 Gweldi nhw i gyd, a ddechrau i'n ddweud i'n 21 y myfyrdd gyrfaith y Comitee yn 2014. Mae'n eich gweithio i ddweud o wybodaeth fynd i cael eu cyllidau oherwydd mae'n fynd i gyd, fel yna gilydd y system ym mwyaf. Mae'n bwysig iawn i gyd, ac mae'n rhannu cyflogol i'i gyrfaith. Mae'n ffordd i gyd, mae'n gyrfaith ei ddechrau i gyd yn fformat. Felly mae'n gyrfaith i'i gyd yma, a bod yn gwirio i'r gyrfaith, Rwy'n gŵr ddweud hynny'n 3 hynny'n 3 negatifs. 1. Llyrganeitau Pension Schim Pesafolwyr 2014, 2. SSI 2014-164, 3. Llyrganeitau Pension Sgwpan 4. Llyrganeitau Pension Sgwpan 5. safeguarding 5. Order 2014, 2. SSI 2014-184, 4. Local Authority Account Scotland Regulations 2014, 2014-2200. Members have a paper from the clerks setting like the purpose of the instruments. The Delegate Powers and Law Reform Committee consider these instruments and do several issues to our attention, which are set out in the cover paper from the clerk. Do members have any comments to make on any of these instruments? Are we agreed not to make any recommendation the Parliament on any of these instruments. Thank you very much, and agenda item 2 is an oral evidence session with the Accounts Commission for Scotland on its most recent local government overview report. I'd like to welcome Douglas Sinclair, chair of the Accounts Commission for Scotland, Fraser McKinlay, director of performance and audit and best value at Audit Scotland, and Gordon Smaill, portfolio manager at Audit Scotland. You're very welcome, gentlemen. Would you like to make any opening remarks? Thank you very much, convener. First of all, the commission welcomes the opportunity to discuss with the committee the challenges facing local government. As we all know, Scotland's councils provide important services, but they do so against the background of reducing budgets of an aging population and rising demands and expectations from the people whom they serve. Our work shows that although councils are coping well, they face increasingly difficult choices about how to maximise the value that they get from the available money. To help make those decisions, they need to make better and more consistent use of options appraisal to look carefully at how services they deliver it and to think openly about how services might be delivered in future. They need to ask the question, what works best and can we prove it? Many of the messages in this year's report are not new. Indeed, the fact that they are similar simply serves to underline their continuing importance. I want to emphasise two areas in particular, if I may. The first is the fundamental importance of good governance. It is the foundation of a successful council, with officers and councillors working well together and in a way that engenders the public's trust and confidence. Bad governance, on the other hand, is dysfunctional, time-consuming and expensive. Secondly, the statutory duty of best value remains paramount. We believe strongly that councils that place best value—in other words, continuous improvement in all their functions at the centre of all that they do—are best placed to deal with change. Although we recognise the current context that is challenging, the commission is looking for councils to raise their ambition and up the pace of improvement. For our part, we are considering carefully how the commission can provide further support through its audit work in relation to local government. My colleagues and I are very happy to answer questions. Dr Sinclair, anyone else who wishes to add anything? You mentioned the demographic time bomb, the ageing population, and we have just dealt with an SSI with local government pension schemes. What overview does Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission have in terms of scrutinising local government pension schemes? Yes. Very recently, in fact, in the last couple of years, pension scheme accounts are actually subject to separate audit. Prior to that, they form part of the accounts of the council and the ministering authority itself. For example, the city of Edinburgh's accounts would have included the Lothian pension funds. Nowadays, those funds are audited separately, so they are subject to a separate audit annually. There is a separate opinion given to the auditor, and there is a separate report alongside that in the same way that we do for councils, referring to the main issues about risks and priorities that have come up during the course of the audit. That extends into looking at areas such as how the pension funds are, the governance of them, the committees that oversee them and the like. That is a relatively new event, if you like, in audit. I think that it is well worth us doing that, because the sums that involve those substantial areas are a very complicated area, so I think that that is a well worth addition to the audit process. As well as them reporting separately to yourselves, do you carry out any forensic audit on individual pension funds at any point in time? Do you pluck one or two out on a regular basis to have a closer look at it? The 11 pension funds are subject to the same audit. If there was any need to probe further into anything, we would of course do that. The main issue for us is looking at the risks beyond the accounts, how the accounts are presented fairly, the financial performance of the pension funds. If there are issues around the way in which the pension fund has been managed or how it is the governance of the pension fund, of course we would look further into that if there were indications that we needed to do that. Continuing on the theme of the ageing population, have you found any examples of really good practice in terms of preparations made by local authorities to deal with the demographic difficulties that we have ahead of us? I think that we have published some reports recently about things such as the reshaping care for older people report that we did last year, which had some case studies in there, which I am happy to send them on to you separately. I think that our sense is that councils and their partners absolutely recognise the importance of prevention in the widest sense, both prevention in terms of giving people and children the best start in life, but also in the older population trying to keep people safe and well before they either fall or hurt themselves and end up in hospital, which is both traumatic for them and expensive in terms of public services. The public services and councils in particular get that concept. I think that what is difficult is actually making the shift from dealing with the impact of that, if you like, at the point of crisis or in that acute sense, to shifting the resource and the effort to actually preventing these things happening in future. I think that that is why we have touched on those kinds of things in our community planning audits and some of the performance audits that the Accounts Commission in order to general have done around reshaping care. Self-directed support was another one with some very interesting case studies about how well prepared councils were for the introduction of self-directed support that came into being in terms of legislation earlier this year. So there are definitely moves afoot and there are some pockets of good practice which we can dig out for you, but I think there is a question about scale and pace and the extent to which that is happening, as you would hope, right across the piece to deal with the size of the challenge that is coming. I think that one of the other issues is the fact that good practice is a bad traveller. It is a wonderful phrase from a Welsh report on public service and I think that there is still a bit in Scotland if it is not invented here, we are not doing it. I think that a challenge for the commission and other inspectorates is can we quantify good practice and put it together in a single document and try and encourage more councils, you with me to pick it up and health boards and copy what is good practice. I think that it is a telling thing for many studies we do. We find good practice in one council and one health board but it is not being replicated. There is no good reason why it is not being picked up by other councils and health boards. I think that there is more that we should be doing as a commission to encourage others to take up the bad end of what is clearly good practice. I think that one of the things that I welcome is catching sight of your reports on a regular basis. Obviously, from those, we garner up information that we often use in scrutinising this committee. It seems to me that a lot of the things that appear in some of your reports which highlight good practice are not looked at to a huge degree by others and brought into play in their organisations. I think that that is a great pity. How do you think that we can improve in terms of disseminating the message from—I think that one of the things is that, when your reports come out, everybody tends to look at the bad and never the good. How can we make sure that folk look at the good and see if we can ensure that that is brought into play in other areas? As I said, one of the things that we could look at is the idea of producing an annual digest of good practice. We will soon have finished our second round of CPP audits. What we found in each of the CPPs is examples of good practice, often despite the community planning partnership at the top. There is often good practice happening because people make a difference and want to work together at a local level. I think that it is very important that we try and capture that in a single document and make that available to the 32 community planning partnerships. I think that there is also more work that we can do with the other inspectories, who are also identifying and finding good practice. I think that it would have more of an impact if there was a single digest from the commission and from all the other inspectories. I think that people would sit up and take note of that. That sounds like an excellent idea. Can I follow on from some of the questions or can I ask some of the questions about community planning partnership? In paragraph 112, they are mentioned that community planning is at a crossroads. Barriers stand in the way. Can I ask you to expand on some of that? As you know, the statutory duty of community planning was introduced in 2003. It is fair to say that it is flatlined quite a bit. There was a bit of work done. I think that people were keen on it, but they were very much focused on the day job, delivering services and working on the CPP, to some extent the statutory job, if I can call it that. There was no doubt that an added impetus was given by the introduction of the statement of ambition in 2013, the joint statement between the Scottish Government and COSLA. That has created a much sharper movement in the development of CPPs. I think that our audits show that there are barriers. There are organisations that have different accountabilities. At the end of the day, the community planning partnership is a voluntary partnership. It is not a statutory partnership. Unlike a health and social care partnership, it is a voluntary partnership. That, in itself, creates its own difficulties and own tensions and makes it harder for people to come together, because there is not a statutory imperative to make them do it. I think that what we have found is that the key ingredient to a successful community planning partnership is building up trust at the top of the organisation between the leader of the council and the chair of the health board. That dynamic, or the chief executive of the council, chief executive of the health board, is the two key players in making community planning work. If they can work together and build up that relationship of trust, they can move forward. One of the other barriers is perhaps being that they are too ambitious in what they can achieve. Community planning has sometimes been seen as a discipline into which you throw everything. It has to be a body that can add value where it can add most value. That is about reducing inequality. Our audits show that community planning partnerships are a limited number of objectives. Glasgow is a very good example where there are, if I remember correctly, four or three or four objectives and they are focused on that in a very direct way, whereas other CPPs have tended to draw a much wider canvas. That means that the sense of priorities has become diminished and diffused, so that is important as well. One of the other barriers is for them to develop performance management arrangements. We have not found that in any of our CPPs and effective performance management. It is quite difficult for one body to hold another body to account to challenge that body to say that we do not actually think your contribution to CPPs as good as it might be. Again, that comes back to building that relationship of trust and comfort with each other so that they can challenge each other openly. There has been some good signs of progress. There is good signs of partnership working on the ground, as I mentioned earlier, but there is still a long way to go. Thank you. I have been around for some time. I do wonder because I certainly have a chair on the council and the airport with two big partners at the table. It was never clear to me what the role of the other partners was, and if we are serious about trying to engage more with the private sector within civic life and local economic policies, it was never clear to me who was bringing what to the table. I suppose that one of the questions is whether there is any evidence that savings, given the report that highlights the major financial problems that it is facing in the public sector, is this savings to be had? If we take, for example, the health and social care partnership, is that the best model trying to bring it together in some kind of voluntary partnership, or would you not be better looking at how these services perhaps are run and managed and actually bringing them together and combining them? Would that not make more sense than trying to continue year after year to get a voluntary partnership? I am happy to say that the important difference between the community partnership and the health and social care partnership is that, as I said, the community partnership is a voluntary partnership, whereas health and social care partnerships are statutory partnerships. They have very clear outcomes to deliver in relation to the Government, and we will be accountable for that. There is a very clear line of sight between the Government and the health and social care partnerships, and we have seen the development of the two-model, the Highland Model, where you have the lead agency, where the NHS Highland has taken responsibility for the provision of all services to older people and are accountable to the council, the chief executive of the health and social care partnerships, accountable to the council for the delivery of that, and the council has the responsibility for the delivery of all children's services. That model, I think that I am right in saying a phrase or correct me if I'm wrong, is the only one of its kind in Scotland, whereas the other partners are an incorporated body, a joint body that is a local authority body in law, one of which we have a responsibility to audit. In a sense, there is a higher threshold, a higher bar for those bodies, because they are statutory bodies. We have a duty to audit them. There is a limit to how much the Accounts Commission gets to audit a voluntary partnership by definition, because it is a voluntary partnership. There is a limit to that, whereas in terms of a statutory partnership, in a sense, we will be auditing them in the exact same way as we would audit the council. That is the difference. To pick up on the savings point at the health and social care partnership, should we assume that those bodies, because it seems to be that it is still two organisations, so in the case of Fife, NHS Fife, will determine a budget that will go into the health and social care partnership. As will Fife Council, there will still be major budget pressures there. The acute services in health will still be making major demands on the health services. There does not seem to me that there is a clear sort of split if what sits within the health and social care partnership, particularly if the health point of view seems to be a bit cloudy. Should there be savings, should there be efficiencies that can be gained? Would we not be better just simply saying that we have a health and social care service and it is run by whoever the local authority or the health authority? I think that you were going to come back to Mr Sinclair. In a sense, the legislation around health and social care is designed to try and do that, Mr Rowley. Obviously, it is very early days that are not up and running yet. They come into formal being in 1 April next year, so they are running in shadow at the moment. I think that what you are highlighting is a real question about, and I think that we are picking up a degree of concern out there that a lot of the attention and focus has been about the governance and integration of the arrangements, and potentially at the risk of losing sight of the fact that the whole point in this exercise is about service integration. It is about making the service more joined up, more efficient, more effective for service users on the ground. That is the whole point. Inevitably, and do not get me wrong, we are all for good governance and strong governance, but there has been so much activity and concern around that. I think that people will need to readjust and remind themselves that it is actually the bit on the ground that is going to make the difference. The danger is that, even though you have a single accountable officer for the integrated joint board to give it its formal title, how does that person ensure that the different bits of the system, health and council, are combining? Certainly, the view from the Highland experience, both on the health side and on the council side, is that the lead agency model, while very challenging and not straightforward at all to manage, is a very effective way of genuinely integrating services, because you do not need to worry about that parallel stuff. You have basically transferred one in both directions, older people and children's services, in their case. It is interesting that, as the chair says, Highland at the moment is the only one that is going down the lead agency model. We think that the other 31 is going down an integrated joint board model. Obviously, as the chair says, because the new bodies have been designated as a local government body, the Accounts Commission has responsibility for auditing those, and that will continue to be a focus for our work in the next few years. The councillors and health board members are appointed to the joint integration board. Their duty is to the best interest of the joint integration board and to make maximum use of those resources, not to the council or the health board. It is like being appointed. If you are a councillor to a fire board or the police board, your duty is to the worst of the fire board or the police board. I think that that is going to be a bit of a steep learning curve, but that is the reality. If they are going to make the best use of the resources, they have to think about what is in the best interest of the users or service. It is trying to figure a way to go forward. We know that we have major issues in terms of an ageing population. We know that the demand on services is coming at us faster and faster. I saw, for example, the health cabinet secretary last week being interviewed about Fife and being asked about the demands on services. He basically said that it may be that Fife Council's social work service is fighting it hard to meet these growing demands. The reality at the end of the day is that these demands are coming fast and furious. Local authorities need some kind of reality check here that there is either going to have to be major investment coming in from the Scottish Government or there has to be something that clearly designates what this money is there and what it can achieve. It is fine coming up with all these other steps that you are talking about here, and it is fine coming up with a governance structure that says we, but unless we actually know that we are going to have the resources to provide the services. I think that the challenge for the integrated joint boards will be to make sure that they can demonstrate that they are getting maximum value for money that is currently being spent separately by the council on health, but that by working together they can create a more effective and more efficient use of that money. I want to pick up on a point, Mr Sinclair, because you said that, like those members of police boards and fire boards in the past, that the members of the integration boards would be accountable to the board first and not to the local authority or the health board that they represent. It was always the case when I was on a police board that some elected members had a great difficulty in recognising that their first obligation when they were on the police board was to the police board. That came out in terms of the joint audits of boards and forces, which I think that most of them came out pretty poorly. Grampiam is one of the better ones, if I remember rightly. How do we ensure that members, whether they be from the health board or elected members from the local authority, recognise their obligations to the new bodies before they are kingdom? The key to that is continuing training, continuing professional development for elected members. One of the points about somebody who becomes a councillor in induction training at the beginning of their career is usually quite good. Councils are pretty good at providing induction training, but there is no penalty if you do not take up any other training as a councillor. There is no requirement in the code of conduct to say that you must participate in training. Councils are complex organisations that spend huge amounts of money. The way service is delivered, health and social care partnerships and allio, is that the world out there is becoming even more complex. It is even more important that councillors understand the roles that, when they are appointed, say that they are the chair of a finance committee or the chair of an education committee or appointed to the board of an allio, they understand what their obligations are and ensure that they have the necessary training to do it. I met recently an ex-councillor who has been appointed the vice chair of an education committee. I will not mention the name of the council. I asked him what training he had received when he was appointed as vice chair of the education committee. None, absolutely none. How can he effectively challenge the officers of the council if he did not have the skills and the knowledge to understand what the education service was trying to deliver? There is a real debate to be had as to whether the training of councillors is adequate in the current climate. It was agreed, I thought, that in terms of the changes to pay and conditions for councillors, that training would have to be taken. When that first came into play, there was probably more training done in that first week while than it had ever been done in my entire time before on a local authority unless you sought out the training yourself. Do you think that it would be wise if there was some guidance, maybe even some legislation, to ensure that elected members undertake the necessary training that is required for them to fulfil their responsibilities? I think that there is a need for a debate about whether their current arrangements are fit for purpose. It is interesting the point that you make, because, way back in 2006, the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee recommended to the Government that there should be a standard job description for councillors, and that all councillors should be required to undertake a training needs analysis and participate in training. That proposal was not taken up by the Government of the Day. It said that councils should be encouraged to do it. I just think that there is an issue in there, given the complexity of the world in which a local government councillor operates in. I think that it is really important for good democracy that councillors of the skills and the knowledge to avail the challenge officers on behalf of their constituents and ensure that the decisions that are taken are well-grounded and that they have the skills and the ability to hold officers to account. Mark McDonald, please. Thank you, convener. I think that, just to follow on from that particular point, as well, do you detect or have you done an analysis of training that is offered and training that is taken up by councillors at each local authority in other areas, or particular councils, where there is good uptake, bad uptake, or is it a kind of same picture across the board? One of the reports that we did a while ago in our How Councils Work series was roles and relationships. How are you getting it right? We define the different roles and relationships in councils, but I think that we probably made the assumption that the training actually did happen for people to perform those roles. One of the current discussions within the commission is whether we need to revisit that topic and go further into councils to understand what is the depth of the training that has been provided. It is easy for the commission to say you understand your role as a councillor at the beginning and the end of the process. You set the strategy and you hold officers to account. However, I do not think that we have the knowledge—my colleagues will correct me if I am wrong. I do not think that we have the knowledge base to be able to say that we know for a fact that sufficient training has been given to ensure that councillors can understand those roles and perform those roles. Equally, when someone is appointed as a chair of a committee, something like a finance committee, what training is provided by the council to ensure that a person can do the job properly? I think that there is a further piece of work that we need to get into to understand how good is the quality of training in our 32 councils. Mr McKinlay and then Mr Smeal, please. I think that, as the chair says, that would be a very interesting piece of work to look right across the piece. We pick it up routinely when we are doing work in individual councils. It is a good indication of, in best value audits, for example, when we talk about the political leadership that is provided in a council to the extent to which training is offered and taken up. It is patchy at best. To be fair to the officer core, if you like, very often, they are leading the horses to water and the horses are not drinking it. There have been lots of moves, particularly over recent years, to think about different times when members can make it, to think about topics, to think about packaging it around council meetings when they are there anyway. There are moves and efforts to make it. At the end of the day, councils need to turn up and do it. I think that there has been movement on that, and I think that there is still a long way to go. As the chair says, we may well be revisiting that whole discussion about the role of the elective member, which, as the chair says, has changed and is increasingly complex and challenging. I think that we will probably want to revisit that in the next couple of years. Mr Smeal, please. One of the points that I want to raise exactly is, as Fraser said there, about the onus and councillors to recognise that there is a need for them to ensure that they are up to date with those things, as everyone is saying here at the table, a very quickly changing and complex situation that councils are in. The other point that I want to add is that the improvement service itself does a survey of councillors to get a sense of uptake of training and development. They do that quite regularly, so that gives us some information. One of the particular areas that keeps coming up is the degree to which elective members are supported in scrutiny. It is really just this whole point about, firstly, the overall environment. Do you understand how your council works? Secondly, there is more in-depth training about getting past the first question, if you like, when the scrutiny is going on at a particular committee. What is the supplementary question? What is the next thing that really gets to the root of the issue, whether it is to do with the finances of the council or whether it is to do with service performance? That training, I think, would really be helpful to councillors to take that next step, and it is vital in the governance arrangements. Mr McDonnell, back in. Could you maybe give us an indication of how many, what percentage of councillors respond to that improvement service questionnaire? My own experience of that kind of situation is that the folks who respond to these kind of things are the folks who are desperate for more training, and those who are not that interested do not respond to those things normally. I do not have the figures with me just now. There is a passing reference to the survey at paragraph 37 of the report, and as we say there, of those who responded, which I think picks up the very point that you are making, there is a reference there to the induction and to scrutiny as well. I think that is the scrutiny point that was coming through quite strongly. Mr McDonnell. Thank you, convener. Moving away from that to the issue around following the public pound. I am sure that, while the press and journal is at the very top of all your reading lists, you will not have necessarily seen today's edition. It reports that the chair of the Youth Festival Trust in Aberdeen has resigned claiming that there are not appropriate reports to show how the public pound is being used by that trust, and also concerns around what she describes as a political agenda within that trust, which I think gets back to the point that convener was making around what interests are being followed when elected members are sitting as members of trusts and boards. How do you feel that, generally across Scotland, whether it is an allio or a trust or a board where elected members are sitting as board members, how do you feel that the relationship in terms of the reporting at board level is compared to the role that councillors would have in terms of looking at the finance reports at a finance committee versus the reports that they are being exposed to, as it were, when they are on those boards and trusts? Is there a disconnect there between the detail that is being provided, do you find, from what you see? Who wants to go first on that one? Mr McKinlay? So, the PNG is very much on our reading list every day. I have not quite managed to catch up to that one, but I will definitely pick up on that one. So, that situation that you described is one that we come across, and I think that, like many of those things, it varies enormously across the country. I think that the whole question of allios and following the public pound is obviously an area that the committee has been interested in for a long time. The commission are two, and we are in the middle of doing a further piece of work that we will be reporting back to the commission in the autumn, which is really, first of all, trying to get just a better understanding of what the allios picture is out there. One of the challenges that we have had in the past is actually, first of all, trying to define what an allio is, because that phrase covers an enormously wide range of organisations. Also, to try to get under the skin of what are the governance arrangements around those allios. What does that look like? What is the reporting relationship between the allio and the council? How does the council, while recognising that the board of the allio, whether it is a company, whether it is a charity, whether that board is responsible for the governance of that organisation, the council has a duty in terms of best value in following the public pound and all those things. So, what is the relationship there, and we will be coming back to the commission in autumn? So, there is a very big question around that. It is worth pointing out and reminding ourselves that allios, whatever status they are, are audited by auditors. Now, not by us always, and the board of that charity or that company need to appoint auditors, and they do an audit of the financial statements following the same kind of international accounting and auditing standards as we do, but there is no doubt that it is, if you like, out with the direct remit of the public audit system, if you like, but in a sense that is kind of deliberate because they are arm's length, and that is in a sense part of the point-and-exercise. So, the commission have been thinking hard about this. They have asked us to think hard about how do we ensure that the existing powers that we have collectively are used to ensure that there is good governance around following the public pound, and that is another piece of work that we are doing at the moment. Can I just add to that? I think that I just made the point, and maybe you did not mean this, that in the sense that allios are not as good as councils. I think that I would just make the qualification that the scrutiny and governance arrangements in all 32 councils are not always that good. There are a number of councils where the scrutiny arrangements are not good. For example, where the chair of the scrutiny early committee is a member of the administration. Now, the commission firmly believes as a principle of good governance. In terms of public confidence that the chair of the scrutiny committee should never be a member of the administration, should always be a member of the opposition. We have also found in some situations where the representation on the scrutiny committee does not reflect the result of the election. I can think of one council where one party was represented by one person on the scrutiny committee. Therefore, it was not able to have a second at a motion. However, that did not reflect the result of the committee. Now, in England, the law is very clear that the results of an election must be reflected in the allocation of seats on committees and sub-committees. That part of the law does not apply in Scotland. I will quote from the article that the councils corporate accounting manager said that trustees receive a number of different finance reports that make it exceedingly difficult to be accurately appraised of the true financial position. That was really where I was coming from, was that the amount and level of information that is often provided, particularly not suggesting that the youth festival trust is a small trust because it is not, but there are some trusts and boards on which elected members sit, which are not huge in terms of the budget that they are dealing with. Nonetheless, it is important to ensure that the public pound, however much of it is being allocated, is being followed and tracked appropriately. Mr MacDonald, Mr Smill, do you want to come back and then Mr Sinclair? Well, it was just to come back to the general point, so I was only at Alio, so I do not want to interrupt the... I am just going to make one point. I think that it is really important when the council sets up an alley of its dealing with complex financial issues, that it ensures that there is the expertise on the Alio board. If councils councillors do not have it to ensure that they appoint someone from the outside world who has that expertise and skills to be able to challenge the officers and to hold them to account. Mr Smill, do you want to go back to that point? I have a couple of points about the generality of alioes and touching on Mr MacDonald's point about scrutiny and availability of information. The commission is part of the How Council's work series. Back in 2011, we did a report on alioes bringing together a lot of these principles, and we had two parts of the report, which was getting it right from the start and keeping it right. Our experience in this overview report this year refers to one particular case involving the Highland Council, where things did not go well with an alley, okay, nice, heat and power. A lot of that was to do with the extent to which the council councillors had a full understanding of the financial position in that alley. My point being that quite often when we are asked to come and look at an alley that perhaps has had problems, we find that things have not been set up from the start. There is no questioning about, is this the right way for us to do things? As an elected member, am I getting the right information that I need to make that judgment? Finally, your point was well made about the degree of money that is involved. Quite often the risks are not to do with the larger alioes, which have got all the machinery of governance around them, with financial people on both sides, if you like, in the alio and in the council. What we would encourage is a risk-based approach from councils when they are setting up and working with alioes to get that right from the start, to get it commensurate with the risks that they see to the public money that is involved. One final question, and forgive me for again being somewhat parochial, but there we are. You will be aware that Aberdeen City Council have established an arms-length company to deal with social care, Bonacord care. No councillors sit on the board of that arms-length company. There are concerns around the ability of the council to scrutinise the way in which money is being spent by that arms-length company. Is that something that is on the radar of either odd at Scotland or the Accounts Commission at present to look at and determine whether the scrutiny arrangements that are in place there are appropriate given the sums of money involved? I realise that we are talking about large sums of money, but none the less. Absolutely, and it is a principal issue around the governance of alioes. As Fraser was saying, we are looking at it from the council perspective. That is the end of the telescope that we are looking at here, but it is really important that these things are set up correctly from the start. We are hoping that the work that we are doing just now in alioes will bring forward, tie up to earlier conversations about good practice, because some councils have fairly well-established processes for dealing with alioes overall. One of the problems that we find quite often is that there is an inconsistency about how a council is overseeing its alioes and this issue about making sure that things are done properly and across the piece. If the council decides, for example, in that case, that that is the way that they want to have representation in this case none, what discussions have had about how it will oversee the use of the money? To make the point, it is not just about how the money has been used, it is also about the performance that they get for that money. We talk about following the public pound, and for me that misses the point to an extent, because it is the quality of the services that are also being achieved from that public pound. It does not matter where the public pounds are spent by the council directly or through an alio. I think that that is the important point. The fact is that the council remains responsible for the money and the quality of the service, irrespective of the fact that it is being provided by the annual, so the obligation does not go away. I want to go back to a point on paragraph 111, saying, ensure that all partners align their service and financial planning arrangements. Certainly, the point that we are making here is that community planning in the past has been at best an effort for the individual partners who have their own plans and their own spending priorities and their own budgets to come together at some point and say, how can we join these up? Or at best, how can we make sure that we are not falling over each others or missing bits? That kind of individual partners will do all their budget planning, service planning and then come to the table. I think that the latest drive around community planning is trying to shift is if you like having that conversation much earlier. Before budgets are set, before individual plans are set in the health board or the council, they should be having a conversation around the community planning table that says what are the outcomes that we are trying to deliver for our local communities and how best can we work together or indeed separately to achieve those outcomes. I guess that what we are trying to get at there is bringing that discussion much earlier in the planning cycle rather than just trying to knit it together once the plans have been set by the individual bodies. Thank you very much. Can I just also come to another point? Deen with the equal pay claims that you are talking about, you have got money set aside for it. Are you still expecting an awful lot of equal pay claims to come up? It seems a huge amount that you have got set aside. Surely we have got this organised by now, are we not? I will ask Gordon to come in in a moment. Thankfully, it is not us that has to set aside the money, Mr Buchanan, but I know what you mean. I am reluctant to say no more, because it feels like we have been saying that for quite a long time. In principle, I will ask Gordon to talk to detail in a second, but there is no doubt that equal pay continues to be one of the biggest risks and issues that councils face. We are having a conversation with the Accounts Commission just in the next couple of weeks about whether there is anything more we might do in that. Currently, our auditors will look at the provisions that are made in individual councils for equal pay claims, and we do an assessment about whether that seems reasonable or not. Pretty much that is the extent of our involvement in it at the moment. I think that there are some interesting, bigger questions about how single status and equal pay has gone in local government over the last, whatever we are now, 10, 12, 15 years. Mr Wilson, thank you. There is a bigger question, which I think we are now in a position to ask ourselves. I think that councils are doing their best to get these things resolved. It is very susceptible to case loss, just at the point to which we think that we have got it all stitched down. There is a case from Birmingham or wherever it happens to be, which opens up a whole raft of new cases. It is a constantly evolving and very complex legal picture. I will ask Gordon to say a little bit about the sums involved. Can I just, before Gordon comes in, make two points of the commission's interest that Fraser touched on? We have probably two issues of interest. One is whether councils did sufficient risk assessments before they got into this business. Secondly, whether there has been a sufficient trade-off between the huge amounts of money and equal pay, or £500 million already, and a trade-off in terms of modernising conditions of service, and whether councils have made the most of that opportunity. I think that it is a question mark that the commission is interested in. Really, just to pick up on the financial side of things each year when the audits have been done of the accounts, the auditors will look at the figures that are brought forward by councils in terms of the money that should set aside, where there is a degree of certainty about how much is going to have to be paid out. Then there is another element to that where there is more uncertainty, which we would call contingent liabilities. The figures there in the report show that this is starting to nudge up towards £600 million. A substantial amount of money, there is an on-going degree of uncertainty, as Fraser was saying. The only other point that I would make, as we say in the report, is that we should not lose sight of the amount of time that officers of councils are having to spend in this HR department. One of the things that we say quite often in best value audits is the degree to which councils have got a full workforce plan and a sense of what they need in terms of the numbers of people going ahead for services. A lot of the people that are involved in that type of work are also involved in dealing with resolving the equal pay element of things. There is a wider impact than, if you like, simply the financial aspects of this, which in themselves are substantial. Thank you, convener. Good morning, gentlemen. I wasn't going to cover these two issues at the stab, but given that they have been raised, I just want to clarify for everyone. I know that the report refers to equal pay, but when we, and I think Mr McKinley, quite rightly identified as equal pay and single status, which were two different settlements that were combined by many local authorities to actually be one debate about equal pay, where a single status in 2005 added into the whole complexity of equal pay. When you have indicated that you may be doing somewhat, Mr Smell, in terms of how local authorities have handled equal pay and single status negotiations, discussions and settlements, could I request that you also look at the amount of external funding that local authorities have actually had to apply for legal advice on many of those cases? I know that there are authorities who have spent substantial amounts of public money on external legal advice to mitigate against some of the equal pay and single status claims that have been made. That is the first point, convener. The second point is the education and training of councillors. I have raised that before in this committee, convener, when this report has been produced, we seem to take little account of the expertise, the educational achievement of some of the councillors that we have in place. That was something that came up just after the 2012 and 2007 elections. I have a copy of the improvement service report that was done in consultation with the councillors, where roughly 26 per cent of the councillors responded. What we have in terms of education and employment is that the improvement service says that over 50 per cent of the elected members who responded to that have a degree or higher qualifications. You would take it in terms of postgraduate qualifications, but over 60 per cent of elected members have the qualifications at that level. I have said to me on a number of occasions by elected members who have been invited along to participate in the training that is being delivered by a local authority that the quality and standard of training is so poor that they felt that they could deliver it themselves. When you are looking at training for elected members, it may be worthwhile considering whether or not the standard of training that is being provided is sufficient and the quality is sufficient for some of the elected members who are already there. Part of the reason why elected members may not be participating may be because of the quality of the training and the feeling that they have already had that experience. We also have another problem. We have councillors who have been there for over 30 years who think that they have been through all and know all and therefore do not need to participate in the training. There is a very good point that councillors should be more involved in the design of the training. As I mentioned earlier, I think that councils are pretty good at induction training, but after that, there is not the continuous professional development of councillors in ways that they would find helpful, in ways that they can influence the design of the courses and training that they need. That would be a useful point for us to explore in any further work that we do on this. The other idea would be to allow councillors to choose training themselves from a menu. Often that will be from external sources, but sometimes that comes in a lot cheaper than some of the internal stuff or IS stuff. Alex, you have got to stop the mention at this point. Is there a balance to be struck, given that local government is exactly that government, it is elected by the people and these people are elected and they are accountable at the ballot box at the end of the day? In terms of training, is there a danger that you can start to look at the professionalisation of the councillor? I certainly would like to raise that. My own experience is that where you have had, for example, somebody who was a council official, say a heidi service or whatever, become a councillor and think they are an expert in the area that they came from, it does not always follow suit. You gave the example earlier if you are the chairman of the finance committee, but I would argue if you are the chairman of the finance committee it does not necessarily follow suit that you need to be an accountant, indeed far from it, because you are surrounded by accountants. I think that it is straightforward as perhaps that would foresee me. I think that we all recognise that when councillors are appointed they have different expectations and different ambitions and many councillors are happy simply being the advocate on behalf of the constituent and enjoy that work and have no desire to become a chair or a vice-chair. I think it is important that we give them a training to do that job effectively and the support so that councillor's time is used effectively and there is the right support that they are not having to do work that can be done on their behalf by officers, but equally there will be some councillors and there need to be some councillor who want to be on part of the administration and ensure that they have the necessary skills to do their job in chairing committees and ensuring that they can hold officers to account. I do not think that that needs a professional background, but it does need the skills in chairing a committee and knowing when to ask and how to ask the right questions. Another supplementary from Cameron Buchanan and then we will be back to Mr Wilson. Thank you. Do you have the powers to monitor the training to control the training at all? Our function is audit and if we were going to do a further piece of work we would do a full up report to a report on roles and relationship, dig down further into the quality of training, the kind of questions that Mr Wilson asked, how effective is the training, what's the quality of it, how satisfied are members, do they understand the roles and relationships and then we would present that report to the local government community and we would expect them to pick it up? The other issue and I'm glad we've had the discussion on training because I think it is important that the other difficulties, as I've said previously at this committee, is sometimes the appointment of chairs or vice chairs of committees is not the best person that's appointed is sometimes politically motivated in terms of who the chair or the vice chair of a particular committee is rather the best person to chair it. Moving on, convener, there is an issue and a wider issue and a note from the chair's opening remark in paragraph 9 where he says that this report is mainly for councillors. I think that this report and the report produced by the Audit and Commission should be for everyone, particularly the public, because I think that there is an issue about elected member accountability and it's not just accountability at the ballot box, I think that there has to be accountability for the decisions that are being made. That leads me on to the question about the allios and Mr Smale and Mr McKinley know my particular interests and the operation of allios in Scotland and how different local authorities take different courses. Fundamentally to that is about the accountability of the decision making and following the public pound, as Mr Smale indicated, in relation to how that money is allocated to Nallu. I think that Mr McDonald raised the issue about Bonacord, where Keith Neth, heat and power, was mentioned earlier, but there is a serious concern that many of the public fail decisions that are being made by local authorities to transfer services and I know that the service that was mentioned in your report refers to leisure services. Mr McDonald made reference to care services and I know that Glasgow and other local authorities have transferred what would be seen as a crucial service for everyone, care being transferred to allios and whether or not there is proper scrutiny of the public pound and how those decisions are being made by local authorities in relation to holding accountable the money that is being invested in those services. The Accounts Commission's position and our position on it's Scotland is very similar to the one that you set out in your report on local government autonomy and flexibility, which is that if you are setting up an allio, it needs to be very clearly based on a strong business case, both in terms of the finances and the service, and it needs to be transparent and accountability needs to be absolutely clear. I think that the reason that the Bon Accord one has been out on our radar since its inception and similarly in Glasgow is that they are interesting and that it does get into services to more vulnerable people. That's not to diminish the importance of leisure services but it does feel different and so we are acutely aware of those things. I think that it's also worth just remembering that we do have organisations like the Care Inspectorate who will still be inspecting the quality of care provided by those services as they do the private sector as well, so we do need to remind ourselves that, as allios, they are not completely outwith the realms of public scrutiny, but I absolutely take the point, Mr Wilson, in terms of how the money is spent and democratic accountability and, importantly, as a service user of a leisure centre or a care service or whatever it is, if things don't go wrong, who am I, who's my problem with? Who am I complaining to? That, I think, just isn't clear to a lot of people. They're not interested in the intricacies of the fact that it's been set up as an LLP or a trust or on anything else. Most people would recognise their local leisure centre as a council-run thing and, if they're not happy with it, they'll pick up the phone to their councillor. Now, that is kind of the nature of the beast and I think what we can help with is ensuring that the clarity of the roles and responsibilities and governance are as clear as they can be and beyond that, making sure that those systems are in places best we can. So the point is absolutely well made, as I say, we are continuing to help the Accounts Commission and figure out what, if anything, more we need to do around those things while being reasonably comfortable at the moment that our existing powers in terms of best value in following the public pound would allow us to go into those places if there was any problems that came to light. I think I'll just add to that. We shouldn't be the site of the importance of the responsibilities of the chief executive of the council and the start of the section 95 office of the director of finance. They've got obligations to ensure that public money is carefully used. I was hoping to base section 95 letter on, convener, about just to concentrate on the issue about allios and the decisions of local authorities. Mr McKinlay made reference to and you gave an example of leisure services if there's something wrong. A member of the public would pick up the phone and phone their local councillor. In many respects, local councillors don't have any say or any control in terms of how these services are being delivered. The public money is paying for that service but under the council structures, because it's an allio, there is no direct accountability to the council or council committees. I've given you an example previously of a local authority where the convener of the main leisure services committee is also the convener of the allio. When it comes to an issue being raised by an opposition councillor or a member of their own party, that debate is usually shut down. When someone asks for a vote on a decision, the vote is usually shut down. There's no roll call vote taken, there's no indication of dissension being recorded. How do we ensure that the democratic process within local authorities is being fully upheld when the debate, scrutiny and accountability is being shut down by the very people who are sitting on the allio boards, which have already indicated are accountable to the allio board, not necessarily to the council? I think you've made some recommendations on this in the past, Mr McKinlay, if memory serves me well. Yeah, and as Gordon mentioned earlier, convener, the report that the commission produced back in 2011, which tried to set out exactly these things, Mr Wilson, where if you are setting up an allio, these are the kinds of things you need to consider. And if there are examples where that isn't working well, then obviously we would want to pick up on those, and it's not straightforward. The challenge of, if you're a councillor sitting on a board of an allio and at the same time feeling that you are responsible for the council is a really difficult thing to do. Where in those two hats is really very challenging. It comes with the territory, and our best advice is for the councillors themselves to take advice about how they manage those potentially conflicting roles. At some point, I think we say in that original report, Gordon, that it may be that the conflicts become irreconcilable, and you feel that you can't do both. At that point, they have to make quite a tricky decision about what they do there, so it's not straightforward. You guys have actually made recommendations previously to councils where these conflicts have taken place. Is that not the case? In terms of councils that have had folk on allios, leisure ones, who were also scrutinising that allio, in particular sub-committees of education and leisure committees, and I believe that you gave the recommendation that that shouldn't be the case, scrutinising yourself. You'll probably remember better than I do, convener. I don't remember that specific one, but we'll certainly double-check, and certainly in examples like Catheness, Heat and Power, the commission made lots of good recommendations for that particular case, and more widely about learning the lessons from what was a very expensive example of how allios sometimes don't work. Mr Wilson, sorry about that. Last question, convener. There are a number more, but I'll just restrict myself to my final one. Just on Mr Stinkler's point about the section 95 officer of the local authority, in your report, you indicate that the officer responsible for finance is often not sitting on the key structure that makes policy recommendations, I should say, because it's the councillors who make decisions. It's the officers who carry out the councillor's decisions, which is something I've still to see happening in many local authorities, but that's another debate for another day. In relation to the section 95 officer and the role of the section 95 officer, and I know that you don't recommend it in your report, but how do you see the section 95 officer influencing the key decisions or the key discussions that are taking place at a senior officer level within the council if that section 95 officer is not there to guide them and only is then being asked to carry out decisions that have been made without their input in the initial discussions? It's a common issue for the Accounts Commission and, again, when things don't go right, it's quite often to do with just where the section 95 officer sits. The commission has taken the right approach here, which is not for the commission to determine what senior management structures look like in councils, but the principle is extremely important. That is about recognising the role of the section 95 officer, a separate statutory role there with responsibility for all aspects of the council's finances. Where the management structures and the movement and most councils over the recent times have been to smaller senior management teams as part of the drive to save money is where the section 95 officer is not at the top table. What the commission is saying, and Audit Scotland is saying this through its work as well, is that councils should satisfy themselves that the section 95 officer has his or her place regardless of where they sit in the structure. Partly this is to do with, to tie it up with the earlier conversations we had about councillor training, one of the things we quite often find when we speak to councillors is, is there a recognition of who the section 95 officer is, what that person does? I can say that can also be extended to the other statutory officers like monitoring officers, just to say that in passing, but to stick with the section 95 officer, who is it, what is the role, and the fact that that individual should be available to elected members for that independent expert advice that would assist them understanding some of the things that are coming through in terms of some of, for example, some of the very complicated financing structures for capital that are starting to develop. So absolutely key role and one that we will continue through Audit to support is absolutely crucial to the governance of councils. Stuart McMillan, please. Thank you, convener. It just falls on from the question regarding the governance scenario. A couple of points have been raised earlier, one was regarding legislation in England and recently Mr McKinley mentioned two words to recommend and advice. So in terms of the allios, would it be your recommendation or is it something that you have thought about in terms of going forward for Scotland to actually have a more, to have a stricter framework to have legislation brought in to ensure that the direction of travel for future allios is one whereby what's happened up to now actually can continue so that it actually is a better level of scrutiny from councils and councils regarding the allios in their areas? Mr Sinclair, I hear what you say. Mr McMillan, I think we'd have to await the Audit Scotland report that comes to the commission later this year and the commission can then take a view as to what further work it wishes to be undertaken or what recommendations it wants to take. I don't think it would be right for me to prejudge that work but I understand the point you're making. Okay, well thank you for that. Another question that's just regarding, it was part of the report and also a key message six on the issue of political tensions. I must admit when I read this I did actually have a wee chuckle to myself because at the end of the day people who are elected from different parties, they're in different parties for various reasons so they're not always going to agree with other people so it could be suggested that that would actually be a normal state of affairs but the fact that you've raised it in this report are you indicating that you've maybe seen an increased level of the political tensions within local authorities? Are you suggesting that the situation's maybe worse now compared to 10 years ago or 15 years ago? I think what we're trying to draw attention to is the fact that the court of conduct is quite clear that all councillors have a duty to maintain public trust and confidence in the integrity of the council. Best value guidance is also upholding the high standards of poverty and propriety. You're absolutely right to say that politics is cutting thrust of local government. It's when it gets to an extreme when the only news coming out of the council is about squabbles rather than about services and the public begin to lose confidence and trust in the council and say, well, you know, council are not serving the people all they're doing is infighting. I think that's when the commission feels it's appropriate to express its concern when the council's leadership on behalf of the community is being, how can I put it, is being disdirected into infighting at squabbles? So, certainly, from what you're saying from the support you're indicating that that's actually that's on the increase. Is that correct? We've certainly found in a number of councils that that's been an issue that's diverted the energy of the council into what we would regard as the appropriate business of the council. Yeah, I mean, I think what's interesting about this year is that we've, I think, for the last couple of years, we've kind of highlighted the risk and or a requirement for political leadership and indeed office leadership to be effective and to work in the best interests in the council. As you say, we've gone a bit further this year because the evidence coming through from some local audit work was stronger about and we do, as the chair said, set a very high bar for this. This isn't the kind of routine political backing and forwards which we would expect and welcome and, as the chair says, is what local government's all about. But it's the point at which it actually begins to get in the way of council business that we think it's legitimate for the reasons that the chair has said to comment on it and it's not been universally popular that we've commented on it, I have to say, but we think it's important and, you know, I think it will obviously be keeping a content to keep a close eye on it, but be assured, Ms McMillan, that this, you know, we only comment on it when we really think it's creating a problem. Thank you. Okay, Stuart. Mr Smith. Sorry. It was exactly the same point that I wanted to emphasise that this is an audit report based on evidence and it's right that if we see a pattern starting to emerge of this type of thing starting to be through, I think also just to keep it in context, I don't think we see looking ahead and we're encouraged to look ahead as best we can based on the evidence that we have is with finances becoming tighter decisions are going to become more difficult and therefore it's likely to add to that, you know, the tensions, the political debate and councils. So it's really just to flag that up so that I don't know that there's an increased awareness of the consequences of when this can go over the point where it's an acceptable exchange about differences about policies and actually affecting the business of the council. So in other words, I think looking ahead, you know, the environment is going to become even more difficult for councils as he's trying to deal with the financial constraints and other pressures such as demands and services. Do you think your colleagues in the Standards Commission could be a bit more helpful in terms of dealing with some of the difficulties that there are right there? They're very helpful in these things. That's very diplomatic, very diplomatic. Stuart? Thank you. That's just one final question. It's really just a point of clarification. In part of Gal 17, where you talk about the equal pay, I think my colleague John Milston mentioned 15 years earlier. So this, the £507 million, is that over that 15-year period? It is. It's the bill. What we've been doing is monitoring the cost to councils of equal pay and implementing the requirements of that, and that's the build-up over the year system. Sure. Thank you. Mr Rowley and Mr Wilson want to come back in. Could you be very brief, please, gentlemen? Mr Rowley? Yes, I agree in terms of asking what work is on going in terms of looking at capital projects. As a former councillor, I certainly found it difficult. Cymigia Leisure Centre came in at about £11 million, ended up costing £21 million and is still rising. I found it really difficult because I was often advised by officers that companies were coming in with lower tenders, that those legalities would come into it, that there would be claims made, etc. That's not always the case, and I know that some of the work that's coming in through hub coos is producing better, but where are we at with that and how is that being monitored? Because that's somewhere that councillors find it very difficult when they're being told that there are all these legal issues and challenges and whatever, but a lot of public sector contracts spiral out of control. Who wants to tackle that one, Mr Smell? Yes. Very briefly, we relatively recently, in the last couple of years, looked at major capital projects in councils and looked at some of the issues about why there was overspending slippage in programmes as well. What we do with some of the major reports that we do is we come back and we'll look at it. In fact, auditors are doing work this year to find out how that report's actually been used in individual councils, so we'll be bringing that back together for the report for the commission to see what's moved on, what's still not working well and then we'll consider it as part of our programme, what more we can do through work for the commission to support that. Mr Wilson? Just in the issue of the disputes that are taking place in council chambers over decisions that have been made, particularly in tight financial constraints, do you think that, as the accounts commission's view, there should be more openness and transparency in terms of the decision-making process, including the recording of the votes cast by members when it comes to decisions in the chamber and at committee? I think that that's a matter for each council, but it's important that councils, in considering what their arrangements are, need to ensure that the arrangements that they put in place command the trust and confidence of the public. That's the key test for all councils to ask themselves. Two final points for myself, one about procurement. Obviously, you state a £5 billion bill and you look at the local government situation very closely indeed. Do you have any remit to look at joint procurement bodies such as Scotland Excel and the work that you're doing? The report that we produced this year, in April of this year, convener, looked at the spending local government and included a lot of commentary about the role of Scotland Excel in there, because it's an important part of how local government now procures services. We have done a report on that very recently, and it will continue to be a thing that we'll keep an eye on. I have to go back and have a look at that. That seems to have slipped my mind. I would recommend it, convener. Finally, 102 in your report talks about priority-based budgeting. We've heard from local authorities that they have embarked in some cases in this, and then you probe and you find that priority-based budgeting means in one sector of their business only and not the rest. Where are we moving on that and beyond that? I'd welcome comment on long-term or longer-term financial planning and where councils are at with those medium-term, long-term financial strategies. Mr Smyll. The first point about budgeting absolutely is that priority-based budgeting is not an easy thing to do. However, the position that we are in public finances—in fact, we published the Commission on the Auditor General published the report just in June a couple of months back—was looking at how public finances were at what the position was and what's been done to move things forward. One of the areas that we looked at was budget setting. The clear conclusion is that most public bodies, including councils, take an incremental traditional approach to budgeting. That's fine when there are gradual increases in the money that's available. Zero-based budgeting and the thing that we're talking about here—priority-based budgeting—is a lot more difficult to do, but it's becoming essential. It's not good enough to continue with the salami slicing approach. We're coming to a stage now, if we've not already reached it, where there needs to be a more fundamental view when budgets are set about what people are trying to achieve. It's not easy to do, it's more time-consuming, but it is absolutely essential if councils and other public bodies are going to deal with the continuing pressures and looking ahead to 16, 17, 17, 18—the prospect of further and more significant reductions in public money. On the long-term financial planning—it's another area that we looked at as part of that, Scotland's public finances work that I mentioned—councils are probably doing more in terms of the medium-term financial planning. They're looking further ahead. In terms of longer-term financial planning, by which I mean looking at the five to ten-year type of time, there's very few councils. I think that it's order about five councils, I think that we identified that we're claiming that they were starting to look further ahead. It's absolutely, as you'd expect to say, absolutely essential, not least because with the impact of some of the mechanisms for capital financing, more and more the flexibility in budgets is reducing. In other words, when you sit down with the sheet of paper, you've got to put an increasing number of things in straight away to meet the costs of previous decisions about how to finance capital. If you take the combination of the need to change the approach to budgets, some of the references we have in this report, the overview report to borrowing and reserves, absolutely points the need for longer-term financial planning. It's not easy, but I think that it's absolutely critical if the public sector and councils are to deal with the challenges that they face in future. Some of your past decisions that you're talking about are things like PPP schools and things like that. Or additional borrowing. Can I ask—it's a small request, but I think that it would be extremely useful—is that there would be some definition set by yourselves about what priority-based budgeting is, what zero-based budgeting is, what medium-term financial planning is, what long-term financial planning is. One of the things that we find—we've definitely found of late at this committee—is that you will ask somebody about priority-based budgeting, for example. They will say that they're doing it, and then you'll find that that is extremely restricted, and it's not really priority-based budgeting at all. Yet they seem to think that that is exactly what it is. I think that it would be useful if you guys, as bodies, put out those definitions so folk knew the parameters that they were working in, and don't make claims that are not the case. That's a useful reference, and it's something that we can take forward. I think that the other point that you made is very helpful as well. We tried to capture that in the report that I mentioned that we published in June. It's just the definition of what we mean by short, medium and long-term, because it's different things to different people. I think that it would be helpful if somebody, like Audit Scotland and the Commission of the Auditor General, made some statements about what that might look like. Thank you very much. I thank you for your evidence today, gentlemen. The next committee meeting is next week on Wednesday, 20 August, and we'll be starting at 9.30. I now close this meeting. Thank you.