sector as a lot of lifestyle decisions, work-life balance decisions and some either early retirement or early for us because a number of our staff will have come from somewhere else for example like the police or the NHS and have a pension anyway so I can't give you numbers sorry but those are I think the reasons fairly much in common with other ombudsmen and public sector. It was 13.8%. Is that a piece of work you're going to carry out then you know to compare other public bodies or do you have that data just now? We don't have the data just now. It's not something that we specifically looked at I don't think. So through we're members of the ombudsmen association which covers the UK and Ireland HR interest group so we compare data fairly regularly and as Rosemary says we know from discussions with certainly other similar bodies that what we were seeing was not out of line with what other organisations were seeing for the reasons that Rosemary described what we are now experiencing alongside other organisations is that levels are returning to normal so I think it was a particular period in time. Okay thank you for that with other questions give me a look. Thanks Marie and now I'm going to bring in Willie Coffey in a series of questions. Thanks very much again convener. Just on the budgetary situation Rosemary you mentioned in your initial remarks that you had some additional resources to help you with the Covid recovery issue and problem and so on. Is that on top of the 2.1% uplift that you've reported in your report? Yeah the Covid staff there fixed contracts for that period of time and it's a moving in a way a moving feast for us in terms of staffing levels because if they rise they're generally associated with taking on additional functions so when we took on the whistleblowing function we took on additional staff we have some additional resource for developing child friendly complaints we were given some additional resource for the welfare fund because of volumes so our baseline staff actually doesn't really change but what we see as a reflection of these other things that we're taking on which is where that rise is more likely to come from. Do you think you've got enough resource really to deliver the service that you're trying to claw this backlog back about have you got enough resource within the team to make that progress? I think the resource for the backlog is going to serve its purpose. If you were to ask me do I have enough resource well the answer is we never have enough resource but I think it's we will always deliver a service we will always deliver a quality service what tends to get impacted more are things like timescales you can only do so many investigations and the area where if I was given more resource would actually be in some of Andrew's team where we are developing training we do advice and guidance we do a lot of stakeholder engagement because those are the areas where I think we add the greatest value where this is coupled with our support and intervention policy so I talked and said we're tracking data and part of what we use our own data for is so that we can target resources where we see themes and trends with particular organisations or particular sectors because it's part of the current years main aims is increasing our stakeholder engagement but those are the sort of resources that you can't say they did x number of complaints that year and one of I think our challenges is actually how we measure impact rather than output so probably enough resource to keep our complaints service going subject to our backlog being cleared but no I never have enough resources but I am mindful that we have to use the ones we have very efficiently so we're constantly learning and improving ourselves and trying to do more with the same or more with less but probably is a good word I think I'll accept. Just turning to some other issues that came out of your report you've noted that there's been a mark to improvement and how public bodies themselves handle complaints in recent years what's happening in there what's causing that. Yeah it's interesting because what's happened during lockdown was the efficiency of complaint handling by public bodies reduced understandably because certainly very much in the early days there and during this reporting year there were resources being at front line put to other things within public bodies particularly health there were a few public bodies who advertised on their websites they were no longer handling complaints Andrews team wrote to them and contacted them very quickly and we gave advice and support on how to look at things but fundamentally because model complaints handling has been in Scotland for such a long time now and because we've had this complaint standards engagement for for several years now what we're seeing is the actual quality of many investigations at local level is improving considerably so by the time we get a complaint it's often because the complainant is unhappy with the actual decision or it's something that when we look at it we think do you know what that was that was all right that investigation the sort of things that it identified if a public body identifies service failure has identified learning is taking measures to put things right we will check and make sure that they're doing what they say they do but we don't take those to a very detailed investigation we will make initial inquiries we will check that what we've been told seems accurate if it's a health related one we often get some advice from a clinical advisor but fundamentally i don't think it's fair to put somebody through a long investigation for something that is likely to come out with the same result especially where the public body has already identified the learning and i think what we're seeing is the culmination of the benefit of model complaints handling it's time for a refresh of that but it's definitely working okay thank you for that detailed explanation and lastly from me it possibly it says that there's an increase in the total number of complaints received over the year maybe that's the Covid factor maybe the climb back from the Covid experience i could explain that but i'd welcome your comments rose to my rate but fewer are being investigated so what would the reason be for more complaints come in but fewer being investigated yeah some of it is that the volume is i think the recovery if you like it related to Covid some of it is because we as niki mentioned earlier we've been working hard at resolution and trying to resolve cases so we're resolving more cases without investigation not formal mediation but taking a mediation type approach we're much more active in asking people what would resolve this for you so that's one area that is reducing the number going for this detailed investigation the the cases i've just mentioned those where we we think that there will be no further benefit for the complainer sometimes there may be a case like that where there's a wider public interest we always pick those those up but i think it's this combination of handling them differently in the earlier stages combined with taking a more resolution-based approach so the knock-on effect is that those that actually require the detailed investigation because you'll notice our uphold rate has also risen and i think that's because the those that we do take for that detailed investigation are more likely to be the more complex issues that predominantly a lot of them are health related so they will require a lot of clinical advice and support in those but but fundamentally we are targeting our resources where they add the greatest value i think is probably the best summary of that okay thank you very much for that thank you thank you thank you really and yeah interesting to hear about the the you know the fact that we've got model complaints handling and that you're noting that it's maybe time for a refresh on that i'm going to bring in paul mcleannan with some questions thank you can be no you may or may not know that there's a few of us ex-councillors on here as well and obviously the local government committee we're interested in in the nature of complaints made about services provided by local authorities there was an increase of 25 between 2021 and 2021-22 and obviously we've got a breakdown of that and i think we're looking at housing planning and so on i would just want to if you want to say anything about that if there's any trends that have come out on rose particular in that particular year in that regard and just say a little bit more on rose may probably come to yourself first of all just for a bit context i can't say that there's specific trends in the sense in this reporting year in the sense that i'm detecting people are complaining about different things so we are seeing beginning to see cases relating to Covid a lot of the local authority ones as well will relate to social care because that that will come through that route i'm not conscious of any obvious trends but i don't know if you you've picked up anything from your team and drew no so my team meet the local authority complain handlers networks and there's no obvious what one of the pieces of work would do is we look at data from across the local authorities and we try and pull out themes and trends there's nothing specific i think and it probably picks up on the last question as well what we've had a focus on is making sure that public bodies are signposting to us as we've came out of Covid as well so that might be an indication on why things have went up as well but the work that we're doing with them is to try and help them analyse their own internal themes and trends and actually one of the points and we reference it in our notes as well is we're starting to look at the hidden data we're you know we're very ambitious with how we look at our data and our data maturity project but so some of the things that we're working with local authorities because that's one of the biggest networks is you know just because something isn't there doesn't mean that there's not an issue with it so some of those things are now starting to come through so it's much more widespread than it being focused around schools or you know complaints about place requests or anything like that so we're getting quite a quite an eclectic volume of complaints that are coming in. That's good so i really watch and brief i think for next year as well to see what comes out next year but no thank you for that. The next question is really just talking at the end about it's the own initiative investigative powers and i don't know if you can just explain a little bit more about what that means in practice and i know that it's already in place in Wales and Northern Ireland where do you think Scotland would benefit from that? Yeah if i could summer own initiative is where you conduct an investigation without first having had a complaint and if i could summarize what sort of investigation it would be it would be giving a voice to the voiceless because there are vulnerable groups vulnerable people who don't make complaints we don't always know why they don't make complaints sometimes it's it's structural you know if you're homeless it's very difficult to make a complaint even to your local authority and what own initiative would give us is the opportunity using our data using trends to actually investigate things that have not been complained about to us so for example the one the Welsh ombudsman did an own initiative investigation into homeless during Covid but we have some areas where it's the blaring lack of complaints and for example from female prisoners we don't get complaints and i can't believe that life is so perfect that you have nothing to complain about um there are other types of of issue that we would be interested in looking at um so this own initiative it frees you up from having to have an individual complaint it also means you can take a wider focus um because when you investigate a complaint brought by an individual quite rightly it is focused on them and the outcomes that they had um it would enable us as well for example if we found something major in a complaint against say one NHS board we could use that as a basis for investigating the issue rather than having to wait and hope we get a complaint about other boards as well and the other side of this is i think it's it's a much more effective resource wise as well as impact wise because you can put one one investigative or small team of investigators on looking at something that is likely to have much more of a systemic impact across a sector or across a type of issue rosmyn can i just in terms of getting that i can see a little bit more in what the legislation just would be required to get to that stage because i mean it does seem what you're explaining that a very worthwhile way to progress it would either take a change to our primary legislation or there are so many other legislative things going through at the moment that it's it's it's not impossible that for example the work that's being done on the human rights bill might actually give us that power through another primary route but at the moment it's it's too early to say that that will definitely be the case because it's still under consultation but it's not something that can be done through secondary legislation for us thank you that's very helpful thanks convener i think that that's very useful to hear that there's potentially is there anything else other than the human rights bill that we could see you getting the powers in this session i think that's probably the most likely the other bills going through i think have a different type of impact that is probably less positive okay thank you mark come in thanks convener just to carry on that line of questions about additional powers if you had the power for since the public value investigation would you see any crossover between yourselves and the auditor general in the work that they do i don't think there would be crossover because they'd be looking at different things they're looking more at best value whereas we look very much at service delivery but i think before you start any investigation you have to do you know set your terms of this sort you would be setting in terms of reference you would be looking at what was already out there ensuring that you weren't doing something that somebody else was doing but we we have a different focus so i don't think there would be a crossover i think they would be complementary okay okay it's sorry i was just going to add actually in the northern island legislation for own initiative they were they set out quite clear criteria around when when you would be conducting your own initiatives particularly to avoid that kind of situation from occurring so you could build it in to the legislation okay thanks you've talked about the difficulty with you know the budget never been enough you know taking on extra responsibilities talk about chair friendly complaints and national whistleblowing office just to ask what kind of burden any new powers responsibilities whether that was the public value investigations you've taken complaints in any form what burden that would put on your office's budget and essentially what additional budget would be required to fulfill those new potential powers own initiative i think are are quite interesting because if i look at how the other ombudsman the welsh and northern Irish ombudsman they're funded for a very small team so one has one additional investigator i don't think there's a specific funding model it maybe we could say we would like an extra person it maybe that we would hope that we could divert some of our own investigative resource from the complaints because one would hope that it would have a wider impact could have the opposite of course it could drive complaint numbers up but the other thing is that we're funded quite differently to other ombudsman in the UK so because we have the funding through our corporate body we don't get any funding for contingency so there is a contingency funding and it's contingency funding that has paid for our additional our additional investigators for for the Covid recovery and i think that in line with niki's point about and your question about public value investigations one of the things that is possible that we actually make a business case to do a particular investigation to show what the benefit of that would be but at this stage i think we're more at the point of the principle but we're not looking at huge teams of people in the same way that we have been looking at taking on additional functions i would also hope that when we have these powers we have the ability to work with other organisations so there may be investigations that we can do jointly with other other bodies who already look at investigating issues in a wider sense but i think it will require some some creativity in getting the best value for the best output okay thank you thanks mark and now going to bring in annie wells thank you convener good good morning panel i'm interested in the type of scottish welfare fund cases that are being reviewed for example what are the most common reasons why the review comes to yourselves and we've heard that there's relatively high hold-up rates for community care grants and self-isolation support grants and would this imply that local authorities are making mistakes or rushing their assessments of the welfare fund applications i'm going to ask niki if she'll answer it give my voice a rest if that's all right yeah thank you so i think one of the issues that local authorities would raise is that the sbso has more time to consider cases than they do themselves and i would i would agree with that but i think what that means is that in terms of us upholding cases we are able to sometimes gather more evidence we do conduct our work more than local authorities do over the phone so i think that's really important that you you have that contact with applicants directly and it's been less so more people are moving online now but i think having that contact does naturally mean that you garner more information from the applicant than you may well do at first and second tier so i think i think there are a you know a variety of reasons but i do think the way that we conduct our operation does mean that we are able to get a fuller picture and therefore more likely to uphold the guidance that local authorities and ourselves follow is Scottish government guidance and that's currently out of date we periodically will feed back where we think something could be clarified and i understand that the delay there is because they're waiting for the outcome of the review into the welfare fund but that can sometimes add time for us and for local authorities if it's not entirely clear what what the guidance is saying or it might involve something going back to them because we've looked at the guidance obviously we see an interpretation from all local authorities and i think that does have some contributory factor as well as the first tier and second tier as nikki said i'm happy with that convener thank you thanks annie and now um miles briggs thank you convener good morning um thank you for joining us um i want to ask a couple of questions with regards to whistleblowers um and specifically start with why there were so few cases being received by the independent national whistle blowing officer um and whether or not you had any thoughts on that or lots of thoughts um yeah i think when we established when the legislation was established we went live with whistleblowing right in the middle of lockdown and i think that probably had an impact in the short term um what we found initially was we had quite a lot of inquiries um but the pattern that seems to be emerging more now um is obviously we had our speak up week that we we did with local authority with the boards and the nhs um we question whether the nhs themselves have promoted it as much as they should be doing and that was one of the things that led to the speak up week um we also um are although the whistleblowing champions the non-exec directors are obviously not in our jurisdiction this is a question that we have put to them as well um it's not clear whether it's because of record keeping we don't think it is we are seeing numbers go up but i think there is still part of this evolution is probably the best way of putting it of this building trust and confidence to speak up because what we are not we don't have enough information about yet is whether there is more just speaking up without the need to whistle blow and i don't think we will get a fuller picture until you know the next few months and things go by now one of the things that we are finding is we've we've handled our whistleblowing complaints slightly differently to our public service complaints in the very early stage because what we hear from um potential whistleblowers is either they're saying i'm anonymous i don't want to be named or it's i don't really have confidence or i i don't know that i want to do this because it's a huge thing to do i mean however obvious and however well protected you are it's a very courageous thing to do um now public service complaints if something is premature it's not being through the local process first um we send it back basically we ask them to go back to the public body um with whistleblowing concerns we've introduced something called a monitored referral where if something has not been to the um the usually an NHS board or an NHS organisation first um we've a number of options the extreme option is we investigate in the first instance and if something is so significant and we think that there would not be a reasonable investigation or we think that there are other public interest reasons we would look at them but the majority that we refer on are these monitored referrals and what we are doing is we with the whistleblowers permission are sending it to the organisation on their behalf we remind them of their responsibilities to protect the whistleblower and any others from detriment we remind them of their responsibilities under the whistleblowing standards some of them we just refer on others we might refer on with a bit of direction like you know if there is a particular concern about detriment we might ask them to tell us what measures they're going to put in place to protect the whistleblower they've been I would say quite successful because we've not seen many of them come back to us but where I think we will see a gradual increase is we need some cases to be able to say look it's okay it works so we're just about to issue our second report and I think if we can get more cases ourselves where there is an outcome that will start building trust and confidence but there is still some work to do and this is you know some of the work that Andrew's team will be doing on stakeholder engagement about you know really embedding those standards and really reassuring you know NHS staff and others that it's okay to speak up and if it's not okay something will be done about it yeah that's that's very helpful sorry Andrew I think one of the reasons that has probably seemed low is that there was a lot of baselining of how boards were engaging across the piece that the team did to begin with that led on to us having a speak up week so really sharing that information making sure that people were aware of what they should be doing and getting a kind of feel of where the levels were in each individual also bringing them together in a network and chatting through it so coming out of that we're now starting to see some data where you know there's more awareness raising you know we've provided resources there was lots of topics online there was speakers etc so we should see that filter through gradually and again that work of the on-going engagement with my team and really speaking to boards and saying you know direct them to this example of good practice or here's a case study that with anonimide you can see that you can share this that's something that will really help as we move on yeah that's helpful it'd be good to have some feedback on what that looks like and have you looked at any other I take on board what you've said in terms of launching this during the pandemic but have you looked at other whistleblowing systems in other parts of the UK and whether or not is learning from that as well we engaged quite a lot with the national guardians scheme in england and there were things that we picked up from them actually the speak up week was was something that we reflected on that worked well for them their patterns in the early days as well were very similar to ours slow start and then it picked up as confidence in the system grew we also engaged with for example the the irish police ombudsman because they take whistleblowing concerns in the first instance so we picked up as much good practice as we could but procedurally we're doing it so differently better I think I think our system is good because it has a statutory basis and it's inherently designed to protect whistleblowers and a much wider definition of a whistleblower so we've picked up good practice we we share and liaise and meet with them but in terms of comparisons I think beyond the things that we've already done there's probably not a lot more process wise that we would be able to pick up I think the key thing for me is that they the complaints require a lot of detailed and empathetic conversation and I think it was the irish police ombudsman said one of the things you'll find is what whistleblowers come to you with is rarely what they're whistleblowing about and I think what I would hope we through our work and through Andrew's team instill at a local level is listen and act rather than spend lots and lots of time angsting and analysing complex picture often and just finally I wanted to ask my colleague Margaret Mitchell in the last session of parliament broke forward an apologies bill and I just wondered what impact that had potentially had given the pandemic it's maybe not had its full potential realised yet but wondering if that's making it easier for members of the public to receive an apology without having to escalate through complaint systems as well it's a hard one to answer that because inherently we through model complaints you know look at something in the first instance try and respond quickly and a good apology is part of redress I would say it probably does have impact but it's hidden because we so apology focused ourselves as well so I'm sorry I can't really answer it more than that. I think as well we as rosemary said earlier we've refreshed how we deliver all our training from good complaints handling to investigation skills and a big focus in that is apologising as soon as you realise that something has went wrong or procedurally maybe out of the counter so in sessions we delivered at the start of last week there was a big focus at the start of that for bodies to apologise for each individual point not as a whole so to pick it up and to say actually we can see that this has went wrong and we apologize so we were very much on the front foot with that in terms of our support with them. We've got a few more minutes a couple more minutes and I wanted to just ask if there's anything we haven't covered that you want to make sure we hear but also just to pick up on in your opening statement rosemary you were talking about how you raised concerns about the increasing complexity of the kind of legislative landscape and and that there are concerns that's going to become more labyrinthine for users so I wonder if there's anything there you'd like to raise now so that we're aware of that or anything else. Yeah if I may I'll touch on that and also on the work we're doing on child friendly complaints this is not statutory yet we've been given extra resource to develop some guidance that will sit within model complaints handling and the project manager for that is in Andrew's team done a lot of taking very much a co-design approach this brings me to the comment I made about model complaints handling and refresh because what has changed since model complaints handling went in is a greater focus on being rights-based and what I think we're going to learn from doing that this work on child friendly complaints is about taking a rights-based approach to complaint handling and this brings in all the things like resolution a different type of conversation we are well on our way we've done the initial design work and are in the process of doing some drafting that will go out for consultation so that is it's a very positive experience but I think we've a lot to learn about how we then look at model complaints handling generally because we would like this to become the normal way of doing things it was necessary and absolutely right that in the earlier days of model complaints handling there was a big focus on process get the process right because before model complaints handling came in there was apparently one organisation had seven stages so we think we've got the process mostly there the rights-based approach brings in different concerns things like accessibility how you get to make a complaint how you actually get to raise an issue about service rather than make a complaint so that's actually quite exciting work for us the legislative and policy context those is a little more concerning so just to give you a feel for the sort of things that are currently going to impact on us there's the mental health scrutiny insurance review I have to refer to my notes for this otherwise I forget them so this is following David Strang's review of mental health services so we have also worked with the mental welfare commission on the mental health law review broadly speaking the conclusion there is complaints handling is okay but we do have these areas where we can improve it particularly accessibility there's the independent review of inspection scrutiny and regulation for the national care service this is Dame Sue Bruce whose information gathering at the moment it's unclear what the impact of that will be and this I think is the difficulty there are all of these things happening almost in isolation there's the patient safety commissioner bill which we're about to respond to the consultation on we're supportive of the concept but again we have concerns about how these different bills are joining up or not joining up in terms of the scrutiny landscape this national care service bill itself and we gave evidence to the health and support committee there's the incorporation of the UNCRC which is the foundation for looking at children's rights and child friendly complaints the uncertainty there is when it would have effect because there's a huge ask on the public sector here in terms of incorporating this and this is another of the concerns all of these things are happening when there's lots of other things happening there's the human rights bill the actual outcome is unclear but we think that it has the potential to be significant for us because it's very supportive of some of the things that we've said we would benefit from like own initiative and then there's the mental health law review and those are just the ones at the top of our list and I think the underlying point here is we keep on top of what's going on we try to look at how it impacts with a complaints perspective but what we are concerned about is the not obvious co-ordination of the impact for the person at the centre of this where they go who they go to and and how is it made easy for them so that in a nutshell is all of the things that we have concerns about how they're co-ordinating and we will continue to respond to each of the consultations thanks very much for that and that's really helpful to hear both about the direction of travel for the child friendly complaints but also the complexity and your concern about the impact on the person using those services so thank you so much for coming in today it was good to hear the evidence and get some clarity on some of those details I'm now going to suspend the meeting for five minutes before we move on to our next item of business we now turn to agenda item three which is to take evidence as part of our on-going work on understanding barriers to participation in local politics the Scottish Government recently published its report following a demographic survey of local election candidates and we're joined today by Scottish Government officials Arfan Iqbal who's the principal researcher in constitution international and migration analysis and Maria McCann who is the head of the elections team and I welcome our witnesses to the meeting before we turn to questions from members I would like to invite Maria to make a short opening statement thank you very much yes good morning everyone and many thanks for this invitation to come to talk about the local government candidate survey 2022 the idea for the survey arose out of responses to the electoral reform consultation which took place in 2017 going into 2018 as part of the consultation ministers met with groups representing women people with disabilities and those promoting race equality events were also held with young people's organisations including the scotish youth parliament there was universal consensus on the lack of data relating to the profile of candidates at local government elections we recognise that gaining a better understanding of the demographic characteristics of electoral candidates and those who win elections is important in helping us assess the representativeness of our candidates and elected members and how that compares to the communities they serve and so we worked with the electoral management board the electoral commission COSLA the improvement service as well as a range of elect equality stakeholders to develop a survey collecting diversity data of candidates standing at the May 2022 local government elections all 2,548 candidates standing for election were invited to take part in the voluntary survey on candidate diversity characteristics it's fair to say that the survey was promoted intensively the electoral commission the EMB and the Scottish parliament political parties panel all encouraged candidates to complete the survey as you will be aware 720 responses were received which represents a response rate of 28.2 percent we were disappointed of course however partners were not surprised as the response rate compared favourably with other similar surveys and the results do suggest that the concerns we all share about under representation are well founded there appears to be notable divergence between the profile of respondents as compared to the overall population with regard to sex age education disability status and socioeconomic background since the evidence from a low response rate is valuable how much better would it be if we had a higher response rate the voluntary model consistently yields this level of response or lower we would be very interested in your views on how that might be addressed in the future thank you thank you very much maria for the opening statement and now we'll turn to questions from the committee and i'd like to begin by asking a bit about the overall process could you describe to the committee how the data was collected the project timetable as well as the roles of local authorities political parties and the Scottish Government in the data collection process so the regards to the timescales i'll just start with that so the survey itself was launched in February of 2022 and it was closed in June of the same year so with regards to the design process there was initial meetings that took place with stakeholders over the summer of 2021 up until the end of 2021 at which point a proposal document was published on the Scottish Government website which set out the intentions behind the survey as well as presenting an opportunity for stakeholders and others to respond and to provide feedback subsequent to that there was some testing done on to the survey and some changes made and like i said it was finally launched in February of 2022 and we did extend the deadline for the survey to the end of June i think initially it was planned to close at the start of June just to give candidates an extra opportunity to respond and then from June to October we undertook the analysis and publication took place at the report in November 2022 so along the way there were a number of different stakeholder organisations that were involved and partners including i believe as maria has mentioned the electoral management board the electoral commission cosla and the improvement service as well as these groups including scotland and gender and equal representation coalition and the poverty and inequality commission as well as the scottish parliament political parties panel we're all consulted and fed into the process as well so scottish government had overall responsibility for carrying out the survey and analysing responses and publishing the report thanks very much for that and you mentioned the work done prior to the survey going out i'll be interested to hear about the groups that were involved in the design of the survey and the project more generally so the equality coalition brings together a wide range of groups so that was a very helpful forum and so we took feedback and made amendments and the questions went round all of the bodies mentioned and there was a lot very useful input and things were adjusted in order to you know to reflect the views of those with an interest thank you i also would like to pick up on the discrepancy on the age sex discrepancy in Canada it's under 34 so it's welcome to see the intersectional analysis being undertaken on this data and vital we continue to do so fully to fully understand the complex and multiple barriers to elected office for many in scottland faith one such insight i'd like to hear more about is on the significantly higher proportion of men under 34 standing for election than women this shows that any perceived progress that engender representation amongst younger people is not the case i'm keen to hear if any further analysis was or can be done to identify causes for this discrepancy so this committee can progress work to address those barriers so one of the bits of analysis that we did was to compare the age profiles and sex of candidates so combining those two factors allowed us to identify that the discrepancy between males and females is particularly acute at the younger age range and as well as at the older age range it seems to be less prevalent in middle age so i would say that you know this is descriptive research that we've undertaken so it is not designed to allow us to determine the reasons that stuff are happening it's more to describe what the situation is as it currently stands and so we would just be speculating if we were to try and determine what might be driving this if we wanted to explore that further we would probably need to do qualitative work but this survey sort of represents the first stage in this process i suppose analysis to identify areas where we might want to drill down further and undertake such additional research thank you for that i'd like to now move to questions from Marie McNair thank you convener good morning panel i'm going to just touch on the kind of survey response rates so i say that survey response rate lower or higher than you expected and what do you think the reasons are for you know over the 70% that didn't respond yes well i was very ambitious thinking that we would buck the previous trend because we would reach out so much and encourage people so much so it turned out that that wasn't possible i mean we really really did use all the avenues that returning officers helped you know all the points of contact with the candidates the parties so it is it was really disappointing and as i said you know i thought oh we will get you know maybe get 40 50 or even higher because i just was so keen to to do this and to and to make it happen so i think we don't really know the reasons why i mean we have discussed it with the partners and i think one of the reasons given is that when people are campaigning they're caught up in the campaign they probably see the piece of paper and they think oh yeah we'll do that you know it's we didn't get a we got two letters from people saying that they definitely wouldn't be completing it because they didn't think it was a worthwhile exercise but only two so it wasn't low people were were writing in saying or protesting or feeding back that you know we don't want to do this so the kind of guests and that can only be a guest unless you know we actually did further work to drill down as our family's saying is that people are caught up in the campaign and and then if they don't get if they don't fill it in before they get elected um then they could still have completed it but i suppose if you don't get elected then you're not going to be looking back at your paperwork and things which is very understandable and obviously the vast majority will be in that category because um there's a lot there were a lot of candidates standing so so we are just speculating but i think that's but i suppose what partners were saying is look the electoral commission and you think the electoral commission people might be more feel more compelled to fill something in from them perhaps just because of their status as a regulator but they are getting that you know that the same kind of response so they weren't surprised at all so i think we've possibly gone as far as we can on this voluntary side of things but as you say it's always more difficult to know why people don't do something than than why they do. Thank you for that Maria. The next question obviously the survey response rates can vary significantly from 13.9 in clerk management to 71 in Orkney and why is there such a diversion? Well we found that some of the contacts in the councils in the elections team were very much you know they were focused and they were promoting it and i think some of them were thinking well as when i worked in local authority you always were mindful that there would be league tables of everything and so you know some were saying look you know give us a good performance for our council just taking ownership of it in that very kind of particular way and then others maybe didn't have the time or you know we're preoccupied with with other things obviously the run-up to these elections we're still in the pandemic people were still thinking about preparing within that kind of context so they were under a lot of pressure the the actual the actual teams but i think where they took it on locally that's where you see the good the good response rates. Thank you. Thanks Maria. I'm now going to move to questions from Annie Wells. Thank you convener good morning panel and i think one of the questions i was going to ask was about those people who didn't respond and what did you do so i think you've kind of answered you've kind of answered that question and using returning officers and electoral commission and stuff like that but the one that i will ask is how confident are statisticians at the sample of candidates who did respond are representatives of the overall candidate population and given the report concludes that it's it's also not possible to draw firm conclusions regarding representatives of candidates how useful is the survey as an evidence source for policy makers? Um so it's actually really difficult for us to say anything definitive about how representative the response is because we don't have the demographic details of people that didn't respond so we can't do that comparison i think nonetheless the report does give us a sort of indicative sense of where there might be potential issues so some of the things that Maria has already highlighted with regards to age and sex etc and we can kind of cross-reference to those against other similar types of surveys which have presented that kind of those kind of findings um so i would say this is again probably a first step towards standardised data collection for this type of information and establishes a baseline and i think that's where the real sort of value of the report is as opposed to saying anything definitive about the the candidate group overall can i just ask one more question about the people who didn't reply or who didn't respond um what else what else could be done do you think what's that the biggest factor or was there any big factor that people were saying other than the fact that they might never get elected so they don't want to be bothered was there anything any one thing that people had maybe said was the reason why they didn't want to respond no i think the only thing that came back was being caught up in the campaign and and just yeah i suppose we just feel that it wouldn't i mean we wouldn't want to repeat this on a voluntary basis you know i mean we are we had made a commitment to do it and as i say we gave it our absolute best shot um but yeah i don't think there's anything else that we could have done but yeah so interested in any ideas as to how things could go better in the in the future thank you thank you thank you thanks annie i just want to pick up pick that up maria because you've said it a number of times now you know not wanting to do it again on a voluntary basis and asking us but i wonder if you've got any thoughts i mean i'm thinking as a candidate okay i have to fill in these papers that then i take to um the um i can't remember the name now but you know so there's papers that candidates have to fill in i wonder if there's something we could do about you know at that time that you're filling in the papers to register that you want to be a candidate you're also filling out that information yes i mean i think it would be uh difficult to to make absolutely compulsory without any exceptions um and we would need to look into all the considerations of data protection etc however if ideally from it would be the case that um the it would be one of the papers required to be filled in you know that the bottom line would be that would be the the way in which we could get the data but whether that would be acceptable and there'd be many you know there'd be a great deal of work we need to do um so i suppose i was interested in your views as what your kind of instinctive reaction is to that is that proportionate is that appropriate to make a compulsory paper when obviously there are papers that have to be filled in for your nomination but you know what would it be going too far to make that a statutory requirement i think that um we will take that into our private session afterwards and give it some consideration i think it's a good question for us to reflect on thank you now going to bring in willy coffee with questions thanks very much convener and good morning to you could i just stick with the issue about statistical significance or otherwise of the survey your report says that your findings haven't been weighted and had confidence intervals applied and all of that what ultimately does that mean does it does that mean that we can't say that it's a fair and representative sample that was carried out because of that is that what you mean no i'll know so it's just kind of standard text to put that into the report to make it clear that the data hasn't been altered in any way so for some certain types of surveys you might apply weighting etc in order to ensure representativeness so we hadn't done that so it's just making it clear to people that might want to access the underlying data that it's not being sort of adjusted in any way so we would normally use techniques like that if the response rate were higher in order to ensure that the sample was either representative or in order to determine whether differences that we were seeing were significant and weren't just down to chance however due to the little response rate we thought it inappropriate to apply those kind of tests so that would give it a sort of undue level of confidence essentially so we haven't used those so like i said it's really just there more for the sort of technical audience to make it clear that there hasn't been anything done to the data but nonetheless the findings that you do find in there you know you can take them at face value essentially because you didn't apply those techniques does that or does that not compromise in terms of the messages it's it wouldn't compromise in any way right i note in the table in the report that quite a lot of the bigger authorities are well below the average in the response i mean Glasgow and Edinburgh and south North Lanarkshire are all well below the average does that tell us something about the quality of the message that we've got there it's not really representative of the broad scope of Scottish candidacy it was standing at the election i think like i'd already mentioned a previous question it's actually really difficult for us to say anything about how representative it is because we are lacking that information about the 50 60 percent or whatever that might not have responded in Glasgow so we couldn't actually compare them to those that did respond to say anything definitive so it's a bit of an unknown unfortunately and just lastly do you find that most responses came in before the election or after them if i remember correctly i think a lot of them did come in before yeah and the ones that you know do people candidates that were not successful did they tend to not respond to you at all i don't think we we know that do we do we know i wouldn't know that for sure i'll talk ahead no no unfortunately we don't know that okay right thanks thanks very much so that thank you can be thank you willy and i'm now going to bring in paul mclaren okay thank you can be not i think you can you almost touched on some of these issues but the report presents the data nationally i don't know if it can be broken down particular around about sex age agnostic disability at a local authority level i think that would be helpful and i suppose just on that i suppose it's looking around about on looking at the survey results which groups are most underrepresented and which are overrepresented again you've kind of touched on that but i don't know if you just want to say anything more on that one our fan probably come to yourself first of all yeah of course um so it had been our intention if the response rate had been hired to provide breakdowns at the local authority level but unfortunately we decided we couldn't do that because of risk of disclosure so we had the data checked by statisticians working for scottish government and came to a conclusion that it would basically risk being able to identify people and for that reason we opted not to provide that data at local authority level with regards to the groups that were over and underrepresented so the ones that we did notice so basically just in summary i guess we saw evidence for fewer females younger individuals individuals with less than degree level qualifications individuals with limiting health conditions and individuals from lower socioeconomic groups compared to the overall population of those that responded to us um although we did see one trend that was sort of contrary to that which was a higher proportion of individuals who identified as lesbian gay bisexual or in some other way compared to the overall population so we can't say for sure what that means but i guess intuitively you might assume that people that are from sort of less represented groups might be more keen to partake in these kind of surveys and make sure that their voices are heard so that might account for somebody who you've thought first yeah me i don't know if you want to add anything at all on that one no no thank you very much thank you thank you thanks paul and i'm going to move to questions from mark griffin thanks governor the research obviously focused entirely on candidates and i just wondered if there was any follow-up work planned on surveying of those who were actually successful elected to get a picture of you know how many female councillors there are how many councillors there are defined by age brackets education level social economic backgrounds i wonder if there's any follow-up work planned for the councillor cohort so we can get picture of what that looks like well we understand that the improvement service always have a candidate survey and they would be seeking to to collect that data but unfortunately there you know they've been around 21 percent or you know in the 20s as well so we may not get more from the elected members we'll need to just wait and see but that's not something that we'll be we'll be leading on because that was already in train okay appreciate that the second question i had was the percentage of respondents who self-identified this come from a working class background was 11 percent and that that seems lower to me considering the figures in the general population are you able to see what the classifications used within that how how was that defined and identified yeah of course so just to make it clear it's not individuals self identifying by what class to go by so the way that we collected that information is in line with the UK government social mobility commission guidance that they provided and the question that's specifically used in order to determine an individual's socio-economic background is to ask what that occupation of their main household era was when they were aged 14 so various research has gone to show that's the best way to sort of collect that information so once we know the occupation of that individual we can basically group it into different sort of categories and and then in turn we sort of get these wider groups of higher professional working class professional working background intermediate background or working class background and that's what's allowed us to determine this and the results did suggest that there was more people from sort of more affluent backgrounds effectively than the overall population as a whole so there's a quite a lot of background information related to this and happy to provide that in writing if that would be a fuse okay that would be helpful thanks thanks mark and i'm now going to bring in miles briggs thank you thank you for joining us today and further to those questions i wondered whether or not you're satisfied that the questionnaire and the survey reports meets stated goals around considering the issue of intersectionality in profiling candidates and whether or not that's also been just as difficult to extrapolate data from yeah so we did have a stated goal of having a look at intersectionality and i think if the response rate had been higher we probably would have added more categories into that analysis we did consider age and sex as well as sex and disability and we were able to do those because there was sufficient number of respondents to those particular questions that the analysis wouldn't be discosive in any way but given the limits due to the small response rate we weren't able to then go into other things such as ethnicity and age and sex etc because the more sort of categories you had obviously the smaller the outputs would be so yeah so we did do some intersectional analysis i think it would be preferable in the future to be able to do more but that would be reliant on a higher response rate thank you for that i think the sort of conclusion is it's going to be difficult to read into the data we do have but i wondered if any work had been done to look at other countries and how they monitor the diversity of local politicians but also candidates and if there's been any learning around that so we have looked at international comparisons but we haven't i suppose this is our first kind of attempt so i think you know we'd look at that again so it did it and it did inform our our thinking at the beginning but i think we need to go back and look and see what lessons we could perhaps learn from from other countries great thank you thanks thanks thank you very much and that concludes our our questions unless there's anything else that you want to make sure we hear thank you very much and so thank you maria and uh our fan for joining us and giving us this evidence today as we agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next two items in private i and we have no more public business today i now close the public part of the meeting