 Good morning and welcome to the 27th meeting of the committee in 2014. Everyone present is asked to switch off mobile phones and other electronic equipment as they affect the broadcasting system. Some committee members may consult tablets during the meeting. This is because we provide meeting papers in digital format. Our first item of business today is an oral evidence session on the Community Empowerment Scotland Bill. We have three panels giving evidence this morning. Our first panel of witnesses are here to give evidence on part six of the bill on common good assets. I should point out that we have a change to the published agenda. Councillor Harry McGwigan has given his apologies as he has been unable to attend this morning. I would like to welcome Anil Gupta and Rona Welsh, community wellbeing policy officers from COSLA. Jim Gray, head of democratic services at Glasgow City Council, Andrew Ferguson of the Society of Local Authority Lawyers and Administrators in Scotland, and Dr Lindsay Neill from the Selkirk Regeneration Company. Welcome and good morning. Would you like to make any opening remarks? Briefly, what I think the councillor McGwigan would have, which is that COSLA is supportive of this element of the bill. We recognise that establishing a register for common good properties will create a burden on local authorities, hopefully a short duration. One of the issues that will clearly be a matter for us to resolve is the extent to which properties that may be assumed to be common good are or not. That will be a judgment call, which we will be looking for advice from our legal advisers. COSLA welcomes the idea that legislation can help to address tricky issues such as the Portobello school one, and we are very supportive of the views taken by Sola with regard to the provisions within the bill. We also want to draw your attention to, I'm not too sure whether we've done this previously, to the improvement services 2008 report, some of which I think may actually have influenced the shape of the bill on the common goods assets, register and funding arrangements, as well as its particular notion that, after a period of time, and in its case it was suggesting about 50 years, properties that have been seen as common goods should actually be treated as such. Thank you. Does anyone else wish to make an opening remark? Dr Neill, please. Thank you very much. I'd just like to record and pay tribute to Ms Mary McKenzie of Peebles who died about two years ago and devoted the latter half of her life to pursuing the common good much along the lines that this bill is going to achieve, I hope, and it's just to say that you've got a posthumous word of support from her. I think most things will come out in the discussion or the questioning. The important thing, I think, which comes out in everybody's submissions, is that we need to define the ownership of common good. There is a simple way of doing that, which I won't go into unless I ask. The other thing is alienability is another thing that requires definition and there is a way of doing that. The third thing is that local people need to have more input into the administration of common good funds, and I've suggested a way of doing that. The fourth thing, these are the four things I wanted to cover, the fourth thing is that there should be some control over the money that is taken out of common good funds by local authorities for whatever reason, and some reasons are quite elaborate. Thank you. Anyone else? No, in which case we'll move on to the questioning. Can I ask first of all what you believe the main problems are with the current management of common good assets in Scotland and whether or not the bill will help solve these problems? The main problems, as I see it, with the current management of common good is uncertainty about the law. I think that the bill, although it's not all about common good in any sense, is a much broader thing. There is an opportunity to clarify that. In solar submission, we've focused particularly on the Portobello park situation and about appropriation of common good land for another public use, but there are also, and you will see that there is a broad agreement here with Dr Neil, there are difficulties in defining what's alienable and what's in the alienable common good. It's hard even to say these words, but never mind defining them. Those two definitions are quite important for the current legislation as to what councils can do with common good land. A definition of common good land itself would be useful because it currently relies on lawyers interpreting some very old case law, and it would really be far better if there was modern legislation, which anybody could read and make a decent stab at understanding. In terms of those definitions, Mr Ferguson, obviously we have lots and lots of different types of common good and common good accounts governed by a number of bodies. In the Highland Kingsworth submission, it talks about 10 different common good funds. How would you go about defining what is common good? How would you go about that definition when each of them are so different in terms of the setup? I appreciate that common good is a very local thing because former boroughs are often quite small in villages or obviously they go up to city size, but people have particular views on very local issues and particular bits of property. To me, defining what is common good is not terribly difficult. I think that it's generally accepted that common good property was only property which was part of a boroughs property. The cases that I referred to, which are fairly elderly now, particularly the 1940 case called Ruthin Castle, defines common good against two exceptions that are to do with common good which was acquired using rates money rather than common good money for statutory purposes such as housing and the other exception is trust property. I wouldn't second guess what the legislators would put down, but I would have thought that that basic definition wouldn't be too hard to clarify. Essentially, all boroughs property would become common good unless it fell into these two exceptions. What about property that was gifted and never belonged to a boroughs or property that was bought from common good accounts? I think of my own home turf in Aberdeen where the common good account there has bought quite a lot of property in order to use the rents to boost the common good account. How do we deal with those kinds of situations? I think that if property had been held on the common good account or if it had been acquired and put on the common good account, it would be very difficult for a council even now to claim that it wasn't common good. I don't really see that as being a difficulty. You could expand the definition to talk about the common good account so that, if there had been property acquired after the boroughs days, I just don't see it as being too difficult. What about devil's advocate? Personally, I don't think that there would be a catch-all definition in terms of the way that some have been handled, but you obviously think differently. I'm not saying that there wouldn't still be hard cases, but I think that what I'm saying is that the hard cases could be tested against a very clear set of legislative principles. At the moment, they're tested against sometimes conflicting judgments in a case from the 1940s. Really, it seems to me that it would be better if there was at least an attempt to definition. I know that, in other submissions, I've seen that people have argued that there is a risk that, by doing that, you exclude something that people have always thought was common good. Again, with a bit of thought, I don't really think that that is necessarily the case. Dr Neil, you're back to my original point about the main problems and whether the bill will solve those problems. Sorry, can you repeat that? Yes. What do you think the main problems are with the current management of common good and what do you think the bill will solve those problems? Right. I think that the bill should be aiming towards restoring to the communities their control and influence on what happens to their common good fund and also act as a referee on the management by local authorities on common good funds. We have had experience and there is still new experiences cropping up of failures by local authorities to observe the existing regulations. Never mind any change in regulation. I would say that the main thing is to involve the local people. Really, basically, because the best guardians of property are the owners of the property. There is a fine distinction, which is avoided by many people, that the act of 1973 did not confer to local authorities the entire ownership of common good funds. What they transferred to local authorities was the title, not the beneficial ownership. The beneficial ownership remains with the citizens of the former borough and the present day and age. They have very little say indeed in what happens to their common good fund. Is that a supplementary from Mick Taggart? Dr Neil, you mentioned the involvement of local people. How best do you think that we could do that? The best thing, as I said in my submission, is to have an equal number of local volunteers to act as a counterweight to the local authority people appointed to common good working groups. That is the way that most local authorities organise the management on a democratic level, although the officers are involved and generally attend these meetings. If there was an equal number, there would be no option of the local authorities steam rolling through any change in the common good fund of a locality. I would also add to that a limited veto power because the phrase that appears in the act and also in the new community empowerment bill is to have regard to. My QC friend who has been taking me hand in hand all the way through this business of common good says that having regard to is legally meaningless because local authorities can have regard to something and simply disregard it and therefore a bit more teeth in that area would be very helpful. I know it says now in the new bill must have regard to but even that is legally questionable and therefore the word must or will instead of have regard to would apply an imperative to these various things. How do you envisage these community representatives being elected, appointed? How do you make sure that the community representatives reflect the views of the people? You mentioned community council. That is a good place for volunteer or people to be appointed from the community council. A lot of people who have given evidence to this committee during the course of this draft bill and others say that community councils do not reflect the views of the community they represent in many cases. I have another finger up which is that the other community bodies that have evolved to meet needs within a community and Selkirk Regeneration Company is one such example and there are others even in Selkirk could put up a candidate for sitting on these management committees and they could be, depending on the numbers, approved by the community council but there could be a limited number for the community council itself. One for the community council, two spread around the community and there would be different people coming in at different times. The approval thing is a bit of a problem. Can you ask one potential candidate for such a position to approve another potential candidate or can you divorce it to some arbitrator which would be a better idea? I could see that causing quite a few difficulties in terms of what others have given us in evidence. Mr Gray, please. Thank you, chair. Can I endorse my colleague Andrew Ferguson's submission? In our written submission, which we made response to the bill rather, we strongly put forward the view that we thought that a statutory definition would be helpful. If I can just rather than repeat what Andrew has said already, say that in general terms, if we are genuinely trying, we are committed to that as well, trying to make this more transparent and more accessible to local communities. In general terms, I would suggest that having a statutory definition, which is more easily explicable to the general public, would be helpful rather than have to rely on a number of cases from the past and varying interpretations of the meaning of those cases. Without overstating it, we strongly feel that there is a missed opportunity of consolidating the pre-existing definitions from case law into statute. We also think that a degree of confusion arises. Dr Neil talked to me before we came in. He knows a great deal more about the common good than I ever would. However, the general public, understandably perhaps, is unclear what the common good is. Funds are, and there may be a perception, clearly not on the part of Dr Neil but on some people, that in some way this is unique. Clearly, local authorities have a number of restrictions in terms of property and what they can do with certain categories of property, whether it is restrictions on the title, burdens, contractual obligations, restricting use or disposal. However, it has also been flagged up by Andrew that within the common good fund, and I struggle to say it as well, the distinction between alienable and inalienable, we do not think that the bill really takes that much further forward. However, in general terms, we would support the idea of opening up and making more transparent the common good. We are already reviewing our policy on the common good. We are reviewing our existing register of assets. It may be more appropriate at a later question but we do think that both the policy memorandum and financial memorandum have somewhat understated the resource implications for local authorities in implementing this. However, we are committed to making more transparent the operation of the common good funding law school. He wants to speak for a cause there. To say, as I indicated earlier on, that we are in agreement with Solar's position and also Mr Gray's, clarity is probably the biggest issue for us as well as the potential burdens of putting in place the register. I would like to say that, briefly, when local government is required to have regard to various provisions under legal duties, we take those seriously. More often than not, that is followed up by examples of good practice being shared between members about how best to manage those things. Part 5 of the bill looks at asset transfers. Can you give us an indication of how you feel about asset transfer requests to common good accounts? How do you think that will play out and what do you think can be done there, Mr Ferguson? That is a very good question because the broader suite of the community empowerment bill is something that is really no opposition to broadly that communities should be more empowered. There are clearly situations where a local authority is not the best placed body to take forward the future of a particular building. Can I stop me there just a second, Mr Ferguson? There seems to be a very strange noise in the room, which I do not know if it is affecting broadcasting or not. Could it be somebody's hearing aid by any chance? No? Sorry, Mr Ferguson, I was just worried that that was maybe upsetting broadcasting. That is okay. It seems to have stopped. What I was saying was that the community empowerment bill generally is about situations where, or to me, there are bits in the bill that try to cover situations where a local authority is not the best placed guardian of a particular asset. There is a community-based organisation that would be better placed. That is absolutely the case. It would be disingenuous to say that that never happens. Of course there are situations where shining examples of that are taking place. One of the reasons that we are looking to get the clarity on common good law that we are asking for is so that, where there is an asset transfer or a proposed asset transfer, the somewhat Byzantine provisions of common good law do not get in the way of that. Essentially, it should not matter terribly much. I know that it matters to the community deeply that something is common good, but whether it is common good or not, if they have a plan for a particular asset, why should not they be able to take it on without their being blocked standing in the way? At the moment, even if there were, it is not quite clear from the wording of the bill whether, if you had an inalienable building, which everybody agreed would be better looked after by a community organisation, whether, even though everybody was in agreement, you still had to go to court under the old 1973 provisions. I think that it is really a matter of stitching in common good property to the overall sweep of the bill and to things like asset transfer for me. Dr Neil? I would agree with that, except that the, I lost my train of thought, if there was a local democratic group assessing whether or not an asset should be transferred from the common good to another agency, if they agreed that the purpose was for the community good, they would probably offer no opposition. Therefore, by democratising the management of common good to a local level, you will facilitate some of these asset transfers when they occur. Mr Gray, please. Thank you, chair. I would endorse the view that we would have to be careful that we are not inadvertently making it harder for groups to take on community assets. It is a big enough challenge and groups need a lot of support and it can take a lot of time. There is a lot of capacity building involved and there are a lot of issues about sustainability. However, I would endorse the view that we would need to be clear that we would not want any changes to common good operation to make it harder for such groups to take on properties that have been in the common good. I notice that I will know you later on hearing from the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, but in your papers at page 50 they touch on this in their submission when they talk about common good and they do mention the exact situation that has arisen earlier, that it would be possibly a perverse outcome if any of this made it harder for groups to use. I will take on common good property for use as allotments, which I will talk about later. I have nothing to add to our previous submission. I welcome Mr Ferguson's request to get clear definition in legislation. One of the issues in relation to the transfer of land and whether that be held in common good. Whether we are concentrating on the common good land or land that is held in trust by a local authority for a community is the issue about the keeper of the register of Scotland. Mr Ferguson's or Solar's submission has indicated that we will not give title to that land. What can we do in the legislation to try to ensure that the keeper recognises where there is a transfer of asset that is held in trust or in common good by a local authority to a community organisation, that that will be recognised in the land title deeds? One of the issues that we have is that many of the communities require ownership of land to be able to attract funding. If they cannot get clear-defined titles of that ownership of land, some of the funding that they may wish to apply for may not be forthcoming. Mr Ferguson. I think that, thanks for picking that point up, there does appear to have been a difficulty recently with the keeper accepting applications for registration. It was another local authority that was involved, so I am not completely conversant with the difficulty, but the keeper did seem to be taking a position that they needed some sort of proof of court authority if it was inalienable common good land. Again, I suppose that the solution to us is in getting definitions of what is inalienable and what is inalienable in the legislation so that it is quite clear. Again, if the acquisition has been carried out under the community empowerment legislation, that gives the keeper a little bit of extra comfort that has been done properly and that he can record the circumstances clearly in the land certificate. The clarity of definition that we are asking for would help that situation and would help the keeper to be able to give the land certificate that a community body would need. I do not know if Mr Gray has anything to add. Not on the technical aspect of it, but it does occur to me that, again, you could have a potentially a normal situation here. I am involved at the moment in a long running piece of work that has to do with transferring into community management, a major facility in Glasgow. We are having a service agreement with the voluntary organisation. Where there is a transfer of ownership, it does strike me there that if we are staying true to the spirit of the common good, do we need some sort of device to ensure that the common good, if you like, the community as a whole has some safeguards built in? If something happens to the group to whom the transfer of the assets has taken place, unfortunately it goes out of business or it is failing to deliver. I think that there is an issue quite apart from the legal one. In what way can we safeguard the longer-term community interests? Obviously, we need to think about that and look at various agreements that we can enter into with the transfer. Let's go to alienable and inalienable rights. For many folks, there are thousands of viewers at home, as I always say. We will find it very difficult to understand what all of that is. How do we explain that to folks? How do we make sure that the definitions, as you want, of these different things are right? You are absolutely right. Explaining that to anybody who is not deeply steeped in the traditions of common good is slightly difficult. Essentially, not all common good property can be sold and that has always been the case. There has always been a class of common good property that, because of its nature, the courts have held historically that it cannot be disposed of. One class of such property is things that were necessary for the administration of the borough. In other words, the borough chambers, the jail and so on and so forth. I am going back through historic cases now. The other main area is where there was a dedication in the title, your 19th and 20th century philanthropist who gave off land to the town, but it was on the condition that it was to be used forever for a recreational purpose for the town. There is a third category, which is about the borough having dedicated some area to recreational purposes. It is usually land that we are talking about in that particular situation. That is quite a long paragraph to translate into legislation. I appreciate it. I do not think that it would be beyond the wit of the legislators to create a definition. The key thing is that those categories of property can now be sold with the consent of the court. There is a question perhaps to be had as to whether taking it to court in front of a sheriff or a court of session judge is the right place to make that decision, but at least if it goes before a court then the judge weighs up the benefits and disbenefits of sale. Those properties can now be sold under the 1973 act in certain situations. Coming back to Portobello situation, where the local authority wants to use the common good property for another public purpose, there is now a clear case law that says that they cannot do that. There is just an absolute brick wall against them doing that in any situation other than taking legislation through this Parliament, which, again, is not going to work. One might wonder if that is the best use of the Parliament's time. It would be tricky to define those categories of common good, because they are certainly in the case of things like old borough chambers. The case of whether they are still inalienable or not changes over time. However, I do not think that it would be impossible, and I think that it would be helpful to have those set down rather than in a string of 19th and 20th century cases and obscure law books. It would be better to have that set down in legislation, which everybody can access on the internet. To me, it would never be a perfect solution, but it would be a better solution than it has at the moment. As regards alienability and nonalienability, the mechanism existed in the 1973 act in section 222 and in section 222C, which permitted a court, either the court of session or sheriff's court, to make compensation for anything that was proposed to have its use changed. In other words, in a park, if they wanted to build a school there, if they provided some other park facility, the court would quite easily decide that. That seems to be a mechanism for transferring something that is inalienable into something that can be used for the public good. The other point about defining alienability and nonalienability was first mentioned in 1937 under the report in the Scots law times, referring to a commission appointed to inquire into the state of municipal corporations in Scotland of 1835. That was the only place that we found that defined clearly what was alienable and what was not alienable. If it is included in the bill, that would be a good place to start to get a definition. I do not have a lot to add to that island to say that perhaps it has just occurred to me that if there is a feeling that it would be too difficult to try and capture all this in the bill, whether there is a case for some statutory guidance here, which, while it is not being prescriptive, could at least give examples, which could at least allow an easier dialogue between local authorities and other interested parties, examples of what would be regarded as inalienable or alienable, and examples of overriding benefit to the community in the land being disposed of, based on the previous case law and good practice. Mr Wilson. Thank you, convener. It is just as a follow-up in relation to one of the issues that came out from the evidence, particularly from local authorities, is the compilation of a register of common good. If there is a difficulty in filing the register of common good assets, how do we know what assets are held in common good and what criteria are actually assigned to those assets? One of the things that Mr Fergus has made a comment about is the philanthropist of the 19th and 20th centuries. I know that the Carnegie Trust gave property to many local authorities or purchased property and built property for many local authorities in Scotland to provide mainly public libraries. I know that in the town that I live next to, the public library has been closed, has been transferred to a new-build facility, but the facility is up for sale. How would the local community determine or find out whether or not the local authority is entitled to sell that property if the property was gifted to the people of the borough of Colbridge? Closler, do you want to go first? Ms Wells. I want to say that we have been contacted by a number of members who have recognised that holding a register of common good property is good practice. In fact, it is cited as a good practice under SIPFA accounting guidelines. A lot of local authorities know about the legislation that is proposed and have started this process already. That is why we have emphasised today the need for clarity around what is considered to be common good. A number of them are compiling their registers and are coming up against some of the issues that you are raising. I think that local authorities at their heart are very keen to make sure that local communities have access to that information. In the process of building that register, we welcome the opportunity to consult with community councils and others in the area and are always open to answering those questions. Certainly, we have never had any negative feedback to those proposals in the bill. In terms of the scale of the task, my colleagues who are working on this tell me that the estimate, and I hence add estimate again, we, the Glasgow City Council, may have in the region of 20,000 title deeds to look at. We are not saying that I am not commenting on what proportion could fall within the common good, but if you want to do an exhaustive analysis, you will require to do that. We are giving priority to assets that have been queried in the past, whether it is a proposal to dispose or sell the asset. In other words, those parts of the potential register, which are most likely to be contentious in the near future, we have managed through our—we run a programme of graduate internships, paid internships, and we have managed to have some assistance through that. We are going to do the same again next summer, but it is a large-scale exercise if we are going to have a meaningful and comprehensive register. Yes, it will also go back to this issue of a definitive definition, because once we have that register clearly, we are required to publicise that register and people have the right to query some of the entries on the register. The community organisation is defined in the legislation. If and when there is any intention to dispose of that, I am risking repeating myself, but the more we can improve the public knowledge of what is common good, the less likely we will to have unnecessary disputes. I think that, certainly from my humble perspective and members of the public out there, they find it very difficult to believe that all of this is not registered anyway. I know what I own and I think that folks get quite upset at points where they go and try to find out who owns something. We have a situation where the local authority sometimes spends years to find out if it can find out at all. I think that folks find that quite hard to comprehend. What have you got at this moment in time in terms of a register of Glasgow's common good assets? We do have a register about where regard is imperfect, I suppose, is what I am saying, that we are trying to perfect it, trying to be as comprehensive as we can. I understand your point, chair. The problem is that we cannot rewrite history. The fact is that we are the successor body to other local authorities that has built up over a long period of time. It is not always a simple and straightforward question as those who know more about it than I do would confirm to you. We are where we are. It is regrettable, but it is very complex. It is not perhaps being given the priority that might have been in years gone by, in decades by, by local authorities at the time, I accept that. We are in the position we are in today. I have to say that, in terms of being the successor, I have inherited very few things in my life, but I know what I own there as well. I would just like to add an example of where the local authority is almost blind to the existence of movable assets in a border town that I will not identify, where there is a room full of pictures which say underneath, dedicated or given to the borough of, and the local authority refuses to believe that there are any movable assets. The argument is that, because they did not receive a list of movable assets from the previous administration, they have no obligation to continue to keep a list. Mr Wilson's point is very well made that, even if we have a common good register, it is an extra step to divide that into alienable and non-alienable. I am adopting Dr Neill's word because it seems easier to pronounce. That would be another exercise, and it may certainly be quite a big exercise, but, at the end of the day, if there is a statutory definition, then at least communities are able to challenge the local authority and say, well, you said that this is common good. Do you consider it alienable or non-alienable? The point that Dr Neill made about movable common good assets is a good one, because there never has been inherited a list of movable common good assets. In fife, we have made some efforts to create some sort of register of movable common good assets. It is very imperfect, and I am quite sure. We have tried to involve the local communities in what we have created. However, to mention the other point that we made in our submission, and to give a concrete example—it is a wooden example—we have a huge table that belonged to Loch Gelley Borough, where they had their meetings. Loch Gelley townhouse has now been sold. We now have the table sitting in storage in Glenrothes. We do not know what we can do with it. My advice to my colleagues who are dealing with it is that there is nothing that says that we can legally dispose of it. Standing there does not seem to be a community use for it at the moment. It is difficult. That is, as I say, a one example. At this moment in time, that would be a liability rather than an asset. At this moment in time, it is a liability, because we can simply store it. Obviously, there are quite a lot of assets in terms of paintings and so on. It is a question of what we can now do with it. Okay. Another case of—could you actually legislate to deal with some of these, or should common sense just come into play? Mr McDonnell, please. I hesitate to ask this question, convener, given that it is sort of 18 years since the establishment of unitary authorities and we still do not have common good registers in some local authorities or perhaps any local authority in terms of a comprehensive register. Should we have an expectation of a deadline being set for the completion of common good registers? My concern is that it has taken 18 years since unitary authorities came into being and we still do not have common good registers in place. Can we afford to sit around and wait for local authorities to get their act together without a deadline being in place? A number of local authorities have fed back to us that the main problem that they are facing is that when they are uncertain themselves on whether an asset is to be included in the common good fund or not, they are taking legal advice and the legal advice that they are getting is that they may have to go to the court to determine whether that is common good or not. Obviously, that takes time and that takes costs and I am not sure that it would be for us, as a member body, to indicate what time that should be set, if one at all. Do you want to come back on that, Mr McDonnell? I just wonder in terms of that legal advice. Presumably they are seeking that legal advice from their external solicitors. That is not internally sourced legal advice from their own legal departments because surely that would be something of a conflict. I can think of one local authority in particular who has taken external legal advice on that. As for all 32 local authorities, I could not say. Mr Gray? Just on that point, I can confirm that where that situation arose, we would get external legal advice and have done so. It is to some extent a judgment call whether to get that QC's opinion of whether to go to court. Clearly, I am going to court to cost more money and take longer. I can only endorse what has been said on behalf of COSLA that it is very difficult for us to give a timescale for completion for that very reason. I can understand from your point of view. Do not be there because we have this talk of getting external legal advice when in a lot of places there are perfectly good lawyers being paid quite substantial sums in local authorities. Are we being overly risk averse in dealing with that situation? The reason, chair, that we would do that is to try and avoid minimised disputes because other parties or stakeholders may take the view that they do not agree with our legal advice from our own solicitors. It is to try and create a degree of independence. It is a step short of going to court. That is the only reason we would do it because yes, of course we would rely on our own legal advice generally. Doctor Neill? Can I suggest that perhaps each local authority should be written to and ask for their assessment as to how long it is going to take them to compile their asset list, both movable and fixed, and make a judgment after that, which could be done by the minister maybe? Not a bad idea. In terms of a timescale for producing a common good asset register, I do not really see why there should not be a fairly short timescale. As colleagues have said, most local authorities have a common good asset register of some sort. The first step in terms of legislation is that it is then published and it will then lead to a discussion. There is no doubt that community interests will have local knowledge. I know that because we have been through this process in Fife and that local knowledge will feed in and will help to create a common good register that is more robust. In terms of an initial publication in terms of what the bill is proposing, I do not see why that should not be a relatively short timescale. When you get to the end of having a common good asset register that is absolutely 100 per cent accurate, it is a bit like painting the Forthbridge, frankly. In terms of an initial process, my concern is that if you leave it as an open-ended process, it is essentially a licence for heel-dragging where heel-dragging is taking place. While there are some local authorities who undoubtedly are going to be further down the road than others, there are also those local authorities who are picking up from the inferences that are being made from Dr Neil's perspective. There are local authorities who are engaged in a process of heel-dragging on that. I wonder whether, rather than leaving it up to individual local authorities to get the act together, there should be some co-ordinating approach being taken. I do not know if COSLA has a view on whether there should be co-ordination rather than leaving individual local authorities to plough their own furrow on that. Our position as COSLA is that, generally, we would ask that local authorities have a local flexibility to deal with their local issues as they see fit. I am not sure that taking a co-ordinated one-fits-all approach would necessarily solve the problem, but I do appreciate the point that you phrased. If I can clarify, I am not suggesting that it is one-size-fits-all. I am suggesting that it ensures that local authorities are making the right steps and moving in the right direction and that no one local authority is being allowed in inverted commas to drag its heels. What are you all suggesting that local authorities should be approached for timescales? Has COSLA done any of that in the past, approached local authorities and asked them how long it would take them to complete that kind of task? We have not done so at this stage, but I think that if the minister is to ask individual local authorities about the timeframes that it would take for both the moveable and the immovable, it would be useful also to ask a little bit about the costs attached to developing those registers in given timeframes because of the points that Mr Gray has raised already. Stuart McMillan, please. Good morning, panel. Some of that has been covered, but I am just seeking clarification on one point. Mr Gray, in your comments a few moments ago, there were two phrases that you used. The first one was that we are where we are. Secondly, I am paraphrasing here that local authorities possibly have not given common good the attention that it should have received in the past. Bear with me the discussion that we just had there as well. What I actually cannot understand is that, with some of the controversy that has taken place over the years regarding common good, the length and breadth of the country, why haven't local authorities grasped that particular thistle to make sure that their registers have been up-to-date and are up-to-date now? I am not sure that I am best placed to answer that. I have worked in local authorities twice in my career, laterally for about six years, and in the 1980s for Strathclyde Regional Council. I can understand that you may think that I have spent a long time in local authorities, but I haven't. I was really responding to an understandable concern that the chair was expressing or frustration about why has it taken so long to get clarity about what local authorities own. In that context, I was expressing a personal view that it is possible that, given the other pressures on local authorities over the decades, they may not, in some cases, have been as definitive in terms of what they were maintaining, an absolutely comprehensive result. In that register, there were presumably more concerned about the individual conveying transactions that were engaged in. I am purely speculating that they may not, clearly if they had treated it as a very high priority, then I am speculating that we wouldn't be where we are, but that isn't easily undone in the complexity of land transfers. Andrew Rennie has already given examples that it is not necessary to even land its assets. Local authorities have taken on a whole range of functions over the years, so it is not just the component parts of the local authorities. It is other organisations that have been merged or de-merged from local authorities. There is a whole series of complex transactions that have taken place. I would speculate the lack of clarity about what is in the common good and not in the common good may have compounded the problem, but it is purely a personal view. Mr Ferguson, do you want to come in there? I think that I would just say that it is, having been involved in Fife, I am not really speaking for solar overall here, but in Fife we have been involved in the exercise of this nature. It is massively resource intensive. It does take a lot of time to reach back through titles, some of them going back to the 1600s, 1700s and to try to make sense of them in the modern day context. It can be done. Again, I would stress that, with community involvement, you can often get information about particular properties that local authority officials sitting in a central office do not have themselves. There is a generational thing that a lot of colleagues who have now retired, who maybe did have that information in-house, have now gone. It is because of the local nature of it that Fife has 26 former boroughs within its boundaries. That is 26 different sets of problems, 26 different sets of communities to engage with. As I say, we have tried to go through that in Fife, and we are at the final stages of doing that. It has not been with its difficulties of communication and otherwise. That is fine from that perspective. I have one further question. In the submission that we received from Highland Council on walls that they are not here today, one of their suggestions regarding the issue of consultation with the community was that they suggested that they should consult only with community councils that represent the inhabitants of the areas to which the common good related prior to 16 May 1975. I am wondering if any of the panel has a view on Highland Council's suggestion. Any views on Highland Council's submission? We were aware of this particular position, and it is very specifically because of its very large geography. It is probably something that would also be felt by other local authorities with very similar broad dispersed populations. It is just essentially that for them, some community councillor in work having a view over what is going on in Sky just seems a bit odd from a community council point of view. The bill requires local authorities to consult with community councils, as we discussed earlier, and other community bodies on its common good register. However, there is no appeals mechanism if the community disagrees with the local authority and their decision. Should the bill define an appeals mechanism? I think that ideally it would, but I am struggling to think what a good appeals mechanism is that does not involve quite an expensive process and paying lawyers essentially to come to a decision. I do understand the desire to have an appeals process in terms of the register. Possibly what might be more useful is to look at when a local authority wants to dispose or appropriate a common good property. Whether the current system that we have of potentially going to the court of session is the best way of coming to a decision on that. However, I suspect that that is really going out with the remit of this bill, and perhaps it is something that would have to be legislated on separately. In terms of the register, I do understand the desire, but I do not really see an easy mechanism to do it. Audit Scotland has a function to review the management of common good on an annual basis for local authorities, including their asset registers. I have been impressed over the years at the inadequacy of their comments on the compilation of asset registers, particularly in the borders, by various local authorities. Audit Scotland is in a position to judge on an appeal in so far as they are supposedly totally disinterested, arbitrary. However, I have had reason to doubt their effectiveness in certain respects. I do not have much to add to what has already been said, chair. I think that it would certainly be preferable if we did have some form of dispute resolution that did not require the cost and length of going to the court of session. I think that we agree with what Mr Gray has just said. Could you even give an example of what that may well be? There are a variety of forms of alternative dispute resolution, but, generally speaking, both parties have to agree, as members will be aware. It is whether there is some provision for an independent person to be appointed or whether mediation, a whole range of ADR methodologies that could be explored. Certainly, we would not want to see a community feeling completely disaffected as a result of an outcome, but, on the other hand, clearly there could be issues, economic reasons, why a particular piece of land is required to be disposed of. There could be jobs that could be at risk or investments at risk. I think that it is the speed and certainty that we would be looking for. I do not have anything specific to offer, and I think that trying to avoid disputes and where you have disputes to resolve them is without having to go to court, if you possibly can. The panel members support the rules that require local authorities to have the regard to the views of the community councils and bodies when disposing or changing the use of common good property. That is having regard to, does not have a great deal of legal strength. If it were the case that the community were consulted and some phraseology was used to say that their opinion carried weight, then I do not think that this is an idea to smooth and avoid, smooth out the decision taking and to avoid conflict, which conflicts all over the place. Lawyers drive on it. Do any of the lawyers wish to comment on that one? I agree with the proposals in the bill. That is me, thanks. The other one has been answered. Thank you very much for your evidence today. I will suspend very briefly for a change of witnesses if we could do that as quickly as possible. It is my turn to consider part 7 of the bill in allotments and food growing strategy. Before we move on to the witnesses, I would like to state that the committee is working hard to engage with as many people as possible in this bill. We launched a short video in the participation request aspect of the bill a few weeks ago, and I am delighted to say that this has been watched nearly 1300 times on YouTube and has led to more evidence being received. Later this week, we will be launching a second video on part 7 of the bill on allotments and food growing strategy. We are keen to hear from folks on the provision for food growing, and we shall be taking further evidence on this topic at a meeting in Fort William on 24 November. I hope that this video will encourage more people to engage with us in these issues. We now move to our second panel for this morning, looking at part 7 on allotments. I would like to welcome Ian Walsh, president of the Scottish Allotments and Garden Society, Pete Ritchie, director of Nourish Scotland, Ross Corbett, Scotland Development Worker, Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens and John Hancock, who is petitioner PE1433. I would like to make any brief opening remarks. I am here representing Scottish Allotments and Garden Society, which represents around most of the allotments in Scotland, of which there are currently 8,000. In 2007, when we carried out a survey, there was 6,400, which was about 10 per cent of the number. We were left at the end of the war, so we have been left at a very low level of allotment provision. What we would hope from the new legislation is that that is going to facilitate turning that situation around. However, we have a number of concerns about it, and there may be a rather than take up too much time at the moment. Nourish Scotland has around 2,000 supporters and campaigns for a fairer and more sustainable food system in Scotland. We welcome the community empowerment bill in general terms. We want to see a much greater community participation, not just in food growing but in a community food economy, because we think that sustainable food is probably one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. The communities have to be part of the solution. I am the chair of Scottish Orchards and also the director of the network of Orchards called the Commonwealth Orchards. We broke full with the petition, which was about land, making land available to people that have not got land. I am very pleased that it has been put in front of the regeneration committee. It is far more than just digging holes and planting things. It is very much at the essence of what community empowerment is about. For me, I have been very interested in the concept of developing a right to grow, a little bit akin to the access laws that have been brought in. I think that basically land should be made available if it is not being used for anything better to grow. I think that it is the use of assets that is important rather than the issue of ownership. Without going back to the man in his table in the previous session, I think that, generally, assets should be available for people to use unless there is any good reason why not. We welcome the update to the allotments legislation. They would like to see broad recognition of community gardening and other community growing within the legislation. We also welcome the measures for local authorities to prepare food growing strategies. They would like to see a recognition that community growing is much more than just about food. There are many other impacts that community growing has and benefits. Following up on Mr Hancock's statement, the use of land should be more readily supported for communities. As it is currently framed, there are some concerns about whether it will do that. One of our major concerns is that, in the new legislation, the reference to plot size has been removed. We would like to see a reference standard still in the legislation of £250,000. The existing acts progressively reduced down the size of what was defined as an allotment. The new bill would appear to be removing it. A 250-square-metre plot will be sufficient for someone to feed a family group of four. Plots that are smaller will not have that capability. We feel that allotment is what defines us as a community. We would be removing the definition of the allotment community by not providing that standard size. On flexibility, I attended the Scottish Order of People's Assembly on Friday to talk about the bill in particular focused on certain aspects, including allotments. Some of the folk that I spoke to informally were saying that they could not manage a big allotment any more, but they still wanted to carry on. Do not you think that they should have some rights to that? I take your point about flexibility, chair. We want it to be a reference standard, not as an obligatory standard that has to be applied in all instances. Part of the response that we have had to the removal of any reference standard is that, if it appeared, the majority of plots being provided to us. Local authorities were reducing in size, so action could be taken. If there is no reference standard, what is the action going to be based on? We recognise that, particularly because the number of allotments in Scotland declined so greatly, most people in the population perhaps have their own definition of an allotment. That is different from what was defined in law and what it was supposed to be capable of doing. We recognise that people have a lack of skill and different time commitments. What we recommend is that other sizes of allotment—half-plots, quarter-plots—can be provided by local agreement with the users of the plots and the providers. Maserio chi, please. I think the answer is no, it won't address the strategy of ensuring a significant increase in allotments because we don't yet take the business of food growing seriously enough and we need a much wider cultural change to start addressing that. We welcome the part of the bill that focuses on outcomes being part of community planning. We want to see an outcome related to food squarely in the middle of the new set of outcomes that is agreed with local authorities post-2016. We want those to draw on the new UN sustainable development goals that are being published next year post-2015, which include, for example, the strategic goal to end hunger, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. We think that once those UN goals are in place, a lot of the single outcome agreement will follow from and be framed by the UN sustainable development goals. I think that once an outcome relation to food and food is part of the national performance framework, we will see a much greater focus then by local authorities on food growing strategies. The work nourish has been doing with others like the soil association on sustainable food cities is moving food up the agenda of our cities at the moment. I think that a strategic approach to supporting allotments and community gardens and, as John says, the use of land which is not being used for other purposes will then form part of a much more strategic approach by local authorities and partners to promote local food growing, more sustainable food consumption and reducing food inequalities. I think that we have to see food as part of a much more strategic approach. We also expect that the new land reform legislation will broaden our approach to looking at the use of land in the public interest and for the common good. I think that those other things will build on the work of this bill and help to make it a more strategic approach, but in itself, in and of itself, I don't think this bill will produce a strategic change. Mr Hancocks, please. I am very encouraged by the bill and I'm very pleased with the bill. I think that what it has done and has the potential to do is to change the culture, partly to change the culture in local authorities and with some of the institutions such as forestry commission and so on, to use their very considerable land holdings, financial clout and so forth to try and enable community engagement. And to develop growing. I think that the legacy of the community empowerment bill could be to really help to transform the amount of food growing that's done on a local level and I would be very encouraged if that, you know, obviously that's what I've been working towards. I think it's important that we don't get too caught up on the issues of land ownership while I'm very much in favour of increasing allotment provision and so forth. I think that allowing considerable flexibility and allowing local authorities and other agencies to allow land to be used for a period of time or to allow it without getting too bogged down in legislative hurdles or in legal hurdles is absolutely essential. I think that there ought to be a culture where people are able to go and identify bits of ground that aren't being used, they ought to dig holes and they ought to get on with it and I think that that's the essence of empowerment, of community empowerment is that people can actually get on with it. My view is that the owners should be put on to local authorities and other people to be supportive and to enable that process to happen rather than to create kind of onerous frameworks that put a lot of responsibilities and kind of public liability and issues like that on to the local groups which can be quite difficult for local groups that aren't terribly powerfully constituted to deal with. You've said that folks should just be allowed to go on and dig holes on land, does that include private land as well as public land and how do folk ensure that the land that is maybe going to have the hole dug in it is actually fit for growing because many areas in certain parts of the country are contaminated sites? I think it has to be a partnership approach with the land owners. I would say that that's absolutely critical. My petition that we put forward that I'm representing is very much looking at publicly owned land, health board land, local authority land and so forth. So I'm not aiming this at private land owners, but I would say, having said that, that quite a number of private land owners had a meeting yesterday with somebody, a farmer, who's very happy for his land to be used, but what worries him is that he says yes to something and then it kind of gets out of control. And he isn't able to then change the land use decisions down the line. That's not true particularly with a person I met yesterday, but in general I think that if you can have an agreement that people can use land on a kind of common sense arrangement and then that can be changed, I think that can be a very positive thing. Ms Corbett, please. I think there is potential for the builders strategically support allotments. I think it could do more towards community gardening and other community growing initiatives. I think potentially that there needs to be more thought about strategically addressing skills and resources of a lot of community groups. There's a massive skills gap at the moment in horticulture and the food growing strategy seems to be an opportunity to address that at a local authority level. Just coming on the contaminated land issue, there's several groups and organisations out there that do already support groups with resources. The Grow Your Own Working Group has recently launched a contaminated land guide for groups that are wanting to assess whether their land is contaminated and there could be more support for those organisations doing that. Can I possibly stick on the area? I know, convener, that you've just discussed it about size, but before doing so, just to make people aware that myself and Stuart McMillan did go out and we're very grateful for Ian Welsh and also to Judy Wilkinson, who's in the gallery today, for the extent of knowing what's going on. I think that the knowledge that you shared with us on the day that you'd taken us around some of the allotments in Glasgow, the major concern or the biggest item from that day was about size. I didn't actually meet any allotment, I don't know, is that a word, allotmentiers? Allotment holders, maybe. Allotment holders that hadn't raised a concern about if the size wasn't in the bill itself, that local authorities may well do shortcuts and cut sizes. I hear what Mr Welsh had said earlier, if you don't have that statutory size to begin with, how can you then start cutting that down and define that later on? Can I hear a wee bit more about some of those concerns that I most certainly heard on the day of the visit? Part of what came out from the visit is that we had ordinary plot holders there, some on my site who have relatively recently taken on the plots within the last five to eight years. We're able to say that when they first took it off, and the other plots are around 200 metres squared plus. The square meters thing is simply the updated metric equivalent of 300 square yards, which is what had been recognised as being suitable size to achieve the same of feeding a family size group. Many new people coming into our site look at the plots and think, oh, these plots are bigging. How am I going to handle this? The target actually heard from two people who both said exactly that, and then have now reached the stage where they feel they don't have enough ground to do all that they want to do because of the range of produce that they realise they grow. This touches on something that has been referred to, which is the lack of knowledge and skill that's out there. The allotment world has shrunk so much that it's not something that's in many people's actual experience any longer. Mine was from when I was literally a child being carried around and was taken to the allotment in Glasgow when my parents had looked after during the war, and it stuck with me. Many people were like that, but of course it's now changing. People have a different perception of what an allotment might be about as to what it actually is. One of the other concerns, which is another point but links into it, is how waiting lists would be triggered to create plots. The current recommendation is that when a waiting list in any area reaches over 50 per cent of the existing plot provision, then the local authority will be required to take action. I think the most likely action that would be taken is simply to take plots when they become available and have them and be able to reduce the waiting list below the 50 per cent. Without necessarily creating any new growing land and we are at a very low ed to give a comparison with the UK. The total number of allotments in the UK is 300,000, so our 6 to 8,400 to 8,000 over the period from 2007 till now is the comparison that's out there in the rest of the UK. Things have declined very badly in Scotland, so we not only have to protect what we've got, but we've got to create a suitable framework to achieve the things that the others are talking about, because the community gardens and the other smaller, all of our part to plan is where people will learn. So there's undoubtedly a value to all that, but the people who learn and then want more will have to have them. The mechanisms have got to be there to let them obtain that. We need to have far more allotments and far more community gardens in Scotland. My concern is that the bill, as it stands, doesn't have any levers to require that to happen. I think the framework of single outcome agreements is the lever we're going to make. I think that the intention of the bill is fine. I'm just not sure that the levers there to get, as Ian says, from 8,000 to 30,000 in the next five or 10 years. That's where we need to be. We do, as Rose says, need a significant investment in skills both for allotmenteers and for community growers. Picking up on the issue of skills, I would say that the best way of increasing the skill base is to work with young people. I've worked with a lot of schools developing school allotments to use the term loosely and also school orchards. I think that working with children is a very good way of working with the whole community because if children get involved and get interested, they drag their parents and drag their grandparents and drag the wider community into it. I feel that providing opportunities for people very much at a community level to take small steps will lead to bigger steps. I really see the number of children in schools throughout Scotland who are having experience of food growing, feeding through to an ever greater demand for growing spaces. Can I stop you there because you say small steps, but do you not think that maybe small size would lead to moving on if that's possible or sticking to that smaller size if that's all they're fit for doing at that particular point in time? That flexibility that I talked about earlier? For me, I'm not wanting to be controversial in any way, but for me, small size, it can be growing in a square metre, it can be growing in a barrel, it can be growing on a window, in a flowerpot on the window, so I think it's all great and I would encourage all of it. I think that the importance of the size does matter, so to say, but if we don't define the size, I think that the concerns from the groups and the community members that I've met, local authorities may well shortcut in half and quarter, and that would then get them up to... the level that they should be, so that was the major concern, but one of the other aspects that I've taken from our visit out to the allotments, the importance of the wellbeing and the community aspect of it, the health, I think, Rose had touched on that earlier. Just the importance all around, it's not just about garden growing, it's about sharing and caring about other people's knowledge and experiences whilst you're there, and it is hugely family orientated, and just the benefits that that creates for people's general health. I just want to support that and put it in context. All the allotments in Scotland fit in 200 hectares, that's a small farm, one small farm's worth of allotments, that's all we have in Scotland. We put hundreds of millions of pounds into single farm payments, a common agricultural policy to support farming. We should be putting more money into more hectares for more growers, and absolutely flexibility on plot size, but Ian's right, we need more ground under community cultivation, whether that's allotments or community gardens. There are 300 hectares of derelict land in Edinburgh alone, especially when you get to parks and golf courses and back gardens, 300 hectares of derelict land. So we have less ground in allotments in Scotland than we have derelict land in Edinburgh. So we need to get a scale on this, and the follow-up to the bill needs to be much more assertive in saying we just need more ground being grown on. It was a very similar point that I was going to touch on, which is that in Glasgow similarly there's something like 3,000 hectares of vacant and derelict land. The vast areas of what are known in the trade is green desert, great areas of grass where nothing happens. I did a little bit of work with a local food operation over on the south side of Glasgow called Lokevore, and they have a pig on a bit of this ground. I think it's worth mentioning that there are, that flexibility, chickens, goats, pigs should all be included in this discussion and that it isn't all about fruit trees or vegetables basically. People like growing food in all shapes and forms. Okay. Ms Corbett, do you want to come in? I think just in terms of the size of allotment plots, if a person, and this happens already, if a person feels like they can't quite manage it, they can share it with someone else that they know, or they can talk to the allotments officer and take someone on. But it shouldn't mean that the size of the plot should be watered down because that should maintain as a standard size and there needs to be provision for allotments at that size. And that their community gardens do play a role in making available smaller spaces for people to grow and for people to meet local community members and things like that. And I don't think it should be seen as community gardens being an alternative to allotment but providing a kind of compliment to allotment in that sense. Mr Welsh? Other people are citing issues to do with land. At the time when I first became involved at this level, I was a volunteer mentor for something called the Allotments Regeneration Initiative, which was a project managed by the Federation of City Farms. And it involved me going round making contact, or I've got a full allotment contacts made by groups throughout Scotland wanting, or people sometimes, individuals it often started with, looking to have an allotment. Now the figures that I quoted to you from this survey we've done in 2007, more than half of those allotments were in our four main cities. The rest were scattered across the rest of Scotland. So under 3,000 of the six and a half were scattered around Scotland. Basically still there because no one wanted that land for anything else really in the years since the war. So they remain there, so it hasn't always been the best quality of land or in the best location, which is probably why no one wanted it for anything else. What became an issue then was that we were, groups then were competing with whoever had an interest in that land, seeing its potential for building development, private housing development. That has receded, but there is obviously going to be in the years ahead a need for social housing, and I certainly wouldn't want us to be arguing the case to have people deprived of that. But I think there is a perception about how much land would be involved in this. Well, if we were to add another 40,000 allotments to what we currently have, it would take a thousand hectares of land to provide them at that standard size of 250 square metres. 1,000 hectares is always something a bit difficult to envisage. This area illustrated here between these roads is about 3.2 kilometres by 3.2 kilometres, which is 1,000 hectares. It is the greater Holyrood park area, which we are sitting on the edge of. In other words, the amount of land to provide 40,000 allotments across Scotland would be no more than that. Stuart McMillan, please. Thank you. Good morning, panel. As I mentioned, I was out to the visit in Glasgow, and someone who had really no knowledge of allotments beforehand, I certainly took a lot from the day, so I do want to thank the people who were there on the day. I know that there are waiting lists for people to go on to have allotments. Is there enough demand to reach the target that has been suggested, certainly from the Scottish Allotments and Garden Society's proposition to go up to 50,000 plots in 10 years' time? Can't we be heard again? Mr Welsh, if you could just wait to be called, please. Ms Corbyn, first, please. I think Mr Welsh probably has better statistics on allotment waiting lists. I definitely say from a community garden experience, a lot of people that come to community gardens don't bother to put their name on waiting lists because they have a perception that they won't get an allotment in the next 10 years. The accuracy of waiting lists at the moment is probably questionable, but I imagine that the demand is more than what waiting lists state. Mr Hancock, please. I think that allotments are part of the provision and part of the demand. I work with quite a lot of people who are interested in community food growing. An example would be perhaps students who were in Edinburgh or in Glasgow for a three-year period. They wouldn't be particularly interested in taking on a plot, I don't think, or a lot of them wouldn't be. They are quite interested in doing some practical work over the period of time where they are resident in the city, where they can get involved, do some useful work with the understanding that they are going to be moving on in a certain amount of time. I think that allotments are probably more appropriate and I do have an allotment and I do have experience of this. I think that they tend to be more appropriate for people who are quite settled and who are wanting to develop their allotment and grow food on their allotment for a reasonable period of time. I think that there is a need for provision for people who are arriving in town who are wanting to just get on with things rather than putting their name on a waiting list and expecting still to be living in Glasgow in five years time, because an awful lot of people don't live like that. They are in town for a period of time, they want to do it but they accept that they are going to be moving on. There is also a demographic here where a lot of the allotment people are a bit older and quite a lot of the community garden people are probably a bit younger. There is a kind of throughput that people who have experience of community gardens often want eventually to get an allotment, but I would say that there is a range of provision needed. I think there is the demand. I don't think it's all pent up and it's all contained with allotment waiting lists. Just some vignettes really. Tom Kirby's work up in Granton with the Granton gardeners where he set up two or three community gardens in a short space of time and brought lots of people in who are new to gardening who probably never had their name on an allotment waiting list but have become involved in community growing. At the farm at home near Pennycook, we have about 40 households in a very sparsely populated area where he thought everybody already had gardens who have taken plots on the farm. Then we also teach teachers. We have teachers from Edinburgh schools at the moment on a course with us and they are all involved in community growing, school growing activities. I think as John says, when those kids grow up, if they've had that experience, they'll be looking to grow more. But I think we shouldn't focus our allotments policy on the existence of waiting lists. We should have a clear public policy that we want to see more people grow more of their own food. It's part of community empowerment. It's part of a resilient food strategy. It should be a public policy objective to increase allotments. Not simply to say, you know, is there pent-up public demand, we should be encouraging demand for allotments and supporting that through skills growing. As John says, through an open approach to people getting access to growing space when they want it rather than saying if you wait five years you might get something. Mr Welsh, please. I agree with everything that the other panel members have been saying. The statistics on waiting lists are that currently there are probably about four and a half thousand people on our main city waiting lists, the four main cities. The other groups out in the rural areas tend to be the ones that have been self-starting. The people that have been empowered themselves. There's been over a hundred of those groups emerged over the period since about 2005. About half of them have probably managed to get an allotment now on new sites, hence the reason the numbers rose. Probably around half are still waiting, so on the basis that each of those new sites has averaged about 30 plots, that would be another 1,500. That could take the total at the moment up to between 14 and 15,000. We have an aim of trying to get it back to the numbers that were there after the war. It's got to be demand led, but, as has been outlined by the others, the profile of a plot holder has changed. When I took my plot on in 1976, it tended to be people that probably looked a bit like me. There's many more families and younger people involved. Some of them do move on because they're on a career progression. They might have the allotment for a shorter period than used to be in the past, but it's reflective of the general interest that is out there in a new generation in growing things. Stuart, could you be quite brief in questions and answers? I've got a lot of other folk to come in. One of the points that was raised today is the issue of land and the availability of land. It was touched upon when I was in Glasgow, just in terms of, potentially, instead of some land banking that may be taking place, that might be there for a purpose at some further point, just as an interim period, so that that land is being utilised as compared to just lying dormant. There would be cost implications for that, particularly for people who actually wanted to take on allotment on there. Would that be a useful activity to get involved in and to take over some of that land, or would there be some further complications if that were to happen? I'll start with Mr Welsh. If you could maybe be briefer than Mr McMillan, please, I'd be grateful. We're not against that sort of flexible use of land per se, but obviously, as our organisation, we are aware of our history, and there was concern expressed after the war by our predecessors in the Scottish allotments about the declining numbers of allotments. That was due to the fact that many of those allotments had been classed as temporary, and the main need for the land was for post-war social housing. Anyone else want to come in on that point? I would say that access to land in whatever shape and form seems to make sense. I can't see the point of having land sitting unused and people sitting in their houses watching daytime television and not being able to connect those two things together. It seems to me to be a bit silly. I think that if you reconnect people to land and give them some of the skills, that that is the very essence of what community empowerment is about. It isn't so much building something that's necessarily going to be there forever. In many ways, it's about growing the confidence and skills of people. Basically, if somebody looks out of the window and sees something they've planted or looked after, that's very important. That's very powerful. Having even small-scale things very close to home is really valuable. Ms Corbett or Mr Ritchie, do you want to come in? Just very briefly, we would support the meanwhile use of land for community gardening projects. The Grove Fountain Bridge in Edinburgh is an interesting example of that at the moment. I think there's an argument for cost benefit in terms of maintaining the site and reducing vandalism and things like that in a short term. I think that's featured in another video, if I remember rightly. Ms Ritchie? Absolutely. We think that the food growing strategy should include clear provision for traditional allotments. We think that they should include provision for use of meanwhile land for community growing, but also more ambitious, larger-scale programmes. There's some very attractive sites, both in Edinburgh and Glasgow, that could be used for larger-scale community growing. We think that part of the food growing strategy should be about properly run social enterprises growing at scale, not simply community volunteers or people growing for their individual consumption. We think that there should be an emphasis on a community food economy in and around our cities, and that the food growing strategy should contribute to developing that. What would be your remedy or solution to the wasteland that you cited, both in Edinburgh and Glasgow? I read in somebody's submission that there was a thing called guerrilla gardening. Do you think that would be the answer? I think that, again, it follows up on the previous question that there is the potential for use of a lot of derelict and underused land at the moment in Glasgow. The Stalled Spaces programme has been quite successful in using that land. Guerrilla gardening is but one type of community gardening that people use for using that land. I don't know if that answers your question entirely. Sorry, my question is, what would you do with this wasteland? Would you legislate for this wasteland to be used for a lot of months, as well as really meaning this fast acreage? I think that there could be a lot more encouragement in the bill for use of that land. I wouldn't necessarily restrict it to allotments. It might not necessarily be suitable for allotment growing, but that would need to be done as a part of an assessment of the plan. Can I maybe turn around Cameron's question? I think that one of the things that legislation might not necessarily be the key here. Do you think that allotments should maybe feature in Council's local development plans, for example? I'm going to leave to Ian. In garden spaces. Okay, Mr Welsh, you've been pointed out there. I would have to say yes, because I see the social housing issue as being... I think that it's going to be very important in the years coming because of the situation that many people find themselves in. I'm never going to be able to afford to buy houses at the prices they're now going at. So it's important that they get decent affordable housing, but I think it's equally important that land is set aside in that for whatever type of growing activity or green space activity people would want to make use of. I would hate to think I'm creating a picture that we basically want people to be forced to have allotments if they want them. What we want is if they want them that the circumstances are there to let them have them. Okay, Mr Richard and Mr Hancock, do you want to come in? Briefly, there's been some good examples, places like Felly, of growing on derelict land, contaminated land using raised beds. I think local authorities need to be assessing the costs of remediating land. The pace of remediating land has been very slow and that's mainly because we're trying to pay for that out of current account. We should be looking at financial mechanisms to invest in remediation of land, of which the payback comes over 30 or 40 years and whether that's through upgrading the value of the land for social housing or for allotments or for any other purpose, we're a bit stuck at the moment with a lot of derelict land that's not getting remediated because there's not a financial mechanism to make it worthwhile doing that. I think that's an area that's perhaps up with the scope of this bill we need to look at. Mr Hancock. Two things. One is I love gorilla gardening. I think anything that makes gardening sexy and attractive to young people is great and gorilla gardening does have that kind of free song that you go out in the middle of the night and you plant things with it, which is great. More seriously, I think that there's a lot of land, things like parks and good quality land, not derelict land, that we have the legacy of Victorian times. Victorian parks that were laid out are all amenity trees. When the Victorians laid out parks, they deliberately planted things that weren't productive because these were the sort of exotics of the time. I think that getting food growing back into mainstream urban spaces is something that's worthy of consideration. I think access to bits of ground in parks should perhaps be considered as part of the considerations of this bill because you basically want open space to reflect what the populace want. People love picking apples off trees. You can as easily plant productive trees, for instance, nuts, fruit or whatever, as you can any other kind of amenity tree and produce food at the same time as the various amenity value. John Wilson, please. I'm going to be slightly controversial and ask the question, should allotments only be used for food production? I'm aware that there's a number of allotment holders at the present moment. Also, grow plants such as the alias, chrysanthemums and various other plants, particularly the ones that are associated with the horticultural shows around Scotland. I've got a slight fear that we could end up with rules and regulations that say that we have additional allotments being allocated, but those allotments under the rules can only be used to produce food for consumption by either allotment holder or by the community. Are there any views? Ms Cormitt? I think that good organic gardening principles would encourage the planting of other things apart from strictly food produce for the encouragement of biodiversity into other garden, and that should be encouraged. Mr Hayhachox? I take a very liberal view of these things. I think so long as people are planting things and enjoying doing it and getting exercise and getting many of the community benefits and health benefits. In many ways, I don't think it matters that much what people are growing. I have an enthusiasm for fruit, but I'm tolerant of people's enthusiasm for flowers. Mr Hayhachox, please. The bill gives local authorities responsibility for regulation of these issues. Mr Hayhachox? The site that I am on is an independent site, and growing flowers has always been part of it. When I took my plot on in 1976, there were quite a significant number of chrysanthemum and alia growers. Unfortunately, that's a thing that's declined a bit. The trend seems to be with most new people coming in that they want to grow fruit and veg, but our site rules don't prohibit the growing of flowers, and I really don't see why any site regulation should do that. It should be so restrictive that it wouldn't let people grow flowers. It's just perhaps a little bit more expensive to grow them in vegetables, depending on what you want to grow. As I said, Mr Welsh made the point that he's in allotments that are independently owned. The issue for us as part of the other parts of this legislation is looking at community ownership. Does anyone in panel think that we could actually get the creation of more allotments by communities making bids to take on the ownership of the land, to turn the land into allotments, or for food production within communities? I can think of, as others have mentioned, lots of green space around towns and villages that are just lying there, and the council will come along once every couple of years and cut the grass, or every couple of months and cut the grass. How would you view communities taking on land for productive use in relation to their allotments or community food growing projects? Let's start with Mr Ritchie, please. In general, we welcome growth in community ownership of land full stop, in the Highlands and Islands, or in the outskirts of Edinburgh. We have to recognise, though, that we do need new financing mechanisms, and we point to the success of organisations such as Terre d'Ileon in France, which issues community shares on a national scale to invest in community-owned land. I think that there are some benefits to looking at a national scale issue, because for any community to raise the hundreds of thousands of pounds possibly involved in buying high-value peri-oven land is a big ask, and it can distract the community from the real job, which, as John says, is to use the land productively. If a local authority has got maintenance costs for a piece of land, it's unlikely that the community will have lower maintenance costs, so they need an alternative business plan that generates an income to meet those costs. We would welcome the extension of community ownership, but we'd want to caution that it's not simply a question of raising a few bob, buying a bit of ground, and then seeing how it goes. Communities do need support to put proper, sustainable business plans together if they're going to take on significant bits of land as owners. Mr Welsh, please. Well, hi. I'm on an independent site and it has been independent for 50 years. I see the community empowerment bill as being something that creates a process by which that could happen for groups that want to do that. I think that the way to it will be from local authorities, perhaps simply because of the pressure of the likely economic circumstances over the foreseeable future, is that self-managing on sites will become a desirable option. There are cost savings in that to the plot holders and potentially to the local authority, depending on how much of the management of the site the group takes on. It's a road to ultimate ownership, which might appeal to some people. Our main concern with this aspect of the bill is the kind of legal entities that such bodies would be. There are problems with the aspects of the unincorporated association, which are quite commonly what an allotment association, if there is one, would be classed as. We were hoping to see something in the community empowerment legislation that might improve that situation. The other thing that we are aware of is... You have to be very brief, Mr Welsh, because I'm really pleased for the time. There is a map difference in what has been happening in most rural areas and what has been happening to a much lesser extent in the post-industrial areas around Glasgow in particular, which I think will reflect in many aspects of community empowerment beyond allotments and growing activities. I agree with the previous comments from the panel. The petition that I put forward was aimed at public bodies, forestry commission, local authorities, housing association, health boards and so forth. The land is already, at least in my non-legal head, in public ownership. It seems to me that the issue should be there for people to use. The issues of transferring land from one body to another doesn't seem to me necessarily where it should be. To my mind, it should be about making that land that's already in public ownership more productive. I would say that we need the presumption in favour of people being able to use underused land unless there's any good reason why not, and that should particularly be so when it's in public ownership. Part of the first question that I was going to ask has been dealt with by Joel Moss, and it's worth noting that the bill provides for not just communities to own land, but transfers do not need to be about ownership, they could be about leasing. There's also the opportunity for participation requests, which I think might deal with some of the concerns around the absence of a duty that is mentioned within the submission. I think that the big question that I would have, and Mr Hancock has just touched on it, is that for almost the entirety of this session we've spoken about local authorities. Mr Hancock has just mentioned other public bodies. NHS holds large amounts of land, universities hold large amounts of land as well, and perhaps we should be looking at how those other bodies out there could play their part in providing more land and availability for allotments, given that it would have an added benefit to some of the work that they are engaged in as well. I wonder what the panel's views would be on that. Maybe he can just give us a yes or no. Do you think that other public bodies should be involved in that as well as local authorities? Yes. Do you think that any First Commission is doing some good work on that? Mr Welsh? Yes. In fact, some instances have already happened with allotments. Could you give us an example of where that's happened? Fort William was foraged the commission land. Thank you very much. There's been other aspects in some of... It's mainly in the rural areas. We're going to Fort William soon. We can maybe find out more about that one in particular. Mr Hancox? Definitely. I mean, there's a lot of different... I think Crown Estates is an interesting one. Crown Estates have a lot of assets, health boards, public trusts of one sort or another. And frankly, I think that landowners... I wouldn't want this to be any way to be controversial because my view is that private landowners are very often very enlightened and can see the benefits about making land available. So I wouldn't want any way to come across as coercive, but I wouldn't want them ruled out of the picture as well. I think that private landowners may well be very amenable to this. Okay. That was a long yes or no, Mr Hancox. Sorry about that. Yes, we've got examples of groups working on NHS land as well. I think that there's a question about land that is remaining with Westminster powers, like the Ministry of Defence and Network Rail, and how they can support that in Scotland. Thank you. Mr McDonald? Okay. I've got one final question and I think it's very important that it be asked. Do you think that there's enough provision in the bill to ensure that folks with maybe a physical impairment can access allotments? Mr Ritchie talked about raised beds at Fairleigh, was it? Are we doing enough of that to help folks with a physical impairment to take part in what we are all doing? My understanding of the equality legislation is that certainly all the public bodies would be required within that existing framework to make provision for people with particular needs. I would think that, as in lots of other areas of local authority policy, they would ensure that the people that they're supporting follow similar provisions, but it certainly should be made an explicit part, possibly not of the bill, but of guidance of implementation stuff that people should pay attention to that, definitely. Thank you. Mr Welsh, please. Yes, we did add to our submission about also taking into account people suffering from mental health issues and problems like Alzheimer's may have their own special needs. On the other side of it, I have seen a site in Bristol in which the association decided to create allotments that would suit people with disability access issues, but it turned out that there wasn't actually the demand and it wasn't being used. I think that means of identifying the clear demand would have to be part of it. Thank you. Mr Hancocks, please. I think that we've worked with quite a number of nursing homes and also, interestingly, things like prisons and secure accommodation, secure hospitals. I think that having some food growing in some of these areas, such as prison grounds, such as... That's really out with the scope of the bill, Mr Hancocks. No, but I'm talking about the access. I think having stuff close to where people are is highly relevant. I think having food growing close to where people live, for instance, elderly and disabled, it's something that should be thought of rather than people having to go out and use an allotment site elsewhere. Thank you. Miss Corbett, please. I've got no further comments. Thank you very much. I thank you all for your evidence today. That has been extremely useful. I suspend for changing witnesses and for a comfort break. Welcome back. Can I introduce our final panel for this morning? I welcome Douglas Sinclair, chair of the Accounts Commission for Scotland, and Caroline Gardner, Auditor General for Scotland, Audit Scotland. I understand that this is your second committee of the morning, Miss Gardner. Would you like to make any opening remarks? Thank you very much for the opportunity to give evidence on behalf of our joint submission to the committee. I'll say a few words on behalf of the Auditor General and on behalf of the commission. First, we'd like to remind the committee of its potential interest in our report, community planning, turning ambition into action, which we'll publish on 27 February. We'll provide the committee with this report when it's published. The report draws upon the findings of the five local audits that we've undertaken this year. Of those, Glasgow, Falkirk, Murray and West Lothian, audit reports have already been published, and the one in Orkneyt will be published tomorrow. We draw on the findings of these audits when giving our evidence today. Our submission to the committee notes that the bill presents opportunities for local communities and public authorities to work differently together to create new models for the delivery of public services. That fits with a core theme touched upon consistently in our work. This theme was articulated in our briefing to the committee last year as part of its inquiry into public sector reform, in which we noted the growing consensus that significant change is needed in the design and delivery of public services in order to respond to rising demand due to the pressure on resources, demographic change and ever-increasing public expectations. Part of that process of change must include thinking carefully about the important role that communities can play in redesigning and, in some cases, providing public services. As I've already stated, we will provide the committee through our forthcoming report on community planning with more reflections on the progress of community planning. Meantime, convener, we're very happy to take questions that the committee may have on our submission. Thank you. Ms Gardner, do you want to add anything at all there? No, as Douglas said, he speaks for both of us on this occasion. Okay, thank you very much. Obviously we have caught sight of the report from Glasgow Falkirk, Murray and West Lothian in a mixed bag. Do you think that putting some of the duties on a statutory basis will help to improve community planning in Scotland? Mr Sincarffis? I share enterprise by placing a parallel duty to all those bodies along with the councils. It's not just seeing that community planning is the responsibility of the council. However, I think that there are some issues in relation to the section of the bill that deals with governance. It's more appropriate. A more appropriate title might be the organisation of community planning. It says in there, for example, that each partner must contribute the necessary resources in terms of money, staff, information to ensure that community planning works effectively. However, there doesn't seem to be anything in the bill that deals with an issue that could arise whereby one of the partners isn't contributing effectively towards the local improvement plan. I think that that is quite an important issue. What's the sanction? There will be ministerial guidance, but there doesn't seem to be any dispute resolution to resolve that. I think that touches on an interesting point in the bill that in the past the role of the local authority has been to initiate, facilitate and maintain community planning. That has been repealed. It raises an interesting point. What is the future role of the council in community planning? That role has always, in my view, been one about facilitation rather than dictation. However, if you think of what a local authority does, what distinguishes a local authority is not the fact that it provides services because many others provide services, including the private sector or voluntary sector. It's not distinguished because it's a regulator or other regulators, for example CEPA and the Care Inspectorate. What distinguishes local government is its capacity for community leadership because of its democratic legitimacy. I think that there needs to be some articulation of what the continuing role might be of the council in community planning, away perhaps from one enshrining statute, but one that is accepted around the table as an appropriate role that you need a leader of community planning at the end of the day, not least to resolve some of the disputes that could arise that I mentioned earlier. Ms Gardner. I agree entirely with Douglas that the definitions and responsibilities set out in the draft bill are useful improvements. I think that one of the themes that's come through both our individual audits of community planning partnerships and our previous national report is the sense that where community planning works well, those things help. Where the partnership is struggling, they probably aren't the answer. Those questions about governance and accountability are important ones in terms of both helping the local community hold its partnership to account and the Scottish Government hold the partnership to account for its contribution to the national outcomes. Now, there aren't easy answers to those things because the partnerships aren't formal incorporated bodies and that may not be the best solution. But thinking through what the support that may be needed by community planning partnerships might look like, what mechanisms might be needed, both to encourage partners that aren't taking part or who aren't statutory partners to play their part and to increase transparency so that local communities and the Government have a clearer picture about what's happening locally and what the contribution is to the national picture seem to us important things that aren't apparent on the face of the bill at the moment. In terms of the sharing of best practice and exporting that from one partnership to another, do you think that the bill will be helpful in trying to achieve that? Because it seems that, in some places, we do very, very well in certain things and yet, not that far away sometimes, they fail dismalay in exactly the same area. I think that the extent to which the bill, as I mentioned, makes it more a shared endeavour so there's an equality of participation that hopefully will help to share best practice. I think that I made the point before to this committee that there's an interesting phrase and a report on public services in Wales that good practice is a bad traveller. I think that there's an interesting point as to whether the commission or the general and indeed other scrutiny bodies can do more together, collectively, to identify good practice perhaps in an annual good practice manual guide of things that are going on to encourage people to move away from the view that if it's not invented here, people are not doing it. I think that there's a lot to be said for an initiative of that nature. That's one of the things that we're thinking about in terms of the future role that we might play in our work in relation to community planning. Ms Garger. I think that you're absolutely right about the challenges of spreading good practice or learning from each other, whether that's good practice or things that haven't worked so well and the difficulty of doing that. I think that the commission earlier might help just giving a clearer picture of what people are trying to achieve and how they plan to go about it, that linkage between what each of the individual partners is doing, can let people see that more clearly and then follow up with questions about why they're trying that, how it worked in practice, why they may have stopped doing something that actually didn't have the impact that it was hoped for. Will the publication of an annual report help in that export of best practice and whether that makes the process much more transparent, particularly for members of the public? Do you have a view on whether what is envisaged in terms of the annual report is enough or should that be beefed up in any way, shape or form? I think that I would like to think that an annual digest, annual report, call it what you will, that's signed off by all the scrutiny and inspection bodies would have a considerable impact on influence on community planning partners. I think that there's an addition to that. There's potential for doing good practice guides if you look at a community planning partnership where their exercise of joint leadership is particularly effective. It would be interesting to try and analyse that in a bit more detail and provide a good practice note that could be disseminated to the other 32 community planning partnerships. Not least because the leadership of community planning is incredibly complex, as Caroline has indicated. You're talking about plural accountability. You've got the council accountable to the local community. You've got the health board accountable to ministers and ultimately to the Parliament. You've got the police commander responsible to the chief constable, the fire officer responsible to the chief fire officer. You've got all these people trying to work together with different arrangements of accountability. One of the things that we have found in that is the importance of building trust and relationship of trust that can bring about change because people want to make a difference rather than through formal accountability mechanisms. Analyzing some community planning partnerships where the leadership role has been extremely successful and effective and finding out why and sharing that with other community planning partners I think would be very useful. Everybody's accountable to the public, though, of course. The end of the day. Ms Gardner. I think we said in our submission convener that the proposed regular national reports by Scottish ministers on community planning and community empowerment would be an important step forward. For us, there are still questions about the accountability arrangements for that. What will happen with the reports? To what extent there will be independent scrutiny of them, whether by this Parliament or by us as auditors, that sense of making sure that they are prepared in a fair and balanced way that people have confidence in feels to us important. The other thing that may be worth adding to that is a growing sense that integrated reporting is a big theme in the corporate world. The question of matching performance on services and outcomes with the finances and the other resources available to them lets you get a much stronger picture of what's working well and where there may be choices to be made. Personally, I'd be keen to see the development of that national reporting happening in tandem with the Government's developing thinking about the way that its financial reporting needs to develop under the Scotland Act and further devolved powers in future to keep those things moving in parallel. Before I bring in colleagues, I'm going to move off this topic ever so slightly. Our first panel today was looking at the common good aspects of the bill and there was quite a lot of discussion there about the register of common good assets. Dr Neil, who was one of the witnesses, said that there was inadequacy on the part of Audit Scotland in terms of holding councils to account in terms of the lack of registers. In some cases, there are poor registers and others. Would you have any comment about that? I'm happy to comment as a former controller of audit, convener, and Douglas Maywell wants to come in. That's clearly a contentious issue that's been important for communities across Scotland and particular communities for a long time. My view is that councils have made significant strides in registering common good land buildings and other assets and that there have been different choices made in different parts of Scotland about the priority that they should put into reconstructing those historical records, which in some instances is very old and very incomplete as against the other priorities that they have to meet. You won't be surprised to hear that I don't think Audit Scotland has necessarily been deficient in following that up, but I do recognise that there are differences in the quality of that information and that, in some cases, making it complete would be a very expensive and possibly impossible task. Thank you, Mr Sinclair. No, I wouldn't disagree with any of that. It's a complex issue and, as Carolyn's indicated, it's been a semi-static question of priorities and a question of finance. I've been interested to see the evidence that the gentleman refers to in terms of his view that the council commissioner of Audit Scotland has been deficient in relation to this issue. Thank you. Cameron Buchanan, please. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good morning. I've read your submission quite significantly and I notice a bit of criticism involved in it because there's words to come in like I'm going to go work effectively holding ministers to account for their achievement and clear about frequency such reporting. What I was wondering is the bill appears to be signed on the extent to which resourcing of the administration and the community planning process should be seen as a partnership. Could you comment on that? Is that what worries you? Is that the main point that worries you? Mr Sinclair. It's a major worry but it's one we felt we should jointly register with the committee at the moment because the duty to lead community planning sits very clearly with local authorities. Audit evidence shows that it's mainly been councils who have provided the resources needed to administer it, to keep the partnership running, to do lots of the background work which is essential to their effectiveness and our sense is that if that leadership responsibility is being more equally shared then there is a risk that the resource needed to underpin the processes of community planning may be less easy to identify and protect because of the budget pressures that are facing all public bodies and third sector and other partners involved in it. So it's not a major concern for us but we don't underestimate the importance of getting that support right for effective community planning and it does seem to us a risk that could come with the proposed changes in responsibilities for leadership. Thank you. Cameron, do you want to come back? No, I'm just going to come back and say in how the performance of the work effectively there's a gap as to how you can work effectively with this partnership. You did comment on that in one of your paragraphs improving community planning in Scotland as to how it can work effectively. You didn't think the reporting bit was accurate enough. I think that there's a lot of goodwill. I think that the difficulty that community planning partnerships have is translating that goodwill into tangible action because they have so many other priorities to deliver. Community planning was established in 2003 and in a sense it's only really taken off in terms of progress since the joint statement of ambition between the Scottish Government and COSLA and I think the ambition is there. Building the relationships of trust and willingness to share resources and willingness to recognise that by working together they can achieve more is not an easy thing for bodies to do and it's complicated by the fact that some of the bodies have separate targets the health boards for example of the national targets so in a sense that's their priority rather than necessarily the priorities of the community planning partnership so it's a slow but maturing process that in those community planning partnerships where they've managed to build a relationship of trust comes a willingness to share a willingness to experiment a willingness to find out where are the areas where by working together they can add demonstrable value I think that one of the key priorities for community planning partnerships is that agenda of reducing inequality that doesn't mean everything is on the table but where they can make an actual difference I think that we also found that perhaps the statement of ambition was in some areas over ambition over ambitious for example it suggested that community planning partnerships should have all the attributes of a board, a governance board that was perhaps over ambitious because as Carlynes indicated there are only partnerships that depend on a very large extent of goodwill, that willingness to work together and because of that because there won't be it takes time to build up that relationship of trust and goodwill to add value and make a difference in terms of outcomes for communities it's a maturing process I think that progress continues to be made but because of all the competing priorities and other demands on public bodies how you move community planning from being the Saturday job will continue to take time Thank you Mark McDonald please Thank you convener I think that if you were to ask community representatives and we have spoken to community representatives there would be a perception that community planning is something that is too often done to communities rather than with communities and they would also probably identify that there's a disconnect between community planning process and then turning what the community planning process comes up with as priorities into deliverable outcomes and delivering on what they discuss do you see from the work that you're doing that that is purely perception or would you say there's a fair chunk of reality in that and how do you see this bill might address some of those issues I think that what we found in our audits there are certainly some good examples of community planning partnerships listening much more effectively to communities engaging with communities for example in Folkirk there was a redesign of social work services in Bones and Blackness to allow people to older people to live in their homes much longer there's an interesting piece of work in Orkney called Empowering Communities where the council is consulting with local communities about the potential transfer of responsibilities for minor services to the communities, for the communities to run themselves generally we found that where community planning partnerships were they were getting better at consultation and participation but actually the transfer of power to communities was still a way to go one of the points that the commission has made regularly in our overview reports is for councils to make better use of option appraisal to look to what is the best way to deliver services and that must include the possibility of transferring the responsibility of services to communities I think one of the difficulties is that communities are not homogeneous and community planning implies a single community when in fact in any area you've got different interests and how a community partnership balances all those interests is not an easy thing to do so I think the other thing I would say is the need for community planning partnerships to consult together rather than consulting separately I think there's a scope for there about how they engage with communities and too often in the past they tend to do their consultation separately and individually rather than collectively and there may be a case for both if the council wants to consult in school closure that's a matter for the council but where there are opportunities to consult together I think there's scope for them to do that better Ms Gardner I think that we're seeing more consultation and public bodies and partnerships getting better at consulting what we're not seeing much of yet is a real shift to making local communities and local people partners in deciding what the priorities are redesigning services and delivering them and my sense is that that real sense of participation and the true sense of empowerment will be all the more important the convener referred to my session with the public audit committee earlier and we spent some time there talking about the choices that we may need to make between short term targets in the health service and social care and the longer term changes needed to meet the 2020 vision for an ageing population we can't do that to people it needs to be a conversation that everyone has the chance to take part in about the relative priorities of shorter waiting times versus the longer term priorities of services that are based near people's homes and can help all of us to live longer healthier lives at home that sense of the conversation with people being right at the heart of resolving the challenges around prevention is more important than it's ever been Can I just add a supplementary point to that I think the bill is very much focused on community empowerment I think there's a debate to be had on the point that Christy made about the need for services to be designed to deliver not just around communities but around individuals and the individual interest not necessarily the same as the community you have a relationship as a patient with the health service and I think there's an interesting point can you empower communities without first of all empowering individuals That's an interesting question which I think has probably going to come up during the course of our deliberations the other point was that you raised the point about local authorities perhaps being given the burden of taking forward community planning in too many places Are there specific public sector organisations or community planning partners who you are finding in multiple areas are the ones who are not pulling their weight or does it vary from area to area I think that does vary from area to area I don't think it's I wouldn't like to call it a burden I think it's as I tried to express earlier I think it's arguably the most important role for local government with that one of community leadership I think that as I've said earlier that there is a way to go in terms of getting a joint commitment and the bill may well help that in terms of placing that parallel duty in terms of the contribution they make in resources staff information towards meeting the local improvement plan I think that it's going to be interesting to see how that works in practice and I think it will be an interesting issue than the commission or the general to keep an eye on to see how well that duty is implemented and what are the difficulties in implementation as Carlynes indicates to date the resource in supporting community planning has come largely from the local authority and I think it will be interesting to see whether other partners are prepared to put their money on the table to help bring that about because community planning won't just happen to make the joints work to implement the decisions of the community planning board if they want to deliver a joint initiative they need somebody to ensure that's managed and delivered and reported back Ms Gardner Very briefly to add to Douglass' comments I think the point that we were trying to convey is that at the moment formally councils have that leadership role and the broadening of responsibility to include the other partners that are welcome by local authorities as well as by others to make it more of a shared endeavour In practical terms we do see variation across Scotland and part of that is to do with local circumstances but I think as Douglass touched on earlier we also do see the effect of having different accountability regimes different performance targets for other partners particularly the health service where there's a strong and understandable focus on the heat targets for each individual health board the priorities of the community planning partnership and other public bodies that have different degrees of involvement and engagement in the local priorities so the shared endeavour will help but also the point that we've previously made about aligning the Scottish Government's policies to make them as consistent as they can be on the ground is also important Just one final brief question I appreciate burdens may be the wrong term to use and mean it in the sense that it was perhaps picked up but do you think community planning partnerships are as accessible as they could be for our most deprived communities and do you think that they have enough of a focus on prioritising investment resources services into those communities who are most in need rather than those with the loudest voices who are not always the same communities I think that's a fair point a fair question I mean if you look at community empowerment what is the definition of that we know it when we see it but first of all you need to build the confidence, the skills of communities to be able to if you want to tackle the council the health board and have the confidence so to do there's a huge resource issue in making that happen and the other side of that equation is ensuring that public bodies increase their openness their culture of listening and be willing to think of other ways to deliver services again that's a big cultural change and a big resource issue I think the danger is that if there aren't sufficient resources devoted to that then the point you're making that the articulate middle class will make further progress with me rather than the communities who are most in need I think we've been encouraged by the fact that a number of community planning partnerships do see reducing inequalities for one priority and I think there's a lot to be said and a lot of argument to me that's a very important role for community planning partnerships to make a difference and to continue to do that there's a bit to go I think the other difficulty that you have in engaging communities with the community planning partnership is on the bill it talks about the duty on the community planning partnership to consult with such bodies as it thinks appropriate it doesn't say to engage with bodies and it doesn't do so in terms of the national community planning engagement standards I think some of that could be tightened up and indeed some local authorities to their credit have said that in their evidence to you so a long way to go I think just one final point that I would add is that we did find in all the community planning partnerships that at the local level sometimes irrespective of the community planning partnership there are lots of very good examples of local partnership working and if we could capture some of that more effectively and that could be part of our annual digest a good practice how they engage with disadvantaged communities and disadvantaged service users let's not forget those that would be really helpful anything to add really very briefly to say it's clearly a perpetual problem that the most deprived communities are the hardest to reach the least likely to have the time and resources to speak up and the least likely to have access to the support that other groups may have our view is that community planning partnerships need to really be aware of that and work to counter it there are some very good examples of that happening as Douglas said one of the examples in our published reports focused on communities where there are particular problems with alcohol misuse as part of the priority they've got for reducing the harm caused by alcohol and building in the support needed to understand what's going on in those communities to help people speak up to really participate in the process and that bottom-up approach I think has got a lot of potential Mr Sinclaw just your comments there struck me and in addition to this annual piece of work do you think there's potentially a role for the benchmarking tool to be utilised as well yep, it's that's a good point it's fair to say that the commission have strongly welcomed the work by Solas and Cosla in developing benchmarking for local government they are now in Barton a new piece of work which is developing benchmarking for community planning partnerships I think is good to see we would not want to see that in any way to the detriment of the work they're doing in councils which has still got a long way to go but I think that's that in terms of providing a base whereby community planning partnerships can compare themselves with our community planning partnerships in terms of performance is something that we strongly welcome thank you John Wilson, please thank you again, good afternoon there are a lot of questions about trying to focus in 2 or 3 convener the issue Ms Gardner you identified in response to the questions from Martin MacDonald in saying that the communities who are most difficult to engage with have least resources spent in them if you can identify that as an issue why are the community planning partnerships local authorities, health boards agencies involved in the community planning process not applying resources to ensure that we do get the engagement from some of the most deprived communities and individuals to engage in the process I think it's important to say that we have found some great examples where people are doing that and not nearly as many as we would like to see and that I think are needed to address the challenges that we're facing one reason is that it's hard to do you need to do it over a long period you need to invest not just money but time and attention and thought in doing it and in many ways I think it really does require a complete mindset for people responsible for public services it means letting go of the idea that you know what the problem is or what the right answer is and going out and really listening and seeking to understand what's going on I mentioned the Glasgow ripple effect project on alcohol misuse a moment ago what's really interesting about that is the way it's going out to seek to understand what's causing the problem rather than jumping to what the answer is and that can feel like it's very time consuming it can be hard for professionals who've worked in this area for a long time and it's particularly hard obviously at a time when public services budgets are under pressure for all sorts of reasons I think one of the tricks to turning that on its head is that recognition that carrying on as we are will keep on throwing up the same problems that it's got down with particular communities being excluded from services and the risk that inequality is actually increasing as more affluent communities get the benefit from the initiatives that community plying partnerships and others are undertaking but I don't want to leave you with the impression that it's an easy thing for them to do I'll comment on that in relation to prior to local government reorganisation in 1995 I know in Strathclyde region had a number of community workers working in deprived areas around Glasgow and did a lot of good work however their focus was changed after the reorganisation of local government we seem to be reinventing the wheel very much in relation to what we want to do by engaging communities and as I said I'll leave that as a comment Mr Sinclair you made a comment earlier in response to a question from the convener about the accountability of the community planning partnerships now part of this bill is about the accountability of what's being delivered at a local level within communities but you made the comment and if I've picked up correctly that local authorities as a democratically elected bodies can hold community planning partnerships to account for what they're delivering in their local areas now my understanding at the present moment in the majority of community planning partnerships the only elected member that sits on those community planning partnerships is the leader of the council there is no other elected member in the majority of the community planning partnerships sit on those community planning partnerships so how do local authority elected members the wider 1,223 local government elected members hold the community planning partnership to account for the delivery of the services in the local authority area if the local authority has the lead role in the delivery of services Mr Sinclair I'm sorry if I gave the impression that local authorities can hold the community planning partnerships to account they are their participant in community planning I think what the council can do is hold to account the performance and contribution of the representatives in the community planning partnership I'm interested in the example you gave of a community planning partnership where there's only one elected member I think the work that we've undertaken shows that that isn't the case in many community planning partnerships in some cases there's an argument that the local authority is overrepresented that's I think that's worth worth making Mr Sinclair can I just get clarification is that more councillors are involved at the strategic level or are you referring to the number of subgroups that have been established by local authorities such as Glasgow has five area partnerships North Lanarkshire has four or five area partnerships where the councillors are involved at that level and they feed into the community planning partnership but they don't actually sit on the strategic partnership the point is that in the audits we've done we've found councillors at both the strategic level and at the thematic partnership level I think there's a balance to be struck in terms of if you want to engage effectively with all the partners in a common endeavour whilst the council has the lead role it shouldn't over dominate or be the perception that's over dominating by virtue of the size of its membership on the community planning partnership that the other partners feel that if you want second class citizens and not have an equality of contribution or representation there's a balance to be struck but I don't think we've found that there is a simple template that's followed by them all because there are 32 different community planning partnerships and in some I mean just to go further in some I think you'll find for example on the health board but the chief executive of the health board because he's an executive member of the health board whereas the chief executive of the council doesn't have that status and may not be represented on the same basis it's actually a complex model of governance or if you can call it that that community planning partnerships do have and a lot of these issues are in the process of being worked through and being resolved but they're by no means I think it's fair to say in some community planning partnerships there's a simple way to go and understanding the nature of representation and the different roles that people play if you think for example the difference between a non-executive member of a health board as opposed to a councillor who is an executive yet they sit round the table with different roles and different responsibilities in their back office organisation and you expect them to work together in a different way in a community planning partnership that's I think some of that still to be worked through that's despite 11 years of community planning partnerships sorry that's despite 11 years of community planning partnerships my sense is that it reflects the complexity of the accountability we're talking about here anyway Doug was touched on the fact that they are voluntary partnerships the way we're able to audit them highlights again that you can go a long way with those voluntary arrangements and that there are limits to them between us we audit all the bodies the statutory bodies that make up the partnerships we can use our audit responsibilities to audit how they work together and to produce reports on them but where normally my reports would go to the public audit committee the commission has got powers to consider reports from the controller of audit and to engage with councils on the back of them for community planning partnerships there are no similar powers because they don't have a formal status now that needn't be an enormous problem when things are going well in the same way that the non-incorporated status of community planning partnerships themselves isn't it can leave you a gap when there are problems and that's what we've tried to draw out in our submission based on that comment about the voluntary nature of community planning partnership engagement by other bodies would it not be preferable particularly given the earlier comment about the accountability of some of the agencies and their spend or the effectiveness in the work they do in community planning partnership areas bring them into a statutory footing so they can actually be quite clear about the role, responsibility especially in terms of delivery of services within the community planning partnership area and based on your comment about being a very voluntary nature of community planning partnerships there needs to be some kind of formal footing whereby we bring them on board and we say there is an expectation in delivery of services along the identified community planning partnership strategy it's worth making the point that the power has existed since 2003 for community planning partnership to apply to become an incorporated body to Scottish ministers and none of them have exercised that opportunity in fact it's reiterated in the bill and that does say something about the appetite for bodies to become incorporated bodies recognising that they are a separate nature of their accountability I think the other point is it's interesting Before you go on to the other point are you aware of any community planning partnerships you have actually discussed in any great depth whether or not they should become incorporated bodies or not? Not to my knowledge, convener I don't know the answer to that I think the second point is interesting that the Scottish Government decided that health and social care partnerships would be a secondary body they will be accountable for something like 40% of the Scottish budget and they are going to be I think the relationship between the health and social care partnership and the community planning partnership is going to be one of an interesting one health and social care partnerships will be represented in future on the community planning partnership but I think it's still to be developed and clarified what is the nature of the oversight relationship between the community planning partnership and a statutory body of the health and social care partnership Ms Gardner I don't think that putting the bodies on the partnerships on to a statutory basis is necessarily the answer I think there can be real strengths in the sorts of voluntary arrangements underpinned by the provisions in the bill that we're seeing at the moment but as we pointed out in their submission it does bring with it a gap in accountability compared to the individual partners and I think given the importance that's placed on them in public service reform and in meeting both the challenges in Scottish society and the financial pressures that we're facing for the foreseeable future those questions about accountability and governance are important ones to work through One last quick question and it goes back to the submission made and one of the bullet points she highlighted that we noted that it would be what would happen in case of a failure by the community to make effective use of the asset and that's a community asset transfer who would you see would be the organisation that would make the determination whether or not a community was making effective use of the asset transfer and what effective use of assets do you evaluate in relation to local authorities at the present moment to hold those assets? Mr Sinclair I think there clearly have to be you'd have to develop some criteria to be able to evaluate whether the community body was making an effective use of the asset that may be something for ministers to develop in terms of guidance I think also that if a view was taken say by a council that a body wasn't making an appropriate use of an asset there should be some appeals mechanism whereby the body concern would have a right of appeal again to some body so that natural justice was seen to be observed I think at the point when the assets transferred it would be important to have an agreement between the body transferring it and the community organisation taking it over about the purposes and how success would be measured that would provide a basis then for some sort of reasonably objective assessment of failure or not because there's natural justice demand that there should be some appeals mechanism linked to it as well Thank you Good afternoon panel although we will forgive you if you think I should be saying good evening I've been here a while Can I ask the panel members their views on how the bill will assist in the measurement of achievements and value for money by public bodies and really it's just can you add in on to why you also incorporate some of the benchmarking that you mentioned earlier within your answer Ms Gardner do you want to go first? Sure We already have for community planning partnerships the requirement that they'll produce a report on progress against their single outcome agreements and we've reported previously that there's room for those reports to develop further to be better based on clear objectives in the first place clear milestones about progress on issues that sometimes will take a generation to change you can't wait 20 years to see if you're making a difference to children in their early years and making better use of the data that's available to show some of the linkages between it so we know there's scope for improvements at the local level I think some of the same considerations are likely to apply to the proposed regular reports from Scottish ministers on the national picture and I think particularly for both of them the long term high level outcomes that people are trying to achieve and the actions they're taking right now this year and this month to move towards them that's not a simple thing but it seems to us really important in helping people make choices about the best way of improving the life chances of children across Scotland or developing sustainable economic growth but it does seem to us important both in demonstrating the thinking process about what the policy choices are that are being made and helping people to think about whether progress is meeting expectations and if not what should be done to correct that that would make a real difference in being able to assess value for money and the overall way that the outcomes are being delivered I just had a point in terms of on the national outcomes the bills silent on who the report on national outcomes by the Scottish minister goes to I think it's a question mark is there a role for the Parliament in holding to account ministers for their performance in relation to delivery of national outcomes Secondly the bills also leaves it to the Scottish minister to decide the frequency of reports on national outcomes and again is there an issue for Parliament to determine how frequently that should be there's an argument for saying it shouldn't be too frequent because you want to allow a reasonable amount of time to see improvements in national outcomes but it shouldn't be too long either so I think there's an issue in there to consider what is the role of Parliament in relation to both the frequency of reports and who the reports go to and finally in relation to that as we said in our evidence it's important that the reports on national outcomes don't mask inequalities it's important that the report on national outcomes covers performance in relation to different parts of Scotland and in relation to poverty are not lost and you want to come back Following on from Ms Gardner's point answer earlier do you feel then that there is enough within the bill that can you links between local improvement plan, strategic priorities partner bodies and single outcome agreements I think we make the point in our submission that those linkages could be clearer it doesn't all need to be in the bill there needs to be some flexibility as governments change and circumstances change over time but making that link between national and local is important and we've found through our audit work in the past that particularly at a local level community planning partnerships aren't always clear about the relationship between their local priorities and the national priorities and the weight that each should take just a tiny final one can be a thank you for your patience community planning partners be removed or added to the current setup there is a proposal on the bill schedule 1 I think I'm right in saying to add a fair number of additional bodies to the community planning partnership I think that raises the issue of the effectiveness of community planning partnership being a big body I think they need to think through how they work effectively with that increased membership okay thank you final question obviously we have the bill and the new legislative proposals how much of getting this right is down to common sense in a change of culture in organisations rather than just legislation I think that's a very fair point convener I think a lot of it is about developing that culture of trust and joint working that's what community planning is about can you plan at the end of the day is about your willingness if you are a community partner to give up some of your power to work for the common good and that's a challenge for every public body it's not something that comes easily to give up power but that's what it requires it needs that sharing of power it needs that view that we are here to provide services that are joined up a view that recognises that the solutions to people's problems are never seldom within the gift of one organisation to put the emphasis on what you call common sense what I would call a culture of being absolutely focused on the user and on the community Ms Gardner We've reported repeatedly convener that where community planning and other forms of partnership work it tends to be because there is that culture of putting the user at the centre putting communities at the centre and then doing what's needed to get on with it I guess the question for the bill is how far it can set the conditions to help when things aren't working as well as they need to and that's the test we'd suggest you apply to it Thank you very much for your evidence today I suspend and we'll move into private session Thank you