 Dwi'n mynd i gorffod hynny o'r 13 ymgyrchu o'r ddweud y byddiad yn y Cymru yn 2019 i gyd, ac yn ffrind arda i'r ddiddordeb i gael i elu, ac yn mwyoedd yn teimlo'r mwyosbwyng. Y ddweud yma ym mhenach ddiad yn 1 ddiad, nad ydym ni o gynghyddiad ucheldyd am 3 gyfo ONR, yw ddweud, neu ddweud? Ddweud ym mhenach dechrau'n ddweud ym mhenach ddiad yn 2 ymgyrchol yr ymgyrchol gyfo Ymgyrchol greeting commission on its reported, entitled Local Government in Scotland – challenges and performance 2019. Today's session will contribute to the committee's overall scrutiny of the budget for local authorities throughout this financial year. We would like to welcome Graham Sharpe, chair and Frazier Mcinley, the controller of audit, accounts commission, Claire Sweeney, audit director and Ashley Magite, senior auditor of Audit Scotland. I invite Graham Sharpe to make a short opening statement. The Accounts Commission welcomes the opportunity to discuss its report to local government in Scotland challenges and performance 2019 with the committee. It is the commission's annual commentary on key issues in the local government sector. Councils face an increasingly complex, changing and uncertain environment. That places different demands and expectations on them. They are also central to delivering many high-level public sector objectives such as the integration of health and social care and community empowerment. Those changes will require councils to collaborate with a range of partners and with communities to think differently about how they deliver and fund services. That is important if they are to meet the growing demand and changing needs of their communities. Councils need to ensure that they have the leadership, staff capacity and skills to deliver change. That will require effective workforce planning. We find the quality of planning to be inconsistent. Nationally, workforce data are insufficient to understand how individual services have been affected by workforce changes, recruitment difficulties and an ageing workforce. Scottish Government funding has remained relatively stable over 2018, 2019 and 2019-20, but it has reduced in real terms by 6 per cent since 2013-14. Council policy initiatives continue to make up an increasing proportion of council budgets. That reduces the flexibility that councils have for deciding how they plan to use funding. At the same time, the demand for council services is increasing from a changing population profile. Councils have made good progress in developing medium-term financial planning and continue to manage their funding gaps through savings and the use of reserves. All councils increased council tax in 2018-19, including 12 per cent by the maximum of 4.8 per cent, and many councils also increased their fees and charges. Some councils are looking at other options to raise income. Despite reducing funding and increasing demands across local government, most performance indicators are improving or have been maintained, although some service areas show more strain and satisfaction levels have fallen. Councils should make better use of data and benchmarking to understand the performance variation between councils and make further improvements or efficiencies. We make recommendations in this report, which are directed at both senior managers and councillors, whose role continues to become more complex and demanding. We highlight that, to improve outcomes for their communities, councils need to be open to transformational change and implement new ways of working. Finally, there is substantial change in the environment within which councils operate. The commission continually considers how its work reflects that changing environment, and this annual overview report is intended to be a helpful summary of evidence from a wide range of local government audit work carried out. It cannot realistically cover everything and is not a comprehensive review. However, it highlights the key challenges councils face and looks at some of the main ways that councils respond to increasing demand and reduced funding. We are always prepared to discuss our reports with the committee to help it in its work, and, convener, my colleagues and I are happy to answer questions. Mr Sharpe mentioned a 6 per cent cut in funding to councils in real terms since 2013-14. Of course, there are different ways to approach figures and come up with figures. I wonder if you can explain your approach. How did you come up with that figure? The detail of the calculation. Ashley, do you want to take through that? This is the total revenue funding, which is the general resource grant, the specific revenue grants and the non-domestic rates income. Those are all set out in the circulars. We have compared the circulars from 2019-20 to 2013-14, and that is the difference. On a number of occasions, the committee has heard different people argue that figures are different. Does everyone accept that this 6 per cent figure is accurate? I do not think that there is any dispute that it is accurate. I think that there are different views on certain factors that should be included or excluded. One area where there has been difference in the past is the amount of money that goes to iJBs through NHS. I think that in the current year, in which we are reporting, that is £375 million. Our approach always has been that, as that comes through the NHS to iJBs, it is not included in our figures for local government. Indeed, since it is included in the NHS figures, if we included it in local government, it would be counting the same number twice. It goes in one place and that is the NHS. The iJB money is not included in that 6 per cent? It is £375 million. The local government element that is attributed to iJBs is. Can I just ask—obviously, that 6 per cent was since 2013-14. What did you notice this past year as the trend continued or was it stopped? I think that if I can refer you to Exhibit 2, I think that it shows the pattern. If you take the last two years, it has been relatively flat with a 0.4 per cent increase over the two years, which in effect is flat. It is slightly complicated because of a change in accounting practice between our previous visit to the committee. That drops out if you look at the two years together, where you see 0.4 per cent over two years as flat. It is 0.6 per cent over the last six years, but relatively flat over the last two years. 6 per cent, not 0.6 per cent. Sorry, 6 per cent over the last six years. It has had a reduction since 2013, but in the last two years it has flattened out. It is flat. It is a 0.4 per cent positive over the two years together. That is very useful. Compared to 2017-18, the total funding gap across all councils in 2018-19 reduced by £0.1 billion to £0.3 billion. What are the implications of that for council services? As I say, it has been relatively flat. We reported in the financial overview that we discussed with the committee in December that councils take other action and increase in council tax and fees and charges. The actual money to councils had been stable over that period. Can I just ask a question on that? You talk about the figures being accurate, and I am sure that they are accurate in terms of what you are looking at, but it is not really accurate in terms of what local authorities are getting? Here, we are looking at a specific element of what they get, which is their main source of income. I think that it is about 55 per cent from Government. It obviously does not include fees and charges or council tax. I think that we make that clear. Even the IGB money is not included in this, which is a sum that goes— The £375 is not included because that is included in NHS money. It is part of the problem that sometimes there is a lack of clarity about the amount of money that gets paid into local authorities. I think that sometimes different groups for different purposes are using different definitions, which can lead to a lack of clarity. Obviously, the headline figures are 6 per cent cut when the reality might be that there is not 6 per cent cut. There is only 6 per cent cut if we use this method of calculating it. That is not having a go at you. You are working on what you have been asked to work with. It is just trying to highlight the fact that there may be other monies coming in that have not been taken into account. There are other monies going into the IGBs through the NHS, and then it becomes more of a policy question about how you view IGBs. Do you view their money as local authority money? Or do you view NHS money as high-JB money? Well, that cannot fight that. Thank you very much. Annabelle Ewing. Yes, thank you. Good morning. I am picking up on that line of questioning. The money goes to core council services. It has always been a bit odd to contemplate that that money is not seen as money that local government has to spend because it is. It is on their core services. It may be that, if you are saying that one would not want to double count money, perhaps that reflection might be considered as to how you badge that money because it clearly is going to local authority. For the general public, it creates a bit of a misleading environment, not in terms of your role, but just generally when that money is going to core local government services and it is not counted as such. By that money, I assume that you are saying that you have 3.75 million money. As I say, it comes through the NHS and it is accounted for in the NHS, so it is difficult to classify it as anything other than NHS money without double counting it. Where it is used, again, it comes down to how you view that IGB. I think that over the last year or two, in practice, much of the money has been used to supplement social services, but whether that would happen in the future or not, I do not know. The first thing that I would say is that we go into a lot more detail on that topic in the financial overview report that we publish every year. In there, we set out in the way that Spice and others have all the different categories of money, so that it is at least visible. I think that we have had lots of conversation over the years about the transparency and clarity of local government finances. When you would think that it would be a reasonably easy question to answer, has it gone up or down? Actually, it is not, because it depends on how you define all of that, so what we try to do is break out all the individual bits. There is an interesting question that was raised about the extent to which it is local government services or not, because, in theory, that money is supposed to lose its identity once it goes into the integration arena. Some of that money might actually be spent on occupational health therapists or other primary care services, not necessarily traditional social care services. I do not think that we can just say that all that money is therefore going into local government services. The whole idea is that it loses its identity once it is in that integration space, but there is no doubt that we will continue, and the feedback from the committee is always helpful. We will continue to try and make it as clear as we possibly can, recognising that there is only so much that we can do, and that different stakeholders in this arena will want to present their money in different ways. I think that that is something that we are all just going to have to live with to some extent. We will continue to work at that, and I think that the important thing for us is, as best we can, identifying the different elements of it. I will pick you up on that question of the IGB, because there is not a concern around transparency with the IGB. I understand that there is a make-up, but 72 per cent comes from health and 28 per cent comes from local government. First, there is a make-up of who puts in what money. Councilers will often tell me that they feel that they do not know what money is coming into the IGB and the transparency around it is difficult. The health secretary has stated in an answer in Parliament that health boards tell her local authorities are not putting in the resources that they need to put in, so it hardly makes for the kind of approach that can be transparency that we would want in terms of our health and social care, our primary health care services. Is there an issue there? Are you satisfied that the whole thing is transparent? Clearly, the IGBs are a major area of interest for us, and we published a report at the end of last year on the IGBs, the second in a series of three reports. There were a number of important messages there, particularly around leadership and finance, and I asked Claire to maybe expand on that. Absolutely. Thank you, chair. We published a report on health and social care integration in November 2018, and in that report we said that it is not easy to set out the overall financial position of integration authorities for several reasons. In part, it is due to additional money coming in later from the parties involved in integration, and the use of that additional money and reserves to get to a final year-end position, so we did find it difficult to be clear about the money that is going in to integration authorities, and we make the point in that report that it does make it very difficult for the public and indeed those working in the integrated environment to understand the underlying financial position, and then, of course, to use that information to make some of the decisions that need to be made to get towards a more integrated health and social care system. Do you have any plans to follow up on that? Surely there comes a point where, if those who are supposed to be ensuring the financial property and accountability of those services are saying themselves that they are unable to do that, surely there comes a point where Government has got to look again. In terms of our work in three main areas. First, we have published a previous report on health and social care integration. We knew that this was too big and too long-term a policy initiative to try and do in one report, so we have looked at it in three major national reports, one of which was published just after the act was passed. This second one was looking at the where are we now question, and we plan to do another piece of work much further into our five-year programme, which starts to look much more deeply at what difference any of this made for the public in Scotland. That is one way that we are starting to tackle some of those issues. The second way is through the annual audit process. We have accountants in all of those IJVs and, of course, in the partner bodies, the NHS boards and local authorities. They will work regularly with those officials to make sure that the information is clear and transparent as possible. Thirdly, and perhaps slightly less visible, is our engagement with senior finance leaders across all of those bodies involved. We will go along next week, I believe, to do a presentation to those members, to the senior finance officers to talk about our concerns around issues such as this, to help to try to move that agenda forward. Yes, it is a big issue for us. Thank you, that is helpful. I will move on to what you mentioned about local authorities looking at fees and charges and starting to look at other ways of doing that. Perhaps you could say a bit more about that, but can you advise, do you look at the impact that fees and charges can have? If you have an overall strategic plan, so one that springs to mind is that we have seen quite a number of authorities now start to charge for the green bins. However, the green bins and collecting and reducing landfill—the green bins—will be part of a wider strategy to reduce landfill to ensure that we get more recycling. As part of the wider climate emergency, do you look at the impact of the introduction of charges there on fly to them? It might end up costing the council more. Another area is funeral charges, where we see funeral poverty. Are you seeing a lot more of those charges? Do you look at whether councils are doing impact assessment on those charges? Maybe I will ask Fraser to come in on what we do in terms of looking at individual councils. In more general terms, yes, we make the point that when councils look at charges, it has to be consistent with their overall priorities and it has to take account of all the effects of charges. You mentioned funeral charges there, and we quoted that as an example in both this and indeed in the financial overview. I know that it has picked up a deal of attention. What I said in December was that, as councils look at different waste-raised income, clearly they are going to review their fees and charges. It is a very uneven starting position, so you would expect councils to be looking at what their peers charge for and at what levels, and over time there to be an evening out in that. In the case of funeral charges in particular, that is a market that clearly has problems in the private sector. Costs have been increasing year on year at a very high rate, which is why the Competition of Markets Authority has launched a market investigation into that. In that context, it may well be that looking around council charges were a quite lone comparison to others, which does not mean that it is necessarily a good thing to raise them. Nevertheless, I think that that is a particular situation in which the market is being investigated in any event. In terms of councils and how we look at them individually on fees and charges, Fraser. The first thing to say is that the commission produced us a report specifically on that topic a few years ago, which was one of the how councils work series of reports that the commission does, which was specifically setting out what our expectations are of councils when setting fees and charges. It says exactly what you have just said, Mr Rowley. We would expect councils to understand the impact of their fee regime to do it as part of a strategy. It is fair to say that that is still very patchy. As the chair said in the financial overview that there is an increasing pattern of fees and charges going up, it is difficult to see sometimes how that forms part of a strategy. What you will see very often is councils saying, well, we are lower than the national average, so we will increase it to the national average without necessarily a full understanding of what the wider impact would be. It is fair to say that we do not really have the resources to audit every instance of that across the country. That would be a huge task. However, what we can do is, as we do in those reports and through other bits of work, remind councils of our expectation to be doing exactly the kinds of things that you have just described. It is also fair to say that this debate is moving into what in the jargon people would call commercialisation, not just raising fees and charges for things, but councils becoming more commercial in their operations as they are thinking about how they raise income. We have seen some fairly hair-raising examples of that south of the border, so it is fair to say, with very small district councils borrowing large sums of money to buy shopping centres miles away from their own area. Thankfully, we do not see any of that in Scotland and I think that that is unlikely at the moment. However, that is a future trend that we will be keeping a very close eye on. Talking about trends, we keep hearing the projections of the demographic change that is taking place. If you look at those projections, the pressure on IGBs, the pressure on local authority services is just going to increase and increase. A whole range of areas that you touch on workforce planning, but generally what is the impact going to be and will we need substantial increases in finances going into public services if we have to meet the demographic challenges? I think that the position that we have set out at the moment is that undoubtedly there is a squeeze of pressure on finances and at the same time increasing demand with demographic change being a major factor in that. That is absolutely correct. The direction of travel is for that squeeze to continue and therefore to put increasing pressure on councils. That is why we make the point very strongly that transformational change is required to meet those pressures, which means working more with partners and looking at different ways of doing things to be able to cope with that pressure. At the moment, from what we see across the board, councils have maintained services well in the circumstances with a lot of efficiency savings. There are instances of good transformational change, but we do say that more needs to be done and those that have not been performing as well need to sort of up the game to those that are sort of leading it. Clearly one cannot keep on doing that forever. At some point that stops, but where we are at the moment is we see that that can continue. However, I would make the caveat that we are talking about local government as a whole. Clearly individual councils have their own circumstances, and there are councils that are better placed than the average position, and there are also councils that are more challenged than the average position. If I am sitting in a council and I am a home carer or I am a refuge collector or whatever, what does transformational change mean? Do you not reach a point where you have to be honest and say that we simply cannot continue to deliver that wide range of services and that we are going to have to prioritise or have an honest discussion with the public and say that we need further funds to be able to pay for those increasing demands? Clearly if funding continues to be under pressure and demand continues to increase year on year, you will get to a position where that happens. However, as I say at the moment, we are saying that over the piece we do think that there is room for further transformational change. By transformational change, I mean, as I said in December, forgetting about how you do things historically and looking at the outcomes that you are trying to deliver, talking to your communities and your staff, and thinking of new ways of doing things that are both more efficient and effective. We can say a bit more about transformational change if that is helpful. Particularly in terms of the integration agenda, our report at the end of last year showed that the scale of transformation envisaged is enormous, so integration authorities are trying to deal with some entrenched issues across health and social care services. We recognise that it will take time, but we highlight in that report that progress has been patchy. The transformation is actually starting to look again at the better data that is available now than it has been in the past and starting to think about how services need to be framed much more fully around people who need support and care rather than services being designed around the services themselves, if you like, so that sense of putting people at the heart of it. What we have seen happen in some areas across Scotland are some of those difficult decisions being made. Better engagement is variable with communities around some services that are no longer fit for purpose, to try and bring in services that better meet people's needs in a more local place, so that sense of people being referred out of hospital more quickly when they are ready to go home and making sure that those good social care services with support from the third sector are in place to help to support people back in their own homes as quickly as possible. What we have seen over the years is a real commitment and sign-up to that as the right thing to do. Of course it is much harder when it starts to make changes to the way people work on a local level. We highlight in that report some barriers that have got in the way of that big system transformation and some of those relate to not being good enough at longer-term financial planning. It absolutely is relevant here. The need to look at scenario planning and be much more future-focused than organisations have been in the past, which absolutely speaks to the point here about use of resources, limited as they can be in future for sure. I will finish on that. If we want to consider the health and social care that I looked at recently at five, the number of 15-minute visits has massively increased. You may say that the person only needs 15 minutes. The number of social carers providing care through agencies has increased. That is cheaper and the terms and conditions are much poorer. Is transformation more than just the workforce loos now and what you end up with difficulties recruiting and what you end up with a lower-skilled workforce? Absolutely. For our interest in this, this is absolutely about how money is used to achieve the right outcomes for people. We say in this report that what we want to see is a much clearer connection between how money is being used and what it delivers and what the outcomes are for people. We have reported on some of the issues around social care services over a number of years. We have plans to do more work in that area and we will be looking at social care sustainability in the future. We have talked at length in previous reports about some of the issues that we have set out and how it is not absolutely about price in terms of those contracts. It is about delivering the right outcomes for people so that it continues to be a big area of interest for us. I would like to ask three questions, one on financial planning, one on ring fencing and one on frameworks, just to give you a heads up. In your report, you talk about the fact that councils have generally made good progress with medium-term financial planning, but less than half have significant long-term plans and of those only five are considering the impact of population and demand change. Obviously, the longer you plan into the future, the less the more difficult it becomes in an uncertain environment, but do you think that it is important that there is long-term financial planning undertaken? I am just wondering if you can say a little bit more about what that looks like. I understand what medium-term financial planning looks like because you are looking into a future that is broadly predictable, but what is long-term involved? Can you give any examples or maybe provide to the committee any examples that we could look at that represent good practice in that area? I will ask Fraser to deal with some specifics in that, but I will give a little bit of context. Not many years ago, planning tended to be one year and in much of the public sector, that was the same position. We pushed over at the last several years for medium-term financial planning and now I think that we have pretty much achieved that nearly all councils do that. Now we are pressing for long-term because it is precisely this long-term squeeze of financial pressure and increasing demand, particularly through demographics, that councils need to think about and they need to think about the shape of the workforce and the way they are doing things. That requires long-term planning. How are specific changes going to affect them, rather than just increasing income by 5 per cent? What does it look like if you decrease it by 5 per cent? What is a scenario planning of a sort? Fraser, do you want to see me in that? Yes, just to build on that. When we talk about long-term, we talk about up to 10 years in this context is what we have in mind, so five to 10 years. I absolutely agree, Mr Whiteman, that that is not easy. It becomes definitely more of an art than a science, but we still think that it is important and, in a sense, we would argue that, because of the uncertainty and complexity, it is even more important, rather than less, that a council or indeed any large organisation has a sense of where it is headed. Recognising that needs to be updated. I think that, as the chair mentioned, quite a lot of councils now can do the kind of input side, so if our budget is 0 per cent, 2 per cent, 5 per cent, 10 per cent cuts, we can measure that. The bit that is less clear to us is the extent to which the demand side is actually factored into those plans. What is going to happen to demographics in our area? What will that mean for services? Importantly, for us, having some sense of what changes the council and their partners are making in terms of service delivery, the transformation point, will then actually make to demand. I think that sometimes we find that councils and some public bodies are a bit accepting of the demographics and demand as a given. It is part of the context. Actually, part of their job has to be about influencing that demand, shaping that demand and reducing the demand. It is that kind of sophistication that we are looking to push at in the context, as the chair said, of councils having made really good progress over the last few years in medium-term planning. In terms of specific examples, I am very happy to write to the committee with some of those. We have picked up some through our best value assurance reporting, so I am very happy to follow up that up for the committee. That would be very helpful. Moving on to ring ffencing, you talk about the increase from 6.6 per cent of ring ffence money to 12 per cent. This is an issue that we picked up in our budget scrutiny and we asked the Scottish Government and COSLA for greater clarity on their view on that point. The Scottish Government told us that it was up to councils to determine how to achieve policy initiatives, but COSLA came forward with a figure of 60 per cent of what they call protection. You have probably seen the letter from COSLA, but it talks about hidden ring ffencing. We raised that because we would like a bit more transparency next year's budget about the question of flick. Never mind where money comes from and how much money is going on, but the question of flexibility, because it is going to become important in terms of medium and long-term financial planning. If you have things that you want to do and yet, even though you might be getting more money to do it, your flexibility to do that is constrained and that will have an impact on that. We think that it is quite important to get a good handle on that. The difference between your 12 per cent and COSLA's 60 per cent is relatively easily explicable, but it is legitimate to talk about hidden ring ffencing or other language that you can use? I will ask Ashley to come in in some of the detail of that. In general, we have taken a slightly different approach from COSLA. Clearly, if you are looking at discretionary spend in a year, you want to know what can change. The approach that we have taken here and set out is to take out that element that is sort of external to councils, as it were. It is either specifically ring ffenced by Government or indirectly ring ffenced in that they have got to do certain things or they do not get the money. I think that COSLA's approach has been more to take out fixed costs and see what is left in terms of what is flexible in the year. For example, they would take out that loan servicing as a fixed cost. From our point of view, we would say that that ultimately is a council decision. Yes, it is a legacy of a previous decision, but it is still a council decision. We are looking at the element that is sort of external to councils and I think that COSLA more focussing on what is flexible in the year, but that can give you a bit more information. That is just about it. The difference between COSLA's numbers and hours is the loan charges. COSLA has taken into account the increase in demand, especially in health and social care, which we have discussed and we are very aware of, but we do not feel that that fits within the calculations that we are setting out here, which are much more based on what is set out in the circulars and in the Scottish budget. We also mentioned things such as education, where there is a pupil-teacher ratio set nationally, so that is what they regard as hidden rank fencing. We have had a meeting with COSLA and we understand the two different ways that we are working. We will carry on having those conversations. We have taken things that are set out very clearly, either in the circulars, in the bits at the front or within the budget documents that come from other portfolios. Things such as the teacher numbers were set out in the circulars earlier than the current ones. We have not included them because we do not have the clarity on what else might be included, because we know about the teacher numbers, but there are a long list of things that we maybe do not know about, so we do not have that clarity to include in our exhibit here, which we are trying to keep clear. We are just covering the last two years. That is very helpful. I think that the committee has, in the past, welcomed the work that the accounts commission and SPICE and the Government have done to share, and if we could do a little bit more work in the coming year on that, that would be extremely helpful. I want to move on now to my final line of questioning around frameworks. I was interested to look at the performance, part 3 of your report. Exhibit 6 took me a little bit of time to get my head around because some of the red ones were positive percentages and some were negative, and the green ones were some of them. Then I got my head around it. Basically, green is good and red is bad, or green is improving performance, and red is not. This is a line that COSLA gave us as well, that they expect that they are delivering, I do not know what they said, something around 60 per cent of the national performance framework outcomes, and they do not feel that they have as much control over their ability to do that as they might. We also have the local government benchmarking framework. Although Exhibit 6 and 7 are useful, to an extent, there is potential for confusion about measuring far too many things. Is there any scope for rationalising this, or would that be inappropriate in the sense that one is very explicitly Scotland's outcomes and the other is very much local government performance, so maybe they have to stay separate? I think that the two approaches are fulfilling two different purposes, as you suggested. The LGBTF is national, but it is national in the sense that it is looking at individual authorities across the nation. The value of that specifically for local authorities is the benchmarking, so they can see where they rank in relation to other councils that are similar to them in a number of respects. One of the features of the LGBTF structure is that they have put councils into family groups, where councils themselves have said, yes, there is comparability here. Clearly, there is not going to be comparability across every service. It is worth saying that, in relation to both sets of numbers, when you look at any of those national data sources, the comparisons that you draw almost always raise questions rather than provide answers. I think that that is very much the case with the LGBTF, and we find it useful. We reduced dramatically the number of statute performance indicators that we required councils to publish to give space for the LGBTF information to go in, and we think that it is useful. We use it as part of looking at a council in the round, and it raises questions that we then look at from other perspectives. That purpose is quite different from the national performance purpose. Clearly, there should be coherence between the two, but that does not mean that you can necessarily merge the databases. If you look at the national performance framework, for example, I do not think that you can break down some of the measures there to individual local government levels, so you could not merge them in that sense anyway. Can you talk about, in paragraph 100, many of the national performance framework indicators are not available at the local level, but the improvement service has developed a community planning outcomes profile to confess that there is no time to go and have a look at that? Is there work under way to try and break down the national performance outcomes at a local level? We are appropriate. Some of them will not be appropriate. That is the point that I was hoping to come in on. There is some work around that. The community planning outcomes profile has actually been a thing that has been in development for some time, and that was designed for community planning partnerships to get data on outcomes in local areas. There is an interesting debate given that the national performance framework was jointly launched last year by COSLA and the Scottish Government. It is not just a Scottish Government-owned thing any more. There is a question for local government and subsequently for us about how, if and how we would expect councils to be able to report on their contribution to the national performance framework. All central government bodies are required to be able to show that as part of their reporting and performance management arrangements. They should be able to draw a line from the national outcomes through to the contribution of individual agencies. There is an interesting question about what we would expect councils to be able to do, given that their interest clearly is local and not national. I think that that is the kind of work in progress that improvements are working with others in thinking about that. From our perspective, that will be part of our development as we continue to look at how councils are reporting their performance to their communities. Can you put a timescale on that? The work that is under way to clarify local government's role— Is the short answer, I'm afraid, no. Okay, but it works under way to try and—okay, that's clearly important. As I'm sure you know, the obligation on councils is to have regard to the NPF. I think that that phrase was carefully chosen to recognise the differences in localities. As Fraser said, this has just started, so it will take some time to find out how that's going to work and how we can use it in monitoring. Okay, and just finally, there was an agreement on the budget this year that the Government would work to introduce a fiscal framework between Scottish Government and local authorities. Are you involved in those discussions or are you anticipate being involved in those discussions? We haven't been to date, but, as ever, we'd be delighted to be involved in an appropriate way. I think that we can bring to bear our experience of this kind of stuff, obviously, for the Scottish Government to work at the detail of that, but we'd be more than happy to engage in that discussion, so I'll take that away. Okay, thank you. Okay, can I do it, Annabelle? Yes, it's good that we go back, because I didn't manage to get my wee suppin at the time. Just to go back to the discussion that we were having about the badging of monies and how that appears in terms of local government's overall budget, I had understood having referenced a previous committee document, so I'm a relatively new member of this committee, but in previous discussions of the committee that, in fact, there might be other monies, other grant monies, aside from the IGB that doesn't make the cut as far as badging as local government money in terms of the look back at the last years, is that correct? So is there money, apart from the IGB money, that doesn't make the cut as being included as local government spent, even though there's grants that go to local government? No, there's no other money at all. No, I mean, so the big, so in this version I've also got last year's report as well, which has the revenue grant, non-domestic rates, the specific revenue grants, and then in the previous version we had a separate line for health and social care funding via the NHS, which the chair said earlier was 357. So no, that's it in its entirety. Over the last six years, there's no other money that's not done. Well, we had to change how we measured this when police and fire came out of local government and became national bodies, but that's something that we agreed with Spice another some time ago, so no, apart from that, it's a like for like measure. Okay, thank you. And another question, I think that a reference was made to where we are with this budgetary year, and I had understood that the overall position in cash terms was that, in fact, the allocation from central government represented a 2.5 per cent increase, is that the right figure? In cash terms, between 2019-20 budget allocation, we say a 2.9 per cent increase in cash terms between 2018-19 and 2019-20, in excess of 2.9 per cent. It's just that every time you read something there's a slightly different figure, but a 2.9 per cent increase in cash terms in terms of the issues budget, vis-a-vis last year's budget, 2.5 per cent. Exhibit 2 sets that out and breaks that. Exhibit 2 sets that out. Right, so 2.9 per cent. The in-year comparisons are slightly complicated by the fact that 34.5 million pounds moved, and that's why earlier I referred to 0.4 per cent over two years, because if I just talk about the last two years, then I don't need to worry about where 34.5 million pounds in 10 billion pounds went, but if you want to start talking about specific years, you actually do have to worry about it. Yeah, so if we do talk about specific years, which many people do, and make that comparison, year-on-year comparison, it's this year versus last year's 2.9 per cent increase in cash terms. Yes, and when we were here in December, the position from 2017 to 2018 to 2018-19 was an increase in real funding, but that was with one treatment of 34.5 million. When that changed, that then became a decrease in real funding, and because 2018-19 reduced, that meant that it was a lower base for 2018-19 to 2019-20, which increased the amount of the increase from 2018-19 to 2019-20, and that's exactly why I was trying to deal with two years together. I think that clarification is maybe left a few people behind, but I think that in terms of what Ashley said, the 2.9 per cent increase in cash terms, I think that's a very clear position. In terms of looking at what is open to local authorities in terms of initiatives and so forth, one of course is community empowerment, and I just wonder what your views might be on how that can be used as a helpful tool, in fact, for local authorities in terms of asset transfer, for example, and other issues. It would be interesting to hear your reflections on that. When we talk about community empowerment, there are a number of aspects to it. There's asset transfer, participatory budgeting, community engagement. I think that one area where we would see it being particularly pertinent, and we've emphasised this, and we emphasise it in the individual best value reports on councils, is that when we talk about transformational change, that involves, as a fundamental part of it, talking to communities about how best to deliver outcomes for those communities and also taking the community not as an object that you do things to or provide services to but an active participant that may actually be involved in doing things itself. I think that that's one specific area where community empowerment links up with transformational change in a very constructive way, and that's certainly one aspect that we highlight. We see this as a really important area of development, so it's complicated to audit. There's no doubt about it. We have set up a community empowerment advisory group, which brings together scrutiny bodies interested in local authorities and experts from the sector. It's been really, really interesting being part of that work. It's made us think quite deeply about how to look at what good looks like, because on the face of it some things may appear to be quite good when actually you get underneath the skin of it. It's not quite as authentic as it should be, and I'm going to really oversimplify this very complicated area, but I think one of the things we're coming to see is that those areas that do it very well have it in their bones. It's part of what everybody does, so they don't have special little teams that tick the box around community empowerment. They see it as integral to how they run the business essentially, so we're engaging well with local communities, looking for opportunities to work collaboratively with communities. It's just part of what they do, so it's no doubt it's early days for local authorities, but we see some signs of real interest in progress. For us, it's a learning exercise as well, so we will want to reflect on that and think about what that means for our future road at work, but it's a big change in area for us to keep an eye on. It's absolutely the case. It provides an opportunity, so I think it's quite an exciting area of activity for local authorities. I'm picking up the point that you made there, Claire. I wonder then the very important point that you made about it, to paraphrase you hopefully not incorrectly, that the ones that are doing best are the ones that it's a whole council approach rather than treating it as some little silo somewhere. Is COSLA on that? Are they looking at ways to ensure that best practice is shared? Because it is in its infancy and it's really important that for those that are doing it really well, that they share their approach with the hope that we can see that roll out across Scotland in that way? Yes. We're speaking to COSLA about this very issue, and it's absolutely right that whilst you can't have a one-size-fits-all approach, people are starting from different places, there's much to be learnt, particularly from those areas that are a little bit further ahead. One of the key things that we look for is to what extent those relationships are well established. So, again, back to health and social care integration, we saw much better engagement with communities where that had been an agenda for a long time. We know that some areas are coming to this a little bit newer, so they've got much more work to do. So, yes, there's absolutely an agenda there about sharing what works, but I'm real appetite for that to happen. I think we see that. That's encouraging. One last area of activity that I'm questioning, convener, if I may. So, looking at issues to do with, for example, gender pay gap and how councils are addressing that, and I would add in that there are still some outstanding equal pay claims and how that has been dealt with, so I don't know who would like to do that. I'll just say one thing in the audits. Yes, in fact, we spoke about this last time we were here, I seem to remember, particularly around equal pay and the pension element of that. So, we're in the process of doing what we call our impact reports. That follows up on the equal pay report that we did last year, which will allow us to look at how progress is being made and the gender pay gap, while that wasn't the focus of our last bit of work increasingly. I think that we need to turn our attention to that. At the moment, there's the Glasgow Equal Pay situation, which has been resolved up to a point, but they still need to pay out to the women who are affected by that. That's something that we'll be reporting on as part of this year's local audit in Glasgow, so that report will come to me in September about progress on that specific issue. I think that, in most other places at the moment, equal pay is reasonably settled, but, as you know, over the years it is highly affected by case loss, so all it can take is another case to be settled somewhere, and that can kick-start a whole series of other things. So, we continue to keep an eye on it, and certainly once our impact reports are available and we've done that, we'll be delighted to share that with the committee. You mentioned Glasgow and, obviously, payments have to be paid, but a deal has been reached, which I think was a very encouraging development for all those affected in the city. At which councils are still—are there any councils, then, that still have outstanding claims that have not reached a deal with the workers concerned? So, I'll come back to confirm, but no, I think that all councils now have settled equal pay. There might be some individual claims, because that can happen at any point, but no, in terms of agreeing deals with the workforce, all councils have now settled, but I'll double-check that and confirm it. That would be helpful. Lastly, just on the gender pay gap, going forward in the future, I take it, then, we can say, with some confidence that this will not be an issue then. You're a braver person than I to say that it won't be an issue. It is 2019, one would hope that, eventually, women might get the same pay. Yes, you would. At least there's a step in the right direction in that we are getting increasing clarity and transparency around what the gender pay gap is, which I think has to be a good thing, but it seems to me that we are still a long way to go until we're in that place, but that's why I think it's important that councils and all bodies are reporting on it and taking steps to make sure that there is equal pay. I think that, as Fraser mentioned, the structure of the framework is such that even though you've agreed a deal and it's all been signed off, it doesn't mean that it's impossible for that to be opened up again unless and until I think it's time expired, as far as I know, in terms of making an appeal. If case law changes and someone takes up the point, it is possible to open up some things. I understand that from a legal perspective, but going forward on gender pay, I mean, one would hope that we're moving to an end game now that we all get paid the same work. Thank you for that, Gideon Collin. Very quickly, there's just a follow-up on the community empowerment issue that Annabelle Ewing was asking about. Clare Sweeney, you said that some councils were basically doing it better than others and some had been doing it for a long time. Are you able to tell us who's leading, who's out there? So, we've got some case studies in the report that set out some examples where we see more progressive practice, you might say, but it is variable. So, the case study, for example, on page 28, which sets out the progress that's been made in East Asher Council around the vibrant community's approach would be an example we would use. But again, places are changing very quickly, so we expect others to start to catch up around some of those initiatives, but that's an example that we would refer to. In terms of sharing good practice, councils do look at best value reports and they look at other councils' best value reports. I know from speaking to councils that when we put out the East Asher best value report and we said that they were doing well on community empowerment, many councils looked that up to see what they were doing. Their model won't fit everyone, but councils do look at what other people are doing and take notice of it. We were already touched this morning on the difficulties that councils are facing with workforce planning. Having the right staff in the right place, with the right skills and leadership, is vitally important for the progress that we have seen in ensuring that they can maintain and retain some of the services that they have. However, we have touched on the ageing population within the workforce and the retention and recruitment issues that they have. How are councils managing to square that circle to ensure that they have the personnel who have the right skills to take the organisation forward over the next three, five or ten years, when they have so many critical demands on budget and financial constraints to manage? I think that we make two points about this in the report. The first is that the workforce planning across the piece is inconsistent. We emphasise in this report and we make the point in individual best value reports on councils that it is really important to have an integrated organisation-wide workforce plans. Some very well-run councils have workforce plans, but they are their service workforce plans. If you are going to undertake transformation and look to the future on how things are changing, you really need to look at the workforce across the piece. We have highlighted some councils where there has been good practice. South Lanarkshire, a couple of months ago, has organised a wide workforce planning at the heart of what it does. We mentioned in the Glasgow best value report that it is retraining so that people can move from one area to another as part of their workforce planning. I think that workforce planning is one of the big issues. We talk about financial pressure and transformational change. I think that workforce is alongside those as being absolutely key. The second issue that we refer to in terms of workforce is that there is no national database of skillsets across councils to identify where there are areas where there is just a dearth of skills across the board. In a number of situations, that would be a useful thing to have. I do not know whether you want to add anything. The only thing that I would add, chair, is that some of those issues can be very place-specific. If I think about the experience in Highland recently, not only were the council looking for a new chief executive and other senior managers, so was the health board exactly the same time. There is just something about the capacity of us being able to recruit to these very big and important senior jobs in places such as Inverness and Highland at the same time. That is a real challenge in some parts of Scotland. As well as the national picture that Graham has just described, there are some particular hotspots that are difficult to manage. You have identified one of the big concerns that they have, which is ensuring that you have the calibre of individuals who can take on those roles and responsibilities. We have also found that, in the report, you touch on sickness absences well across some councils and the impact that that is having on the non-teaching side of that. There have been some variations across some of the councils, with some doing extremely well and others struggling to manage that. That is having an impact on the quality, support and mechanisms that go into ensuring that you have, as I said, the right people doing the right job, but they need to be there to be able to do that effectively. That seems to be a growing issue that councils are now having to manage on a month-to-month basis much bigger than they had in the past. What are the views about how that is being resourced and supported to ensure that they can get and are getting the workforce that they need in the locations to do the jobs? Within the report, the point that we have made is one that scrutiny bodies or regulators frequently make. You can take the average or the upper quartile and say that, if you could all achieve that, you could look at the impact that it would have. That is a useful tool because it avoids issues about whether we are not comparable with the different type of business. That is looking at your own area and saying that you just do as well as other people. It is a bit of a blunt instrument but, in terms of encouragement and pointing out issues, it is very useful. The evidence that you heard from Clackmannasher and East Ayrshire was really interesting. One of the points that the chief executive of Clackmannasher made to you was that the health of the communities in Clackmannasher is the same as the health of the people who work in the council because they are the same people. That will be the case in lots of places in Scotland. That is why taking a wider view of health inequalities and prioritising that with partners in the NHS in the third sector and elsewhere can be very important. There are absolutely things that councils can do as an employer organisation, as you would expect them to do as good employers. In some places, there is a wider picture to that as well that they also need to work at. That comes down to the fact that we have touched on transformational change about the culture, about the effectiveness within communities. What are the supports that are available to councils in developing that transformational change to ensure that they can address the cultural change and the needs within their community? The improvement service is currently doing a specific piece of work around transformation, so it is developing a tool kit or an approach. It is doing some work to learn the lessons from transformation programmes across councils and to pull that together in a handy guide. As well as that, the improvement service has been quite proactive in working with individual councils to get people into the councils to work so Clackmannasher is an example where the improvement service has helped them to recruit a change manager, somebody who has been brought in specifically to help the change process. I know that some other councils have done that too. Again, this is an area in which we can certainly help through our best value audit reports. As the chair has already said, we think that they get well and widely read. It is an area in which we will continue to work with the improvement service and others to see what more we can do to help share a good practice when we find it. It is clearly a greater challenge for smaller councils where they will need to look outside for help, unlike the larger councils that might be able to put together a team of quite a few people to deal with it. Good morning, panel. A really fascinating report, as always. In paragraph 64, I quote, councils in England have experienced very significant reductions in funding to local governments following by 49 per cent between 2010, 2011 and 2018, and have used several commercial approaches to support their finances in response. Earlier, he said that SIPF is concerned by the level of boring by councils who have went down this road. He talked about shopping miles, in fact, my own council narrowly voted 17 votes to 16 against spending £72 million buying a 47-year-old shopping centre. I am delighted to say that that did not go through, but what should local authorities consider when trying to develop commercial services? Clearly, there must be some positive aspects to what is happening in terms of that area down south. I think that the first point is that it is a decision for the council to assess, and they need to look at the risks and advantages. From my point of view, if you are a council, you are set up in a completely different way from a commercial business. If you are venturing into a commercial market and competing with other businesses, you need to have a very good reason for doing that on a basis, and you need to be able to say, what is my sustainable competitive advantage there? There is no point in saying that fashion is hot and let's go into fashion as a business. You either need to be exploiting existing skills or services that you provide and can be used or redeployed in a commercial way or assets that you have that have a commercial use, rather than just going into commercial activity for its own sake on the basis that it is a good thing. However, you come down to, why are we doing it? What are the risks? That is a decision for the council, and they should go through a careful process of assessment. There is a fair bit of evidence out there in the app see, which I think stands for the Association of Public Service Excellence, which is a UK organisation that does a lot of work in this area. It is in regular contact with the Society of Local Authority Chief Execs in Scotland to share the experience of down south. Although the examples that we have just used about the shopping malls are an extreme version, there is a lot of stuff happening. In a funny way, the significant funding reductions that have been experienced in England have resulted in probably a bit more innovation and some slightly more radical thinking about how they can generate one income that is well short of those risky endeavours. I know that councils in Scotland are often looking south of the border to see how that might work up here. It is a matter of invention, I should say. If anyone wants any advice on fashion, I am sure that Alexander will be willing to provide it, given that it is his career. In exhibit 10, I found it quite heartening that Scottish educational attainment has grown by some 16 per cent, improved by 16 per cent from 2011-12 to 2017-18. However, what is concerning is the gap between local authorities in terms of that improvement. It appears to be huge—1 per cent in D and 34 per cent in Falkirk. You talk about the fact that, you know, even if one considers, for example, deprivation, you know, you say, for example, a paragraph 110, the reasons why Glasgow and Falkirk have seen big improvements in attainment to D is not can't explain the simple element, spent on education or levels of deprivation, and you talk, you expand further on this in paragraph 1112, I mean 112, for example, Education Scotland rated rent for your council, excellent. What you have talked about is the need to share best value, the Glasgow Improvement Challenge, for example, Falkirk councils, good performance management, which was highlighted as far back as 2015. Are councils, like Dundee and other local authorities, not performing as well as they should be, despite the level of resources relative to the local authorities? Are they starting to change? Are they picking up the best methods of working of Glasgow or Falkirk or other areas? How do you envisage improvements taking place in terms of this really important area? The short answer is yes, they are. We mentioned that, in Dundee, they have, I think, all the attainment challenge process in Education Scotland found that that was beginning to have inroads. I know that the chief executive in Dundee is hugely committed to the local government benchmarking framework as a tool to ask questions. It does not provide the answers as to why things are there, but it does help to ask some questions. He is very keen to learn lessons from other places, and there is lots of evidence of them doing that. In a sense, I think that that is what we are trying to demonstrate in this section, Mr Gibson, which is not for us to have the answers as to why it is, but to highlight the fact that at least a couple of the areas that you might think would inform the results do not appear to, so money and deprivation. There must be something else going on there, and it is absolutely for the councils to get under the skin of that and to really understand what has worked in Falkirk or Glasgow and how might that work for us, recognising that all local authority areas have different contexts and different needs. We do see a lot of that activity happening. Things such as the People Equity Fund have been helpful, because, as well as the money that is spent in individual places, Education Scotland is providing a whole series of resources for councils to identify what has worked in some places, and that is building up a really good database of what works across the country. We are going to be doing a report on behalf of the commission and the Auditor General next year on educational outcomes, where we are going to get into all of this and the education reform agenda more. Generally, that is scheduled for May or June of next year, so this is a real area of importance for us. So, in a sense, what you have in here is a wee taster, and we will do the full education report next year. I have one thing about the statistics that you mentioned. If you look at Exhibit 10, there is a wide range there, but it is a very skewed distribution. If you look at all 32 councils, there is one or possibly two councils that are significantly different from the others, and when you are looking at range statistics, that does spread it out quite a bit. I hope that your report will explain that in further detail. In paragraph 51, you talked about the E-School programme in Aileen Shire, using technology to allow pupils to access teachers' classes of resources from any school within the council or elsewhere in Scotland. Is this something where you envisage significant improvements and the use of digital approaches to drive improvement? Well, digital is a major area that all councils are interested in. I have to say that they are all working together and sharing practice. We attended the Solace conference last year, and there was a section on digital with a couple of councils presenting to the others. It is clearly one of the main areas that Council C has the potential to transform services. I think that the digital office for local government has been a really good recent development that has been up and running now for a couple of years. It is a relatively small organisation in its own right, but it is designed to provide the networks and the connections. Virtually all councils have now signed up to that. As we go on to say on page 23, in paragraph 52, there are some things that councils need to be aware of, particularly in the jargon digital exclusion, so recognising that not everyone is able to or wants to engage with their local council through digital means. I think that the examples that we have produced in 51 and the Glasgow one in particular are a great example of sometimes it is not about new technology, it is not about putting in new IT systems, it is about thinking about how we can better use the data that we already have. I know that one of the challenges that councils have, not just councils but many public sector organisations, is having the right skills in-house to do the data analysis, the data analytics type work that allows councils to make the most of all the data that they have. They are very data rich organisations. Councils know a lot about their communities. The trick is to be able to organise and use that data in a way that can be more helpful for services. As well as the IT bit of it, a big part of the digital office's job is to look at data and how we better use it. One area of disappointment in the report was in paragraph 67 where you say, shared services were a potential approach to partnership working. Through our audit work, we have seen only a limited number of examples of councils sharing services and you give three examples. Things such as council tax collection payroll or even road repairs. There must be a lot of areas where councils can co-operate across boundary to deliver more efficiently and effectively their services. Can you just talk a wee bit about that? I think that our approach to this is to emphasise the partnership element. Councils work in partnership with a range of bodies, including other councils, but also other public bodies, third sector communities and private sector. We do not have a particular push on working with other councils specifically. There may be reasons for different priorities or different administrative structures that make a partnership with somebody else easier. Working with other councils is one of the elements of partnership that we look at, but we would not assess partnership working purely on that. We would look at how they are working across the piece. Only very briefly, convener, I am in danger of plugging the work of the improvement service a lot this morning. I am noticing, but they also happen to be doing a piece of work on shared services specifically at the moment, so they have just embarked on that work. I think that they are hoping to have something done this year, which looks at the examples of shared services that there have been, what some of the barriers are, how they can make it work most successfully. I think that that will be a really helpful tool for councils. I think that, to recognise when something is right for shared services, we have seen too many examples where an awful lot of time and energy is spent trying to get a shared service up and running, and then, for various reasons, it does not happen. It may be that if there is a better assessment up front, once you embark on the process, you will have more confidence that it is actually going to work. I hope that that will be a helpful piece of work. I have been dotting around a wee bit, convener, because there are so many different things to cover. I thank you for your indulgence. I will touch on, I will not talk about EU workers in paragraph 86, but I will go into 121 just to finish off if that is okay. This is about homelessness. We have undertaken a major inquiry into homelessness over a period of nine months. I made a look at recommendations that were picked up by the Scottish Government back then. I notice that it says here that the Scottish Housing Regulator reported in March 2018 that Glasgow City Council had failed to offer temporary or emergency accommodation to 40 per cent of 5,377 applications had for assistance in 2016-17, and it also provides settled accommodations to just over half of the households that it is duty to provide to. There has obviously been a change in political administration, I am glad to say, in Glasgow since then, but what action can be taken when local authorities are not fulfilling the statutory requirements in such important areas? I think that this particular area falls under the scope of the housing regulator, and so the housing regulator would follow this up. We ourselves are going to be carrying out some work on housing that we will report next year. Homelessness was one of the principal contenders for that, and then we have gone for affordable housing, because there is a lot of work being done on homelessness, not least your own committee. The housing regulator is going to do some thematic work on homelessness and their consulting with Audit Scotland on that. We are interested in that, and we are involved in it, but the main work is at the moment being done by others. We think that we can get more value for our resource, but by looking at affordable homes, as far as housing is concerned at the moment. We will continue to monitor that, particularly in individual best value reports. I would like to ask a couple of quick questions and go back to Alexander's workforce planning and sickness levels. Is there any evidence, any correlation between the reducing numbers of staff working within local authority services? There used to be a saying that more for less was the buzzword for a well-in-local government, but the pressure that is on those that are left—mental health, stress and sickness—is there any correlation between reducing numbers of staff? I am not aware of any specific work that has been done in that. Intuitively, clearly, if a particular area is under a lot of pressure, that could well result in higher absenteeism. Possibly we have all been in environments where we have seen that sort of thing happen, but I am not aware of any cross-the-board work. I am not sure that it has been done yet. I do not think that there is a clear correlation, and I say that on the basis that pretty much every council on the land has reduced the number of people they have, and some councils manage sickness absences much better than others. There is something about the way in which it is done that is important. I think that that is why we keep banging on about workforce planning, because I think that where you are most likely to find those kind of scenarios is in specific parts of the council. In relatively small teams, a couple of people leaving can have a disproportionate impact on the people that are left behind. That is why it is really important that workforce planning understands the impact on the changes that people are making, not only in terms of being able to deliver a service, but in terms of what the impact is on the colleagues that are still working there. It is about workforce planning and about how you manage absences. It seems to be the difference rather than just necessarily a reduction in numbers. We know that people are now told that we have to work towards 68 years old. The average age for senior officials in local government retire must be in the 50s, as they thought. There seems to be a big gap between workers on the front line and their resources, their pension and senior officials leaving the councils through early retirement normally to take up a quango someplace. Have you done any work on that? We haven't carried out any specific work on turnover, but it is something that we keep an eye on. If you look at IJBs, for example, there is quite a high turnover of senior management in IJBs. Given the situation that IJBs are in, it is clearly not a very helpful phenomenon. It is something that we look at, but we haven't. We look at all senior departures individually as they happen. As part of the annual audit work, the local auditors would always look at the circumstances surrounding the departure of a senior person, and councils are required to disclose all that in their remuneration report every year. Increasingly—I am very anecdotal, Mr Rowley, so you will forgive me—I cannot think of that many early retirements that have been happening more recently. It is an interesting question that you pose and I will see if we can have a look at what we know about the nature of senior people leaving. However, to give the committee assurance that when and if and when it does happen, our local auditors are looking at those individual circumstances. Thank you very much. I would like to thank Liam Sharp and his colleagues for attending today's session. The committee will spend the remainder of the meeting considering this evidence in private.