 Ben ли警 and welcome to the seventh meeting of 2016. Everyone present has asked to switch off mobile phones and other electronic equipment, as they affect the broadcasting system. Some members will refer to tablets during the course of the meeting, as we provide papers in a digital format. Item 1 is the decision on whether or not to take item 6 consideration of our evidence on the commission for local tax reform in private. Are members agreed? Item 2 is our first substantive item. It is evidence on the local government benchmarking framework. I welcome Malcolm Barr, chair of Solace Scotland, Colin Mayer, chief executive and Emily Lynch, programme manager for performance management from the Improvement Service Scotland. Would you like to make any opening statements? Mr Barr, please. Thank you, gentlemen, just very briefly on behalf of Solace. I think we're very pleased to note with the framework the continuing collective commitment to it. It's not that old in terms of benchmarking methodologies, but all 32 councils continue to be committed to it financially and organisationally. I would say at all levels of organisations that has a strong interest from elected members. I think that there are very good examples of that through Audit and Scrutiny committees but also service committees, the Length and Bread of Scotland. I think that we're very pleased to note the affirmation of the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland through the statutory direction for the forthcoming year that councils report through the framework. I think that that's a measure of its acceptability and its place in the public performance structure. Certainly, the responses from a lot of councils indicate that we want to develop it further, not just to adapt it. We have to adapt it for changing circumstances and I'm sure that we'll talk about that a little more this morning, but just to adapt and continually improve the indicators themselves, particularly on planning and economic development in those areas. I think that it's classic, intelligent, and it's established its place in the public performance firmament. Just perhaps linking with what Malcolm said, and looking forward a bit, we are now working quite closely with colleagues involved in the national improvement framework for education, the framing and measurement of national health and care outcomes. There's a bit where the framework itself will need to adjust over time to take account the fact that much more of the work of a council is now done through partnership vehicles of one sort or another. We need to have a clear look at how the framework fits in with the developments that are taking place in those areas. We're also interested in looking much more deeply at the economic impact of local public services, both in terms of employment, procurement, asset distribution and so on. That's a bit of work, I think, again that benefits from a partnership focus as well as a focus on councils. The second strand that we're aware of is that changes within councils themselves are calling into questions. Some of the service classifications that the framework is built around and that, increasingly, distinctions between services are being overtaken by the merger or integration of those services locally. We need to be careful that what we are reporting to you and to the public is up to speed with what people are doing by way of organisation and delivery of services. I think that the final bit for us is a very important bit of legislation passed by Parliament. Last year, the community empowerment Scotland legislation, there are a range of things that we will need to look at to see how councils and their local partners are progressing with that, and that will be part of the work strand going forward. I think that we've established a solid enough base, but I think that that will need to change with the pattern of reform that's going on. Ms Lynch, please. Do you have anything to add? Nothing to add at this stage. Okay, thank you very much. Let's start by looking at some of the intelligent intelligences that you called at Mr Barr and how certain things are measured. I think that we'll maybe take an example from some of the evidence that the committee has had of late around burial costs, where we found that burial costs in the western isles were the lowest in the country and burial costs in East and Bartonshire were unbelievably high, in my opinion. It was difficult for us to get a real grasp during the course of our scrutiny of costs around what that cost was covering. Of course, we've tried to draw down and we've asked questions about what the costs are in the western isles for what is being delivered there, compared to what is being delivered in East and Bartonshire. In terms of that intelligent intelligence, are we actually ensuring that the measures are comparable? What I'm getting at is backroom costs, all of the rest may be being added on in a certain place for the delivery of a service, but in others not. Have we got the grips with that? There are a couple of different elements to this. One is that it's actually the process. There are some factors that make the measures different, which are important in driving the improvements. There are some factors that make the measures different, which councils have control over, that they are able to influence. They need to understand what are the factors that are creating a difference in those measures. For example, if I look at our sport, culture and museum costs, one of the factors that is driving the variation there may well be about the different service delivery model that is being used within authorities. That is important to understand within the family groups, for example, and within the scrutiny committees, to what extent is that a factor that is shaping and driving both the cost, but that leads me on to my other issue, which is that it's not just about the cost measure, we have to look at those measures in the round. As we start to look at other factors in terms of whether it's customer satisfaction, whether it's productivity, whether it's some other measure of outcome, that's important in understanding the difference between them. I would say that we have a very robust validation process now that is focused on ensuring that the information that we receive from councils follows a very clear, strict methodology to ensure that the information is measuring the same thing as far as is practicable. We know that all authorities have different structures in place, so that will never be perfect. As we have said previously, we are 95 per cent confident that the data allows the discussions that I mentioned previously, the discussions that really get at what is making the difference. We have a validation process in place. The family groups further work to address any anomalies that exist. I am a member of the public. I am looking at the benchmarking figures for a number of areas, and I have picked up on burial and cremation. What I want to know is why is it that the costs of a burial in the western is so much cheaper than it is in Easton-Bartonshire? That's quite a simplistic thing to do. If I was a councillor, I would also be wanting to find out what the difference is in terms of the delivery of that service in the western is compared to Easton-Bartonshire. That's what I want to know so that I can, as a member of the public, say, hang on a second, what's going on here, why is this so different, what is going wrong in my authority and if I'm a councillor likewise the same, how can we deal with that? No matter what, we can talk about quality of service and different delivery methods and all the rest, and that may be in the background, but at the end of the day where you have huge cost differentials between the delivery of a service, there has to be an understanding about that, particularly in the times that we find ourselves in. Part of that will be policy choice whether elected members are wholly aware of it or not. Some people will be running services, burial services, parking services and so on with a clear aim of maximising income and will be putting no public money into subsidising those services. Others will be taking the choice that because of the nature of the service or economic objectives they have, they want to charge for this in a different way. My feel is that this is probably less a question of cost attribution and a question of policy choice within those councils. Some of that may be based on assumptions about what the market will bear, if you like, even though that is quite a course way of talking about something like burials, but it is certainly true if you look across Scotland at charging for street parking or council car parks. Of course they are massively variable because markets vary across Scotland and policies vary across Scotland. In that sense, I think that there may be issues about the precise calculation of cost and the figures that you have looked at. I do not think that we include burial figures, as it stands just now, but I suspect that policy choice is a clear factor in that particular example that people are choosing to either underwrite the service or not underwrite the service, and that may depend on the financial circumstances of the council overall. Before I move on, Mr Burr, do you have anything to add to that? Very briefly, chairman. It may also give rise, and I think that that shows the benefits of the framework to questions about how that service is organised. I imagine—indeed, I know—some of the reason for our lower costs are because we organise that service flexibly. Perhaps the higher spending, the higher charging councils have a workforce that is entirely dedicated to that service, and therefore the costs need to support a specific workforce in that regard. It is a very good example of how the framework works. It should give rise to just those questions as to whether it is policy choice or organisational structure. That is exactly what I am trying to get at because, at this moment in time, that is not really spelled out whether something is policy choice or whether it is the cost delivery of the service. In talking to some folk around about that, they were saying, oh, this is the cost of the service, but what we were unable to gather from the evidence that we took and were drilling down is what backroom costs were added to the cost of that particular service, or is it a policy choice that they decided to put that fee so high? What is interesting in the answer that you have just given, Mr Burr, is that, obviously, in Cynun and Yellenshire, you have a situation where you have staff who may not just deal with that service, but may work cross-service. The question that we might want to ask is why are other councils not doing likewise? While we have all the data now, there are still hidden things in the background that we are still unable to scrutinise, would it be fair to say? Our assumption is that the way in which the data is compiled in the framework is strictly in line with the criteria for the local government financial return, which is a statutory return from local government to government. I am trying to keep this as simple as possible. At the end of the day, I can now go and compare a number of things, look at the family groupings and get an understanding of why an authority is in that family grouping and all the rest of it. In some of the differences in service delivery or in some of the service costs, it is still difficult for me, or for a member of the public, to draw down and find out exactly why it is that a service may cost x amount in one authority and y amount in another. It is difficult for them to judge why it may be that that service costs four or five times as much in one place than it does in another. The second point that I was going to make was that we have abused your hospitality on the board due to death in this over a number of years. The purpose of the framework from our point of view is to allow people to pose questions. We do not think that the data in that framework will answer the question. If you are a councillor leading a particular service in western islands 5, why are we more expensive here? Why are we spending three or four times as much? Is that because we are choosing to offer a richer service? Is it because we are less efficient than those people are? The draw down part of this, which follows from having the comparative data, is something undertaken by councils through the family groups. That is an actively on-going process. Many councils have introduced changes because they think efficiencies other people have made that they can learn from and make in their own context. I do not think that this framework ever set itself to answer a question. It set itself to frame and pose very precise questions about why are you different, but the duty is then on the participants and the framework to take that and run with it. You have said that a number of councils have already used the framework, looked at what has happened elsewhere, posed the questions and made the changes. Could you give us some examples of where the framework has been used to bring about change in a local authority area? Ms Lynch? I would be happy to give you an example from my own council. In fact, one, perhaps two examples, if you will allow, one at a strategic level, the other at quite operational. The operational one is council tax collection, the rate of council tax collection, which in the Western Isles has always been very high, around the order of 95 per cent plus. I noticed in recent years that we were not improving by a couple of points within a per cent. I have to say that, before the framework came along, I would probably have put that down to simply the effects of austerity of it not being an area with high incomes and just the problems of people struggling to pay council tax. However, we used the framework and noticed that others in our family and other comparable councils were actually increasing their council tax collection rate. We applied appropriate measures and the result is that the rate has gone up to beyond the previous level. Again, it is all within the 94-96 band, but without the framework, we would probably not have known whom to speak to about the measures that we would employ. The other example is in education, where clearly we felt that we could have done better on a loosely called vocational education on population retention. We have done quite a lot in that regard, again based on benchmarking. Ms Lynch? I think that, as you have seen from the responses that we have received from a number of authorities, the framework has been used in a number of different ways across councils. We are starting to see some examples of improvements, of targeted efficiencies and also of on-going investment as a result of that. We have been working with authorities to try to pull out some examples of that. We can see that some authorities are using the framework to identify where they can prioritise savings in the budget. Given the current financial climate, that is a particular focus. One of the ways that that has been done is to look at the family group that the council is within and to understand the family group average in terms of spend or cost in relation to particular measures, for example street cleaning waste collection, and to use that to have a discussion with elected members' services around how they can reach this family group and what the savings would be generated as a result of that. We have seen examples of that process and targeted savings identified from that in a number of authorities across a number of different service areas. We have also seen how the framework and the position or performance as identified in the benchmarking framework has been used to identify priority areas for service improvements. Areas where perhaps you are continuously not where you would hope to be in comparison with other similar authorities. That has been used particularly by elected members to raise the profile of those areas and to explore how we can improve that. We have seen an example of that in one of the authorities. There has been rent arrears where an authority with a particularly low level of unemployment had a specifically high level of rent arrears and comparably high against other similar authorities. It was the benchmarking information that helped to ensure that that maintained a significant profile. Over a period of time, the authority has worked with other authorities to look at how to improve that. In the last year, it has reduced the income loss through rent arrears by 11 per cent, which is against the national trend as a result of some of the improvement actions that it has taken. In addition to that, if you permit me to add one final comment, what we are seeing is the learning coming through the family groups. It is not just about targeting and prioritising where to make improvements, but it is also about learning from colleagues about how to make improvements and what might work. Importantly, what might not work. We have heard from one authority that it is looking at implementing the second home discount, for example, in relation to council tax, but through discussions with other similar councils in its family group, it has identified the potential costs to that against the benefits, so it altered its decision on that. There have also been a number of improvements that have been developed in terms of ways of implementing agile working, reduction in absence that we have seen across councils in relation to that and in terms of waste structures. That is an extremely positive picture here of how it is being used. You look at the evidence from councils alone, I have to say, and you get in response to how often do you use the local government benchmarking framework. Generally, Dundee uses this LGBTF data once a year around this time. Others use it annually. It does not strike me as being a tool that is being used for continuous improvement if you are looking at something once a year. If I may, I guess that it depends who responds to those things. If I was the performance officer of Dundee Council, I would probably look at it in some depth once a year because I will report to the chief exec and the members on what this year's round of data is saying and how that differs from previous years. The point that Emily Bell is making is that people who are working in particular service areas or family groups are getting together the operational managers of this disabled. Why do these differences exist? What can we learn from each other? I guess that the question is, like any questionnaire, that one can issue. Who responded to the questionnaire on behalf of a particular council? What is their interest in this framework? That would be different if you are a corporate policy and performance manager than if you are a service manager within the council. We have tried to make arrangements to engage with both categories of officer around this, so we get the maximum impact on performance management but also on service management. That comes back to the point. Who is filled in the questionnaire as an interesting one? Our correspondence goes to chief executives and to leaders of councils. Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder whether chief executives or leaders of councils look at the responses that are given. That is maybe what gets them into some difficulties in the first place. John Walson, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning. We are just looking at going back to the benchmarking family groups. Clearly, some of the feedback that we have had as the convener has indicated when we get East Ayrshire Council and North Ayrshire making similar comments about how they exchange the lessons that can be learned and whether or not there is enough work being done throughout the year to ensure that there is the exchange of views, ideas and that learning is taking place not just at the end of the year when the report is done but bringing together those family groups to say, right, what are we doing, how are we doing it. Some of the issues that you have raised in terms of the rent arrears issue is good. You have shown that in local authorities, there are increasing the collection rates, so there is less arrears, but when you start looking at some of the other figures in relation to them, I am just trying to find a case that I am on, in one of the other areas where there were issues about council tax arrears, where 19 out of 32 managed to increase, dressed effectively failed to increase the collection rates, as Mr Burr indicated. Western Isles might be good at learning the lessons, but clearly from this it looks as though other local authorities are not learning the same lessons. I think that the family groups always need to be adapted and reviewed, and I think that as councils deliver services in different ways and as partnership working increases not just in terms of strategic direction but in terms of delivery, we will have to continually look at the family groups. For example, I will not go on about my old friend, the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, but that is a very blunt instrument for rural areas. Just as an aside, we are working with the improvement service on delivering a more measurable fragile areas index, but if that were used, we are sometimes within the same family group as very large councils such as Glasgow. That is to say the least questionable if certain measures are overemphasised to the detriment of others. We must always review the family groups and keep them under constant scrutiny, because structures change. As Ms Lynch said, if we are going to make this meaningful going forward and services merge and services are delivered jointly, the Community Empowerment Act will I think very soon ensure that or assist with the process of communities themselves delivering services. We will need to look very carefully at how the family groups reflect not just the services and not just the background but the structures to make sure that it is a meaningful measurement. I am not sure that you have answered that question. As a case of trying to find out what is happening in relation to those family groups, to be honest with you, I was quite surprised when you actually talked about the fragile areas groups and to take away from the Scottish Index of Mental Deprivation, rather than trying to work within the frameworks that we already have, which I thought the benchmarking framework was trying to attempt to do when it was established and first talked about, so that we all understood the measures that were being applied when local authorities were delivering services and how those services could be improved from the learning from others within the sector. As I said, it seems as though, Mr Murph, to forgive me if it sounds a bit brutal, you seem to be looking to find other ways of measuring things, because you just happened to be in the same family group as Glasgow when it comes to issues of multiple indexes and multiple deprivation. The reality is that why we are now talking about setting up a whole different structure to measure things in that area, which surely would take you out of the concept of the family group to measure the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation and how that has been applied within your local authority. My apologies. I have clearly emphasised the exception rather than the rule. The family groups are vital and we use them, as I have indicated with our council tax example, very well. I am just making the point that they need to be reviewed from time to time in the light of changing structures and changing methods of delivery. However, they are there for a reason that Solace is fully committed to that process, as is the improvement service in COSLA. Those are our structures, but, like any other structures, they need to be looked at from time to time. Why do they need to be reviewed in terms of local authority? I am talking about local authority, because you are not the benchmarking family in terms of how that local authority interacts with that family and what information is gathered, how you gather that information and how you then translate that information into delivery of services. Simply to reflect any demographic changes or any other changes to our— That is fair enough, Mr Kerr. The point is quite simply. Does not matter what joint procurement you are doing or joint service delivery that you are doing, at the end of the day, Kinian and Yellen Shire, for example, would be responsible for a service? Even if they are joining up with Argyll and Bute to deliver that service, you have the responsibility. The performance indicator would be based on your area. Why would you need to change the family grouping? Simply to reflect changes in localities, changes in, for example— Localities do not change, Mr Burr, do they really? No, but populations change and service delivery models change. If we want it to be an absolutely best comparator that we can have, those need to be reviewed like every other aspect of the framework. That would be very, very irregular. It would not happen frequently. The framework has been in place— Once a decade maybe? Yes, exactly. But we are talking about a new scenario, where we are just concentrating now on the implementation of that. You are already talking about change a decade away, rather than looking at what is actually happening at the moment. I am just trying to keep an open mind about the criteria that comprise the framework. I want to pick up on a particular example given clearly one of the things that would be done within family groups and across service communities, because there is a distinct community of people responsible for revenue collection across Scottish councils. I would be to look at why some councils are improving collection over time and why some councils are not, although the broad trend has been improving across the past five years. The balance, again, of the technical, are some people adopting mechanisms that others should copy and so on. Are there some policy choices here? There are some councils where, if they have households that are under a variety of pressures, adding the pressure of debt enforcement, but the council is not seen to be advantageous and indeed not even cost effective because the downstream cost of services, if you do it, would be higher. I think that those things are genuinely explored in some depth. I think that the second point I am making is that I have always struggled. I do not want to undersell this framework, but I do not want to oversell it either. Within each service area, education, social care and so on, there are professional associations who also do benchmarking together, so this is not it as far as councils are concerned. What this provides is a high-level overview for elected members in the public of comparisons between councils. If you go into the education arena, there are very detailed comparisons right down to school level that you can do and people do do with each other to look at improvement, development and so on. This framework is not all that happens around benchmarking in Scotland's councils on community planning partnerships. There is a very wide range of other much more detailed activities that this links to and supports. The aim of this one was to say, well, let us make, as the Accounts Commission used to do through its SPIs, some high-level comparisons between councils that will pose questions and allow the public to pose questions of their council as to why they are different than others if they are different, why their performance looks less good if it is less good and so on. Again, just to reassure you that not only do we work quite hard with councils across the year on this in terms of looking at what the data means and how people can improve, but there are also sorts of other improvement devices taking place all of the time as well around much more service-specific benchmarking and so on. I find that interesting, Mr Mayor, in terms of the comment that you made there about other associations who do their own benchmarking in terms of service delivery. You can correct me if I am wrong, but I have been on this committee for a number of last sessions in this session during some of the early discussions on what benchmarking was setting out to try and do. My understanding was that it was to try and declutter the landscape in relation to all those other organisations carrying out their own benchmarking and reporting structures so that we could have an overview of what was happening in local government in Scotland that would be brought together and be able to pick up effectively one document and say that one document tells us what is happening in the various areas that were originally started in 42 areas. If you are saying that there is other benchmarking taking place, then how does that other benchmarking fit into the work that is being produced through the improvement service and Solace? Surely the logic would be to cut out some of the backroom work that is being done by other officers to collect information that should be collected centrally and should be reported and recorded in one framework that everybody can then look at and say that this is the situation in Scotland as we see it for the past year. Two things. Yes, that was a name, and we have done that. There is a single publication that overviews a whole range of local public services with high-level indicators. If, however, you are the head of schools in a particular council, you will want to look at the balance of your administrative and non- administrative and teaching costs within each school that you are responsible for. I amant, and we do not publish all of that for the whole of Scotland. That is about people looking at operational detail with each other and saying why do you do it this way, why do we do it that way? We report the high-level indicator, you are over all costs per pupil, are higher than that council. If you are saying that this document is not an overarching higher-level document that does not engage—I am picking up what you are describing—it does not engage in the exchange of the learning that is taking place in local authorities, because that learning is being done elsewhere. It is not being done through this framework, it is being done by the associations and other organisations that mentioned teaching and other organisations that are doing that work. Where is the learning for the local authorities within the family groupings that have been established through the benchmarking framework? Much play was made about bringing local authorities together and putting them into the benchmarking families so that they would learn from each other. What you are now telling me is that, at a lower level, there may be other things that are taking place where people are working out with the benchmarking family to learn from each other rather than doing it through the benchmarking families. I thought that the lessons that were supposed to be learned were supposed to be learned, so we all understood what was going on in local authorities and how they were delivering those services. I hope that that is what I am saying. The language that we have used consistently across the development of this is high-level, drill-down, and it is the drill-down that I am talking about. When we pull families of authorities together, we would have directors of education in the heads of schools together to see why those variations are occurring within the family, because we have all got fairly similar populations. Why are your performance varying? Why are your cross-structures varying in let's explore that? We use it to learn in that way, but that is the drill-down bit of this. Clearly, the EIS, the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, get together discussions about a wide range of things about educational performance and contribute to the national improvement framework. We use the devices as part of the drill-down process around this framework. We have not created a different one, because there was an infrastructure there that we could use for improvement purposes anyway. I am quite sure that Willie Coffey will come back to that. Thank you, convener, and good morning to you. I suspect that it is a similar question that I am about to ask. I have looked to the report, and it is full of numbers. I have gone up, numbers have gone down, numbers are staying the same, but if you are a councillor or a head of service or a member of the public, you are looking for information about performance and quality and whether things are improving or not. I find it hard to see the real evidence for it. I know that you might find that difficult with the volume of data that is in there. Most of the qualitative public perception information is gleaned from elsewhere from the Scottish Household Survey. Is there not a case that this kind of report should have another section, another level here, that describes where good performance is actually happening in Scotland within those groups or whatever? Where the best opportunities for improvement still remain? I cannot see that. I certainly think that that is something that we can consider as we develop this approach and as further evidence and information becomes available. However, I would also highlight that that richer detail that you are describing will be provided by individual authorities within their own public performance reporting, because it is there where they take that information and they have to then provide the information that says that this is why this level of performance is occurring and that this is the other information that we can use to understand what is going on and what is driving it and that is what we will be doing about it. What you will see in the local public performance reporting is that much richer information that you are describing. However, it is certainly something that we can consider for the overview report going forward. Mr Meir was going to come back. You point about public experience of services, satisfaction and so on. You are absolutely right that we are thin in this. We have spent some significant period of time exploring the opportunity here. Different councils have a variety of different ways of assessing community satisfaction with their services. Some use resonance surveys, some have standing citizens panels, some employ outside agencies to manage those things on their behalf so that it will be of independence. The agreement at the outset of the framework was that if people had put in place devices that were working to give them the community and customer feedback that they needed, we were not about standardising that out of existence. There is clearly one major national data source in terms of the household survey that gives a measure of satisfaction with different public services across Scotland, but it is not that reliable in honesty if you take it down to the level of individual councils. We did look at asking the household survey to greatly extend the sampling, but we were talking figures of £1 to £3 million, which, frankly, we simply do not have. We are exploring the alternatives of taking the three major surveys that go to households that have different sample bases and asking all to build on a set of questions about local services for us. We extend the sample base and we get a more reliable measure of variation between councils. Again, in the public performance reports that councils may cannulate, which use some of that data, they also do resident surveys, service user surveys, and so on. That data is published through these public performance reports, so there is a richer source of data there. Forgive me if it is not your role to do that, but I kind of expect that kind of information to be uppermost in a report like that. You are saying that it is not your role to gather that performance and public satisfaction information, because others are doing it. I think that our role is to make sure that an agreed set of data is collected, analysed, and churned annually. We also then engage with councils around whether you see off the mark here. Why is that? How can we support you to take that forward? Just in the satisfaction one, the board that oversees this, which is chaired by Solace, has looked quite hard at how we can improve the measurement of satisfaction and public perception of services in different parts of Scotland. It is very, very expensive to do that well. As councils are already investing locally for their own purposes in surveying their own local communities, but they are doing it using different methodologies, different sampling devices and so on. The data is not strictly comparable, but we are again looking at whether we could aggregate all of that and say, well, what is the broad spread of satisfaction between councils? We are working on it. I think that it is important, but the various routes that we have tried to explore to improve that today have either had such heavy price tags. It is not practically doable, but we are looking for discussions with colleagues who run the major national surveys now in Scotland. Could they accommodate us by building some additional questions into each of the national surveys that go into households across Scotland? My own authority in East Asia, I mean that John Wilson mentioned East Asia, mentioned this difficulty about comparability amongst the data sets of family groups and so on. I would hope that there is some attempt to be made to try to standardise that, so that we are competing like that. When your own report, though, at the tail end of it, does claim that last year, you saw councils in Scotland improving the quality and performance of the services that are covered by this framework, how can you claim that if you do not have the data yourself and there is a lack of comparability amongst the data sets? The statement was intended to be a remark about the generality. We have a very good measure of spread across the whole of Scotland from the household survey. There is data there that says that customers across Scotland are reading the services provided by Scottish councils very highly indeed, and we have other measures of both financial input and output are outcome for those services. I would stand by that remark. What I am saying is that if you break it down to individual council level like East Ayrshire, the sample from East Ayrshire in the general household survey will be, Emily will correct me, a very small scale, because it is meant to be proportionate to the Scottish level, not proportionate to each council level. We can make statements about the whole of Scotland, the difficulty is making the variations between councils clearer on that basis. My last question is, convener, on page 8 of your report that is your concluding paragraph, you say that, with further challenging budgets and so on, it should not be assumed that improvements will simply continue. Why not? No, sorry, I think that I wrote that slightly old word in signing sentences now, so I will take full responsibility for it, but I think that the point was simply incremental improvement will not simply carry on. We will need to do more transformational things now, so the point was not that we are not going to have to carry on improving, the point was that the pace and scale and depth of that improvement will have to speed up to keep up with the pressures that are faced demographically in the one hand and in terms of budgets in the other. That tells me the way that I read that, that says that you cannot make any improvements unless you get more money. I do not think that we are making the point that, as council budgets reduce continually, there is always a risk that it is inevitable that improvement cannot be assumed, but I think that we have to look at the overall context here of service delivery. I am thinking of health and social care integration, I am thinking of other partnership approaches, and that perhaps links to what I was trying to say quite badly about different ways of measurement. Councils themselves, their budgets are reducing, and I think that the framework is very well aware of the reduction of budgets that is happening right across the public sector because of the austerity measures of the UK Government. We are aware of that. Mr Coffey has made a specific point about a specific statement. Could someone please answer Mr Coffey's direct point? I will certainly answer it. Mr Coffey has drawn right attention to a new word. The point that I was wanting to make was that there has been a pattern of incremental improvement to date that will now need to become much more transformational if we are going to address both the demographic pressures that we face on the one hand and the income pressures that we face on the other. What is being said here is not that the improvement will not continue, but the nature and depth of that is going to have to shift categorically if we are going to keep up with the patterns of demand. Can performance improvement take place with a static budget or can it? Yes, and it will. It can take place. I am interested in some of the points that came out there, because the household survey is not enough to gather up certain data, but the household survey itself allows you to make the statement that Willie Rennie read out. What is it? The household survey realys me to make an accurate statement about local government across Scotland. In general, it does not allow me to make an accurate statement about East Ayrshire. The sample is not big enough and is not designed to be accurate for East Ayrshire. It is designed to be a balanced representative sample for Scotland. The next question is that we have different measures in 32 local authorities, but we have measures. Mr Coffey said why we cannot have something based on those measures, showing where improvement is taking place dramatically so that others can pick that up quickly so that they can go and do similar. That would be a very natural development of the framework. Why is it not being done now? It provokes analysis and questions. It leads to continuous improvement, but it would be important. Can I stop you there? We know all of that. We know what the measures are for. We know that it provokes questions. We know that it should provoke scrutiny and should provoke service change. For me and for the general public across the country, the easiest thing for me is not to go and look at 32 local authorities' performance reports over the year. I am a nannorack, I have to say, but even I do not manage 32. I cannot imagine that there will be many others who do so. Why do we not have a situation where we have the headlines and the best delivery of a service or the biggest change in a service delivery? Why is that not highlighted at the top level of the reports? It is simple. If we truly are striving for improvement, then surely we should be pointing out to folk where that improvement is taking place and how that has been achieved. The top level ones in the report surely, or am I just being far too naive here? Can I ask a question in terms of just to understand that a little bit more? Do you mean in relation to identifying individual councils? Let's have an example. Let's look at, again, let's go back to burial and cremation. Let's look at Western Isles and say why is it that they are achieving a service for £680? What are they doing that allows them to deliver that service for £680 when it is costing East Dunbartonshire £2,716? In terms of how we can develop this going forward, I think that that is a natural progression in terms of as we develop our understanding across the authorities of what the reasons are for the, as you say, with burial costs, what are the reasons for the difference, how is one authority managing to achieve something and what are the other consequences in terms of the performance of the service or the quality. As we develop further, that information can be included. How much more development do we actually need before we get the answers to these very simple questions? It is a progression. It would be good for future reports to each councils. I'm sorry, progression. It's taken years to come up with a set of indicators for this framework. Years. How many more years do we have to wait to get the simple situation of being able to look at why a service is being delivered A in one authority and why it's being delivered at four or five times more cost in another authority? I realise that it may well be policy choices mean that the service delivery is somewhat different. We were told that all of that would become apparent in the drawling. However, the simple situation of me, any man or woman in the street being able to go and say, why is it costing this here to deliver that with lesser service than it is elsewhere? That information is absolutely of interest to members of the public. All I would say is that a few years ago, that comparative information would probably not have been available to anyone without a great deal of individual effort. It provokes that very question. I'm sure that the higher charging councils will be called upon to answer it, but yes, I think that that information should come through that report as well. However, it is primarily a high-level benchmarking report. The questions would be so different in each local authority area that I wonder if the information would become unmanagable, but it's something that we should absolutely look on. I'm not asking for all of that information to be published in a document, but what I am looking for is a simple scenario where the public can work out why there are these huge differentiations and costs, so that they themselves can scrutinise their own local authority about the cost and delivery of that service. Although we have concentrated a lot on cost here, it is not just about the cost. It may well be that there is a gold standard service being delivered in that particular place that people want to continue in that vein, and that's absolutely grand, but we need to have the reasoning, particularly in those times, why there are these differentiations. I wonder if the panel could comment on Unison's view that the report focuses too heavily on cost measures and on too few council services for it to be an accurate reflection of council performance. Yes, certainly our view and the view that we've heard from Solicis, there are a number of key areas where we would prioritise developing outcome measures or performance measures so that we are rebalancing the framework, so that the cost and the resource information is critical, it's important, but we also need to understand in terms of performance. For example, in relation to culture and leisure, at the moment we have measures on costs for culture and leisure, but the framework doesn't currently include measures on performance, so that's any that we're working with, vocal, with the family groups in sports and leisure to identify what would be meaningful measures in terms of the impact of our culture and leisure services in order to strengthen the framework that way. There are certainly some areas that we're working on to address that. Probably the sports leisure culture gives an example of the issue of performance here, that if you look at the framework, what it's suggesting quite significantly over the last five years is the cost per person attending the council museum, library, sports facility and so on has come down quite sharply, but that's mainly because the attendance has gone up very sharply. In other words, one of the things that we're trying to do here, which is to get people engaged in sporting activities, cultural activities, using libraries and so on, that's gone up very significantly. Though it ends up being expressed as a unit cost, cost per attendance, in reality there is an element of performance measure there as well. The reason this thing is improving and we've got the detail in that in the report is precisely more people are now using those services and participating. I think it's not simple to say, but I do think that we're covering about 90 per cent of all council spending, so I think that the idea that we're missing out on huge blocks of spending that we ought to be covering is actually not the case and the big, big blocks of spending. On the outcome side, I think that that's probably the point that colleagues in Unison are raising and they're right and I think that it picks up on Mr Coffey's points about quality as well. Are we, do we have a framework that is properly balanced in terms of our understanding of quality and impact of public services and not just units delivered and so on? That is something we're working very closely with colleagues on. We are engaged with the national improvement framework in education and that should give us further data on outcomes for kids across their young lives. We are engaged with those leading health and care reform to see if there's going to be an outcome of the framework for health and care reform. We need to get those outcomes built into our framework so that we get the high-level measures appropriately, so that work is on-going and will strengthen the framework over time. I have nothing to add to that, Jim. A question that wasn't related to that. Just looking at the role of service users and Colin Meir said earlier that the framework allows the public to pose questions to the council, what efforts have been made to publicise the framework so that it's accessible to people and not just to council officers? My guess is that the vast majority of people have no idea that the framework exists. Never mind how to find the information that might help them to compare the value that the council is offering. One of the ways is that we have developed an online tool, which every authority then has embedded and used within their own website and local reporting mechanism. That tool was designed to make it easier for members of the public to interact with the information, to look for the information that they were interested in that they found most useful. That is accompanied from the individual local authority with a narrative that helps to understand what is driving that, whether it is a policy priority and what is being done about that in the future. That is one area of the development that we have supported councils with. It has been very interesting to note in a recent series of budget consultation meetings how much the framework has been used by community groups and others to say that you are not doing so well here, you cannot cut this, or we are doing quite well here, and you should look at this as an area of saving. It has been quite remarkable, but I would like to think that that is through good public performance reporting, but that is just an anecdotal example from ourselves. The success of this is how councils report it publicly through their own PPR frameworks. Without that, it would not go beyond a council or a community planning partnership, but I just do not believe that that is the case. I think that the committee has been written to by the chair of the Accounts Commission, and there is a directive that requests councils to fully report on the data within the benchmarking framework and the relevant comparisons to their local communities. The combination of the online system that Emily talked about, which lets you go in and look at any particular service you want to look at, or any council area that you want to look at, or a combination of both, is there just to hopefully support that participation that you have talked about? To follow on from Carrie Hilton's question, which I was going to ask, but I am going back to what you were saying about developing a more outcome-based approach to performance reporting, how do you see the public and service users being involved in developing those outcomes? Sometimes what is a good outcome for the public is not dependent on low cost. The public does not mind pain if they are going to get a service that is suitable, so outcome does not necessarily mean low cost. I wonder how you think the public could be involved in those discussions, would it be through yourselves, through councils, a combination of that? How is that going to go forward? There is a significant amount of public engagement around, for example, the national improvement framework in education in which we participate, and the Government has held a number of significant events and invited contributions from a whole range of community, voluntary organisations and directly from parents. There is participation in what outcomes do we want for our children in education? I do not regard the cost data as outcome data at all. Yes, we have to balance the books, but that is not a statement of outcome for the public, so I absolutely agree with you on that. We would work through those broader frameworks, because what we are keen not to do is to say that we will do work on educational outcomes, our colleagues in government and elsewhere in local government will do work on educational outcomes, and then we will pile them all up. Rather, let's work together to get to a set that we all agreed on, but the public have had a significant chance to influence and shape. I think that also in the health and care reform agenda, which is the other big area where we are light seriously, we are absolutely not capturing outcomes, as it stands just now. Defining what we want for older people and the outcomes of what people want in their lives, beyond good moral propositions, we want them to have decent lives, independence, dignity and so on, but what are services delivering in that space and how do we define that and measure that? We are working with colleagues on that as well, because I think that it really does matter. We will spend large sums of money, a lot of service. If we are not giving people what they need in the way that they want, we are missing a trick here quite seriously. I absolutely take your point, and that is a focal area of work just now. Cameron Buchanan, please. I have a quick follow-up from Mr Burr about who is using this framework, either at the political or officer level and how you are measuring who is using this framework. You mentioned it and you touched on it, but I did not want to elaborate on that. Every council is using this framework at both officer and political level. I would just observe that within the specific areas it goes down to quite lower levels in council services. This is not just a corporate management team elected member document. It is very widely used. It is on service committee agendas, it is on audit and scrutiny committee agendas, but if external validation of that is sought, I would suggest that it is through Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission support for it and its appearance in the statutory direction, which has been referred to earlier. Thank you. Are you convinced that it is being used a lot by the general public? I have given my anecdotal example. It is good to know that it is one thing to believe those things and to be assured of it, but it is good to hear it face to face when those figures are being quoted back to you. It appears so much in a council's own statement of its performance and in Audit Scotland's statements and in the local scrutiny plan and all of those documents. It has a high public prominence. The material in it is easily used by the media and members of the public to make comparisons. It is very readable in that regard. Obviously, we have got councils out there that are performing very highly in certain areas. What methods do the improvement service use, or saw this for that matter, to ensure that the best practice that is going on out there is exported right across the country? We have a whole variety of ways to do that. At the moment that we identify the variations in this, we are out to the councils who are off the pace to say that we now need to look at why that is in work with you. We often build communities of practice so-called around these improvement areas so that people who are doing very well can share not just what they are doing but how they are doing it because that is often the issue with people who are struggling in certain areas. The family groups have contributed here because a lot of their role is to say, what is good practice if we look at the variations and how we make sure that it is more easy to adopt. We give straight practical support because implementing good practice requires changing if people need support around change. Where can I find out the information about what you are up to in that regard? It is reported online around our business plan, which has kept up to date. All our board reports are out there and their reports progress against each of those dimensions. They are out there and online if people want them. Whether it is a good read as far as most of the public is concerned, I do not know, but is there a wheel very happily to copy you into this? I am sure that we will all have a look at that. Who does the improvement service benchmark against? Work closely with a variety of organisations in national governance, such as Health Scotland, NSS and so on. We look at our own offerings. We evaluate ourselves in every single project and programme. We deliver with the people that we have delivered it with and for. Self-evaluation is not benchmarking. Who does the improvement service benchmark itself against? I suppose that that is an array. It is an interesting and relevant question. It is obvious that the question cannot be answered. I would add to your question from the solace perspective that if the improvement service was not doing what chief executives and councils wished it to do, we would find other means. There is a negative affirmation. Can I be honest with you, Mr Burr? In some regards, I am not really interested in what chief executives of councils may think. In some regards, I am interested in what the public thinks. What I want to know is how you, the improvement service, benchmark what you are doing and who you benchmark with. We evaluate it. It is fair to say that I would not know who I would benchmark in Scotland and indeed now in the rest of the UK. It would probably, in some cases, be private consultancies if they were willing to benchmark with us. That is maybe something that our successor committee will look at later. I thank you for your evidence today. I close for a wee bit for a change of witnesses. Heals for the interest in and support for the framework, which is appreciated. Our next item on the agenda, item 3, is consideration of a statutory instrument, the assessment of energy performance of non-domestic buildings, Scotland regulations 2016 draft. I welcome Marko Biagio, Minister for Local Government and Community Empowerment, Gavin Peart and Stephen Scott from the Building Standards Division of the Scottish Government. First, we will take evidence in the instrument. In our next agenda item, the minister will move the motion for us to recommend that instrument is approved. Minister, do you wish to make an opening statement? Just briefly, convener. Thank you for the opportunity to do so. Through building regulations, the Government has already introduced step changes in 2010 and 2015 that address the emissions and energy performance of new buildings. However, each year, new buildings represent only a very small addition to our overall building stock. If we are to address climate change and effective use of resources, we cannot ignore the need to improve existing buildings also. Those new regulations take that first step for non-domestic buildings in response to section 63 of the climate change act. The ambition set out within the regulations is a measured one. Improvement targets are set at a level that will pay back investment in a few years. That will reinforce the message. We hope that simple improvements make sound business sense. By applying regulations only to larger buildings at this point, we are also developing the skills and capacity to do that work at a sustainable rate. Regulations allow owners to defer improvement by formal reporting of annual energy use. That offers flexibility to an industry who have told us that they wish to show that they can deliver savings through action other than just fabric improvement works. That is also the first step in a longer journey. Further regulations will be needed and review will be necessary before the end of the decade. That is why I am glad that we are now identifying and improving the energy efficiency of Scotland's building stock as a national infrastructure priority. In which case we move on to item 4, which is the formal consideration of the motion that the instrument be approved, I will invite the minister to move motion S4M15457. The committee has up to 90 minutes to debate the motion with the minister. Please note that officials may not participate in this debate. After the debate, the committee must make a decision on the motion. Minister, can I invite you to move motion S4M15457, please? Moved. Thank you. Does anyone wish to enter the debate? No, thank you. Do members agree to motion S4M15457? Thank you very much. I suspend very briefly for a change of witnesses, please. Our next item in the agenda, item 5, is to take evidence on the commission on local tax reform. I welcome Marko Biagi, co-chair of the commission on local tax reform and minister for local government and community empowerment. David O'Neill, co-chair of the commission on local tax reform and the president of COSLA. Robin Hane, Emma Close and Adam Stewart from the commission's secretary at. Would anyone like to make an opening statement? We'll do a joint opening statement, which I will begin with the permission of the convener. Thank you. Good morning and thanks for inviting us both. Joining us today are officials from both COSLA and the Scottish Government who work together to provide the secretary for the commission. It was our privilege and pleasure to chair the commission on local tax reform together. In saying that, we also have to acknowledge the role of the committee in this initiative. The beginnings of the commission can be traced to your inquiry into the flexibility and autonomy of local government that reported in June 2014. You recommended a cross-party approach, and that was the right one. Other bodies have considered alternative means of local taxation, but the commission was the first to have a membership made up of representatives from Scotland's political parties and from local and central government working alongside experts in public finance, law, housing, welfare and equalities. Our report, Just Change, a New Approach to Local Taxation, fulfills a very comprehensive remit, determined again jointly by the Scottish Government and by COSLA. It sets out the factual position associated with different systems of local taxation, although it does not advocate a single preferred alternative. That ultimately has to be a political choice, but we do expect that all parties in Scotland will offer their own proposals for alternative systems of local taxation at the Scottish parliamentary election that is coming in May. The intention is that our report serves to inform the design of those alternatives by any political party and, most importantly, also helps the public and civil society to understand the implications of the choices that are offered. Our commission was convened in February last year, meeting in full on 16 occasions. Our remit required us to engage with communities across Scotland to assess public perceptions. We invested substantial effort in that process. Indeed, the steps that we undertook were perhaps the most comprehensive of that kind to date in this country, with 12 oral evidence sessions engaging 58 experts and representatives from a huge range of interests, a formal consultation that received 203 responses, and an online questionnaire intended to give us a flavour of the views held by the public that gathered around 4,500 responses and 12 public engagement sessions across the country. Complimenting this substantial body of qualitative evidence, we undertook an association with Heret Watt and Stirling University's the most comprehensive analysis ever performed on the Scottish housing stock, including modelling up-to-date property and land values, and examining how property taxes and income tax relate to household incomes. The commission was committed to be open. For example, our oral evidence sessions were streamlined live on the internet, and if anybody wants a box set for Christmas, they are still available online. All the research and evidence conducted by the commission and for the commission is published in the two companion volumes to our final report. Those can be downloaded from the commission's website and they set out the breadth and depth of our research in more detail, amount to over 600 pages of evidence and analysis. That is the briefest of summaries of the work of the commission and I would be pleased to answer any of your questions as best we can. Even I will forgo the offer of the box set. I thank you for recognising the committee's role and the establishment of the commission. It came from a recommendation in our autonomy and flexibility of local government reports. I am glad that your work has now been concluded. Let us cut to one of the main questions. Can you give us the reasons why the commission concludes so strongly that the present council tax must end and why the report will have a different outcome to previous attempts at reform? I think that the reason it will deliver a different result to all of the reports that have sat on the shelf is that the people that will have to look the electorate in the eye and implement the reform as we are sitting around the table when the work was being done. It is very common to get someone the great and the good often with Sir in front of their name to take a panel of experts that are quite detached from the practice and come up with what in the abstract would be an ideal system. There is no ideal system. That is what we found because around the table we had all of the different interests. Indeed, we found that as quite a concrete finding. In a way, that refutes implicitly those reports that have come out in the past saying that it is all right and that all you need to do is this particular form of tax, when in fact none of those have come through. Recognising the difficulty is the core strength of what we produced at the end. The council tax has a great many problems in it. Fundamentally, it is a regressive tax. There are very few ways. In fact, there is basically no way of looking at it analytically that makes it look like a progressive tax or even a proportionate tax. Since that is the core base for local government autonomous finance, it creates a base for local government finance that is regressive. Anybody who wants to ensure that those who have the ability to pay or the ones who are paying will find problems in making council tax fit that definition. That is why we need some change. There is early evidence, chair, about the way that the present system was brought in. Colleagues all recall that it was brought in as a replacement for the poll tax. It was forged, it has to be said. It was brought in in a hurry. It was seen as a stopgap measure until something better came along. Nothing better has come along until now. The system that we currently have, as Marco has already said, is regressive. It means that some people, primarily at the lower end of the income scale, are paying far too much. People at the top end of the income scale are paying far too little. There was almost instantly universal agreement within the commission that the council tax, as we currently know it, was way beyond its sell by date and that there had to be change. How long do you think it will take, gentlemen, for any replacement to actually come into play? David, do you want to go first? I would suspect that there will need to be a degree of primary legislation and possibly some secondary legislation. I realistically do not see this coming in before the local government elections next year and probably it will be about halfway, perhaps even longer than that through the lifespan in the next Parliament. To get a system in place that is not going to be rushed, it is not going to be botched, to do the work that would be necessary for a new system will take some time. A legislative process is at its best when it takes its time rather than doing something in that rush. Largely, I agree. It depends, in part, on what each party wants to bring forward. There are clearly different timescales for different types of taxation based on how much of a change it is and the more you want to change the base of revenue, the more time it is likely to take. I would say that there are quite pressing factors here and it will also be necessary for anybody putting forward detailed proposals to sketch out a route map very clearly with what is going to change in each year so that people are familiar in each year, but it will depend very much on what the outcome that is desired is and how long it is going to take to get there. The committee itself has done a fair amount of work out and about seeking the views of members of the public and you did likewise during the course of the commission's work. What were the main issues that were brought to bear by members of the public when you were out and about and in terms of their responses to the survey and the online work that you did too? I think that it would be fair to say that the vast majority of people that we talked to had not really given a great deal of thought to it other than the fact that they did not like the present set up as it was. We did find that, when we started some of the sessions, there were preconceived ideas, but by the end of the session some of those preconceived ideas had been turned round about. We actually get good information back from the public about what would be more acceptable. One of the things that we are clear about is that, if we end up with a system that we cannot explain to the public, it is never going to be acceptable. There are different degrees of familiarity at the start with each of the different types of taxation. I have to say that it was remarkable to watch people who have never been exposed to the idea of land value taxation in particular, which is the most unusual of the three options, go through both the learning and the assessment process in front of you in the space of about 45 minutes. It was far more useful in getting a feeling for how people's thought processes worked than any bit of written evidence that I have ever been given. I just want to note that a few criticism have been levelled as to why it did not deal with business rates or non-domestic rates, because the whole thing was that it was a committee on local tax reform. Surely it should not include business rates as well. The remit that was agreed was that there needed to be a really detailed and substantial piece of work on council tax, because council tax is the largest chunk of local government revenue over which it has the great level of autonomy. There was a real identified issue here. I am not saying that there is not also a discussion to be had and work to be done on non-domestic rates. As a Government, we have signalled our desire to have a review of them and there is on-going dialogue here. However, the amount of time and resource that we had and the amount of detail that we wanted to apply meant that we had to be relatively narrow in what the report was looking at. That does not mean that we do not look at those issues elsewhere and in parallel, but that was designed to be a focus piece of work on that. That said, many of the people coming to give evidence to us did raise wider issues, so there was a great deal of consideration of that in the discussions. Perhaps there could have been a lesser public engagement if the commission's work had been broader. I think that if we had started earlier, but you need to bear in mind that it was following Mr Adrian's appointment as First Minister and it was in the statement of the programme of government that was announced that we were going to have the commission. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We should have started it three years ago rather than 18 months ago. You used the word parallel. That is the key, because people felt that the non-domestic rate should be in parallel with council tax, and that did not really happen. That was a fair amount of criticism, if I am not mistaken, of reading the evidence that you had. Would you accept that? I have been in discussions with local government. We have had regular meetings with local government and, indeed, with the City's Alliance. In both of those spaces, the issue of non-domestic rates has often come up and been discussed. There was a recognition of the priority of that, but there has been work both before and alongside on non-domestic rates. They are two quite qualitatively different things. Yes, okay, they are both parts of local government finance and local government revenue, but the experience of individuals, households paying their tax in a domestic way is rather different with different challenges in questions of fairness and administration than businesses and non-domestic entities paying their charges. Had it come together, trade-offs would have been made. I agree that, given some more time, it would be a worthwhile thing. That is why the Government wants to have a further review on the non-domestic rate system. There are two very different things. If my memory serves me right, there are 2.5 million domestic properties in Scotland, and there are almost 60,000 non-domestic. You are looking at two very different creatures. Should there be continuing dialogue about non-domestic rates? Absolutly. As far as the council or the public concern is concerned, they are one and the same thing, because it is how the councils raise their money through non-domestic and council tax. With all due respect, the public buy in large was not aware of how money was raised by local authorities. A vast number of people thought that the bulk of our money came from council tax, and the actual fact that our revenue expenditure is only about 12 per cent of it comes from council tax. One of the criticisms that has been made of the commission is the fact that what you try to do is work within the existing financial parameters of local government and look at the reason, the same level of revenue, particularly in light of some of the demands that will be made this afternoon by two political parties asking for more money to be raised at a local level. Can you explain why you felt that you wanted to work within the existing financial parameter, rather than looking at the possibility of increasing the amount that is raised through a new taxation system other than the community charge of the council tax? What we were looking at initially was something that was going to be cost-neutral, but something that would be different from what exists in the future. Would that remain cost-neutral in the future? Who knows? That would be a matter for individual local authorities, a matter for Parliament. Taxation, in my experience, will always change either up or down at some point, but what we were looking at initially was something that was cost-neutral. We took a view on that. There is a clear recognition that there is a positive way of not taking a view on something. For example, we excluded from detailed work taxes that clearly could not match the revenue-raising potential of council tax, so if it was something that would be worth millions or tens of millions, it simply could not stand in the gap that council tax currently occupies of about £2 billion a year. However, in the analytical work that we did, when you look at some of the consequences of it, it has very implicit messages about scaling should you wish to try and scale it up. For example, if you were going to try and scale council tax up to be £4 billion of revenue and reduce grant by £2 billion, I think that all of the things that we have found about council tax would suggest that that was a bad idea to do. The question of what you want your taxes to add up to is a separate question, and what we have done is say that if you are raising money through this mechanism, here is the ups and downs and the consequences. It would be entirely possible if a party wished to come forward with the proposals that added up to more than 12 per cent local funding through local taxes to do so by putting those together. What we have done is create an analysis of each of the major revenue-raising tools that there are for local authorities under the various options that we looked at. That was roughly benchmarking each to about £2 billion of revenue. Minister, you made a comment earlier about the 45-minute session that you had looking at the land value tax issue. In relation to the experience of the commission and the learning not only for political parties but particularly for the members of COSLA, how has that learning been translated into understanding for many of the people and individuals, particularly elected local members, to understand the issues around how we raise local taxes and the impact that local taxes might have on the residents of those local authorities? I think that everybody knows a lot more about the process than we did before. Certainly those who came along to our participation sessions left with an understanding and an appreciation of some of the difficulties. We have left as a commission a legacy of analytical work that can be accessed by individuals, by practitioners. There was an event held recently by the Institute of Revenue's Ratings and Valuation, where most of the commission spoke and presented the findings to continue to disseminate that knowledge. In particular on land value tax, there was a great deal of work done that has not been done before. I have got to pay tribute to the academic area. What did that modelling work that will give a basis for the analysis of potential land value taxes, whether it is a good or a bad idea to leave aside? It will give greater evidence for that than there has ever been before in Scotland, and that has to be a good thing for the general state of awareness. I think that this is the first time that there has been a serious discussion about the three different systems of taxation. I personally knew nothing about land value tax beforehand. The minister and I could now take you to the pub and bore you rigid on land value tax and the other options. Again, there is an ongoing discussion and an ongoing dialogue to be had there. What we are looking at is for something that will work. It is probably going to be a system that will be in place for quite some time, but we are not restricted to having only one system. There could be a variety and a basket of systems, and it is important that the dialogue continues. I am so early tempted to go to the pub, but we better continue here, I have to say. Anyone else wish to come in? I wonder if you could give us a little flavour of the three not-proposals, but the three options that the commission did. Finally, the local income tax is a reform proportionate council tax and a steeply progressive property tax. Can you give us a little flavour of what the pros and cons of each of the three are mainly for the benefit of the public that might be listening to this? That is essentially 90 pages of reports, but if I was going to summarise it, I think that economists value property tax and consider it stable. People are familiar with it, but it is rather difficult to make it progressive on the basis of income, which many people apply as the test of fairness. Some people dispute that that is an appropriate approach to take. Income, on the other hand, is very fair and abstract, but you then have to make sure that the fairness carries through into the implementation, and you have to be very careful about how you plot that through. Land value tax is, with the pure economic theorists, probably the big favourite, but it is, in many ways, the most abstract and is the one that is furthest from people's understanding. It can also be difficult to explain how it works, for example, when you have a tenement block with 10 people sharing the same land underneath, and there is a serious communication issue there. The word that we used was that it was promising that targeted or general land value taxes were promising, but it was far too early to be able to assess in sufficient detail the impacts of implementing them, because it is so far from what we have right now and the data sets that we have right now and the analytical tools that we have right now, but that, over coming years, that should be more possible to do as we get a better impression of the valuations of land and the ownerships and usages of land on a central basis. In a way, we left a bit more of a question mark on land value tax, because it is a much bigger change and it is harder to quantify. I think that it would be fair to say that the public were keen in the idea of local income tax. Again, perceptions at the start of the session tended to change by the end of the session. For example, local income tax does not actually tax wealth, it taxes income, and somebody can be very wealthy without having income. Somebody can have a smart account, and that would be another example of that. Land value tax is the one that was perhaps further from people's perception, but there is an awful lot of interesting things within land value tax that should be looked at and considered for the future. In a property-based tax, everybody recognises that the way that it is just now is unfair. You can change it and make it less unfair. You cannot make it completely fair, but, as Mark was saying, it is all contained in a great big report, and it is not possible to summarise it in the short time that we have here. Favourite marriage, even amongst and within the commission, or is it just that there is no favourite really coming through? We were absolutely clear that what we were doing was informing the discussion and it is for political parties to put their options forward. In terms of the modelling data that you used or that you obtained to inform the proposals, I am assuming that that will still be available to the parties in formulating their actual proposals to the proposal, because it moves forward, yes. If we were going to stick with a property-based tax, what would be the impact of revaluing property prices so that it is fairer? How long would that take and how much would it cost? We had evidence from the written evaluation people who said that they certainly could do that job. I might be the oldest person in the room. I remember when revaluations used to take place even before the days of the poll tax, and it was very controversial. We have not had a revaluation since 1991. It will be very controversial if that has to happen, but the other thing that we were absolutely clear about, part of the reason that it will be controversial, is because it has not happened since 1991. You would need to do it on a regular basis to keep valuations up to date. It is fairly clear from the evidence that revaluation or, indeed, valuation issues are one of the big challenges for any property tax in public acceptance, in transition and simply making it work in a political sphere. We were very aware of that challenge. We have heard extensive evidence about the difficulties and why there has not been such a revaluation since the institution of the council tax. It would be very politically challenging to deliver for anybody who wished to do it. It is something that has to be considered in the context of your reforms and anybody who is putting forward detailed proposals will undoubtedly be asked about revaluation if they are using a property tax as part of that. Based on what is in the report, they would be wise to be very cautious. John Wilson, please. In terms of the issue of revaluation, one of the issues around land valuation tax is the fact that not all land is registered and that ownership of land, if you are going to do a land valuation tax. Did the commission look at the issues that might be around the under-registration of land at the present time in Scotland? I know from work in another committee that did previously that registers of Scotland said that it would be difficult over a period of time and that they set out a longer period of time. I am glad that Fergus Ewing, the minister for the economy, has asked that to be speedied up in terms of registration. In relation to any new system that was brought in either revaluation or land valuation tax, how quickly in the commission's estimation would that be able to take place? If we are looking for the political parties to come forward at this election in 50 May with alternatives, what would be the reality in terms of those alternatives coming into place? I remember that, nine years ago, a political party put forward an alternative that was not taking forward. The public is aware that, if we are talking about some form of change, how quickly that change could be put in place, particularly for local authorities who are keeping claiming to be cash-strapped in times of austerity? I do not think that we came to a conclusion about timescales, but I think that it would take longer to do the valuation if it was a land value tax, because there is no base to start from. If you were starting on a property base tax, there is a base to start from. It is a very poor base, because part of the evidence was that, in 1991, it was streets that were valued rather than individual properties that were valued. It was done in a very hap hazard way, quite often by a drive-through from valuation officers. It is difficult to put a timescale on it, but I suspect that domestic property would be quicker to do—not quicker—than a land value valuation. Land valuation would definitely take longer due to the issue that you identified about transparency of ownership and the delineation of land. As you might imagine, with Andy Wightman being the nominee of the Scottish Green Party, on the commission, land value tax was explored in great depth, and that issue had come up. Given that it was a non-tax issue, we did not want to come to a view on how long it would take to achieve land registration, but we did recognise that it was needed in order to allow a land value tax, and that that was still some years off. In the previous session at the committee this morning, I heard from the local government benchmarking framework about the variation in costs of services across Scotland. When you did your public listening events, whether public accountability and a sense of, we are paying for those services, how much of that is a big issue for communities in Scotland, or are they happy that services need to be paid for? How much control do they want to have over what they pay for those services? I was surprised by how often in public participation events people wanted to broaden the discussion out, not into non-domestic rates revenue but into expenditure and talk about their views on the pluses or minuses of what their local authorities did. The idea of the connection between how much you pay and what you get is quite strong in a lot of places. The idea that I deserve this because I pay my council tax, you hear it often, but it comes from the belief that council tax is the sole method of funding councils when, in fact, 12 per cent is the figure that we use by this calculation. There are different ways of accounting, but they are in that sort of territory. It is important that people understand the broad range of ways that local government is funded. Indeed, that will help them to understand the wider situation for local government, but what we have done thus far in the past decades is not something that people have yet taken on board. Reform should do as well as make a lot clearer to the public how much money they are putting into their local authority, because right now it is not as clear as it could be. That is a much wider discussion to take place on local accountability and local democracy. I previously chaired the commission on strength and local democracy, and that commission recognised through evidence the link between the ability to raise finance and how we spend it locally. That has been diminished over the years in Scotland, in fact, in the wider UK. The UK and Scotland are way out of step with what happens elsewhere in the developed world. In that context, what is your view of the possibility of local authorities using other tax instruments? There is a lot of talk about the tourist tax and the bed tax. That seems quite controversial in some places, but it is quite acceptable in others. Do you think that that sits alongside the local accountability? Can the two operate in parallel? We recognise that a basket of taxation would be useful. What was it? You did not have a bedroom tax, did you? No, the tourist tax and the bed tax. There are some places where a tourist tax would be absolutely right. There are other places where it might be something different. For local government, having flexibility in how you raise your funds and having the ability to have a basket of taxation would definitely be advantageous. The commission report highlighted that some of the options for these, as they weren't £2 billion scale taxes that they hadn't gone into in great depth, although there was some work on some of them. As a principal, if they are workable, then there shouldn't be an impediment. I think that with tourist tax, which is the one that is the most advanced in discussions in the public sphere, there is a difference of opinion between the Scottish Government and the main local authority advancing it in terms of the benefits, as opposed to the costs. Where there is a workable system that is found and agreed on, then, in principle, there is no reason not to. Where there are such proposals that appear that they could be workable, we will have those discussions. That could be part of a wider reform from any party that wants to put that forward. The report itself was unanimously agreed to. I think that there was one dissenting voice at one point, is that right? That was paragraph 1314. Do you want to expand on that for the record, please minister? No, I value the consensus that was achieved in the commission. I also recognise the work that went into coming up with a wording for the conclusions and recommendations that carried virtually unanimous support. There are 90-plus pages in this report. There was one paragraph that one member dissented to. I would rather look at the overwhelming agreement that we had rather than at that disagreement. Fair play to you, minister. He is quite nice. You are in general agreement at that point as well. Gentlemen, I thank you and lady, even though you did not take part. I thank you all for your evidence today. I have to say that when we wrote the recommendation in our autonomy and flexibility report, some of us wondered how long it would be before somebody would take up our call for a commission, but it happened extremely quickly indeed. I am glad that you have put in the effort that you have in all of that. I now suspend and move into private session.