 Good morning and welcome to the 13th meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee this session. Apologies have been received from Natalie Dawn and I'm pleased to say Evelyn Tweed is attending in her place. Our first item of business today is a decision to take items 4, 5 and 6 in private, are we all agreed? Thank you very much. The next item on our agenda is on the third sector recovery. Third sector organisations have been recognised rightly and celebrated for their innovative and fast response to the challenges posed by Covid-19. However, the pandemic has also inflicted real damage and today the committee will look at the longer-term resilience of the third sector and the challenges it faces. We'll hear from two panels today. I welcome the first from Paul Bradley, policy and public affairs manager at the Scottish Council for Volunteer Organisations. Martin Tyson, Head of Regulation and Improvement, the Office of the Charity Regulator. Kia Chihinska, Senior Development Officer of TSI Scotland Network and Duncan Thorpe, Policy and Public Affairs Manager at Social Enterprise Scotland. Welcome to you all. I would like to invite colleagues around the table to ask their series of questions. First up is Pam Duncan-Glancy, please. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thanks for joining us and also thank you for your submissions in advance, which were incredibly helpful. I just want to put on record to my thanks to the third sector for everything that you've done in this year in particular, but also before that, having spent years of my working life in the third sector, I know how hard you work and how important it is, so I just want to put that on record. In some of the evidence that we received, it was really, really clear to me that the impact of the last year on not just the services that you deliver but also the jobs that you have and you create has been significant. In some cases, you know that some organisations have been really struggling and have had to make some painful operating decisions. Could you tell us a little bit about that and about the redundancies and how many jobs you think could have been affected by the past year and a half? Could you suggest who you'd like your question to go to first, please? Thank you. Yes, please. Could I direct that to Paul Bradley from SCVO first, please? Of course. Thank you, Pam, and thank you to the committee for inviting us along today. Overall, I would say that the sector has coped remarkably well over the course of the past 16 or 18 months. I don't think that that is too surprising given that the sector operates in an environment that is always uncertain, and we are always unsure of what is going to come next in terms of funding and resource and support. It is really important—I want to stress that today—that, although the sector has shown itself to be resilient over the course of the past 18 months, that resilience should not be taken for granted. The sector was already in a vulnerable position before the pandemic, as Pam just mentioned. The outlook for the sector back in 2019 and just before the pandemic was uncertain. SCVO stated that the sector survey picked that up back then. Our recent research for the Scottish third sector tracker has shown that nearly all organisations were impacted by the pandemic in some way. That survey revealed that 98 per cent face challenges since the start of the pandemic, 88 per cent experience disruption to service delivery and roughly half experience financial issues. On that specific point in terms of redundancies, 9 per cent of the organisations that we surveyed were around 600 organisations in total. 9 per cent of those had to make staff redundancies. We know that there is significant support for the Scottish voluntary sector provided by the Scottish Government. That was welcome, particularly the third sector resilience fund. That undoubtedly saved thousands of jobs in ensuring that organisations could keep the lights on. The furlough scheme was hugely important. Our research showed that 29 per cent of organisations made use of the furlough scheme, and one in 10 still had people on furlough during the summer. While we expected that to be a significant challenge for the voluntary sector when furlough was lifted, that has not come through to fruition. One of the biggest issues that we face now is around recruitment. SCVO's good moves jobs portal has had its busiest autumn on record in terms of putting jobs up there to recruit for. I have an additional question if that is okay. What could we do as a Parliament, as a Government to support the third sector going forward to make sure that we can maintain those jobs in the sector and ensure fair work practices? Yes. The biggest challenge has to be the short-term funding cycle that many organisations face in the sector. I am sure that you will hear about that from the rest of the panel and the second panel. It is that short-term cycle that is really hard to keep staff in post. Speaking to organisations recently, I really struggle to recruit staff when they are only able to offer six-month contracts if it is midway through the year. Staff who are on short-term contracts like that will always be looking for other roles for their own job security. That long-term funding is vital to provide security to staff. There is also an issue around the challenges that leaders in organisations face. The pandemic has put a lot of pressure on senior leaders, and SCVO has done quite a bit of research in looking into the wellbeing of senior leaders. I am sure that there are plenty that are thinking about their next move and whether they want to stay in the sector because of the stresses that are put upon them as leaders in navigating the choppy waters that their workforce encounters. A big one will be the need for inflationary uplift. I spoke to organisations recently that have not had an inflationary uplift between six and 12 years. We think about the cost of living and the increase since then, even just in the last year. That is a huge impact on organisations that are not always able to dip into their reserves and the other resources that they have available to top up those wages. I am conscious of the fact that what you said about the level of organisations of your members that had access to furlough, which seemed to be a very small number, compared to the other areas of society. Would that be because of the very heavy lifting that the third sector did during Covid, providing services to communities across Scotland? I think that Martin Tyson wants to come in here. I want to amplify a point that Paul made about the slightly longer-term funding. Part of the importance of that and the importance, for instance, in supporting employment in the sector is the ability of charities to build up reserves. There is some evidence that charities went into the pandemic with some quite low levels of reserve, particularly smaller charities. The ability to build up reserves would really help the resilience of the sector. Paul or another member of the panel, does anyone have any reflection on the fact that, to me, that figure on the number of organisations utilising furlough seemed low? That seems to suggest to me that a number of those organisations were having to keep their operations pretty steady throughout the pandemic. Is that an accurate reflection? In terms of SCVO's work, that is one survey. I am not sure that other panel members would be able to dip into other surveys that they have published. The voluntary set that has been on the front line during the whole of the pandemic has shown that the Scottish Government's initial package of £350 million highlighted the recognition that the public sector would not be able to meet the needs of people and communities about voluntary organisations, charities and other groups in communities. That resilience funding, total to £22 million from the Scottish Government to keep the lights on in charities, would have been hugely helpful for organisations that were cash-strapped. However, voluntary organisations on the front line and many of organisations would have experienced the busiest periods that we have had in the lifetime. You are absolutely right. I take my heart off to everybody who continues to do work and provide service throughout the pandemic, putting themselves at risk in order to help others across society. It was an incredible effort that is still going on in communities across Scotland. I wonder whether Kea or Paul might be able to reflect on one of the positive aspects of the pandemic in terms of the third sector. That has been the anecdotal spike in volunteering that has taken place across Scotland with people really giving their time and services to local organisations. Is there evidence to support that anecdotal suggestion? Kea. Hi, absolutely. We will find the TSI network, especially throughout the Ready Scotland campaign. There has been a huge spike in volunteering. We do not necessarily, because we are locally based, we do not have the statistics across the country. Just for illustration, for Adam Bram, 5,550 people have signed up and 524 volunteers have been onboarded to the community task force programme, which supported people with things like prescription deliveries and those kind of front-line supports. That continues today. There has been seen a small number of decrease to 446 volunteers up until now, as of yesterday. I would still say that, especially during the initial stages of the pandemic, there has been a huge, huge interest in volunteering. Even with the furlough skin finishing and with people going back to work, we have seen some drop of volunteering so far, but it is still a lot higher than it used to be before. I think that what we need to think about is how do we build on that coming out of the pandemic. This is obviously an Adam Bram example, but it was all very similar across the country. For example, for Ethan Bartonshire, it was 835 people who have signed up for their written Scotland campaign, 500 replied, and then I think 384 were placed into supporting communities via mutual aid groups. So, there has been a huge volunteer effort. Probably, in terms of resilience, what we need to think about is how do we build on that. Apart from local support that the SI has offered, apart from volunteer Scotland support, I wonder how we can build towards a national effort around that. Absolutely. Paul Bradley is looking to come back in. Paul, is that the reflection from SCVO as well? Is that spike likely to be because people have found more time on their hands due to furlough? They are able to give more of their time. How do we harness that positive aspect of what has happened during the pandemic going forward to encourage people to keep supporting their local third sector organisations? Of course. The voluntary sector relies heavily on volunteers even before the pandemic. Nearly three quarters of voluntary organisations in 2019 were run solely by volunteers, so it is a much smaller percentage that relies on the aid workforce. As Cair has mentioned and others, there was a huge spike in interest in volunteering. Some of that came about through people having more time, but Scotland's nature is wanting to be part of volunteerism. Before the pandemic, at least 1.4 million people could be classed as volunteers. Obviously, that has increased, especially through informal volunteering. One of the issues that voluntary organisations would have faced was that they were not able to place every single person that wanted to volunteer during the pandemic. There was a huge increase through Scotland Care's initiatives to try to drum up volunteering. We saw that the emergency need for volunteering and support were well matched with infrastructure that was already in place. It goes to show the importance of fostering and investing infrastructure before crisis hit. Voluntary organisations did a remarkable role in allocating volunteer placements where they could. I thought that it was interesting that, through the long-tutorial survey that SCVO has been sponsoring, despite the expected increase in informal volunteering, which is quite hard to capture, 36 per cent of organisations surveyed as part of that tracker reported a decrease in the number of volunteers that they usually work with. Only 17 per cent had increased the number of volunteers that they worked with across the time. Part of that, especially if we look at the formal volunteering stuff, supporting formal volunteering is not free. It costs, and there has to be infrastructure in place. You need effective volunteer managers that can provide support for people in positions, particularly those who require further additional support. We know from the Scottish Volunteering Forum that economic pressures have led to some of those volunteer management roles in organisations going missing after the pandemic through redundancies, and during the pandemic some of those are being placed on furlough as well. It is not a complete picture. Absolutely, we have seen a rise in informal volunteering, but from organisations that rely on volunteers all of the time, the survey suggests that there has been a decrease in the number of volunteers that they are able to support. Thank you very much, Paul. Before I bring in Marie McNair, I can see that Duncan Thorpe and Kaya Chahinska wish to come back in again briefly. Duncan Thorpe. Hi there, yeah. Firstly, thanks for the invitation today. I would like to echo what has already been said to start with. In terms of voluntary sector, I think that patterns are reflected in the social enterprise community as well. I think that there are a lot of predictions around catastrophic impacts on the sectoral organisations in terms of jobs, in terms of survival of organisations, but I think that that has not happened in reality in the sense that Scottish Government funding, furlough funding, etc., was put in place quite quickly. That is all credit to Government and ourselves as a sector for getting that funding in place. I think that we need to look at, I suppose, the long-term recovery, so a lot of organisations have survived, they have retained staff, and they are working in communities across the country already, but I think that we need to look at the longer-term impacts perhaps. Perhaps it is time to survey and do a bit of research around that, around what that might mean for the sectoral classic ground, and in terms of the long-term impacts of the lockdown period. First of all, I would like to echo Paul's point in terms of investment and voluntary management. I think that this is a foundation on which good volunteering practices can be built, because volunteers can be supported within their roles. I would like to touch on the barriers, so I think that Paul has mentioned that some of the form of volunteering has reduced. In some cases, that is due to the fact that some of the volunteers were shielding, or shielding, or they were from the older demographic. I think that what we also need to consider is how do we support people who are shielding, or still shielding, or our experience with other barriers to come back to volunteering, to ensure that they can support the charitable sector. I think that part of that is to do with investment and voluntary management, and ensuring that voluntary managers are equipped and skilled in helping organisations to address those barriers. In some cases, I think that it might be investment in practical, while supporting organisations with practical issues of reducing those barriers. For example, in terms of disabled people, sometimes charities do not have funds to make adjustments that are needed, or in other cases as well. I think that there are two different things, but one is the investment in voluntary management and also making sure that organisations are equipped to support volunteers the best that they can. I think that we need to do all that we can to break down the barriers that are associated with volunteering. We heard recently about the barriers that people are facing on universal credit when they are trying to volunteer. The Scottish Government has acted in several ways to support the third sector during the pandemic in your view of what has worked well and what can be improved. What good lessons can we learn from the future? I will post that to Duncan, thanks. As I mentioned, we were pleasantly surprised and pleased with the response from not just Government but non-government funders as well in terms of getting money into social enterprise and third sector bank accounts quite quickly. There was an initial shock period where organisations felt they were at crisis at least. That funding did reach people quite quickly, so I think that worked really well. If we look at a similar situation and what didn't work, there are a number of barriers in terms of social enterprise community at least. I would say that startups and pre-startups felt through the cracks a bit in terms of funding support. There was an organisation that I spoke to that was about to launch just a week after lockdown. It was a case of that they literally couldn't access any type of funding. I think that they did actually end up referring to universal credit for the only source of funding that they could access. I think that there is an ongoing issue for community interest companies that are a key type of social enterprise. I think community interest companies are facing barriers in general in terms of funding from maybe non-government sources in particular. I think that there are a number of organisational types that I think felt through the cracks in terms of funding, but overall we didn't face that catastrophic situation, which we thought we might face, because I think that funding did on the whole reach back accounts quite quickly. I think that non-government funders were really good in terms of pivoting and adapting the grants that they had given out to organisations and saying, look, we said you need to spend on this particular project, but in the circumstances you can spend on something else. I think that it's a case with local authorities as well. There was very much a flexibility, I think, which wasn't particularly there before. Paul Bradley, you'd like to come in here. Yes, just briefly, I want to just echo the point about independent funders as well. It's the first time SCVR has really worked so actively with independent funders over the course of the pandemic to really kind of share learning and experiences and look at where there are needs and how funds could be adapted and how people could be supported through that. That's been really positive, and I hope that that can continue. I think that the Scottish Government's support for the sector was fairly rapid and strategic. The fact that that £350 million package was announced in March well before the UK Government announced any funding for voluntary organisations, resilience or support through equivalent wellbeing funds for people in communities is a really positive thing, and it's great that that recognition was there that we could play a vital role and that the infrastructure was there to do that. I think that there was on the positive side of things that trust in voluntary sector infrastructure to really understand its communities, understand organisations, whether that's at a national or a local level, and trusting them to help design systems and processes and procedures to get funding to where it was needed most was, I think, a huge success. Of course, there's room for learning and that's what we're here to do today and in other sessions too, but I do think that that sense of partnership between the Scottish Government, SCVO, funders, third sector interfaces and others around things like the shared funding platform that SCVO set up along with partners was hugely important in terms of streamlining application process, making it more accessible, but also just that partnership working that's needed at a time of crisis to share information and build systems that are going to be agile enough to get funding to where it's needed most. I think also, using existing infrastructure really important and the speed was also important. I think that the Scottish Government pivoted its funds based on needs. Obviously, we started with the third sector, the resilience fund and the wellbeing fund. The resilience fund was all about keeping the lights on. The wellbeing fund was about getting small sums of money at the start out to people in communities who were most in need and supplies and so on. Later on in the programme, we had the adapt and fry fund, which is about supporting organisations to adapt their services for the long term through the pandemic. Overall, each organisation really just played to their strengths. It's an example of where barriers have dropped and egos have dropped, and people work together for a clear outcome. In terms of what works less well, speaking to our funding managers, it was clear that the split—we had to be really careful when we talked about things that didn't work so well because of all the great things that did work well at such pace—the split between the resilience fund that was keeping the lights on and the wellbeing fund that was about getting money to voluntary organisations to support people created two different application systems and there would have been a better way of doing that. The benefit of hindsight is something that's nice. I think that there was some confusion on the ground about different funds that were available. Some funds were open, some funds weren't open, some funds were allocated through prior knowledge of organisations in local areas. I'm not saying that that is a bad thing, but I think that transparency around some of that could have been improved perhaps. Linked to that, I think that the reflections were because the different funds managed by different parts of Government. The funds that SCVO work closely with were run by the third set, the unit, but there are others across Government. It may have fell at times that there wasn't someone behind the scenes of in-govern joining all those dots together because of the differences between different application systems, reportings and how funds were being distributed. However, our engagement with the Scottish Government was fantastic during the pandemic in terms of funding. We have to focus on the things that could have been improved for the future, but at the same time we need to recognise that it was an overall positive experience. Many thanks, Paul. Before I bring in Pam Duncan-Glancy, I can see that Kia Shehenska is looking to come back in. I would like to echo all of the points that Pam Duncan and Paul had mentioned. In terms of flexibility of different funders, some of the Government's funds are also independent funders. I would like to add in terms of the trust that Paul mentioned in terms of the intermediary bodies. I think that trust has actually extended to the third sector organisations. I think that, in some cases—not in all cases, but in some cases—it has changed the relationship between the funder and the funded organisations. I think that that is something really important when the funded organisations are trusted to do what they believe is best for their community and for the people that they support. I think that this is something that we would like to bring into the future. I think that, from positives as well, some of the initiatives included routes and platforms for local intelligence to be fed through the funding processes. I think that that is also something that we would like to bring into the future. Thank you very much, Pam Duncan-Glancy. Thank you very much, convener. I am really pleased to hear that those things that we are putting in place were positive. I hope that they will continue because it shows that we can do things differently and be very fleet of foot when we need to. It is really encouraging to hear that. The question that I have is specifically about the resilience fund and the local authorities who were able to access that. The additional 10 that we were able to access and it would probably be for Kaya, if that is okay. Are you aware of how they were chosen? Do you think that they went to the areas where it was needed the most? When the additional 10 were added, did that come with additional funding or was it a case of spreading the initial funding slightly differently? In terms of the resilience fund? Yeah. The community recovery fund, sorry. Community recovery fund. We haven't... The ASI network hasn't been involved, so I'm not really aware of why some of the choices have been made. Okay. Is anyone else on the panel here? Paul Bradley is looking to come in here. People always come with Bradley. I don't have a very clear answer for you here, unfortunately, but what I would say is that SCVO provided the platform for distributing the funds and for the assessments across many different funds, and that included the community recovery fund. But what was different about the community recovery fund is that we didn't have any involvement in setting up the terms of how that fund would be managed or how it should be allocated. In that respect, we're not clear on how those decisions were made, but I want to be clear that there is some form of SCVO involvement in that, in terms of the shared funding platform that we developed and built with partners, and we allowed the Scottish Government to use that and use that resource for different funds. However, I think that there's that point about what didn't work so well, and I think that maybe there's potential for lack of transparency around how some of those different funds were put together. Obviously, they're put together at speed, and I'm sure there are absolutely valid reasons for why certain groups are picked over others. I'm sure those could be explained by Government, but I think that transparency raises questions and two key organisations or groups in the sector aren't able to answer that. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us today, and again, as colleagues have said, thank you to your organisations for everything that you did during the pandemic and going forward. I wanted to ask a few questions with regard to MTSI's third sector interfaces, and specifically with regard to the funding of those. They have an annual budget of £26 million, so I wanted to ask how do you see that utilised, do you think that it's sufficient, and what would your ask be around that, especially given that we have the budget today? I'll maybe start with Kia and then go around. Thank you. The TSI budget has been at a standstill since inception about 10 years ago, and we haven't had inflationary increases. One of the TSI partners has done a calculation, and obviously there has been a decrease in capacity, but the decrease in funding equals to 37 per cent since the day of their inception. This is quite a significant decrease in capacity as well. I also think probably it's worth mentioning that with the TSI evolving as a result of the review in 2018, many more pressures have been placed on TSI's. With the role being more strategic. Considering the wide spectrum of areas that TSI is getting involved at a local level, sometimes they really have to make hard choices in what they can get involved into their capacity. I think especially on the community planning level, in some areas there is some investment from the community planning towards capacity with MTSI, but that is a different picture across the country. What that means is that the TSI's are not always, sometimes they have to make impossible choices in terms of getting involved and supporting the voice of the third sector within those priorities that are identified locally. Probably worth mentioning are the pressures which the TSI's have experienced, similarly as the rest of the sector. In our report earlier this year, in our internal report, a lot of chief officers have named the challenge of capacity and increasing workloads on themselves and staff. This is mainly due to the pandemic and the demands from their organisations themselves. It's due to the fact that the profit of the sector has risen during the pandemic, which is a very positive thing, but that also places expectations on TSI's from different public partners to get involved in various agendas. I think what is probably worth mentioning is that we really have worked with the third sector unit and we appreciate and recognise the support that they have provided for us, especially over the past year. We welcome the involvement in the mental health and wellbeing fund, the adult learning fund and the ability to support and direct the first sector organisations that we serve, especially in terms of the grassroots first sector organisations with those funds. We also welcome the fact that the review of the funding formula is mentioned in the programme for government for this year. Overall, there are many positive steps that have been taken in terms of ensuring that capacity of TSI's is adequate to the work that they are doing. At the same time, it is important to remember that we have seen that increasing capacity over the past 10 years. Thank you. Is there anyone else who wanted to come in? Yes, I can see Paul Bradley and Martin Tyson are both looking to come in here. Yes, I think that SCDO probably wouldn't comment directly on the specific levels of funding for our local partners. I think that it's important that the committee listens to the experts and TSI's. I would point out that 26 million figures in the briefing are not just for TSI's, but for a whole range of infrastructure bodies that include SCDO. I want to be clear that SCDO is a recipient of the fund. I am here to talk about the wider sector. However, I would talk about the infrastructure of the sector as a whole and the importance of investment in that, which stretches not only to the TSI's and will be on SCDO, but to 60-plus national intermediaries that work in thematic areas such as health, community, social care and so on. I think that the pandemic has highlighted the importance of having that fostered and in place to mobilise groups and get resources to where it is needed. It would be interesting that we would never know, but how would we have supported all those people and organisations over the course of the past 18 months without that solid infrastructure in place? However, as Cair has said, that has been chipped away over recent years. I think that on that point about budgets being at a standstill, it is crucial that intermediary organisations, infrastructure organisations, receive long-term funding just like other organisations in the sector. However, they also get inflationary up, which is absolutely crucial. Those intermediaries are funded based on the needs of their areas, too, rather than just things being dished out without any thought about what the actual need is. Therefore, there may not be enough resources that those organisations are getting to manage with that increasing need. It is vital that the infrastructure is supported and funded. As we have heard, over the past three years, that budget has gone from about £24.5 million to £26 million, but many of the budget lines would have been at a standstill. I am not clear on what that increase went towards. Mark Tyson, please. Mark Tyson, I really want to echo the point about the importance of the TSIs and the general landscape of intermediary bodies. The point for us is that the Scottish charity sector is very much biased towards smaller charities. Most charities in Scotland are volunteer run, but they are very small in terms of income, so the support that they get from intermediary bodies is really key. It is also a very dynamic sector. Every year, a lot of charities are being deregistered and a lot of new charities are being registered. Again, there is a need for the support and the infrastructure to be there, so that is a key function as far as we are concerned, and that is a key partner. Thank you for that. I was interested that it was raised by yourself here with regard to community capacity building. One of the things that I know from my own region going around different organisations is that during the pandemic a lot of that was organic, a lot of the work that was undertaken previously would have been more risk averse. People would not have been brought in, but that public health emergency response saw a lot of organisations adapt and really build that. My question is in terms of TSIs and other organisations, how do we make sure that that volunteer capacity and those who have wanted to support their communities over the last 20 months is not lost going forward and what has been learned during the pandemic to make sure that potential barriers that we have seen previously to volunteering are removed? Probably a good example in terms of how this capacity can be harnessed as Easton-Bartonshire TSI and how they have harnessed some of the capacity of the volunteers that have came through the reach spotting campaign, but also throughout the pandemic. What has happened with Easton-Bartonshire was that mutual aid groups sprung up at the start of the pandemic when they were most needed in different areas of Easton-Bartonshire. For the reach spotting campaign, Easton-Bartonshire TSI has erected the volunteers to the most appropriate geographical area for them and also according to their interests, but what is quite interesting about the model and the approach that they have taken is that they have supported the groups throughout. As the volunteers may be moving on to something else and they have supported them with further volunteer equipment to those mutual groups, they have also supported them with governance. They helped them to constitute, they helped them to access further funding and then this way they built further capacity for those groups and for the sector. I think that the holistic approach is something that we need to take when we think about volunteer equipment, but also when we think about any aspect of the third sector and TSI. This is what TSI is really trying to do. In terms of harnessing the volunteering in the recovery phase, I would probably say that volunteering management is crucial in making sure that volunteers are supported and I think volunteering needs to be recognised and volunteering needs to be supported and I think that what makes it thrive. I'll probably just echo the point that I made before that volunteering management is always crucial and volunteers can't really, it can happen on its own and there needs to be support provided for it. Thank you very much indeed. Paul Bradley wants to come in briefly here please. Sorry, my microphone wasn't un-muted. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes, sorry about that. I just want to draw the committee's attention to the volunteering action plan that's currently being developed. Stakeholders are working together over the next six or seven months to look at many of the barriers that organisations face. I'm not sure that was mentioned just then because I got logged out, but I think also to draw the committee's attention to the Scottish Volunteering Forum as well as a really great resource and a group of organisations that would be well worth speaking to if the committee was going to be looking this in a little bit more detail going forward in addition to SCVO and others. Thank you very much indeed. Next question from Pam Duncan Glancy, please. Thank you, convener. The first question that I have is for Kaya. In your submission to the committee, you note that in order to achieve the volunteer for all strategy and to get to Affair of Scotland, a number of social security changes and other changes would need to happen. Can you tell us a bit about what those specific social security changes would need to be so that we can support, volunteer and encourage it? I would probably echo Paul's point that it is the volunteering framework and volunteer action plan that has adopted a really good approach to looking at those different changes. I know that, as we speak, they are looking at thankfully barriers to volunteering in terms of different protected groups and protected characteristics. In many ways, there is a lot of exploration that still needs to be done to understand some of these barriers. I think that this is one of the things that has been acknowledged within this work that has been happening at the moment. Of course, those barriers to volunteering will be very different for all the different protected characteristics. I think that probably the first thing is that the part that has been taken with to address those issues is really good from the TSI point of view, and also bringing together stakeholders and looking very holistically at the volunteering picture. Also, I think that there needs to be a bit more work than understanding those barriers, because I think that probably we do not have the full understanding yet. Can you talk specifically about any barriers within social security? I would probably say that I know that there is work being done across the network within that action plan around people being able to volunteer while they are on benefits. I think that there have been some barriers in accessing volunteering in those cases. I can come back to you with specifics around this. I will probably need to contact people who are in the best place to speak about this from the network. Thank you. That is really helpful. My final question is for Paul and Martin. It is around the sustained funding. Given that there is a three-year funding approach now from the UK Government, have you any indication that that kind of approach will be transferred to the funding arrangements that you will get through from the Scottish Government? I am happy to go first. No real indication other than what has been said in recent years about there being a shift to an approach to multi-year funding. I think that multi-year is important, because yes, three-year funding would be great, but maybe even longer is needed. I have been in committee sessions where I have spoken a fair bit about multi-year funding and the response that comes as about a specific fund of in-government around equalities in human rights, but it is a small funding stream within the grand scheme of things. The hundreds of millions of pounds that go towards the voluntary sector to support it to deliver vital services in communities is just a small part. We need to see that rolled out across all parts of Government. I am hearing already recently organisations that have had multi-year funding now going down to single-year funding. We are trying to do a little bit more work on this to see where this is happening, where there is good practice and where there is less so good practice. We saw in the public audit committee meeting last week, Audit Scotland, saying that we have to move away from single-year funding if we want to deliver on outcomes. We talked a lot about the Christie commission, which is over 10 years ago, and if you want to deliver long-term change, you have to fund for the long-term. Everyone around this table knows that, and I am sure that if I sit in there, I can see your head shaking. We understand the challenges, but we need to find solutions. As you say, things are part of the UK Government with its spending plan, multi-year and the Scottish Government looking at how it funds voluntary organisations for the long-term. I understand that the uncertainty of voluntary organisations is sensible. We know that, yes, things can change, but even having that indicative sense that you will get renewed funding—not just renewed funding, but inflationary uplift—is really important. I am more than happy to continue to communicate with the committee over the next months and years in terms of SCVO's work in this area, because we are doing a lot to really understand where multi-year funding is happening, where it is really happening and not just the rolling single-year funding that is increasing. However, we have to see progress in this area for so many different reasons, whether it is about job security, whether it is about the outcomes that we want to deliver as a sector and as a country. Unfortunately, it is slow where progress is being made. Thank you. Thank you very much. With 10 minutes left, we are looking for brief questions and answers, please. Martyn, are you looking to come in at this stage? Yes. As far as Oscar's funding goes, we are aligning the Scottish budget, and we will find out about that along with everyone else. However, in terms of the sector funding, I echo the point that sustainable funding and flexible funding are needed for sector bodies, both from Scottish Government and from other funders. The point that I made earlier about being able to build up reserves is a key one. There has been a lot of praise for the resilience of the sector and the flexibility of the sector, but to be able to avoid flying by the seat of the pants and build up the resilience and diversity in funding streams. The ability to cope with headwinds such as the panda and multi-air funding and flexibility in the approach to funding is really viable. Thank you very much. Martyn, next set of questions from Brevity personified, Jeremy Balfour. Thank you, and good morning to the panel. Again, I just add my thanks for all the work that you have done and someone who has worked in the third sector for the pressure that a lot of you are under. I wonder if I can start my question to Paul. Just going back to last year and the funding that came from the Scottish Government and from the UK Government, I got quite a lot of feedback over the last summer that a lot of the money went to the big charities, you know, your kind of headline charities where I will not name, where a lot of the small charities who were doing my work on the ground really struggled to get that money. Is that just winging from the small charities or is there any truth behind that? And how do we learn going forward, how we can get the money to the people who are actually doing my work rather than who map the site like this? I mean, it's absolutely not winging at all, and I think every organisation faces unique experiences in their funding situation. You know, I was speaking to an organisation just recently that's put in 100 applications to see if a funding has received nothing. Just because their area of work isn't necessarily kind of a Scottish Government or a national priority as such is still really important. So those are just long-term issues. In terms of the funding that went to voluntary organisations, I think that, of course, there's lots to learn, and we would hope that that would come through in evaluations. I'm more unhappy to go and speak to our team on that and get back in touch with the committee with any information that we have in terms of the breakdown, which we will have in terms of size and scale of organisation and location. Initially, the small sums of money that were put out through the wellbeing funds to get to people who are most in need. That funding was small in the couple of thousands. It wasn't through open applications, but it was through existing networks where due diligence from those organisations has already been done. We knew that we could trust those organisations. They had the robust governance in place to be able to handle that kind of money and get it to where it was needed most. However, there were also open applications and all that information, especially the SCVO-managed funds on behalf of the Government, and all that information on who got funds and for what is on our website. However, I will get in touch with the committee to follow up on that particular point. However, of course, there will always be organisations that have missed out. I think that particularly some of the funds, for example, if you've got too much reserves, do you necessarily qualify for certain levels of resilience funding? However, if you use all your reserves up and then, later down the line, you're too late to get resilience funding, then you're worse off. There are loads of things that we can learn from the specifics of how funds are developed and how we can improve that for small and large organisations that have unique challenges. What's important if you don't hit small and large organisations against each other? I think that that is one of the interesting issues about reserves and how we hold reserves. If I can move on to one other theme quickly. My question is in regard to future reform of how charities are regulated. Obviously, we've got Martin here. I think that the Government has announced that there will be legislation coming forward in this session to reform Oscar and the practice of it. My question is to someone who is a trustee of lots of small charities. Does it seem to be heavy on paperwork? I wonder from your position, Martin, are you conscious that the small charities often have to fill in the same number of information as the large charities? How do we get around that? I mean, maybe Paul and others, from your perspective on charity, what reforms would you like to see? Are you talking, Martin? Sorry, I'm not sure if my microphone is live there. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. I don't think that it is true that smaller charities are asked to provide the same level of paperwork as larger ones. There is a sort of graduated regime there. Most small charities will, for instance, generate much simpler accounts than the larger charities. Also, we ask smaller charities for much less information in their annual return every year, and that's something that we really keep under review. It's something that we have changed and slimmed down over the years. I think that one of the other things is a learning point for us through the pandemic. We took a more relaxed approach to enforcing some of the compliance regime. We also took a different approach to some of the documentation that we looked at. One of the things that we're doing at the moment is to see whether some of the innovations that came in and some of the streamlining that we did during the pandemic, how far we can take that forward. In terms of the reforms that the act obviously has to the charity legislation, that's something that we have called for. We put various proposals to the Scottish ministers and we look forward to working with them on those. Final question just back to David. David, as we come out of this pandemic and as we move forward, do you think that there will be a lot of smaller charities, medium-sized charities, that will start merging? Do you think that we'll see a redefining of the sector because of what's happened in the past two years, or do you think that in a few years' time it will just look fairly similar? Paul, please. Is that for myself? Yes, we've seen organisations merge and work really well and other mergers that haven't worked so well. If there is a case-by-case basis where organisations feel that they can deliver better outcomes and do better for people, then absolutely, but I don't think that we should be saying that there's a lot of organisations working in this area, so therefore we should be merging. Lots of them will have different specialist skills and provide the unique aspect of the voluntary sector is that specialism that's there. I'll just quickly touch on that charity little point because I think it's really, really important because a lot of what we talk about resilience is about operational and financial, but we often forget the recutational resilience of the sector. The voluntary sector has resumed for all the years that have gone by in recent times, that we have a shared reputation that we share amongst all charities and voluntary organisations. If something happens to one organisation, the cloud forms over all of us. It's really important that we have robust regulations and legislation in place that supports voluntary organisations and charities, in this case, to do their very best. In terms of the public trust in charities, it's great to see Oscars report recently that public trust is at its highest level in Scotland in charities that we've seen since records began in 2009, but we can't take that for granted, and absolutely the changes that are being proposed by Oscar and Scottish Government with tweaks and with more involvement of the sector in terms of shaping those through the legislative process is vital that Oscar gets the powers it needs to be able to perform its role as a regulator. I would like to say one final point, though, is that the sector has not been asked what reforms we would like to see to modern charity law. The act hasn't been updated since 2005. Proposals put on the table with very much proposals, and rightly so, put forward by Oscar and Scottish Government on how to get strength from the regulator's role, and that's really important. However, we have not been asked what changes we need to see as charities, and let's not forget the legislation around charity law. I should say that we have been consulted on those proposals that have been put forward, but we haven't been asked about what changes we would like to see as charities. That's important, because at the end of the day, that factors into the reputation of charities themselves, and not just the reputation of having a strong regulator but charities themselves. It's not a severe role to say what should change within charity law, but I think that voluntary organisations need charities, and they need the opportunity to say what they want to see change to ensure their credibility, legitimacy and reputation going forward. I would like to say that if proposals to charity law are implemented over the next year or so, that cannot shut the law to further discussions for another 16 years on changes to charity law, but charities might want to see to make that more robust to charities themselves. Thank you very much indeed, Paul. Final set of questions in this panel from Evelyn Tweed, please. Thank you, convener, and hello to the panel. Thanks for all your contributions so far, and we've been very helpful. How can we make sure that there is partnership and co-operation in the third sector if organisations are constantly competing against each other for funding and contracts? Is there a more holistic way that we can do that, and could I put that to Paul Bradley, please? Yes, of course. As I said, SCV is currently sponsoring a Scottish Affairs at the Research Tracker, which is a community of 600 organisations. The next wave of those results in early 2022 will go into some detail about partnership work in the longer term and what's changed since the emergency funding has dried up and so on. Overall, launch organisations are keen to work in a collaborative manner, and we've seen that during the course of the pandemic, and we've seen that from local authorities, from national government and so on. The funding structures and funding systems that are in place hold all of that back from a small level. If we have application processes for grants, where even in the pandemic, the Government was encouraging organisations to work in partnership, but we've given them a six-week window to get their application in, which just isn't long enough to form new partnerships and trusts and all those kinds of things. That needs to be improved. Obviously, the big one is procurement, and we've seen a shift in every single conversation that we have with launch organisations in procurement is about that shift to procurement over the past 10 or so years in favour of cost-cutting. Arrangements tend to be unfavourable, but also around fair work and no inflation and so on. The point that you're making about the competition aspect and making voluntary organisations compete with one another and driving down the quality of services, because what's being bid for is not at the right level of costs. It freezes out smaller and more specialised organisations who we might want to see involved in the procurement landscape. It's not just procurement, but funding overall. The Equalities and Human Rights Committee back in 2019 heard about how our qualities groups are pitted against each other to secure funding. Within that report on value in the third sector, the Scottish Government was asking the work of statutory partners and the voluntary sector to look at how partnership working could be improved and what its plan was for that. I'm yet to see any progress that's been made in terms of that recommendation. How can we ensure that the third sector is at the heart of social and economic recovery? What can local authorities, UK and Scottish Governments do to ensure that that happens? I apologise to everybody. My broadband literally went down completely during the session, so it hasn't happened in the past 18 months. Can you repeat that question, if that's okay? Yes, no problem. How can we ensure that the third sector is at the heart of social and economic recovery? What can local authorities, UK and Scottish Governments do to ensure that that happens? Some of it's about mainstreaming, to be honest. If you deal with a certain department with a local authority within the Scottish Government as a charity or a social enterprise, you can get contracts, you can get funding, but I think that often it's a case of other departments within local authorities and governments who don't understand social enterprise in the third sector. There's a real issue here with mainstreaming the sector. I'm breaking out of our bubble in a sense. If you speak to certain economic development officers within local authorities, they understand social enterprise and deal with social enterprise on a daily basis, but if you speak to procurement officers or other departments within a local authority, there's just not that understanding. It's trying to break out of the usual suspects in a sense. It's trying to speak to other officials and other departments to really get them to understand. Sometimes it's just a basic awareness raising to start with. It's just a bit of a misunderstanding about what charities and social enterprises do and how they contribute to our economies at a local level. Thank you very much indeed, Duncan. I can see that Martin and Paul are looking to come back in there. I'm very sorry to say that our time for that part of our session is up. I'm very delighted if there is anything that any of our panel this morning feel they haven't been able to get across for us to take that in writing if you're willing to do that. I'm very grateful to you all for your time and insight this morning. It's very helpful to us in terms of our work and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you very much indeed. I would like to suspend the meeting for two minutes now in order to change over witnesses. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much indeed and welcome back. Thank you again to witnesses from panel 1. Very grateful to colleagues who have joined us on panel 2. We have Ian Bruce, chief executive of Glasgow council for the voluntary sector, Ian McNeill, chief officer of the voluntary action barra and vattersay partner in sector interface of western Isles. Glen Liddell, chief executive, people know how. Susie Burt, trustee of Letham for all, a miles fit the strategic lead of financial health citizens advice Scotland. I'm very grateful to you all for joining us this morning. First question from Pam Duncan-Glancy please and again if I could remind colleagues to direct who their questions would be for. Thank you very much. Thank you very much convener and good morning to the panel. Thanks again for the submissions that you've already sent in and for joining us and I'd like to again put on record my thanks to the work that you've done, my thanks to you for the work that you've all done on-going but also particularly in this past year and a half which I know has been a really really difficult time for the sector so I just want to say thank you and I appreciate the work that you do. My first question is for Miles if that's okay at Citizens Advice Scotland. A couple of questions. The first is that in your latest data you've noted a 138 per cent increase in visits to your mental health pages. Could you tell us a little bit about why you might think that is on the basis of perhaps what you're hearing through your bureaus and also could you tell us a bit about the model that's been used through delivering services online or on the phone and the importance of a kind of hybrid approach if indeed that's what you're hoping to do going forward. Thanks for the questions. In terms of mental health, yes there is an increase in the people coming with mental health issues. I'll take this maybe from a financial health perspective which is the area that I work in. It's maybe a good way to do this. People who are obviously struggling with debt in mental health and money is interlinked so there's people who have money problems that cause mental health and you have mental health that is exacerbated by money worries and of course through the pandemic there's been a whole set of concerns about people's finances and wellbeing and where their managing pay bills and just all the ups and downs of their financial lives so that has led to an increase in people who are coming with mental health concerns and that is an area of focus for the CAB service and for Citizens Life Scotland going forward. In terms of the delivery of advice and how we do this, I mean we absolutely embrace a multi-channel approach for anyone seeking advice so not just face to face but we do have whether it's email, it's web chat, it's phone advice and also through our online pages so at the height of the pandemic at the start we were seeing a lot of traffic, a significant number of traffic coming in to our online site whereby people are looking for employment and benefits understandably because that's where the concerns were but also about paying bills and budgeting it wasn't necessarily about debt as such it was actually about money, how do they pay the bills, how do they manage their money so there's a whole set of ways in which people are being engaging with the service going forward and I would just say there is a concern that we would want to make sure that whilst the pandemic has necessitated a multi-channel approach and we absolutely fully endorse that people should have all the options open to them we would want to make sure that the face to face element which is incredibly important to be able to give certainly vulnerable but vulnerable people the opportunity to have that human contact on a face to face level doesn't get left behind so that's something we're very keen to make sure that going forward that face to face remains an integral part of how we deliver our services and that digital doesn't become the default necessarily but as I said it should be part of our angel options. My next question if that's okay briefly to Ian is that can you tell us a little bit about the experience of your organisation in terms of being able to deliver for the people you represent and the organisations that you represent and specifically around the employment of the people in your organisations and have you seen any need across the city for redundancies and has that been an ongoing concern in the last year and a half? Absolutely happy to answer that but we haven't seen for our own reasons we haven't seen the levels at different points in the pandemic so we had obviously expected it early on that the UK Government furlough scheme mitigated some of that early on we also saw the additional investment from Scottish Government which enabled many organisations that might have had to make tougher decisions to pivot their organisations and think about how they responded in a different way. So up to now we haven't seen huge numbers of redundancies however we are now starting to see some organisations struggling particularly as they start to look forward to the next financial year so the investments that have been made during the last 18 months have to an extent mitigated some of the things but what we now have for many of our members is there's a lack of clarity around what is next what funding will they have next year and a number of our members are telling us that they're distinctly sitting at the moment with deficit budgets for next year and that is going to result almost certainly in conversations around redundancy and for me that that sits at the heart of the capacity of the sector to be a fair work employer a fair work sector you know that context of organisations that many people in the third sector are often on time limited contracts and a proportion not not the overwhelming majority but certainly a significant proportion of third sector organisations find themselves repeatedly having to go through the motions of redundancy they're putting people at risk of redundancy even if they're then able to withdraw that because they don't have the reserves and they don't have the income security to be able to avoid doing so so it is a challenge. Thank you very much indeed next question from Marie McNair please. Thank you very much for giving evidence this morning it's really helpful to us very much appreciated there's a lot of joint working between third sector and councils how important do you see the third sector relationship with local government and what can be done to improve it any examples you could give of good practice during Covid that we'd like to highlight this morning I'll put that to Miles and Ian actually thanks okay I mean the thing now over the course of the pandemic I mean local authorities were were really really great in terms of applying for bairns when it came to issues around paying council tax and other other payments that you have to make to local authorities there was a great flexibility from local authorities and and that's something we would certainly want to to see going forward and there is a you know there's a strong link between the cab service and local authority services as well and I think the pandemic showed that there was strong working together on on various areas and we would like to see you know everyone talks about the new normal and how we progress going forward and we'd like to see that continue and we certainly will endeavour to do so thank you very much indeed Miles Ian please yeah absolutely some great examples during Covid a sense for me that the the rule book got thrown out the door in favour of relationships and trust and I think that was really really powerful and certainly in the city what we saw was organizations coming together we worked with our local authority around the development of the Glasgow helps framework which was about understanding in the city which organisations were best placed to help people and I think what's concerning for me is that we are not out of this pandemic yet and already the system is starting to creep back in so we've seen really welcome for example we've seen really welcome financial interventions from Scottish government in areas like employability and children's mental health coming into the city resources that are there to be you know to be used to support people during challenging times in which I think everyone would expect the third sector to play a significant part in but actually we've had real barriers around procurement in particular or commissioning more broadly and how that money can flow from local authority coffers into third sector organisations that are best placed to deliver and that process is slow when actually the response requires to be fast and in particular during this year we've seen a number of interventions from Scottish government that are money that required to be spent in year and actually local authority are simply in a position that they're saying we simply cannot commission get that money out of the door in a timeline legally in a timeline that would enable any organisation to deliver anything meaningful within the year and that's a real concern because that's the sort of red tape that we were able to put aside during Covid and which now is very much back and forth. What do you think can be done to improve? I suspect that that was coming back to me. I mean I think we need to have a real think about what what commissioning and procurement looks like. There is something, there are two things here. I really welcome the Auditor General's comments the other day about you know people not feeling that they're going to be scrutinised for for taking you know I can't I don't want to I don't want to misquote them a misquote but the the concept of people being here to take chances and I think there is some capacity within the current rules for people to be a little bit more relaxed but I do think that probably what is needed is something which which which transforms the rules I think there are particularly when you look at what third sector organisations do a lot of the value of what third sector organisations do comes from the relationship that those organisations have with the communities and the people they support and I don't think our current procurement approach recognises that and a lot of the procurement that we do treats the commissioning of those sorts of services not hugely differently from the procurement of IT support or pencils for schools. I can see that Glenn Lidl is looking to come in here as well please Glenn. Thank you very much. Thanks to the committee for being invited along this morning. I just want to come back and respond in terms of how the third sector and the public sector work works together. Forgive me I've not been at one of these committees before possibly I'm kind of wider than Mark but a lot of the things I've heard this morning seem to be quite absolute it's this way or it's that way and I think a lot of the work in the sector is far more nuanced. There are good examples for example of where third sector public sector have worked together yes of course there are but there also are still lots of barriers and these go back to times way way before the pandemic. We've started a situation where people work in silos and that happens within local authorities that happens within the public sector. I experienced that on a regular basis where to try and get two different parts of the system to work together it's just a real struggle. So that was the first part I wanted to make was around silo work and that still very much exists. There's also I think a tendency to operate in a manner which is around addressing things in a first aid approach. I was what I mean by that is that people look at the the kind of immediate response the emergency response what can we do to patch things up and people don't I think this is the people's struggle to look at those more structural and systematic system changes that need to happen to actually do things differently. There are a lot of things that still happen that are being created by the system. If we change the system we could actually not have to to address some of some things that happen. The third point I wanted to make was around the power dynamic and again we've heard really good examples of how everyone's working together and his values and there's there's truth in that but there's also a real issue around parity of esteem. If I'm sure you'll all be aware of the kind of hustings all political parties spoke about this in terms of there being there should be parity of esteem between public sector and third sector and it simply isn't there. A lot of that I think is around the missing a lot of the language this morning again is very absolute is very cognitive is very what do we need to do and I think a lot of what needs to happen is actually to get a greater understanding of the third sector. I think there needs to be a shift and a change in culture and in values and just in really how we look at those relationships going forward. The other thing that I think is missing from this morning is that people know how we talk a lot about connect4 and that's to bring together the public sector, the third sector, the business world and academia and that is a really powerful combination where we can get those people into those spaces working together and again we've got really really good examples of that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I can also see Ian McNeill and Miles Fitz are looking to come back in come in here as well. Ian, please. Thank you, convener. I was just thinking there's something around the community empowerment agenda that comes down from the Scottish Government and goes through local authorities and then makes his way through to our communities and their communities kind of look at it and think right what is this and it's like well we're going to give you some more powers. Along comes a pandemic and all of a sudden there's a rush on to put the owners on communities to try and sort out local affairs what's happening there and here's some money to support that. So looking back in that I think it's probably worthwhile to look and see how communities reacted to that and how well they reacted to that challenge of having some resources put to them in a very short space of time and trying to target them. Thank you very much indeed. Miles Fitz, please. I just had this opportunity to make the point around voluntary organisations, I'm speaking from a CB perspective, that have been seen as essential community assets. CB service is a very important service but there's an element where it's an essential community asset. CBs are anchored in local communities and they deliver a service that's best suited to local needs. They have that local connection between advisers and local people and that's extremely important. Also there's the opportunity for people who are volunteers to go on to great other jobs and get into employment. I think it's important going forward that the recognition that the first sector isn't just about necessarily service delivery but it's the valgo role in which they play within that. There's an agenda, the community wealth agenda and across Scotland organisations are more than just service providers in many ways, they're actual assets to the community and I think that that should be recognised by the committee and by the public sector and by the Scottish Government as well. Thank you very much indeed. Pam Duncan-Glancy, please. Thank you, convener, and thank you for your responses so far. They've been really helpful in terms of support during the pandemic. Can you tell us a little bit about the funding that went for the recovery fund to specific local authorities? Are you aware of the way that that money was delivered and distributed? What were the criteria? When the additional local authorities were added to that criteria, do you know if additional funding followed that or was the original source spread across? Maybe if we could hear from Ian Bruce and Ian McNeill on that. Thank you. Obviously, Glasgow was not included in the original 10 local authorities, which was obviously a surprise to us considering the challenges that we know exist in the city. Obviously, further concern that the 10 local authorities also did not include Glasgow. That's really all that I can say to that question, to be honest. We haven't had any further involvement in it other than a concern that Glasgow was not included. In terms of the funding that we got in the Western Isles, it was targeted, I suppose, if any comment I had to make is the lag in the administration time in understanding what the fund was about, putting in an application and waiting for approval. When organisations that run funding to go out to communities have to consider the amount of administration that is involved in that for TSI and local partners in the time that it takes to put it out and they tend to follow normal audit streams, whereas the time lag that it is taking to identify what the need is to get the fund through them by the time that four months has passed and therefore the need is maybe not as great. Thank you. I have one additional question in this, if that's okay. That's really helpful. We heard earlier about some of the disadvantages that people experience in terms of volunteering and the number of disabled people who have been volunteering are of concern. Do either of the panel members this morning have anything that they could tell us about those figures? Also, have you got any experience that you can share about improving volunteering or supporting disabled people to volunteer and how we could try to make that happen across the country? I didn't want to pick on someone just in case, but if there's any—I know Ian, forgive me—in Glasgow, there's—Glasgow disability lines have been quite involved in a lot of work, but is there anything that you could share that we could try and listen to and look to improve elsewhere? I'm going to speak because you've come to me, but I'm just for people to be aware that the third sector interfacing glass was a partnership TSI, so volunteering isn't our area of focus. From my experience, part of the challenge over the last 18 months that we've heard from organisations is that they are telling us that bringing on board new volunteers during the pandemic is particularly challenging and that that's been an area of difficulty. I think that there is—and I heard—I was listening into panel 1 and I did hear some input around the recognition that volunteering is not a free activity, and there is something here about how we make sure that third sector organisations are resourced in a way that enables them to think about how volunteering is effectively included. There is a wider agenda as well, which is about how we improve the qualities practice within the third sector. The third sector is obviously a really important part of society in Scotland and contributes hugely, but we have to be honest and recognise that the sector won't always have as good at the qualities practice as we would like, and that's an area of focus for us as intermediary organisations in the future for our sector to make sure that we're always being inclusive and that we're always at the forefront of making sure that everyone is able to participate in our sector. Thank you very much, Zeed. I can see that Miles Fitt and Glenn Little are looking to come back in, and I'm also conscious that we haven't heard from Susie Burt as yet. Susie, if you have anything that you would like to add, please type R into the chat function in BlueJeans. Miles Fitt, please. Yeah, it was just to quickly say that what I echo Ian's point about, you know, we've had an increase in volunteers wanting to come in and get involved with the CAB service, but the challenge of the pandemic has been difficult to be able to respond to giving them the training that they have needed, so that's been difficult. On the point about from those who are disabled, I'm happy to, it's not something that I can answer just now, but I'm happy to contact the committee later on yourself, Pam, with an answer. That's okay. Thank you. That'd be helpful. Thanks. Glenn. Thank you. Thank you. I really thought we should respond. People know how we talk a lot about VIPs, volunteers, interns and placement students. In the last 12 months, we've had about 250 such people supporting us along with a staff team, about 20 or so. For us, they are essential. We simply couldn't do all the things that we do, and they hold a whole range of responsibilities. I think it's also worth pointing out that, again, it's obvious, but our board of trustees, as with every charity, are also volunteers, and they bring a huge amount of experienced talent and time to the organisation. In terms of specifically to support people around disabilities, we have always taken the approach of being very open to everybody, and wherever possible, we'll make adjustments, we'll support people. We have a number of people that do volunteer with us on a regular basis that have a whole range of disabilities. I think that it's also worth acknowledging that there are a lot of disabilities that are quite hidden and are not so obvious. It's not until you really get to know somebody and unpack that what their needs are and how to best support them. We, as an organisation, went through the process to gain our investment in volunteers accreditation. That's been very, very important to us. Being open to challenge, we haven't got it right. I think that the whole sector needs to be constantly looking at our practice and how we do that in the best possible way. Another point that's not directly related to supporting people with disabilities, but that's supported to the voluntary sector, to supporting volunteers. We have a volunteer officer. We're actually looking to recruit a volunteer co-ordinator, and there's been a lot of comment about how volunteers require lots of support, and that's absolutely right and true. It's also not an absolute. There are many organisations that function purely on volunteers. They're board of volunteers. They're the people that operate on the ground, volunteers as well. Those organisations can work very, very adequately on the board of one such organisation just now, and they've been operating for about 40 years. I've never, ever had a staff member. It's really about looking at horses for course, if you like. It's not an absolute. Some organisations can operate wonderfully as all volunteers. It's not that we always need to have volunteer management, the volunteer staff, to support them. I hope that those comments are helpful. Thank you very much, Douglas. They are indeed. Miles Briggs, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. Like others have said, I thank you for everything that your organisations have done during the pandemic and coming out of this pandemic. I wanted to ask a couple of questions with regards to financial stability and sustainability. We've already heard about the importance of multi-year funding potentially being developed. We've seen that and hopefully we'll hear more at today's budget along those lines. I wanted to ask specifically, I know of cases where health boards have already tried to move towards that for some mental health charities and also for some drug services as well in the country. I just wonder if anyone in the panel has any examples of that or where they've seen the difference that makes and the additional capacity that it can actually provide. I don't know if I want to bring Ian in and then if anyone wants to put an R in the chat. I can't name any specific examples where that's being implemented at the moment. What I have seen over too many years working in the sector has repeated attempts to do it, that often fall foul of later processes. There's an attempt to do a three-year funding cycle and then it gets to the end of that three years and there's only a year's funding left in the budget and it vanishes and then the organisation finds itself fighting to do that again. There's something about the systemic in there. There is a second bit for me, which is around the language that we use because quite often we talk about three-year funding. There's something in here about the risk that what that does is take the current problem and just simply makes it happen every three years instead of every year, which is great, but I don't think that necessarily puts that consistent with the parity of esteem context that we would expect with other sectors. For me, there's something about an expectation of a rolling sense of grant, so that at any point in time, even in the last year of a three-year grant programme, there is still an indication of what the organisation will have funding and is able to move things forward and be able to look a year in advance at the bare minimum. I think that there's quite a lot of complexity under what sounds like quite a simple concept that I think needs to be. I don't think that simply three-year grants that are then still renewed minutes before the end of the financial year or the third year is the solution in itself. The other Ian, I think that it's coming on this as well. I've seen some migration from the health board towards delegation of ADP funding locally, which in some sense isn't a bad thing because we're a bit closer to the co-face than the NHS itself, where they're based. It is a movement in the requirement to deliver services for ADP, where there's clear gaps locally. Mental health support is along the exact same lines where the need is there, but the funding isn't, and therefore the onus is put onto the third sector to try and find other ways of delivering that service. You could say the same thing in terms of community transport and the connectivity of clients getting from their home to their service providers. Another area that was in a sense foisted on the third sector is IJB, where there's a structure of locality planning groups, where the theory is that they gather the information and feed up to the independent joint boards, and you try to make movement there. It doesn't necessarily work out that way. It tends to be more coming from the top down. In any case, the amount of time that the third sector and volunteers and community groups are expected to spend in that, with no resource whatsoever, is pretty disappointing. Thank you for that. That's helpful. My final question with regards to this was learnings from the pandemic. Specifically last Friday, I visited North Edinburgh Arts Centre and we were talking about the new partnerships and the new relationships that were built during the pandemic and how to sustain those. That very much came down to that facility that was able to be utilised by them. In terms of us all wanting to see additional capacity across Scotland built, do you have examples of how that's been achieved during the pandemic? We've heard already that, to some extent, people just made things happen. There was maybe a movement away from just risk averse people not getting involved in things. I just wondered if there's any examples of that. Maybe Susie, you've got a local example of that to maybe bring you in there. If others want to come in and put an hour in the chat, thanks. Thank you for inviting me today. I found from our experience and a very local experience, the liberation of taking a lot of barriers away to just make things happen was fantastic and we were able to direct our resources and working together to tackle our local response to the pandemic last year. Our particular issue was around getting food to people and dealing with that really quickly and supporting them through the first stages of the lockdown. It was that, never mind who you work for, never mind what area you work in, how do we make this work and who's got what and who can put what in the pot. We made that happen really quickly and with very little resource, and it made a huge difference to people. I think that we were up and running before Mr Johnson made the national announcement and then Nicola Sturgeon. Those things happened really, really quickly. The other significant thing that helped us locally on the ground for our organisation to become a community anchor organisation and support with the supporting communities funding has nurtured local partnership working in our localities really a lot faster. It's like incubated it and things have happened as a result of that and are continuing to happen because as a community anchor organisation we had the access to funding to distribute amongst the partnerships and to kind of make those partnerships grow and because of that having access to that funding to do things immediately just absolutely sprouted lots of ideas and made things happen. We're trying to do that with community recovery funding now to a lesser degree because there isn't as much funding around but again it is making us collaborate more and just having access to that little bit of resource to do that is absolutely fantastic. The partnerships between local and voluntary organisations and the growth of people who want to replicate what some communities in our area are doing, the growth in community capacity building has come about as a result of the pandemic and I'm not sure that would have been there had it not happened. Thank you. Did anyone else want to? I've not got anyone in the chat box but I was looking to follow up on one of Miles's questions there to ask Susie how much of a challenge it has been to fund raise during the pandemic and how useful multi-year funding would have been for you during this time. Well, FFMFeral is a very new organisation. We're only three years old, we're run by volunteers and we do have some staff that support what we do. The hunt for funding is incredibly difficult. Our own personal experiences and it's very unique to us as we're going through a major capital project that was put on hold for Covid and our funding that we had secured to last through that transformation in our building in the capital works has evaporated as we've kept doing things for the pandemic and contributing to the local response. So we are now in a position where we have to start all over again and look for funding for the next three years after our funding runs out. So it's a constant battle looking for money and I think that there is funding out there but it's hard to be because it is very competitive and that in the earlier panel somebody talked about kind of one of the barriers to partnership working is actually you could be in competition with another group going for the same pot of money so that that is incredibly challenging if we if there was a year on year on budget that would be heaven but maybe that's a little bit wishful thinking we have no locality budgets in our areas in our community through community planning for doing things and when money does become available again you're in a competition for a limited pot of money to go across a lot of organisations it is a very difficult challenge to look for money and through the pandemic as well looking for small pots of money crowdfunding appeals looking at some of the community pots of money that big businesses have put up like Arnold Clark's and as the foundation in Tesco's you continually filling in applications to help families become connected digitally to get Christmas food parcels out to get warm jackets and coats for kids in local schools because there's no access for that locally and we're working with the schools to put that in place and I think that's some of the things that we've managed to fill a gap that might not have been in our area we don't know who would have done that if we hadn't done it so it's always a challenge. Thanks very much Susie, before I bring in Pam Duncan Glancy for the next set of questions I can see that Miles, Ian and Glen are all looking to come in off the back of that so Miles Fitt please follow by Ian Bruce. I'll make this brief it's just to touch on the general point about funding of CB services there is a variability across Scotland some are one year some are in three year funding cycles some some have sufficient money to provide adequate level of service others don't have that and I think in order to be able to embrace the multi-channel approach which the service is taking to be ensured to get ensured that face-to-face comes back as something which is an integral part of what we do to make sure that we have that more than just an important service but we become that essential community asset then I think having that stability or funding across Scotland would be something which would allow those things to happen and I think the wider society will benefit from those things being in place. Thanks Miles, Ian Bruce followed by Glen little please. Thanks it was just off the back of Susie's point about funding and I suppose one of the things that I would like to bring to the committee's attention is probably the number of mid-sized organisations that we work with now who have what you might regard as an excessive number of small grants where actually things might be more manageable for everybody if they if they were funded from a smaller number of large grants and we're seeing organisations and talking about organizations with turnover around £200,000 and they are managing upwards of 12-15 different grants to get to that income level and I think that's not just about the application processes that organisations need to go through and the monitoring they need to do off the back of that but it's the financial accounting that they have to do in the back end on an on-going basis and the governance that they need to do to make sure they're hitting all of the different targets that they have that become really challenging so there's something there about how the sector is funded as well. Thank you very much, Glen Lydl and then I'll bring in Pam Duck and Glancy. Thank you. Funding is such a huge issue. I just wanted to make a couple of points. One, I think it's kind of built on previous points, made already just the huge resources that are expended in getting it such an inefficient system. We have at least one full-time member of staff constantly looking at funding and the reporting back that's also a huge job and that's not to say that that's not we shouldn't of course we should be reporting back. I'm just pointing out that by way of a system it's a very very inefficient way of going about doing things. We probably our income this year will be heading towards about £1 million and that's probably through about 50 different 50 different funders ranging from grants of over 100 phas into grants of £500 but all require reporting back on. Sometimes in the cold light of day if you look at a grant and you look at the process to receive the funding and then to report back you're actually questioning yourself on whether it was a good return on time and investment and often often it's not. How is it done? Often just by simply burning the midnight oil that's how a lot of organisations including ourselves actually managed to do this. One final point I want to make is around perhaps reframing this. We often we talk about funding and money but the work that we do is resourced in so many different ways. I'd like to think we're quite good at bringing up in other resources. We have various buildings and spaces that we've managed to procure on a zero rent basis. Our VIPs that I mentioned earlier near about 250 VIPs if we were to be having to pay for that kind of resource just on a living wage that would come to a colossal amount of money and our staff team as well. Also pulling in resources on a pro bono basis from different supporters as well. Thank you. Thank you very much to you Glenn. I'm Duncan Glancy please. Thank you, convener. The questions I have are for Miles and also for Ian again if that's okay. In Glasgow you'll be aware that a number of citizens advice bureaus had faced some difficulties in funding in the past year or so. Can you tell us a little bit about the impact of that and the importance of resourcing organisations like that and also given the approach and the changing approach from the UK Government to a three-year funding settlement, do you have any indication from local authorities or government in Scotland that they will seek to transfer that approach to your organisations and notwithstanding the fact that three years is good but more would be better? Miles Fitt followed by Ian Bruce I presume. I think there was a pressure put on the CV service in Glasgow. I'll be honest, I'm not best placed to answer that question. Again, I'm happy to follow up with the committee with an answer on that but there was certainly pressures and there was an element of having to establish how the service would be delivered with those pressures that came on. I'm aware of what went on but I don't know exactly how the detail is to hand so I'm happy to follow up without a doubt after the committee session. Thanks Miles. I was assuming that it was Ian Bruce that Pam was looking for. Similarly, I would need to come back before giving a lot of detail on this but certainly as part of the Glasgow City Council's transition from its old integrated grants fund to the new Glasgow community fund, we did see some not just citizens advice bureaus but other financial inclusion organisations and wider third sector organisations either not being funded or being funded at a lower level than they had done previously. Obviously, that creates huge challenges in the city. People don't need to be reminded of the challenges around deprivation in the city and the context of Covid means that demand on the services has been high. In terms of the wider context of that three-year funding, the UK Government's commitment is welcome. Despite my early caveats from Maine, the Scottish Government has given me a number of the right noises around the direction of travel on three-year funding. At a local level, certainly the council's main funding programme is a three-year funding programme but our concerns are always about how we make sure that that still isn't just that organisations being given a month's notice at the end of not being funded from 1 April. That is currently an area that we are discussing quite extensively with the local authority about how we make sure that we don't find ourselves in that position at the end of the current band. However, outside of that core funding, there are other grants and contracts into the third sector and they are not all from the local authority and they are not all consistently three-year or above arrangements. I wanted to return to some of the questions that I had asked with regard to TSI's and just wondered the panel's view on how they have operated specifically with regards to the budgeting. Obviously, today we have the Scottish Government budget but have you seen during the pandemic in your own areas that that really comes to the fore on how we are delivering support for the third sector? I don't know who specifically wants to come in on that. Maybe bring Ian in with a classical perspective again. Ian Bruce, please. I'm not. Sorry, I wasn't unmuted. I'm happy to come in on that. It's been really interesting. I think that what we've felt and genuinely a feeling for me is that actually the value of what we do, the strategic value of what we do, rather than the operational value of what we do, has been really appreciated during Covid, so TSI's have always had a key role in representing the sector locally and building their capacity around organisational development, social enterprise and volunteering, but what we've seen during Covid is people recognising that the TSI's are well placed in terms of their understanding of what's happening in the sector at a local level, their knowledge of the sector at a local level and their relationships with the sector. We've started to really see that play out. Going forward, we're certainly seeing a dramatically improved relationship with the local authority in the city, with a tone that's much more around being regarded as a partner in addressing some of the challenges that the city has and making sure that we take advantage of the opportunities that come in our direction. That stands out for me as you asked in the previous panel that TSI funding is just over £8 million a year nationally. That has remained static for, I think, 11 years now, at least 10 in cash terms. Members may be aware that the distribution of that funding nationally is not necessarily as equitable across local authorities as you might expect. As a comparison in Glasgow, where the local authority would expect to receive in the region of 11 to 13 per cent of Scottish Government spend for its activities, the TSI in Glasgow receives 5.5 per cent of the national Scottish Government funding. That results in TSIs across the country having different capacities to respond to local needs. Is there anyone else who wants to come on that? One of the points that I wanted to return to was what you raised earlier, Glenn, with regard to Connect4. My question is looking to the future and the potential reform or improvement around TSIs. How do you think that we can achieve that? It is important that you outline how we bring together all those four sectors. I think that there are examples of that, but is that something that we could look towards TSIs potentially helping to achieve? My experience of TSIs varies dramatically across the country. There are clearly fantastic examples of TSIs and fantastic examples of work that happens and takes place, but there are also issues where TSIs could make substantial improvements in how they operate. To preface that, my answer is that the TSIs are starting from different points, different places in terms of their current capacity. Some TSIs are really well equipped and are well positioned to start to build and develop those further arrangements. Generally speaking, TSIs from my experience seem to be relatively well connected with the public sector, with the local authority, and less so with the NHS. It often takes two to tango, and often the NHS does not quite know where or how to engage with TSIs. That is a challenge. In terms of the business world, from my experience again, the focus is on social enterprise, which is absolutely fantastic. We use a social enterprise model and approach to some of our work, but in terms of the wider business and thinking about chambers of trade and commerce, I think that sometimes those connections are not as strong as they could be. Again, in terms of academia, universities and colleges, I think that there is work to be done there as well. I hope that that is helpful. Iain Bruce, do you want to come in as well? Yes. Just to give a practical example of where we are doing that, we have been working with Glasgow University. During the pandemic, we worked with Glasgow University to set up a pilot project called The Collaborative, which was around connecting the third sector with academia. There has recently been a report published on the success of that, which I am happy to share with the committee after today. We have also done some really interesting work. The review of the national care service, in the consultation into the national care service, we have been working really closely with Strathledge University and third sector organisations, as well as independent providers of social care, to look at what implications that has for the city and how we have best respond to that, at the same time as working with our public sector partners to look at the implications for Glasgow. I think that a lot of that is definitely in scope for us. That is very helpful. Finally, as you have established yourself during the pandemic as an organisation, do you feel that the public health emergency has really seen the third sector let in and now are being pushed out again, or barriers are being put in place that certainly have not been there or been taken down during the pandemic? How do we prevent that? I know a lot of organisations that I have spoken to who have done a fantastic response during the pandemic, but now I find it difficult to be listened to or do not have the same relationship that they did have with statutory bodies. I just wondered your opinion on that and anyone else in the panel as well. In terms of our local authority, we work very well with them. There are mutual benefits. I would probably say that we can sometimes be of more benefit to our local authority and their support teams than they are to us. We have very little contact with our health and social care partnership. Considering that our initial work is all about health and wellbeing in our community, that is quite sad. We do not know where the door is to get in. That is all I can say on that one. Iain McNeill, you are looking to come in at this point. Yes, I would agree with that. The western Isles example would be that it took us a wee while to establish ourselves as a real player and a real partner in that in the emergency planning side of things. We brought quite a lot of issues to the fore, but it took us a while to get accepted and a lot of it was around issues of confidentiality and things like that, but once we got those barriers out of the way, we were accepted as a good partner. I have seen since then some good work and some more inclusive agendas. The pandemic has probably brought a good few closer together, and I hope that that continues. Iain McNeill, you are followed by Jeremy Balfour. Thanks, convener. A lot of funding comes from local councils. Can you highlight any good practice that you are aware of by local councils in their financial support to the third sector? I will put that first to Miles and anyone else who would want to come in and comment on that. Again, I cannot really give you any details on this, other than a general statement that the councils fund local bureaus, and in some areas the relationships are good, some less so in other areas. The level of funding will vary across Scotland. There are partnerships that go on, but I do not want to give any detail at the stage, because I do not want to give you the wrong information. I am happy to follow up with the committee afterwards. Nobody else is going to come in at this stage, Marie. Again, from our perspective, as a charity, we set up projects and services often with multiple streams of funding. Often, there will be public sector funding, but that will be through a local authority, through the NHS, but we always put that together with other funding from trusts, foundations, the lottery and some of the household names of big funders that you all know. Often, other funding in terms of match funding, so often our local authority will think that if we fund that, that will build and add capacity. Likewise, if a local authority has funded an initial piece of work or the NHS has funded initial piece of work, where we can gather additional funding, that builds capacity. The question that started with a lot of funding comes from the councils. There is white to make the point that a lot of funding comes from elsewhere as well, and to make the point around resources in the shape of volunteers, interns, placement students, spaces, buildings, pro-boundary support, support from universities that can be very, very real and quite sizeable. Ian McNeill, I can see you are looking to come in again briefly, and then I will take in Jeremy Balfour. Just to highlight one of the funds that the council has worked with the community through local wards is the Crown of State funds. The Crown of State funds and the Western Isles and our communities have had good access to the schemes that have been rolled out so far. Thank you very much. Jeremy Balfour, please. Good morning. Just two quick questions, maybe if I can start with Ian for this question. It is a similar question that I asked the other panel in the just looking for lessons learned from last year. Do you think from talking to the people that you are involved with that the money that came from the Scottish Government and UK Government got down to the charities that were dealing with the most need on the ground? Did you hear any stories that it got blocked with either larger charities or it did not get to the people that were doing the work? A few things here. I will start by making it clear that, considering the pace that everything happened at, I think that that worked very well, all things considered. I will highlight just a couple of areas where we think things might have been a little bit more effective, but it is genuinely said with the absolute benefit of hindsight. We found locally when we spoke what we found was that there were some organisations that were excluded and it wasn't. I do not think that it was deliberate, it was done with very good intentions. We found that the city has a very high, compared to the rest of Scotland, very high BME population. Many of the organisations that are best placed to reach that population are very small and volunteer-led. The wellbeing fund from the Scottish Government required a minimum grant of £5,000, which in itself seems very reasonable, but it also required that applicants apply for no more than 25 per cent, if the committee can forgive me if that is not the right figure, 25 per cent of their normal annual income. That meant that the organisations of an income of under £20,000 were excluded from applying and the overwhelming majority of those BME organisations fell into that category. I think that later interventions tried to address that, but there were some bits. The second thing that I will say is that there was not necessarily other huge gaps in organisations getting money. What I think we probably saw was the approach and again probably necessary at the time, but it probably did not result in the best use of money and the best coverage in the city. What we got was a little bit of feedback from some communities that what was happening is that people were getting in terms of things like food parcels, people were getting multiple food parcels delivered from different providers. That is a little bit of a reflection. How do we take, in future, more of an emergency response approach rather than one that was effectively predicated on a faster version of a usual grants programme? I want to triple emphasise that all of those things are really easily said with hindsight. Thank you. That is helpful. I am very conscious of time, so if I can just move on to one other area, maybe aim this at either Glenn or Susie or both for a brief answer. I might just find the whole issue of your relationship with Oscar. There is likely to be brought forward in the form of charity law within the next five years. Do you think that the things that you would want to see changed? Is it over bureaucratic, the number of forms that you have to fill in, or do you think that it is about right? I might start with Glenn. That is a quick answer from my perspective. I do not find the report in back to Oscar overly burdensome. As an organisation, we have grown quite dramatically. What has been a challenge is that, in terms of accounting rules, that has changed dramatically going from our first year's account for £5,000. We are just about to sign off on accounts that will be heading towards £1 million, but that is a reality, and that is as it should be. Of course, there are more accounting processes and audits and everything else in process. I am a great advocate of sceos, and I think that a lot of people, a lot of charities in that organisation still do not realise the benefits of a sceo, so that can save people from being registered as a charity but also as a company. I think that there could be more work to promote sceos. Very quick, Susie, as somebody who started a new charity, how has the relationship been? I have to say that the support that we got from Oscar setting up, we were a bit worried about timescales, but we actually found the whole process very quick. The reporting process for us at the moment is not burdensome, it is very easy to do and it is very easy to put online and it is very transparent to our members and community. We are a growing organisation and we realise that the kind of governance around accounting will increase for us, but we will grow with that as our organisation grows. So far, we have found that our work for Oscar is not over burdensome at all. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. Thanks for all your contributions so far, they have been really helpful. My questions are around recovery and renewal, and I know that you have spoken about some of the sounds probably in your previous answers. How can we ensure that the third sector is at the heart of social and economic recovery? What can local authorities, UK and the Scottish Government do to ensure that that happens? Can I direct that question in the first instance to Ian Bruce, please? Yes, absolutely. There are a number of things that stand out for me. First of all, it is worth saying that what is really important is the recognition of the third sector's role in the economic recovery. That is probably the first time that I have seen current consultation happening on the Scottish Government's economic strategy, and it is the first time that I feel that the third sector has been seen as an economic force in its own right, which I think is really positive. There are a number of things for me. The first and foremost for me is around the focus on the local, and I mean the local. We often think about local, and I think that people drift to thinking about local authority areas, but when you look at a city the size of Glasgow, local means something much closer to home. My sense is that the closer you get down into communities, the more obvious the role of the third sector becomes. When we look at things in the abstract and the national and the regional, it becomes easy to ignore or forget the third sector's contribution. In my own area, I live in the Gorbals in the city, and when you are in the Gorbals in the city, what you see is the impact of third sector organisations on the lives of people on a daily basis. I think that there is something very much from here on how we plan services and how we commission things at a local level that will ensure that the third sector is best placed to participate in. I would make a plea for some kind of plan. We are working really hard on the ground to support people to recover in terms of mental health, in terms of wealth and wellbeing, about employability in all aspects of their lives, but we are going on our gut knowledge and our knowledge of our community, but we do not see where that feeds into any kind of plan at the moment in our area in terms of recovery. Again, I think that having some way of bringing us together—I do not know if that is the TSI role locally or if it is through community planning—there is nothing that pulls us all together to ensure that we are not duplicating and that we are making issues of resources around recovery. I can see that Glen, Ian and Miles would also look to make very brief contributions. I am going to repeat some of the things that I said earlier. Three points should get away from silo working. We are still saying a lot of—you are nodding already, I do not need to elaborate on that point. My other point that I made earlier was about what I call the first aid approach. There is often a lack of opportunity or desire to genuinely change things at the system level. That feeds into my third point about the paradigmic and the parity of esteem. How often do people see the third sector in a position of leadership as working with the public sector at best? When we are asked, sometimes we cannot be things that were not expected and maybe pushed to one side because it was not quite the right answer. That feeds into the whole issue of the paradigmic and parity of esteem. If you really want collaboration and partnership working, that has to come from both sides. People need to be prepared to change and to modify their views, their opinions and their outlook. Otherwise, that is not a genuine partnership if both sides are not prepared to change. Just look at what makes personal relationships work. We have to have a bit of given type. Miles Brifley and Ian McNeill, please. It is just to go on the point about the economic strategy and economic contribution of the volunteers of the third sector. From the CBE perspective, I did touch on how organisations at the cab service can bring volunteers in, giving them my experience to go into the workforce and make that contribution to the economic situation. The cab service helps people to unlock money. Last year, £147 million was unlocked for people, but from the advice that we gave, that goes back into the local community and into the economics of the local community. There is a valuable role, not just in the service provision, but in how we can contribute to the economic recovery. It is important that the first sector stays fully involved in that. There will be many other examples across the third sector, where the economic output and financial output back in the community will take place. Social and economic renewal, in my opinion, has to start at the community level right at that baseline. The third sector has a big role in helping to drive that forward, possibly through social and economic forums, which include partner agencies and local authorities. Thank you very much. Evelin, do you have another brief question? One more quick one, if that is okay, convener. I want to ask Miles Fitt. How can we make sure that there is partnership and co-operation in the third sector if organisations are constantly competing for funding against each other and contracts? Is there a more holistic way to look at that? I think that there is. Again, I do not want to—I cannot properly answer at this session and I will follow up, but again, other than to say a general response of yes, I think that a recognition that the organisations involved are seeking the same outcomes, the ability for organisations to focus on that and to align resources that get to the best outcome for recognising the roles that each individual partner would play would be a basic answer to your question, but I am happy to follow up afterwards with a bit more detail for you. Thank you very much. That would be very helpful. I am sorry to say that that is the end of our session. If there is anything that anybody on the panel would have wanted to say but did not manage to get across, we are very keen to hear that in writing. I have a couple of one question that I would be keen for you to do that in, if that is possible, please, and that is around digital exclusion, both in terms of the people that you are providing services to. So, how challenging that has been accessing digital services have been for the people that you are providing services to, but also as organisations whether or not you have been able to access your platforms, been able to support your members and been able to facilitate the services that you are providing as well. If there is anything further that can be done to support that from Government or indeed local authority level, that would be very helpful, please. In the meantime, I want to say thank you very much to you all for your time this morning and also for the work that you and your organisations have been doing during the pandemic, and as we continue out of it, it is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much indeed. I would now like to move on to the next item on the agenda, please, which is where the committee is invited to consider the following negative instrument, the council tax reduction Scotland amendment number five, regulations 2021. Background to those regulations are outlined in paper nine. Do members have any comments that they would like to raise in relation to those regulations? Nope. Are members therefore content to note the instrument? Thank you very much indeed. That concludes the public part of this morning's meeting. The next week, the committee will take evidence on the proposed adult disability payment regulations, and I would like to suspend the meeting now. I move to a private session. I would like to invite colleagues joining us remotely to leave the meeting and join the private session via the link provided. Thank you very much indeed.