 Ie ddweuddd yn ei gion. Felly, rwy'n fwrdd i'n meddwl i'r 21 anghylch gyweunidol o'r Llyfrgell gwahanol cymunedol yn 2018, ac yn mynd y cymdeithasig cymdeithasig mae'risingu i MSPs.ones, o ffordd a Sci-Metallol, mae'n cael ei gweld bwysig bydd y cwyrdd gwrdd hyn yn y byd i ddech chi. Felly, mae'n ysgrifennu am amser, doedd yn cychewch gweithio yn gweithio, fod ynElfan hynol, mae'n gweithio i'r gweithio i'r ysgall Felly, we are feeling a little bit in relation to budget scrutiny, because this is the first year that the community has undertaken a new approach to budget scrutiny, as recommended by the Finance and Constitution Committee following a review carried out by the budget process review group. This involves parliamentary committees carrying out pre-budget scrutiny throughout the course of the year, so it is an all-year-round business budget scrutiny. Today, the committee will take evidence and workforce planning to inform its pre-budget scrutiny. That has been a recurring theme for the committee in the past year or so. Therefore, I welcome our witnesses, Dave Watson, Head of Policy in Public Affairs, Unison Scotland, Rebecca Marwick, Parliamentary in Policy, Officer of Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, Sharon Dick, President of the Society for Personal Development and Development Scotland, I apologise, and Sarah Tennant, Talent and Organisational Development Manager, North Lanarkshire King, representing the public sector network. Good morning, thank you everyone for coming along. You have not been given advance warning of this, do not worry, it is not opening statements that we are looking for, but the MSPs, and I look at this with colleagues, we are not as familiar with some of the organisations as we are with others, so I am just wondering, even just 30 seconds, just explaining who your organisation are. Now Dave, we know who Unison are, but we will give you your 30 seconds anyway, and then the rest of the quality. Why do not we start with your say? Yeah, I am Dave Watson, Head of Policy in Unison Scotland. We are Scotland's largest trade union, we are also the largest trade union in local government, we represent 155,000 workers, mostly in the public sector, but some in the private sector across, certainly in local government, across every profession and sector. Thank you, hi Rebecca. Hi, I am Rebecca, I am from the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, we are a strategic anti-racism organisation, we do a lot of work with policy and the public sector equality duties, we work at different public bodies and with the Scottish Government and the Parliament to advance race equality. Hi, I am Sharon Dick from the Society of Personnel Development Scotland. Our association society represents most of the local authorities, we have 32 of the 32 councils, so really we try to look at best practice from our policy and personnel in our workforce perspective, covering up the whole range of issues, and we work closely with COSLA to see how we can influence. Hi, Sarah Tennant, I am representing the Public Sector Network today, so we are a member of the Public Sector Network within North Lancer Council. The network was set up in 2015 from Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Government, and we have representation from just over 63 public bodies, and it is growing, and there is representation from local authorities as well. The purpose of the group is to look at how we can improve young workforce development, and we address and identify common areas and challenges that we have, and the benefit of that network is that we can collaborate, we can learn from each other, we can share practice and work more efficiently to try and address some of those challenges. It is really helpful, and I should have pre-warned you where we are going to do that. I could just introduce yourselves as you have done anyway, but I was thinking of that, but it is a helpful thing to do, not just for MSPs but for anyone following this at home. So we will go straight to questions now. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning. In unison's evidence, and the question is for all of you, but unison says that since 2009, 29,000 jobs have been lost in local government in Scotland. Unison says that that has led to an increase in workload and an increase in stress, but councils are not, to a large degree, doing much workforce planning. In fact, unison says that only three councils have produced good guides on this. I am not sure what is happening with the other 29. I wonder if you can comment on the numbers and the stresses and the perceived lack of planning for this. I think that it would be fair to say that the numbers are not in dispute, they are all discotten, as well as ours and COSLA and everybody. I think that the important statistic is that nine out of ten austerity job cuts have been in the local government, so the local government has taken the brunt of the job cuts there. I think that the numbers speak for themselves. There has been no real reduction in the amount of work to be done, and I think that is the key point. If you look at, and we have done as I have outlined in the evidence, but you can look at our website and read some 20-odd damage surveys where we have asked the front-line staff what the impact of that is. As I have said in our evidence, there are a number of themes that come through that. Most of them could be put in the phrase keeping the plate spinning, so essentially what people are doing is that they are trying to sort that problem out, and then the problem just grows somewhere else, so they move on to somewhere else. We have not really looked in local government, there has been a lot of salami slicing of services, trying to make do, trying to patch and mend, and I think that that obviously has real pressure on staff. On workforce planning, I think that the problem is probably that councils and, to the extent ourselves, have been very focused on managing that decline in local government, trying to manage the workforce's consequences of austerity, and therefore probably not given the amount of attention that workforce planning looking forward needs. There is another, I think, more cultural issue here, that local government tends to work at, as you would expect, at the local level. There is not a great deal of coordination. If you look at the health service, for example, which is a much more monolithic organisation, they do at least have professional workforce planning, albeit only limited to a few professions. Local government does not tend to have that approach, so there are good examples. In fairness, local government, there are more than three. There were three examples that I was picking out. Certainly most councils will have some form of workforce planning, but, as Audit Scotland pointed out, they said that only half had. I have not done a survey precisely to look at that. I will accept their numbers, but what you do find is a fair variety. There is some very basic workforce planning. It tends to be local and ad hoc, and I think that the essence of our submission is that we can do better than that and we need to pull of that and coordinate some of that together. I should point out that I thank you, Sharon Dick. That is very helpful. I am very unobservant, so do signpost when you want in, because Sharon Dick followed by Rebecca Marek. I guess I could just fall up and talk about the councils overall as well. I would agree with Dave's point about the numbers, so there has been significant reduction in the numbers quoted are. We are all in agreement with them. Workforce planning, I think I will now be a bit more positive about it. I think for local authorities, there has been a lot of workforce reporting. Over the years, we have tried to move more to workforce planning and make that longer term. I think that there is recognition that some of it has been quite short-term. We are making the push to make that much longer term and to look at working with our local partnerships. A lot of the council will have good community plans and we will look to work with our partnerships a lot more. The problem that we have is that there are a lot of conflicting priorities, and it is quite hard to get the overall picture. I think that that is maybe something that the Scottish Government could help. That would be an area for us to look at. There is difficulty with the resources impact, so there are a lot of challenges, breadth of issues that we are trying to address. Not many councils have systems that they can use for workforce planning. I think that some councils have very good examples of workforce plans. They are all getting audited with Audit Scotland, so I would say that they are all there to some level. They are looking across the board at good practice, so we are trying to share that and help councils that are not as advanced to move forward. With regard to stresses, absence continues to be a big issue for councils and stress continues to be the number one reason for absence. We are seeing increases in the number of absences due to stress and in particular work-related stress. I would say that that is increasing in the majority of councils across the board as well. That does not do much work with workforce planning, but I think one issue I would like to highlight is if you are seeing a number in local authority staff reducing and while we are also seeing a rise in the BME population, it is worth wondering how we are going to eventually achieve parity in terms of the BME population locally and how it is represented in councils. I think it speaks to some concerted work needing to be done to reach that. I think it is also worth questioning, and I do not have the answer for this, but it would be interesting to know when jobs were reduced, whether an equality impact assessment was taken to understand whether there would be a disparate effect on BME employees losing their jobs, if that would further reduce their representation on local councils. I think that when we are speaking about these issues, it is also important to keep the equality implications in mind. Thank you. Sarah, do you want to add anything? I think that just to back up both Sharon's point as well about there are pockets of good practice I think within my council that we acknowledge and what we want to do is build on that and take a much more consistent approach. I think that your point about working with the support partners can be quite challenging to navigate the landscape. Particularly the public sector network is a good example of how we can collaborate to work together to address some of those things. Do you want to follow up on that? Yeah, just look at this in a little more detail. I think that one of the big issues probably across the public sector, but certainly in councils, is that we have an aging workforce. In fact, I think that the average age of the public sector worker in Scotland is 45 and 40 per cent of public sector staff are due to retire in 10 years. That strikes me as we might have a ticking time bomb here. It is really important that councils plan for that and have strategies in place, but it sounds to me like they certainly do not all have that. The other point that I think I would make is quite a lot of the work that in councils is physical. If you think about the roads departments, things like that, if you have an aging workforce and a physical work, that makes it even more difficult. Planning ahead is really important. I would just like to hear your thoughts on that. What can be done? Why is not stuff being done? We have known about this for a long time. I think that there are very fair points. There is a neat little infographic in our evidence that I hope helps to illustrate the point. I did some quite detailed research on this last year, which is where the infographic comes from. To my extent, I suppose that I was not surprised with the numbers in local government. One of the ways that we manage reductions in the workforce is to have it recruitment-free. Self-evidently, those who are there get older. You are not bringing in younger workers, so therefore, the workforce gets older. I think that there has been some work done on the fact that there are increasing numbers of people working past 65 now as well. Pension pay-outs in local government are very low, so you tend to find people who want to work on past 65 increasingly, particularly women who obviously make up the bulk of the workforce, who do not have that sort of pension service in place. The numbers are still very small. They have doubled, but it has gone from 1% to 2%. The real increase in numbers is the 50% to 60% group who are in work. They are becoming the big numbers. By our calculation, that means that about 40% who are going to retire in the next 10 years. That creates additional issues. We were not great fans of the crudlin and review on the state pension age, but one of the very sensible recommendations in that report, I thought, was the idea of a mid-life or a mid-work-life MOT when you looked at where you were and where you were going to be able to do those jobs. There are some jobs. I do not know what the current status is, but a few years ago, there was a statistic that virtually no ambulance workers have ever reached normal retirement age. If we looked at one or two local government ones in some of the physically demanding jobs, I suspect that we would not be far off that in there as well. I think that we need to have some thought. Frankly, virtually nobody is doing any work on the fact that I get invited to speak at conferences on the ageing workforce, because if you google it, you get me and not much else. It is not because we have done anything absolutely fantastic. It was a fairly simple piece of research, but the reality is that we did suggest in some of that some of the practical measures, particularly the health and safety, particularly some of that. Remember, there is still age discrimination as well against older workers in the workforce as well. The one local government point that I will probably flag up to you is that one of the challenges that local government has is that we tend, like everyone does, to focus on the big groups like social work and like education. I would really ask you to not forget that the local government has lots of small groups, small professional groups. The problem about having local and rather ad hoc workforce planning is that you might be able to do some credible work on social care in a local community because it is largely a local workforce. If you are looking at trading standards or environmental health or planners, you are talking about relatively small numbers for which, frankly, local workforce planning has grave limitations. They are the sort of groups that we need to have a bit more co-ordination on the Scotland-wide basis for. Rebecca. Apologies in advance. I feel like I have one note to play here, but I think it is important to look at the race equality implications of an aging workforce as well because I think that shows a good opportunity for increasing the representation of minority ethnic groups in local government. All minority ethnic groups are younger than white UK groups with the latest census figures compared. 29% of white Scottish individuals are aged between 16 and 39 compared to 50% of groups within Asian, African or other ethnic backgrounds. The BME community in Scotland is younger. A lot of those communities are sort of aging into a time when they could take up these jobs that are going to be vacated through retirements. I think it is a good opportunity to look for. It is also to keep in mind that a lot of BME people in Scotland have been educated throughout the Scottish school system. They go to further and higher education and higher percentages. They outperform white Scottish counterparts in schools. It is a great opportunity if we are willing to plan and take advantage of that. I would like to second Dave's point about the fact that we have a great focus in modern apprenticeships. We acknowledge the early years expansion, but there are pockets regionally across local authorities who struggle particularly for construction workers, planners, surveyors, for occupational therapists and residential childcare workers. We need to look at those areas and how we fill those pipelines. Can you echo some of that point? There are some of our activities such as trading standards, roads where we are struggling to get the places where we can educate people. A lot of councils are looking to do modern apprenticeship programmes, but we should not forget that the apprenticeship levy has had an impact on councils that has reduced the number of modern apprentices overall. We are only getting £10,000 in return for the amount that local authorities are paying for that, and there is an impact. We need to look at how we make sure that we continue to keep modern apprenticeships in the workforce as part of it, because they can be a noisy target for budget cuts, and that is not what we want. We want to increase our young workforce. We also want to see how we can work with schools better to make local authorities a more attractive place to come for your career. There is an impact as well with the pay restraint on professional occupations, and we need to look at that as well. How can we make it attractive for people to come in for a career in local government? Some councils have now started competing with one another to try to get that workforce. Can I get some views on the idea of the golden hello that some councils have chosen to go down the road off to try and entice individuals to join their council? What are your views on that? Obviously, a council wants to give our members money. It would be strange as me as a trade union official would say no, but I do have to say that it is really not the way ahead. Robin Peter, the paypal, does not seem to me to be a practical approach. We have to recognise that there are some cyclical issues in local government. For example, some local government professions are almost entirely in local government. Others have private sector equivalents. If you are in areas such as building control, planning, architects, engineers to extend the legal profession, my own profession, those areas that we tend to find are the construction industries in the boom. The private sector poaches all the local government people because they pay better. When that seems to decline, there are jobs there that come into local government in the other way. There is a cyclical change. We are seeing it particularly. I think that I did provide you with our report on building control, which is a very good example at post-Grenfall. Suddenly, we have 65 vacancies for building control officers across Scotland. It is difficult to work for planning, because if we could guess the economic cycle, we probably would not be working in local government. We are making a lot of money in the city. There are challenges in terms of reflecting that. I suppose I would say it is a short-term measure and not a very helpful one if we look at the picture holistically. I would not encourage that. I would prefer to see us try and do our best in terms of taking a more Scotland-wide view of workforce planning right across the public sector, because some jobs are cut across different parts. That is a better approach than the patching mend with the golden hellos or other incentives. Can I check a couple of things? I do not want to get into a discussion about headcount in the mountain of staff and local authorities. Clearly, finances are challenging and headcount is challenging, but I just wanted to check those numbers about the reduction. Do they include allio workers? Is that taken into account? Is it adjusted for that? There is a certain irony here that our figures are the lowest of all the estimates, because I take account of allios and transfers. It is very difficult. The numbers are not exact. If you see any numbers that are rounded to thousands, you know that they are not exact. We do have a problem. One of the difficulties is that you have to make some estimates about the number of staff who have gone into allios. You have to make some estimates about the numbers who have transferred. I know that you are covering paper that talks about staff going to health and social care partners. Staff do not actually go to health and social care partners. What happens is that sometimes people change between local government and health. Obviously, most know to be in Highland, where there was a particular model chosen. The difficulty is that we do not know precisely who has gone where. Obviously, we have had less outsourcing in Scotland, so that drift out there. I have to say that, in fairness to CODLA, their numbers are always higher than mine. They have come down to our numbers. I take a fairly conservative view about where the numbers have gone, but they are estimates. There is no getting around that, because there just is not the data out there, which, of course, is one of the points that we keep making. Data on workforce in Scotland, not just in local government everywhere, is pretty poor. That is an important point. I am glad that they are adjusted. I find that very helpful, because when we come on at some point to look at the revenue budget, there are numbers, more numbers and even more numbers all looking at different angles. Does it take account of—I just got a note from my office before I come in saying that there are changes in police and fire service classifications in April 2013? That is all taken into account in those numbers. That is the first number. We actually do know the numbers that went in that one, so that is the easiest adjustment to make. That is really helpful. I move on to my substantive question. Local authorities are funded mainly through the revenue grant from Scottish Government. We know that there is money transfer from integrated joint boards. We know that there is the council tax, there are fees and charges. I will not list all the various monies that there are, but the committee will be scrutinising all that, but there is always a significant focus on that revenue grant transfer every single year. I am no doubt that there will be a political debate at that point about whether that number is sufficient. Is it a good deal? Is it a bad deal? Is it indifferent? Let us forget what that number shows. In respect of what that financial transfer is to local government, should there be conditions placed on that in relation to workforce and workforce planning? Should it be more closely aligned to the Scottish Government's national pay policy framework, which does not include local government but, as the cabinet secretary said, should we use a benchmark for local government? What is the connectivity in relation to that settlement and any conditionality around how that should be used to promote good workforce planning? That is a budget scrutiny session, after all. I am fine with the conditions that are applied. I think that it is a good practice for the scrutiny aspect of it. If we are going to apply conditions, we need to work with local authorities about what they are and listen to the feedback. There have been issues with some of the conditions that have previously been placed on councils, and it makes it difficult. I do not think that it helps workforce planning in the long term. I should say that I have no idea whether there should be or not, but if we are talking about the granular level of workforce planning, we have to know what the connectivity is between local authority grant settlements and the planning that takes place on the ground. Any other suggestions on how we can follow that a bit more, Dave Watson? When we do the answer to the budget, we always say to our people that the Scottish Government grant is such a huge part of it that that is a crucial starting point. We always say to our local people that it never looks quite the same. You have this grand debate about funding at the Scottish Parliament level, but you are talking about that grant allocation at the local level. The whole range of other demands that are coming on is demographic change. The apprenticeship levy was mentioned earlier a couple of years ago, and that was the biggest increase that was not taken into account anywhere that councils were having to pay that. We always say that our local people have an entirely different conversation at council level than the one that you are having politically at the Scottish Parliament level. In a general approach, we do not favour ring ffencing, we just think that it is supposed to be local government, not local administration. Councils are not the local governors to have a handout there, so we are not generally in favour of that. What we would emphasise is that on pay, for example, the Scottish Government rightly sets a public sector workforce, which I accept pay policy, which does not directly impact on local government. Clearly, we do not want this robbing piece of the pay pool, so we do not want people jumping from local government to health because they are getting a decent pay rise in local government and not in vice versa. I do think that government needs to make sure it funds its own pay policy. Clearly, you will know that we argue very strongly, and I am still arguing with Derek Mackay about that issue to this day, that it has not been funded. The overall funding settlement should include pay policy. I am not in favour of trying to pick out workforce groups and set targets from the centre on that, because I think that that needs to be a local decision. I do not know how feasible this is, but I think that CRER would be really interested around a conversation on equality, if there were to be conditions placed upon it, movements to achieve parity in workforce representation, demonstration of movements to recruit more equally, to evaluate policies more critically, to produce action plans to increase the BME representation in the workforce. The Scottish Government itself has committed to having parity with the population in their own workforce by 2025, and it would be great if they could encourage local authorities to do the same and hold them to account on that. I wonder if we could ask the question a different way, because I expect it to get a reaction when I use the word conditionality, of course. Is there a way in which we can incentivise local authorities to do more robust workforce planning? I am about with the realms of possibility for unexpected increases in cash to local authorities, if only it were so, Mr Watson, or unexpected declines in cash to local authorities that there is a robust workforce planning framework in place, so that you know what you are going to do with that money, how you tighten the belt and how you expand it and improve public services. Sometimes that will involve using reserves in a structured planned way, rather than an emergency way, if you are upscaling or downscaling. It is not our job to scrutinise local authorities. We are scrutinising the budget, so is there any way that budget can be used to incentivise that good practice that is happening in a limited fashion in local authorities that has to happen a lot more? I think that the single-year budget settlements make it difficult for local authorities. It would be wrong to say that local authorities are not keen to support robust workforce planning, because I do not think that that is the case. They are struggling just now with the impact that they have had on the budget cuts, and they are trying to manage that best they can. They are looking to try to embrace new ways of working with digital and modernised. That can be quite difficult when they have not got the level to invest in some of their systems. Some councils again are more successful than others, and that depends on the resources that they have had, and there is difficult. Dave mentioned demographics, so it would be wrong to not look at the local picture. There are differences from a local perspective as well. From a budget perspective, the point that I was making about is that you could have better oversight of the policy changes if you use early years, for example. We have an early years workforce where we were not qualified. We have now made strides to make them qualified, so there is an investment there, which I am not saying is the wrong thing to do, but it costs money. Obviously, you have to work with some of that workforce. It is difficult to train, but we work with them to make sure that we achieve that. Now, we are having to increase to large volumes of early years. Again, it is not the wrong thing to do, but we are competing with ourselves, we are competing with other local authorities, and we are competing with ourselves as well, because it tends to be the same workforce that we would target for social care as well. There are policy changes that, when you look at them in isolation, there are maybe all the right things to do, but we have to look at that holistic picture and help to put the budgets in place to make it all happen and for us all to work joined up to deliver. After all, it is all about the community. That is what we are here for, so it is to try and achieve the best outcome for our community in residence. I will try to push a little bit on that, because we will look in detail at the numbers once they emerge and what happens every year with the debate around those numbers. I used the expression incentivise what other than as generous or as significant an award to local authorities as possible through the revenue grant, which I was expecting all of you to argue for. Of course, you should be arguing for that. That is the single thing. We will look at the numbers when that is published. We will have about a week or two weeks to look at those numbers before we look at word report. What else and how that money is used, whether it is incentivising, whether it is ring fence funds that you can bid in for or whether it is conditionalities, so you have to spend some of it a certain way or something as yet that we have not considered, what else can Government do to assist at a local level in relation to workforce planning, because that is kind of why we are having this evidence session. I think that probably incentivisation is further down the road for workforce planning. I think that the starting point I would take you earlier in the process. In care, for example, we are starting to… The Scottish Government has developed a process for doing workforce planning in social care. We have had discussions in early years. We have got a massive expansion of the early years sector, but there are huge differences in opinion. Is it 12,000 extra early years workers or 20,000 actually? People look confused. If you are a provider of training, or a local authority, or even the private and voluntary sector, you are saying, well, how many are we going to need? Part of the reason is that it is a difference between how many will be full-time and part-time. I suppose that my argument would be that we need to start earlier. We need to have co-ordinated. I do not think that we are in the stage of incentivising yet. If people ignore co-ordinated workforce planning and do nothing about it, then I think that you will bring out the stick later down the road. But at the moment, we are just not doing it. There is no proper liaison on a national basis for a whole range of areas. Universities start or cancel courses as and when planning… I was called in some years ago by the Scottish Government officials and said, we have not got any planners, Dave. I said, well, we have just closed one of the two planning schools in Scotland. Should you be surprised by that? They had no saying that. Queen Margaret University last week closed their masters in public administration courses. We have only got two of those in Scotland. Where are the next public service leaders going to go if universities take unilateral decisions in terms of closing courses? My plea would be for co-ordinated workforce planning, which involves the education and local government, to tackle that. If they do not deliver or the different parts do not deliver, then I have no problem about incentivising people later down the track. We see workforce planning in relation to the childcare sector, because that is getting a significant expansion. Obviously, there is a debate about what appropriate levels and what the skills base should be, but there is active workforce planning around that. Dave Watson is mentioning in the care sector that there is much more of a look and attention being given to that at the moment. However, because of statutory duties around education, there is workforce planning in relation to that and teacher training colleges and Delight, there was not around planning, as Mr Watson mentioned. Is it patching in relation to some local authorities such as Jigsaws, where part of the Jigsaw has a workforce planning tool, whether it is the same tool that every local authority uses, but it has a connection to the national picture in other parts of the Jigsaw? Is there a need for a holistic workforce planning tool for local authorities more generally? Does that exist? Is it in its genesis? How would we go about it? I will take you last on that, Mr Watson, because I suspect that that is what you would think should happen. What do others think? Sharn Dick, you are on the ground trying to give advice to local authorities to do some of this stuff. I think that it is down to talking about the small groups again. The big groups have got a bigger voice. Obviously, for my Scottish Government, I have probably got a bigger profile just now, so that the health and social care integration is a big agenda item in the early years. It is easier just now to influence, and there are more avenues that people can get their voice heard on what is required in those areas. Planning, I did see Glasgow City Council have announced a big investment because they are looking to create more job roles in that area, but it is the point that Dave has made. There are a number of university courses that stop, and sometimes local authorities might not even realise at the time. It might even be a year later, and then we realise the impact and we are starting to—because it might not be an area that we recruit in, especially a specific local authority might not recruit in a lot, so they are then having to start looking at that and how to fulfil those gaps of specialist areas. To go back to your question about whether we need one approach, I think that there are differences in local areas. I do not know that you need one tool for everything. The workforce plans that councils do, a council does not say, we will just look at early years and workforce plan in that area. They do workforce plan for their whole council area, but it is just nationally, there is probably a higher profile in those areas of early years in health and social care integration. I am going to move on in a second because I am getting lost in my line of questioning. Dave Watson, I would like you to finish off on where you think national workforce planning should go, but I am just conscious that every year—I understand this and I say this every year as well—Cosla will identify pretty quickly the financial pressures that will come with a price bill to the Scottish Government in relation to how to meet the demands that are being placed on them by the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government will come up with a completely different figure and eventually they will reconcile that somehow. I am just wondering if head count and workforce numbers are part of that discussion because that is the biggest cost to local authorities and service delivery that is staffing. Is there not support for a national workforce planning framework that can take into account those local nuances? Is it just not possible to let local authorities get on with it? Local authorities, via Cosla, when they go to the Scottish Government to ask for cash, as they should do, have to be able to get robust, reliable strategic statistics. If they cannot, that weakens their argument with the Scottish Government. Should there be a national agreed framework? I guess that just responding data that local authorities can produce data on their workforce. We regularly give Cosla updates when they come requesting. We are on a number of councils on a different HR system, so the data might be in a different format, but we provide it in a standard format for them. I do not know—maybe I am not answering the question appropriately, I feel—but the data can be provided to Cosla on the workforce. Maybe the question is not focused enough and it is unrealistic and naive, but I have to ask it to be clear in my head whether it is possible or not. Dave, we will take you in a second. Does anyone else want to add to that before I bring Mr Watson back in? Maybe it is in my simple mind. For me, it is about the direction of any funding and where that goes to make sure that we are meeting our local needs as well as our regional needs. I think that that is the challenge that we hear through the public sector network, where the different local authorities get together. We are looking at our youth employment strategies and there are certainly lots of strategies in place. An example of that could be in the modern apprenticeships, where we have trained in agreements for a year and we have funding for that. Sometimes maybe a year is not long enough to get people ready for employability and employment. Does that make sense? We might look for more funding to extend that. Work that we are doing through our care experience programme, shown in Aberdeen Council and our own council as well, is the commitment and the funding that we need for that and the length of time. Does that work? I do not know if that is— No, it is helpful and multi-year budgets are ringing about in my head. You are saying all that as well so that you can plan ahead in relation to that. Dave Watson, do you want a final comment on that? There are tools and I have referenced some of them in our events, but they tend to be employer-based tools. Now, you can aggregate those up. No one is a bigger champion of local determination than unison, but in a country of five million people, we accept that there is a need for frameworks. It is not about central direction, but we do argue that we should start with some national frameworks. Do you remember that the Christie commission talked about the one public sector worker approach? It talked about better coordination, particularly on training and education, so we have some common modules. Very little of that, frankly, has happened. There is a case for national workforce planning. I think that the Government's fair work approach helps enormously in that area, so that is part of it. If you do not value the workforce, no one is going to want to work in the public sector. Data is a huge problem. Rightly it says, I am involved in a whole range of initiatives and we sit down with COSLA and we ask everybody for all the data and it comes back in all sorts of different ways. It is a hugely difficult job just to give some basic data together. The other thing that I would argue is look at the whole workforce, not just the small ones. Yes, there is some silo-based national planning for care and for early years and so on, but there are lots of generic jobs in local government and there are generic challenges. For example, we have whole work groups of jobs where there is gender segregation—that is a point that is made about black and ethnic minorities as well—but gender segregation is only 3 per cent of childcare workers are men. It is about 13 or 14 per cent in social care. We need 65,000. These young women do not exist, folks, I am afraid. We have to break down gender segregation and that is a national issue about how we do that. We need to build in what public service reform is into that process, which every local authority cannot do. It is not in control of the big drives and the big changes like early years and education and we do need to get those training providers around the table as well. That is my six-point plan, which I would argue makes the case for a national approach, which is not directive but is a framework approach, which brings all the players together around the table and, hopefully, then develops a longer-term plan for the workforce. Very helpful. Thank you very much. Andy Wightman. I have a few questions. The public sector network, can you say a little bit about the practical day-to-day work that you are engaged in? Yes. Can I give you a summary of the outcomes of what the group is hoping to achieve? Traditionally, the group meets a buy annually and then there are steering groups and sub-working groups that identify challenges. Some of the things that we are looking at at the minute are recruitment practices, how we attract people into roles, particularly in the local authorities in the public sector, and how we can increase our brand or presence as an employer in the public sector. We are looking at identifying the challenges as to what stops people applying for roles in the public sector and how we can make that more attractive. We are looking at our graduate apprenticeships and do they meet the needs within the local authorities and across the public sectors. Particularly, we have an area within teaching that we are struggling to recruit, so what can we do to influence the graduate apprenticeship programmes in that area? There was a good example that I gave earlier about the care experience work. It was called Place and Train with Aberdeen Council, which looked at supporting people through care experience into employment, where they did six-week placements. We in North Lanarkshire Council are learning from that example, and we are offering 12-month placement opportunities. It is about learning from each other and looking at the challenges. How can we look at improving our pipelines of youth employment? How can we address some of those? That is helpful. It was mainly focused on the young workforce. Yes, that is the main aim. That is fine. Rebecca, you were talking about the challenges of redressing the imbalance and representation of BME groups, particularly those more represented in younger people. I would like to ask Sarah what the public sector network is doing about that, but maybe Rebecca, you have a better question that you could ask Sarah. I would be interested to hear. Are there specific working groups within the network that looks at representation by ethnicity or specific initiatives that target groups? I saw from some evidence local councils submitted to an inquiry the Equalities Committee did a few years ago on race and ethnicity. A few councils had initiatives in which they could not advertise in specific newspapers or radio stations. Have you heard any sort of work along those lines? I have heard that, unfortunately, through the involvement that we have with the forum, but I can certainly find it. I encourage you two to have a conversation about that, because I think that it is a very important issue. Some of the points that Dave made about having national frameworks to try to encourage better workforce planning, and I am particularly taken by your comments about the small. We seem to have in local government social care education some very big workforces and then, as you say, some very small but critically important workforces. Are there any good examples from the rest of the United Kingdom, the British Isles and Europe, where countries do that better? Across Europe, we have lots more local government than we have here delivering more services than they deliver here. How do they go about that? I do not think that there are any in the UK that I am aware of, although in fairness to Wales they have tried to do some work and they had a One Wales project. It has not gone as quickly, I think, as some people hope to do so. They have certainly done more. For example, in the leadership area, the masters and public administration point that I made earlier, Wales does have a very good programme developing now. I was in Wales a few months ago, a few weeks ago, and I was very impressed by the work that was being done by universities and others down there. There has been an effort in Wales to co-ordinate some of that. I am certainly not aware of that in England, if it is happening. In terms of the European model, the German model is probably the most well-known one, is that they build in workforce planning to their sectoral bargaining arrangements. If you sat on the fly of the wall of the Scottish Joint Council with us and COSLA, you would hardly ever hear about workforce planning being discussed. If you went to the German equivalent, you would find workforce planning. Best known probably in the manufacturing, engineering areas. They would be looking five and ten years ahead and saying what are the developments in the sector. These are very disparate, mostly private sector employers, but they all come round the table with the unions and sit down and do plan out. Don't always get it right. The big debate about is workforce planning a science or an art form. I probably fall more into the art form category, but there are people who disagree with me. In Europe, there is an effort. In local government, in Europe, you are talking about a much larger number of local authorities, much smaller than ours are, yet they managed to co-ordinate some of that work and do some planning. My six-point national framework plan would not be unusual in some way like Germany and other European countries. It has not been the culture in Scotland or the UK more generally. My argument is that, based on the fair work convention, it has talked about having more sectoral approaches to workforce in Scotland. If we could develop that initiative, particularly in local government, we would do a lot better. Are there times in the devolutionary area since 1999, when we have done workforce planning better? The convener talked about care work and that is an expanding area. Obviously, you have to do workforce planning if you want to get anywhere near recruiting that number of people, and the budget was expanding in the first half of the Parliament. Have there been any changes over the past 18 years in this area? It is interesting that, only recently, we have looked at social care. To be honest, it has been put in the two difficult box. As I have said in the evidence, there are 14,000 care providers in Scotland. That is a hugely fragmented employer base and it makes it a nightmare of a job just to pull data together, let alone anything else. Historically, I think that we have done it in silos, which again was one of the Christie commission criticisms. I spent 18 months early years of devolution working in the health department. I did work on workforce planning. There, doctors, dentists and nurses all have their own workforce planners, but nobody looked at anybody else. The minister said to me, where is the first pressure? At the meeting, I said, I have looked at it, it is actually laundry managers. Nobody had looked at laundry managers, all of whom were over 55, none of whom had a deputy, and you cannot run the hospital without laundry. Nobody had bothered to look at it, absolutely nobody. That is my point. If you have comprehensive workforce planning, you do not allow specific groups to fall between the net of the big planning arrangements. It is somebody's responsibility to join up and link up those things. At the moment, there is nobody in government or elsewhere who are making that joined-up thinking. A question for Rebecca, thanks for your very comprehensive paper. What is the problem here? Is there institutional racism? That would be our line. I think that, especially if you look at, in local authorities, when you look at levels of application, they are nearly on par with the national figure for what it should be, but there is a bit of a drop when you go to short listing and then a more severe drop when it comes to appointment. I think I might have highlighted in the evidence, sorry. 31% of white, British and Scottish and 51% of white, non-British short listed applicants were appointed. Only 17.7% of BME applicants were, which means that overall white applicants are about three times more likely to be successful in securing a post than BME applicants. I think the excuse given in a lot of these instances is on the supply side of things. If you look through the public sector quality duty reports from the 2017 reporting round, a lot of outcomes that are focused on employment for local authorities are looking at making BME groups more employable. There is a big focus on translation services and ESOL provision. I think we would argue that those would be, you know, they are necessary for maybe some newer migrants regardless of race, but it doesn't discount for sort of the figures that we're seeing here. From some analysis we've done of the 2017 reporting figures, if you don't mind if I just grab those, in 2013 about 1% of local authority staff were from a BME background and that's only at 1.5% now in 2017, four years later, when local authorities were tasked to gather information on ethnicity in terms of recruitment and then use that information to lay out plans to sort of improve it. We really haven't seen much work done at a strategic level. A lot of work in kind of an anti-racism sense is on unconscious bias training. The report from the Equal Opportunities Committee that was published in 2015 that I referenced earlier found that unconscious bias training wasn't a very helpful approach. It's not—sorry. Go on. Just finally on this line of questioning, we've seen increasing attention paid to the need to get people with disabilities into the workforce as well more effectively. My question is—and this is just because I don't know anything about the topic—would workforce planning normally include the need to support greater equality in the workforce, not just for BME, but for—would that be a normal thing that workforce planning would do? Or is that an equalities issue and seen separate from workforce planning? Very much should be called to workforce planning, not least because there are numbers of workforce. I mean, we've got large numbers of people who are in that 50s, 65s, despite all the ageing workforce, who aren't in the job and would like to be in the job because there's largely, partly because of disability and health, but others because there's unconscious bias with the older workforce as well. If you've got groups of workers who you could tap into to address your workforce planning issues, then if they're not coming, they're not being recruited as clearly they're not in the field that we've been talking about this morning, then you need to build that into your workforce planning. You have to have very specific plans in terms of training. If middle managers, if they're not trained in issues like recruiting people from black and ethnic minorities, then what happens is you get—I point people who look like me. That's what happens. I've seen this in the private and the public sector where I've walked into places and said, why have we got so few in an area where there's clearly a workforce out there? In fairness, when HR and managers say, that's a good point, Dave, yeah, and you then put in measures like training, awareness and monitoring, you do get results. I could point you, I won't name them, I could put you a very big private sector company in Glasgow who did a big programme and turned over literally in an area where there are a high level of black and ethnic minorities and they turned their recruitment around as a result of the right programme, but it took, is it where someone just to say, hang on, that doesn't look right? Workforce planning should tell you that from the numbers and the sort of numbers that we've got here today. The 2017 reporting round of the Public Sector of Quality duties that they should be aware of, these duties have existed for a while, predating the Equality Act. There was an impetus to collect data on ethnicity and we've hardly seen any change in 10 years, so I think that they've been aware that there is a problem. I agree that they should happen as part of workforce planning, but we're not seeing much evidence that it does or that it's happening on a level that's high enough for it to be effective. Graham, for a supplementary in relation to this, but I'm just conscious and shard and I can say at the end that it's not the opportunity to say maybe about what is happening on the ground, so maybe after Graham's supplementary you might be able to put some of that on the record and you're the next line of question. I was very struck by the figures in the teaching workforce. If we look at Glasgow City Council, BME population 11.6 per cent, BME teachers 3.4, Edinburgh population 8.3, teachers 1.5, Aberdeen population 8.1, teachers 2.2, so it goes on. You can make the same argument for gender in primary schools are a good example, lots of female teachers, not very many male. Do you think that councils should have specific policies to rectify this so that the teaching population better reflects the actual population? Then we'll give Sharon Dick and Sarah Tennant an opportunity to see what is happening in their areas. Rebecca? Sure. Again, I don't work for local authorities, so I wouldn't, these plans might exist, but I guess they're certainly not well highlighted in their public sector equality duty reports if they are there. I think the Equality Act has resulted in a move to generalize equality. You'll see in a lot of these reports we don't have any problem with recruitment. We've looked and there's no discrimination, there's not a problem. We have generic equality working groups that look at these issues and it's fine, but this more general approach overlooks issues that might pop up for gender or for disability or for race in particular. I think teachers is one area where that's a really clear problem. If BME students aren't seeing BME teachers, it becomes a less appealing or career to pursue. There's less people going into teacher training, which results in lower numbers of teachers. I think there needs to be a much more concerted and focused approach on how we're going to improve the workforce. These figures are taken from a census that was done in 2011, but we would estimate that the BME population has at least doubled in some areas since. In reality, those figures are much more disparate than they seem. I hear a lot of challenges. I'm just wondering, Sharon, you're involved in a lot of the planning across 30 local authority. I wouldn't say, but I know all the detail of the 30 local authority. You might have an example of some things on the ground where this has been looked at perhaps. To respond to Rebecca, the figures are the figures, so there is an issue. I think it would be wrong to sit here and say that we have equality across the board because we don't. We know it's an area that we need to work on. I think that even looking around this room, you can see that it's an issue. We have protected characteristics in the rumbly areas. If we look at the covers, not just black and ethnic minorities, we've got issues with age and disability. One of the issues that local authorities are trying to tackle through, and I agree that equality and mainstream reports should just be part of workforce planning. It shouldn't be something separate that we talk about. We should just be looking at it and integrating it and making sure that we do it. One of the things that we are doing is trying to encourage people to declare. Local authorities have an issue with that as well. That was highlighted in your report as well. There are quite a lot of actual employees who won't declare the fields and what their ethnicity is, et cetera. We need to get that more known. I think that there is data there for recruitment, and some local authorities are starting to look at that. The points that Rebecca has raised—I'm not saying that we've got a lot of them—are getting completed actions, but I think that there's a lot of work that's now starting to look at. Is there bias at short leading? More councils, in fact, through the systems that we use now. You can't tell who the person is, so it's now more at interview stage that we need to work on. How do we make sure that we don't have unconscious bias happening there? There are a number of actions that are being taken around recruitment. There also needs to be—this is something that is difficult, and I'm going to catch up with Rebecca after this, because if she's got ideas, I'm keen to hear them. We know locally that there are issues with recruitment, because there are quite a lot of people who get feedback through their quality managers who work a lot with their local communities. A lot of our black and ethnic minorities don't want to come and work in local government. They don't see it as a career. That's an issue as well. As I said, I'm going to follow up with Rebecca to see how we can tackle some of that. There are a number of paths that are on-going, not just with ethnicity. We're also looking at disability, trying to make our workplaces more accessible. There's more flexibility, I guess, with us moving to a more agile workforce, which a lot of the councils have now. That has helped to break down barriers, and it is making the workforce more flexible to help to support people with different needs in the workplace. Very quickly, on the supported employment piece, there is a lot of work going on on the ground that we have identified through the network to help people with disabilities to get into work, whether that is from youth or other ages. It is difficult for individuals to navigate all the support partners and everything that is out there. Our work is to look at how we can work together and how we can collaborate under these increasingly financial pressure times to optimise the resources that are out there from the different support partners and put ground frameworks in place so that we can see progress for people around the area of supported employment. Graham, do you want to follow-up any more on that? Thank you, convener. I think that earlier on, Sharon Dick really got to the heart of it. I think that you sort of said the discussion matters, because it's about communities and it's about outcomes. Notwithstanding the legal justices that Rebecca has clearly touched on, I think that we would all agree that the local government workforce should reflect the communities that it serves. The diversity of the workforce is not really a good picture, but the question that I had, I think that maybe Sharon has now partly answered it in terms of people not declaring their ethnic background. In the written submission that we have from Rebecca from the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights, there is a huge variation in the data that is available. For example, the ethnic background of almost 60 per cent of East and Bartonshire council employees is unknown, almost 60 per cent, whereas in East Renfrewshire that figure is much lower, just under 14 per cent. Rebecca, I wonder if you can maybe say something about data collection, but also under reporting or not declaring what's actually going on there? I think it's important to distinguish between people who on their forms have ticked that they prefer not to declare and people and just figures that are unknown. I think there might be some instances with those who prefer not to say that there's maybe uncertainty about how the data might be used. I think that's just a matter of emphasizing what the data is for, the protections that are around it. Local authorities figures for people declaring that they prefer not to declare their ethnicity went from 8.6 per cent in 2013 to 10.4 per cent in 2017, so a slight increase, but not large. The much bigger problem is with unknown, which was at 20.8 per cent in 2013 and 23.8 per cent in 2017. I guess, again, I would just say that the public sector equality duties have been in place and there is the requirement to gather this information. People ticking that they prefer not to say is one thing, but there's a much larger issue with why are so many of these figures still unknown. I would caution that there's no evidence to indicate that all the BME people we just don't know about and that's why these figures are low. I think you'll find even in local authorities and other public bodies where declaration rates are high and unknown rates are low, it's a consistent picture which is in line with national figures around underemployment and unemployment. There is a question about why so much is unknown and why has filling in those gaps not been made more of a priority? Has that answered your question? No, that's hateful, but it does feel like there are unresolved issues around data. Rebecca, I don't know if you have a view on the UK race disparity audit that was commissioned in the Scottish Government and elected not to be part of that. Are there other lessons that we can learn, meaning, for example, was that an opportunity miss or do we have enough systems embedded in Scotland? We would have been in favour of participation in the audit, bringing data to light is always a good thing for a variety of reasons that wasn't the path that the Scottish Government shows. I think that their emphasis is maybe more on the equality evidence finder that they have and revising their equality evidence strategy. I think that's more about bringing data that exists to a central place where people can find it and use it and analyse it. I think the problem still is some of that data is just not known and some public bodies are just not making the efforts that need to be made to fill in those gaps and answer those questions. I guess through reading some PSED reports we find that we don't see an issue with discrimination because figures are so low. I guess you question if the figures were a bit higher, if it would be a bit easier to identify that there are those issues. Maybe it's them. Some groups might just rather not know. Thank you. That's helpful. Then thinking about outcomes and why a lot of this matters, so in terms of whether it's the Scottish Government national strategy and outcomes or regional and local strategies, the committee has been looking at city region deals, for example, and the concept of inclusive growth. However, if workforce is not very inclusive, you start to see that there can be a disconnect. That brings me to some of the special roles that Dave Watson, Sharon Dick and others have touched on in terms of planners. I will again declare my interest as a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and I can totally relate to what I know. I'd be surprised by the convener, but I can completely relate to the story that Dave Watson has relayed about the planning school in Glasgow shutting down, which I'm sure there's no reflection on my time there, I hope. In terms of trading standards and building standards and so on, those are jobs that, if people don't turn up for their work, people could die because buildings are not being inspected and environmental health restaurants are not being inspected. It is quite troubling in having, like other colleagues, been a local councillor and worked in local government. It's quite troubling when people are doing workforce reporting or workforce planning that the serious consequences of not having enough people in these roles. I know that there's been a discussion already that it can be done on national co-ordination, but surely that's really, really critical, particularly when we've seen what happens when there are fires in city centres or parts of Lanarkshire where people have died as a result of poor hygiene in butchers and local bakers in the high street. What will it take to get that higher up the political agenda? Sadly, it does tend to be when something hits between the eyes too late in the day. The example that I gave with planning earlier was an example of that. Obviously, building control suddenly gets a focus because of Grenfell. Obviously, we had a big look at environmental health a number of years ago. I have to have the Wisher outbreak and another issue. Sadly, what tends to happen is some big event happens and people go, why did this happen? Everyone goes, we're actually building control, we're carrying 65 vacancies, staff are spending all their time filling in bits of paper to report to the Scottish Government and not doing inspections on the ground. These are things that come up later. In terms of being where we go, we simply can't do workforce planning on the back of crisis. We've essentially got to have that sort of structured thing that I was talking about earlier. There are challenges, as I mentioned to Alexander Stewart's point, about private sector leakage, which is difficult to manage. Even things like getting people career pathways, for example, just to test it this morning on the train over from Ayrshire, I tested to see if I wanted to be a trading standards officer. I'm a bit late in the day for it, but if I wanted to be a trading standards officer, I went through a Google data, I went through the World at Work website and all the rest of it. It was pretty difficult to know where I was going to get the training course, should I do a degree, should I get a trainee job. There were bits there, I'm not saying there was nothing there, but you'd have to be pretty determined. A friend of mine happens to be a training standards officer, and his son is going to be one, but we can't rely, frankly, on family connections. I suspect that very few other people, most young people, have given up the ghosts to being a training standards officer by the time they ploughed through that system. I do think that workforce planning, I would hope, would not just be about producing lots of numbers, it would be about delivering some actions, which might say, well, how can we improve the approaches there? Government can help, because the government's got levers here. You talked about region deals, procurement is another one, obviously, we've argued with the Fair Work Convention about doing that, funding streams, where you can incentivise to use Bob's earlier point. I think there are ways of doing that, but I think my key message would be to start early and don't wait for a crisis to happen. As a final line of questioning, I think that, going back to, I think, Rebecca, I talked about equality impact assessments earlier on. I don't know maybe if Sharon and Sarah can maybe see something about this, but when there's workforce reporting or there's workforce planning or there's decisions that are taking at budget time and there's efficiencies and there's posts that disappear. Are we getting really robust equality impact assessments? Still feels like quite often it's like a box that's been ticked and committees of councils are told, oh yeah, there's been an equality impact assessment, but they don't really put over the detail of that because it's buried in about 500 pages of committee papers. Recently, this committee has been scrutinising the planning bill and Engender said that the equality impact assessment that went with that bill was very poor. That would lead to further constraints in terms of how we plan the built environment and do that in an inclusive way and respect the diversity of our population. Do we have the right skillset around doing good equality impact assessment and how does that feed into informed workforce planning? I can't say across all 32 councils, but I know that equality impact assessments are done for any change, be that through budget changes or a change to terms of condition or a major policy change and that should always be carried out. One issue that I would say for equality impact assessments is that they're not always in the same format. I know that they're looking for the online tool and I think that that will help because I think that it's easier to see the content rather than to try to work out the structure of the report. I think that the equality impact assessment should be focused and should be very clear what it's highlighting and there should be good data in them. The unions always challenge us in the equality impact assessment, so if we don't do one, we soon get asked the question. It is an area that is a focus and we do take appropriate action out of them as well. I think that it really depends on what time in a planning it's done. If it's done at the beginning, you can be proactive, you can build a quality interlay that you're planning and looking at things. If it's done at the end and the result of the EQI is, it'll result in the same outcomes for everybody. On one sense, I would question whether that's true, but in another way, if it's resulting in the same outcomes for everybody, the same problems are going to perpetuate. I guess I would also note you were talking about the skill of people doing the impact assessments. I know the EHRC produces a lot of guidance and I'm sure it can assist in cases like that, but if a BME underrepresented workforce is doing impact assessments on the impact it might have on BME communities, I think there might be the potential for some significant oversights, which is why it's important to have a diverse workforce so that you can be cognisant of diverse issues. I just said that I would totally concur with that, and I agree because the quality impact assessments in one of my discussions is not a live document that needs to continue through the whole process, so it should start, but it should get revisited through the process and also would emphasise and encourage for us all that it needs to be as a group exercise, not just one person sitting in a room doing it as a tick-box exercise. It was just going back to Dave Watson's earlier comments about the impact of austerity on local government. In fact, since 2009, there's been 29,000 job losses. That's enough of a lot of people with a lot of experience of local government who have gone out the door. I wonder if the panel can say something about the people who have left in terms of exit interviews and feedback that those people have given. What is local government learning and what is Scotland learning about those people who have left local government and how is that influencing and informing decisions that we're taking now and into the future? It is a simple fact that we are losing lots of people with lots of experience. It's important to understand that there is a tendency for us to pick either big groups or to pick some of the specific groups that we've mentioned today, including planers, but there are quite a lot of generic jobs in local government, administrative jobs etc, where there can be leakage to other parts of the economy. These are important jobs that are often forgotten, but we've done surveys that show that social workers, planners and architects engineers bemoan the fact that they've got no administrative sport, so they spend all their time filling in bits of paper that used to be done by other people, frankly half the cost as well in other areas. We shouldn't forget the generality. That's why I think attracting people in local government is an interesting point when we look to some of the data and we keep saying the data is poor, but one of the interesting points is if you look at how the 29,000 jobs losses have been managed, they haven't obviously the 60 to 65 year olds were not the natural wastage. There's actually a lot of people under 50 have gone and they haven't gone with pensions because you can't get your pension until you're at least 55, some cases 50, but generally it's 55, so these are not people who are going. Gemini speaking, councils are very reluctant to let 50 to 60 year olds because they're very expensive to let go in pension terms. You have the what's called strain costs, which are quite expensive, so actually what we're finding, you look at the numbers, is lots of people under 50 are voluntarily going just with a basic redundancy package, but they've got other jobs, so they're not going into retirement and pick up the slippers, they're going to work in other sectors, and I think if we looked at some of the reasons why they've decided not to stay in local government in many ways, that would tell you more than somebody of my age who says, frankly, give us a pile of money, I'm going to retire and that's great. I think you want to look at the under 50s who are leaving local government and see what's what's necessarily there. The other consequence for workforce planning, which isn't well understood, is with a huge level of delayering in local government, that's being done to try and save money, but what you tend to find is that departments are now multi-disciplinary departments, so the head of protective services might be an environmental health officer but not a training standards officer, which means training standards in that department is actually quite a junior member of staff and there have been a number of rather sadly well publicised problems that have arisen as a result of this, so what you lose with experience is the collective knowledge, it's not just about skills and training, it's also about knowledge. I know what happened in the past, I know that this works, I know the area, we lose that collective knowledge at our peril and in senior levels we are now talking about quite junior staff who are struggling because they haven't got the experience and to be able to make those big strategic decisions. I guess to emphasise Dave's point but I think local authorities are trying to do a lot of succession planning to alleviate some of the problems, so the points Dave's made are very valid, so we are losing a lot of knowledge, they are trying to identify I guess risk areas where we might be getting a single point of failure for one person doing a job, which is happening because we've had budget cuts, so councils are looking at that to try and make sure that there's better resilience by doing succession planning over a number of years and trying to, where people have indicated they want to retire, this is more for people that are choosing to retire or choosing to say, I will go as a voluntary redundancy in a year's time, we're putting better plans in place now but there is issues with the knowledge and there is issues with multiple roles, a lot of the restructures councils are having to do because of budget limitations means that we're restructuring with the people we have internally and people are now spread thin over maybe multiple roles and that is something that's coming out in exit interview, some people do choose to leave because they want to remain true to, in fact I'm picking on planning because we know what's our topic, it appeals, but they want to be a planner, they don't want to be a planner who manages environmental health and trading standards, so there is people making the type of choices as well. Okay, we're going to have them, we want to work on the next line. Is it a supplementary on this? I've got you for a new line of question, so I've got Jenny Gorough of the MSP first minute, there's plenty of time, we'll take you. Jenny Gorough. Thank you, convener. I'd just like to go back to revisit the early learning and childcare in terms of workforce planning because I've had representation from the Scottish Child Minding Association recently who are pretty concerned about local authorities who don't engage with using childminders to provide the entitlement and they published a report last year which showed that only 15 local authorities across the country were using childminders to deliver on the entitlement and five councillor, one of the ones who aren't using it, so I just wanted to ask more broadly are some councils better than others at working with partners in terms of workforce planning? That might be Sharon Dick again here. I feel that I probably can't comment on that because I don't have enough local knowledge of each local authority but I'm sure that there will be variation across from council to council but I don't probably have a wide enough picture to comment on that, sorry. Does Unison? See, we represent that group work. Obviously, this is a good example of public service reform, big expansion, we need lots of extra people so we sit down and we say that. We've had a look at it and some of the areas that we've looked at and we've said to the Scottish Government, look, the reason, for example, there's a difference in numbers is because we think that the Scottish Government is assuming too many full-time staff going to be working in this area whereas our experience is that a lot of childcare workers are actually part-time workers delivering and they make that choice. It's part of the reason that 97 per cent of them are women and that in itself is a challenge that needs to be broken down. In terms of the three levels of childcare provider, there is the local authority provision which is the one that is largely the best qualified, therefore generally speaking staff there are HNCH and D or to manage a unit, you must be degree qualified now so they pay better. Therefore, it's undoubtedly the case that what happens is that when you need to expand very quickly inevitably people go to the better paid also where they get proper training as well. There is the partnership nurseries, which is the new area there where the Government is talking about paying the living wage in that area. The trouble is that the living wage is just totally inadequate for somebody who should be qualified to HNCH and D level. What male-dominated job would that be an acceptable level of pay and the answer is none. If it was a job aimed at construction or anything they wouldn't even consider the living wage as being an appropriate wage for that level of qualification. Then you've got the basic level which is not getting that element of Government funding and the economic model in that area, not everywhere, is pretty poor. It tends to be 16-17 year olds and then we're encouraged out because you've got to pay the national minimum wage for the higher age group. Surveys have been done which shows that even supervisory staff in those nurseries are not getting the living wage and there's a reluctance to pay the higher age rates even with the national minimum wage. There are some very major problems in that area. There is also an issue. What is the purpose of education and childcare? Is it to help mothers and fathers be able to have better access to the workforce or is it about an intervention with the very youngest people? I'm sorry to go back to Christy, I was an advisor to it but Christy pointed about the interventions that can be made that are crucial to tackling inequality. It's probably a bit of both but I don't think the workforce planning around that has taken into account and I've just given you off the top of my head four or five factors which I don't think have been properly factored into the expansion of early years but if we have proper workforce planning those are the sort of things that we'd be talking about right at the outset of the policy not when we've got to deliver some pretty big numbers next year. I suppose the concern from the Scottish Child Mining Association is that in some local authorities that their services are just not being used at all and I also take your point with regard to the purpose of childcare but certainly from my own experience in terms of childminders they do have a role to play and it's not just about being babysitters it's so much more than that. Shandic, you spoke about restructuring with regard to local authorities and particularly in Fife at the moment we have an issue around about admin staff where the councillor restructuring admin staff in schools which are predominantly female roles and often not very well paid at the same time. In April of this year it was reported that Fife council has five execs on salaries of more than £100,000 with the chief exec reportedly earning more than the First Minister and the Prime Minister. So I just wonder then to what extent you might have a view and Dave Watson this is perhaps another one for you with regard to capping council execs salaries. See Mr Watson scribbling furiously in relation to that it's worth putting on the record Mr Watson before you answer that we'll come to you first I take it that this committee was pretty unanimous that chief executive should not be the additional money to be returning officers at elections either it's perhaps worth putting that on the records there's a bit of a theme emerging from this committee over a period of time Mr Watson. Something we welcomed at the time as well we agree that you know should pay the rate for the job and not start splitting things up into bits and pieces so I think that was absolutely right. I suppose you know and I'm not always fair to chief officers in local government they or they might say that I do have to say that if you look at equivalent responsibilities in terms of size the scale of the workforce the budget size etc that chief officers in local government do not look overpaid it has to be said and I think there's there's there's any doubt about that ideal and have deal dealt with some of the biggest private sector companies in in Scotland and you know I know people who have come into the public sector and said hang on you know I'm having to take a very big pay cut to do a job which is actually bigger than the one I was doing in the private sector so I think I would have to say that I think some of the comparisons are not entirely fair on chief officers having said that there's always a but and my my but in this context is that we are in favour of pay ratios I think there is a very strong argument as the the high pay commission in their reports have highlighted that there should be pay ratios in the workforce and not ones that could be manipulated as they often are in the private sector by outsourcing low pay jobs so therefore you tweak the numbers so I think pay ratios but my answer would be we should do it in the private sector as well as the public sector because I think that's only only fair and fair and reasonable. Any additional comments from others in relation to that? I appreciate the reluctance there may be in answering that question but you've put on the record my score of your concerns in that area so I want to add before I take Mr Gibson in. Just a final question. Public procurement was mentioned earlier and I think in response to line a question from Monica Lennon and public procurement is one of the 24 powers that the British Government is currently proposing to retain following Brexit which will directly impact on the powers of this Parliament. I wonder then how well are local authorities preparing in terms of Brexit with regard to workforce planning? I knew we'd get to Brexit. Rwft on this, it's inevitable that this would be asked at some point. We might give you a bit of a rest Mr Watson, does that when I was wanting to commence on that question? Obviously Brexit is an issue for the workforce. We are looking at it. Each council just now is looking to see how much of their workforce is affected by it. Edinburgh City Council in particular have got the biggest issue at this point in time. We're concerned about it with our diversity, we're concerned that people will choose to not stay in roles, they might become to study in Scotland and maybe choose to go back and we're concerned that people who are actually about longer term will choose to return to their home country as well. The stage that we're at just now is assessing the workforce to see what the level of impact is. Cozzler is pulling together the metrics on that so that we can see an overall impact in Scotland and we're also trying to make sure that we can put the appropriate support in place for our employees who are affected by it so that we can help support them through the process, which is quite cumbersome. It's the form, I can't remember how many pages, but it's not an easy form to complete so we're trying to make sure that across the country that we've got appropriate support in place for people so that we can try and get them citizenship now ahead of Brexit and then we'll obviously do continuing support for what we need to do as it progresses, but as a big concern. Sarah, did you want to come in? With that from the knowledge that I have through the network group that that's going on. Mr Watson, I apologize before you ask this because for time constraints I think we should maybe ask this as well because it is budget scrutiny of course and at Brexit it's an incredibly relevant question to ask. If there's going to be emerging cost pressures in relation to planning for Brexit and the fallout from Brexit, then the budget scrutiny session of course. It's only fair to sit this within the context of the UK Government talking about not language, I would ever use a Brexit dividend and all this additional cash that there's going to be. Personally I don't see what's going to come from myself but that's not the job of this committee to analyse that. It is the job of this committee to look at additional cross pressures on local authorities and if those are emerging because of Brexit and we're looking at budget scrutiny we have to look at where the finance to support that comes from so that might be helpful in any response that you give as well Mr Watson. I will remember the day after the referendum waking up and going to my office and said we need to find out how many EU nationals there are in Scotland working in the public sector and even how many were unison members and of course you know there was no data for the reasons that have been indicated self declaration even in areas where we have relatively good workforce data like the NHS. It was self declaration and we just had a huge number of don't declare. I think we do have to ask questions of why people of particular ethnic backgrounds don't declare their ethnicity not on the interviews but when they get to work they're still not filling them in in terms of annual surveys etc so I'm a bit uncomfortable and slightly worried about that. I think the pressures we've done quite a lot of work particularly in the social care sector. We've worked with the Scottish Government project on interviewing. We've got about 6,000 unison members in Scotland who are EU nationals. My team has been out doing face-to-face and on telephone interviews. A part of a project of the Scottish Government is gradually releasing some of the information about what they feel about it and you know much of it you expect but the sense of feeling of being let down and not wanted in Scotland you know not just in Scotland and the UK generally but obviously we're interviewing Scottish members and this sense of almost rejection and we know in the care sector that this is adding to the turnover issues which have cost and clearly workforce planning so any workforce planning has to include Brexit in there. Let's all remember however that we have problems in the care sector before Brexit. Brexit has just added to those particular problems. I think the procurement point that Jenny Grooth made is a very fair one. A lot of people are focused in the debate about powers on new stuff coming from the EU but one of the problems with the UK Government's approach to this is that the headings actually don't just include powers coming from the EU, they include powers that we already have in Scotland and procurement is the one that worries me more than anything else that essentially they have the powers now to start laying down. We have a separate legislation in Scotland, we have separate regulations in Scotland in relation to procurement. Now they don't include everything I asked for in you know Scottish Government and my view didn't go anywhere near far enough with some key areas over procurement but they are still more progressive and more interventionist than you will get in most other parts of the UK so I think they are better and I am very concerned. The last thing on earth I want is a UK Government that doesn't understand Scotland, doesn't understand our sectors and the tighter areas they're starting to put one size fits all policies and regulations in place in relation to procurement so I think that's a very big worry for us because procurement is one of the areas particularly in social care when 60 per cent is essentially outsourced already where we need to make interventions to get that right so I would hope that the workforce planning would take Brexit into account in a big way. Okay any other comments on that? Okay Jenny Gawr has went to follow up on that. Thank you. Okay very patient Mr Gibson, Kenneth Gibson. He was very much convener loads of things I want to ask about, I mean really hasn't been a fascinating discussion. One thing that hasn't really come up yet convener so far as the Scottish Government's policy of no compulsory redundancies I'm just wondering how that's impacted on workforce planning. It's a good question, I mean inevitably it means that policy of no compulsory redundancies of course largely doesn't apply in local governments so that's the first thing to make the point that we have had compulsory redundancies in local government. Not many in fairness and there's always a debate about when a redundancy is compulsory or voluntary or whether it's Hobson's choice in some cases. What a lot of authorities do is that you know if you've made a change you've made a restructuring try and save money then what you end up is with some spare people and you put them in a pool and you try and reallocate you do retraining and you spend some time doing that. Generally speaking that's a form of workforce planning and I think fairness local authorities have sadly become very experienced in doing that and do it generally fairly well so that we do that and it's not just the local government in the public sector more broadly. So we have avoided despite losing 29,000 staff we have avoided very significant numbers of compulsory redundancies and we haven't been able to reaccommodate through retraining through upskilling in many cases that's that's that's the workforce. Yeah an HR director might well say to you oh well that's an additional challenge you know if you were in another industry you just basically sack everybody and it's nice and easy in local government and in and in most of the public sector it requires a degree of challenge so I think unions and HR people in the public sector are probably better at doing this than my experience of the private sector because we have constraints and there's also cost factors you know I mean it's expensive to let people go and so therefore you don't want to do it unless you absolutely have to so I think we've developed some pretty good techniques it's not perfect but I think that that's an element of workforce planning we probably do rather well. How does it impact on efficiency though for example in one department you've got a surge of people who want voluntary redundancies and then there might be an impact in morale if those who want those redundancies are not able to get them and then you've got other departments where frankly the local authority would like to be able to reduce the head count but people maybe aren't too keen to leave. It is a problem if you offer up voluntary redundancy and there are lots of people want to go and people get then that's pretty demoralising because you're essentially putting it out there that you want to go. I'd have to say that was probably more an issue in you know post austerity in the early years it's less of an issue today to be honest Kenny I think the I would say to you that and equally it tends to be the case you can always have the exception where there'll be clusters but you know it's it's not a massive problem there will be problems in individual authorities at different times. I'd also be happy to I think we've had a tendency for local authorities to consume their own smoke in some of these areas and I think one of the one worker approach might enable us to do a little bit of of cross work there. I was doing a meeting the day with social care workers and was impressed by the number of former steel workers and in manufacturing industry folk who are now men of you know my sort of age who are working in in the in the social care sector and you know efforts to retrain those etc to get them into those areas can work but you've got to make those jobs attractive and you've really got to start doing some very early work with these people to say look you know have you thought about retraining this isn't a more attractive career than you might think it is and do that sort of work it's not it is a challenge but I don't think it's a massive one and not one that frankly should be beyond us to manage in HR and trade unions together. You know on the early years I was quite interested in the questions that were asked by Jenny there and your responses in North Ayrshire they're rolling out a pilot of 1140 hours but in the three towns but what they're only doing is they're only rolling it out to local authority nurseries so what that basically means is that you know partnership nurseries are losing staff and indeed you know parents hand over fist who are all trying to enroll in the in the council nurseries because obviously they can get full time free what that's meaning is it's impacting on the viability of other partner nurseries certainly so how do we actually if that if councils are going to be doing that how does that help workforce planning when we're trying to get possibly somewhere between 12 and 20,000 additional staff in within the next three years I don't think that I mean I don't know that particular example I think yeah if we want to get an argument about where the best type of childcare is there's plenty of international studies which says public service delivery for child education childcare is the gold standard and it's where we ought to be going right well at the moment we need both because I mean there are funding issues and other reasons that you know that to do that so when we have both and that's certainly true in childcare certainly true in social care my view is the workforce planning needs to encompass right we talk about public service workforce planning not public sector workforce planning but obviously that is a challenge you know that when you've got 14,000 care providers a lot them very small their capacity to engage in that sort of dialogue but you know fairness to them I would say we're not having that and social care there's a bit of that around the ijb's when you've got some of the providers around the table I think probably not in the childcare sector and I think there's a case for essentially a sectoral bargaining approach which you recommended by the fair work convention which would be a public service one and that would get at least some of these organisations around the table so they could make the points that are obviously making to you and that could be built into into workforce planning we're not simply saying well exclude everybody other than the public sector we represent you know private and voluntary sector care providers as well and our view is that you have to bring all of these around the table and have a public service solution as in fact again the christie commission recommended over five years ago okay in your submission you've suggested looking to think well first of all I would say a lot all this talk about why do people not declare well maybe people don't want to be defined according to their ethnicity and I'm saying that someone who is of Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian, Jewish, East European and South Indian ancestry so many people are a mixture and maybe don't think they should be defined within one particular box or another but what you have said and your response is that there should be you should set public BME employment targets to which organisations are held to account so I'm just wondering how that would be done practically given the fact that you know that the proportion of BME people across Scotland varies enormously so would the quota if you want to call it that be set according to the population within a local authority would it be set within a department within a council for example you know you've looked at east and batons of 4.2 percent with 4.2 percent of planners 4.2 percent you know of people who work in the museums department 14.2 4.2 percent people working cleansing have to be BMA or would it be generally and of course Graham raised the issue of teachers but of course it's individual schools that recruit teachers not local authorities per se so how would local how would a school it would be the same would it be by the English department would have to have a proportion the mass department how would this be delivered in practical terms that's a great question I think across different jobs and in individual schools there will be variation which is why I guess if we're talking about targets it would probably be a council target a local authority target maybe something that's disaggregated into some of the the bigger kind of job areas within that but I think the place to do it if you're wondering is within those kind of public sector equality duty reports um you know any adjust bodies do them councils do them education authorities do them large and small non-departmental public bodies do them um so they're probably the ones who are best placed to understand what their workforce looks like what a reasonable target would be what measures they would have to take to reach there um I think those reports would represent a good place to do that um but yeah setting you know if it's a four percent BME figure across the country obviously that differs from you know Glasgow to Orkney so you know one size won't fit all but I think um those bodies which are listed under the public sector equality duties would you know we would welcome and encourage any target setting in those individual and just to follow that up I mean obviously would this percentage be a target would it be a minimum because in some areas of the public sector not local government for example medicine you know it's well exceeded this target um so how would that be um and one other just one other thing um I do have concerns that the in terms of the the post advertiser interviewed you talked about 17.7 percent of BME applicants were successful and 31.3 percent of white british scotish but yet 51 percent of other white shot listed applicants so the gap between white british and other white is higher at 19.7 percent than between white scotish and british and BME at 13.6 percent so do you think there should be a balance overall not just in terms of BME but also white scotish british relative to other white people? I'm not the individual who did that particular bit of research but from what I understand I think that may have been reflective of the small numbers represented in the white but not British or Scottish numbers that might have resulted in that skewing a bit um because it was done through a freedom of information request so it was limited by the information we were able to get and the bodies who responded to that so I'm not and that is just local authority figures so I'm not certain that would be a problem across all sort of employers but I'd be happy to look into that a bit more for you um just a bit about targets should it be a target or should it be a minimum there should be a target should be a minimum I think you know I don't think legally we can set minimums and quotas I think targets are what we're able to do at the minute um I think making them public and you know highlighting them in these reports is a good way to increase accountability and also we were talking a bit about problems with um BME groups maybe not wanting to go into local authority jobs I think you know that's a bit to do with visibility that's a lot to do with career advice and I think it's also somewhat to do with the equalities rhetoric that are the lack of equalities rhetoric that might be surrounding some public body so I think the more we can emphasise that there is a desire to reach parity the better it'll be whether that is through group setting their own targets or group setting their own minimums um as long as it is done in a a public way that involves the communities themselves I think that's positive has that answered your question sorry I think so yeah can I just ask one of the of of of Sarah and Sharon then just you can't do it and then just give people a time check because I'm kind of using our delimitation right now for after the session to tell MSPs to ask some more questions we'll be finishing around 10 minutes time so Alexander Stewart's got a final question we'd like to ask him that that will wrap up the session it's just it's about an issue that Dave Watson's talked a lot about but I'm quite interested in hearing Sarah and Sharon's perspective and that's about how we actually bridge this gap of the 65,000 health and care workers by 2022 that we need now we know there's already a chronic shortage we know that there's high turnover and I'm just wondering Sarah how can we how do we interact young people I mean I've actually participated into some kind of a princess trust kind of courses where they've worked to look specifically people on the edges of the employment market to try and get them in and they've actually been very successful I'm just wondering how we how we kind of scale up how do we get younger people interested in this crucial area of the public sector and workforce planning and I think that's an area through the network that we're looking at in terms of increasing employer presence in schools and how can we can actually attract them from quite an early age so then there was an example I think recently with Fife council who had been doing some foundation apprenticeships and been working very closely with employers and that one individual I think that was in the news had secured a role so I think it's about getting in earlier and looking at how we do that and we increase our presence and build our relationships so maybe taking people from school to visit the care homes to actually see what's like on the front line that kind of thing yeah I mean there's ways that actually North Lanarkshire we are doing that through our supported employment where we're offering that off the back of placements but yeah definitely and bringing people into schools and looking at what we can do within the health and safety and what about yourself shan particularly gender imbalance I mean obviously there's actually you know as as Dave said just isn't it the the women and the workforce available in Brexit's going to reduce that significantly so what can we do to get more males for example interested in the care sector I think one of the areas as well it's about talking about the career pathway with people because just now um well I'm saying just now historically I don't think we've been very good at signposting the pathway for people and the possibilities that it could open up and that's something that local authorities are working on to actually show that there can be a career in health and social care and how that you know we could look for something so that it's attractive for people coming out of school but also attractive for people retraining and they see that you know the opportunities and also the for some people who are maybe retraining it's maybe someone who's taking a redundancy at some point in life and is looking to retraining in another area it's about the flexibility you can get in that role as well because it's not a typically a nine to five role so sometimes that works for people as well who maybe want to have a different approach to life so that's the things that we need to make people aware of and make it more attractive to people for the career and the flexibility and give to your lifestyle as well okay thanks very much okay Alexander Stewart thank you can you know we've touched on so many points this morning it's really been very informative and very interesting but we touched on manage and decline we touched on the pressures that the councils are facing we know that you're being asked to do more with less but what are the pressures that the Scottish Government and their prioritising from here from this parliament when they talk about ensuring that affordable housing becomes the priority or the the care sector becomes the priority we've also discussed earlier with with general gurus about the the involvement in in the child sector and also empowering communities so you are being given that added pressure and you've been given that added intensity for you to deliver on what is expected from the Scottish Government but you're not necessarily been giving the resources and the finances and funds to make that happen and how how that impacts on workforce planning would be very useful to hear from you all. I think if we had the answer to that we would you know we'd be set up on consultancy day we've seen that early and we wouldn't be what do you know I think if we'd the answer to that you know we would just give you a bit of paper and go right like there's the way to sort it what you've outlined there is very real so that is day to day what it is like working at council right there's a huge number of priorities when you look every one of them is the right thing to do there is a lot happening with community empowerment that does take a different skill set as well a lot of councils are looking at how we train employees more to engage with the workforce sorry the community's better how we you know we look at it from their point of view so we're not just doing a policy because that's the way we do it it's more about what the community needs and how the customer if I use the example of even job names so health and social care integration it doesn't help one of our residents if someone goes in from the local authority that's called a support worker and then the NHS person comes in and they're called a care worker it just can confuse people especially if they've got dementia or something so we we need to be better at working and things and think from the customer perspective I think how we deal with that as we try to you know we set out look at the priorities and try and balance our resource best we can I think where the challenges come with us is it's fine with the big priority items what it sits behind that is all the statutory requirements audit requirements as a local authority and an employer we want to be we're seen as best practice for a lot of things there is the challenges of equality there's all these different aspects that we're trying to deliver on I think the difficulty then is you can't be gold standard for everything and that's where local authorities I feel are at this point in time they are trying to deliver right what can be gold standard and what maybe needs to drop to silver or bronze and that's difficult some of these decisions are very difficult and it can be difficult messages to to have and talk but I think how can use help I think it's just about we all need to have try and have the best agreed approach to have the best outcome for our reasons and that can be difficult because there's always different views comments on that I did what I said I mean let me I think the Scottish Government is perfectly entitled to set broad priorities and largely we would agree that the right ones like childcare like because we know what a difference education and childcare at the early stage not just childmind education interventions at before birth and shortly afterwards has on inequality it's massive and therefore I think that's the right priority we priority to put money into social care is right because the demographics are undeniable and the cost of having people's you know delayed discharges in in our NHS hospital is enormous and clearly crazy when we did a christi commission there were two chunks of money that we looked at one was prisons and the other was acute hospitals where you could actually free up resources if you did things differently politically hugely difficult to do for you lot I entirely closing hospitals and prisons is not is not an easy political sell on the doorstep I accept that but nonetheless from a public policy point of view I'd have to tell you that's where that's where the money is so we agree with the priorities obviously we'd argue the funding hasn't always followed those priorities we made the argument this year in local government you needed two and a half percent for those priorities just to stand still before we talked about the three percent for inflation when we actually we ended up getting one half percent for inflation so those are the sorts of funding arrangements there I think there's um there's the the point that was being made earlier about about leadership's important there these are different skills if I sound irritated by I'm not picking on cube queen market university but frankly closing down essentially the sort of courses where the next generation of leaders are going to come from is very irritating when we need to move to a more collaborative model to pick up the points that Sharon's making around community these different skills this is not about commander control this is about getting people to work together in different ways that requires very different leadership skills and my last point would be preventative spending everyone agrees your committee every committee in the parliament says preventative spending is the way forward let me tell you that in local government every single survey we have done of staff they say the one thing they're abandoning is preventative work if you ask if our environmental health officers they don't do education in in the kitchens anymore talk about training standards officers they don't sit in the fact you're talking about the way you can you can make those changes it's that type of work which is easy and what happens is you just do the enforcement you just do the by statutory basics and you abandon that so we're serious about preventative spending we need to build in some resource to do that as well as you identified by losing the resource by losing the staff numbers you're then judged by the the care commissioner or at Scotland on how you perform as a local authority and you're then judged across the the benchmarking review to see which one is the best and how they manage that process and that makes even more difficult for you to then square that circle to ensure that you are providing the services that people require at the time they need them you just tick boxes to be to be blunt building control that you your committee looked at yeah we made the point on our survey building control officers said they spend two days a week filling in the scottish government forms you know for a whole monitoring arrangement which was frankly over the top and you know i think you know government and others need to look at and the regulations and issue in social care etc you know about just looking focusing on what we need to do to free up staff to go out there and do the job they were paid to do okay we have that good shift i think this morning i should say just before i do the kind of formal thanks that this was a budget scrutiny evidence session i think we understand me under under the theme of workforce planning but just to remind witnesses it is about budget scrutiny yes i said during my line of questioning there will be debate around the level the input into the local government settlement when the budget appears later this year and the final part of the process early next year that will happen with the political domain it always does we have to do our best to get beneath those numbers not just whether those numbers are sufficient but how the money is used at a local level and we want to do that in relation to workforce planning that is not an easy task because otherwise we're only measuring inputs if we only go to that raw data we want to measure outcomes at a local authority level so we're lurching it a little bit around in the dark so if you you go back home and you go actually here's a really good thing that could be tracked and looked at in terms of outcomes at a local authority level please give us that information that would be very very helpful be very helpful to get information of where you know a substantial input perhaps gives a poor outcome or a reduced input gives a a better outcome so we can get to track where that money's been best used within the public sector but that's with its shirking obvious challenges there's going to be financially at a local authority level so that's my appeal to the witnesses thank you for what is approaching two hours of evidence which i think is above and beyond the call of duty for all four of you so that said we are now finished this evidence session and we move into private session at agenda item two thank you everyone