 Welcome to the 20th meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Today, we continue your evidence-taking in the Scottish Government's public service reform programme and we hear from, with names, et cetera, hopefully pronounced correctly. We have had some debate at the end of the table. Malcolm Burr to the Executive of Cymaline and Aileen Shaw, Robert Emmett, Executive Director of Corporate Services at Dundee City Council and Ian Tuff, Head of Corporate Support at East Ayrshire Council. I welcome you all to this meeting. I tend to allow up to around 75 minutes of the session. If witnesses would like to be brought into the discussion at any point, please indicate to clerks and I can then call you. We have your written submissions, so we will move straight to questions. I think that the first question will be to Mr Burr. So let's just start at the beginning, I suppose, Mr Burr. I mean one of the things we have been asking about is sustainable services. Of course, as with the COSR submission, the phrase was used, sphere and sustainable funding. What does sphere and sustainable funding mean to you? Bearing in mind, one of the comments that I noticed in your report, which is that your local authority has had the biggest reduction consistently in revenue funding over the past few years, so I wonder if you can talk us through that. Yes, chair. I'm happy to do so and thank you for the invitation to the committee. The Corle has indeed seen the largest prorata funding reduction in its revenue budgets over the last 10 years, some 15 per cent, and that is all set out in the spice analysis of the Scottish budgets each year. That's a combination of the funding formula and other factors, but for a small council it means our sustainability in terms of performing our statutory duties. Showing community leadership, being an effective advocate for our area, is inevitably questionable in future. I think that we were all struck in the Highlands and Islands, particularly by Highland Council's chief finance officer's statement at his council's budget meetings in February that Highland Council was no longer sustainable in the medium term. That was a striking statement and it was there in black and white. Many of us, I think, in local government at the moment, could construct a similar argument. You will have seen, chair, from our submission that a lot of our work, a lot of our answer to that, as well as the more traditional means of using resource more effectively and no doubt will come on to those, is invested in public service reform, particularly single public authority. That, thankfully, is on the move again, but without that I think that there is a real risk in areas like mine and whether there are multiple organisations each facing significant funding reductions that we singly become less and less effective and then the capacity for community leadership and delivery is lost. Very soon, I think, the services that we provide will not be of the same level or standard as we would like. Okay, so what is fair and sustainable funding? Fair and sustainable funding for us is needs-based funding and that brings me in our case to the islands act, I am sorry to make it a more specific point, but the island Scotland act provides that an island community's impact assessment be made by law for any change to policy, strategy or service that that in our view includes Scottish budgets, so there is that formal side to it. To answer your question, we need a gradual restoration of funding levels, not in excess of what was there before, but to mitigate some of those reductions. We also, I think that, like most councils, seek multiyear clarity. It is very difficult, I think that we have to be honest, it is very difficult to undertake strategic planning in an atmosphere of one-year budgets where you are waiting for the verdict as it were every Christmas as to what the allocation will be and I think that that impacts the smaller councils particularly. Sustainable funding in today's straightened times and where we recognise the pressures on Scottish government too, means sustainable funding means multiyear, at least two to three-year indications because otherwise we cannot plan effectively. Fair funding means looking at the needs of areas and what is required to run a reasonable level of services in those areas. Part of that assessment has to be that other options that are available to larger authorities such as outsourcing of services, such as sharing services across boundaries are simply not available to islands councils. There is no market in the western aisles to undertake refuse collection or waste disposal or leisure services. Likewise, I cannot close a leisure centre and hope that the private sector will pick that up or that customers can travel on a bus to another part of it. If I close a leisure centre, that entire island's leisure facility is gone. There are four islands, Lewis, Harris, US and Barra. If one of them goes, that service is taken away for the whole island, so that genuinely needs to be factored into account. I am not a fan of special pleading except where there is evidence to justify it, but it needs to be more nuanced than it is. Sorry for the long answer. No, I think that that was a very comprehensive answer. I mean that you have touched on a couple of things that you have mentioned in your submission. For example, you have talked about the need to have one single authority. That is a significant point. You have also talked about the difference between yourselves and others in terms of being able to outsource. That is also significant. Depopulation, I imagine, has paid some part in terms of the reduction in funding. No-one ever seems to want to say how much I have to say what Fiernsicillol funding is in terms of £1,000 and £1,000. Ross actually raised that last week. The Scottish Government itself does not have multi-year funding, so it is kind of difficult for it to have multi-year funding for those who depend on it when it itself is not in that position. Is that not a fair comment? I think that that is a very clear difficulty chair, but we must rise above those difficulties and at least set indicative budgets for a longer period than we currently do. We all recognise circumstances and unexpected events, but the share of the Scottish budget that local government attracts has diminished significantly in recent years. I am the longest chief executive in Scotland now. When I was appointed a way back in 2005, it was roughly a third local government, a third NHS and a third Scottish Government and its business. That is now hugely skewed towards NHS. I make no comment on that. Those are political choices, but there is a consequence of that. I think that a greater balance needs to be restored if we truly recognise the importance of local government services that are fundamental and we need to use the words new deal because that is on the cards, but we need a number of things. There are lots of them. We can talk about fiscal empowerment as one, but in the short term we need greater clarity. I respect that clarity is not there for the Scottish Government either, but we must set indicative budgets or proper planning is impossible. We will be down to single-year solutions, which means either drastic reductions or redundancies among staff very soon. That is what Highland was saying. I endorse that. I suggest that, even with one year funding, medium to long-term planning is still extremely important. Do you not agree with that? Absolutely. If you look back, in my experience, we have been making savings most of my career, particularly since 2008. We have been under financial pressure, so it has been important that we plan ahead. It has become harder to do things and it takes more time to do things. The types of changes that we are looking at now are taking longer to do. We have to be planning ahead and looking at what is happening and what is happening with our cost base. Some of our costs are easy to project going forward. You will be aware that inflation in the past period has made a substantial impact on the nature of planning, so the impact of the costs on things such as PFI contracts, energy and staffing in particular have increased the level of uncertainty that we have. We are looking forward to our projections that we considered when we set the budget in February, where Dundee would have to save almost £30 million over the next few years, based on the best information that is available to us. We have to plan, so we are in a position to set a budget when we come through to next year. Any proposals that we are taking forward, we have to make sure that we are consulting on and we are assessing the impact of them in advance. That planning is important, though that planning might change, so it is based on a set of assumptions. The more certainty that councils have about what the thinking is—we see some of the thinking from the UK Government but not all of it—and what the thinking is within the Scottish Government, so the medium-term financial plan gives us a steer on that, as to what we might expect and what plans we might put in place to address that. One of the things that you are obviously implementing, as everyone else says, to a degree is digitalisation. What kind of time period are you hoping to deliver digitalisation over, in terms of what you are hoping to deliver? I am just wondering if you are working with other local authorities about this, because when I read reports about local authorities and their work on digitalisation, it seems that everyone is beavering away. I am not sure what kind of level of cross-local authority working there is. For example, we could have similar types of systems being implemented, possibly economies of scale, etc. I am just wondering where you are on that. I think that it is a multi-year programme. As we move towards those things, it is going to take time to do so. We are doing a piece of work with a neighbouring authority looking at how we can, what we might be able to do in terms of sharing services. Can we share a system? Can we share a team? Does that help us with resilience? Does that save us any money? Does that make us more efficient in the process that we are doing? We have been on a journey, as I said, over the past 10 plus years about how we can make things more efficient. That is the next area to look at. My own view is that we have a lot of public bodies in Scotland who are repeating things, who have their own payroll systems, their own ledgers, their own directors of finance, dare I say it. What can we do to streamline that process and make that process more digital? I think that there is space. We could be in there because the digital office is trying to do some work around that. It is hard to synchronise big public authorities into the same system. If we are looking at a fight across the water, who have a big ERP system that they are invested in, synchronising that with what we are doing would be quite a big plan to do it and have a long-term challenge. Would the providers then be looking to charge you double for moving into that space? There are challenges around that, but that is the direction that we are going in. We are looking at tests of change. Can we work collaboratively? Can we focus on where we are with back office services? The only thing that I would add to that is that digitalisation is only part of the service. If I look at all of our management costs, there are about 1 per cent of the business, most of our costs of delivering services are tied up in front-line staff and what they are doing on the front-line. Digitalisation is part of the agenda that will continue to improve efficiency. Along with other things it will help to bridge some of the gaps that we have in terms of trying to reduce resources and streamline things. Yes, staff is always going to be a major component, if not the major component in all local parties, no matter how digitalised you become. I am just wondering if you see digitalisation as an on-going thing, or is there a goal at the end of that, where you feel as if you are able to reach optimum service delivery? I think that it will be ongoing. I think that how technologies evolve, how virtual meetings become a thing, and how people can do business and what people can do. I think that we are still on a journey. We are some way off technology replacing people in things such as care services. However, if you think about some of the developments in AI that we have seen in the past few months, how do we capture and take advantage of those? I suppose that we do not know what is around the corner that we are going to be able to make use of to do what we do better. If you think that, in the education space, the opportunities and the information that are technologies are available have surely got opportunities to think about how we are delivering services and how we can deliver services differently, particularly in remote areas where access to services is a challenge. Mr Tuff, you have also got quite a lot of detail in terms of your digitalisation strategy. You are hoping to invest in digitalisation but to be able to recoup that. Ultimately, have you got any kind of time period over which you think that you will be able to recoup the cost of digitalisation or is it always going to be something where you are never quite able to manage that? Our digital strategy is a five-year strategy but that will not be the end of it. That five-year period is a longer journey for us. Recouping the investment is something that we have promoted and set aside. It is also within the papers that we have for our strategic plan that we set last year and our budget that goes along with that, the medium-term financial strategy. We have a £3 million investment fund, so that is really to incentivise some of that return on investment, so to have money up front that services can then use to get that return on investment. That is very deliberate to address the point that you make about just how sustainable some of that innovation can be. We are really encouraged by having our digital strategy, which builds on really by necessity what we had to do through the worst of the pandemic, moving so much of our transactional work online, helping communities still to engage and that was really successful for us and we are wanting to build on that. It was by necessity but it is put in place now the foundations for what we think is an improvement journey for us that we will not get to in five years but we will certainly make inroads towards where we want to get to. One of the things that you have said in your submission is that monthly online transactions have increased from 1,500 pre-pandemic to over 25,000 monthly, reducing paper handling, improving processing times and transforming service delivery. How does that work for people who are not digitally included? Alongside that, and again it is a theme within the digital strategy, it is about inclusivity and making sure that those who are furthest away from having that access, there are other ways for them to do that. We have examples of providing equipment to communities, in schools, to families. We have a digital access network that is really about identifying where there are gaps and addressing them. While we want to shift as much of that because there are efficiencies, we also recognise that not all parts of our communities will be able to embrace that just as much as other parts. It is very much a theme of the digital strategy that we want to embrace those efficiencies but we also want to make sure that we do not leave anyone behind. One of the things that caught my eye in your submission, Mr Tuff, was the fact that you have transferred 58 assets to community ownership and operation. Obviously, we rationalisation of estates is an important part of the form agenda. I am just wondering how successful those have been if some of them had to hand them back or are they all managing to work effectively, albeit that one or two will need some continued support from the local authority. How is that actually working? Is it something that you believe that other local authorities could learn from in terms of estates model? That has been a success for us and that is over a period of 10 years. I think that we are up to low 60s and 61s. I think that it is now asset transfers. We have had some that have been more challenging than others but we have also had some fantastic successes. We have a former high school in Kilmarnock and Kilmarnock Academy is now part of a performing arts centre stage who have a fantastic reputation. They have been able to draw down resources that the council could not do to invest in that facility. There are a range of examples from very small cat transfers right through to the very large ones such as the centre stage at Kilmarnock Academy. They have been fantastically impressive. They are very much owned by the communities. It is their facility and they run them. We provide some support at the start to get them up and running but we have yet to have any that have returned the asset to us but we know that there are still more to come as well. That journey of 10 years on the asset transfers was very much part of our transformation strategy work as well prior to that. That was from 2012-13 right through to 2021. The service that we created to deliver the cat transfer, our vibrant community service, has just celebrated its 10th anniversary as well. The cat transfers is one part of their success but there are many more. There is a different model of supporting our communities and that has been a bigger success for us. One of the things that I have talked about for many years is about shared best practice with local authorities. Is that something that other local authorities should be looking at in terms of how they stay assure that it does this? In what do you feel that you can lead from other local authorities in terms of how they deliver services, for example? On your first point, convener, we know and we have had approaches from other councils because we have been out promoting what we do. The chief officers, the team that has been delivering our vibrant communities, we just won a municipal journal award last week as well. We have a bit of a national platform for our vibrant community service and we have had approaches from others to see how we do. We are also keen to look at what is good practice in other areas that we are working in to see what else is happening. One of the areas that we are a priority for is ties on a wee bit with the digital that you mentioned, just how we manage data and more of a strategic approach to how we manage data. We are actively looking to see what is a benchmark, a good practice example out there of that. We are spreading that net wide. It is not just Scottish authorities that we are looking at but elsewhere. The other part, going back to our transformation strategy, we had some cultural change work through. We developed what we call face principles, and that, again, was very much based on the best practice that we found in other parts of the country. We are very open to seeing what else is out there, but we are also proud of some of the stuff that we have taken forward ourselves. Thank you. Looking at Dundee's submissions, one of the questions that was asked was about the organisation's plans to seek and deliver on the Scottish Government's three strategic priorities, which were set out. What I have noticed in Dundee's response is that you have said that you are reducing child poverty and inequalities in incomes education, but you have not really expanded on that to really see how you are actually going to deliver on that. It is just really a line. I am just wondering if you can expand on that a bit for us, please. I am happy to share with the committee the details of the city plan, which goes into more detail on what we are doing, but a lot of the focus of the city's work is around preventative and investment in early years. To a certain extent, that reflects, in my mind, the priorities of the Government, which have been around investing in early years and giving people the best start. That also comes through investment in staffing, which is where you see that the growth in staffing across the council has been through the Children and Families Service and in teaching over recent years, whereas the areas where efficiencies and reductions have been made have been across the other services. One of the challenges for us as we go forward is that that is such a priority for us. There is a place for digital in the classroom, but a lot of the work that is needed within schools to give people the best start is around resources in the classroom and in the early years setting. That has been a priority for us. That also comes through when we are setting our budget and we are looking at the areas that we are focusing on and that we are protecting as a council. I do not know if that helps, convener, but I am not the expert on early years. You will appreciate it. We are doing a piece of work across the council at the moment, which is looking at positive destinations and how we can collaborate with our partners to give people the best start. So, when they leave school, where are they ending up? What opportunities do they have? And what are the things that are influencing whether or not they have a positive outcome and whether or not they have a less successful outcome? That comes back to attendance at school and support in school. If you think about where you want to end up, how far back do you go in the process to make sure that people have the best start going forward? One of the things that comes out of that is that there are a number of bodies involved in that. So, again, we have different agencies working around the table, not necessarily or with the same objectives going forward. That is why our public sector landscape is quite complex, I think, is what I would say in that. The last thing, I suppose, reflects a combination of pressures and circumstances. So, we are seeing in the last year—this year, in fact—our biggest financial pressure is from placements for children and making sure that we find the best way to look after people who have got challenging and complex circumstances. Individual placements can be very expensive and we need to find the ways to make sure that we prevent those coming to fruition and we actually find the best outcomes, again, for children in our community. So, that can be a very expensive area for the council in terms of resources. What we are working on at the moment is how we can best look after people in our local community, which is where they are best served. That is also often the most efficient way. A lot of those things link in, convener, so that also takes us back to community wealth and how we are looking after and retaining and managing resources in our own communities rather than at a distance from us. Apologies, I have gone over a lot of ground there. No, not at all, actually. I am just going to ask you one more thing, then I will move on to Mr Burr and then open out to the rest of the session. That is just about the 12 questions that we asked. I was intrigued to note—I am going to be asking Mr Burr about this in a minute—the three of the questions and the responses. The response was not applicable, so I will ask you about that and the reason for that in a minute, Mr Burr. In terms of Dundee submission, you did not respond to questions 10 and 11, and 10 was one of the ones that Mr Burr did not respond to. Question 10 was, what level of support and guidance has your organisation been given by the Scottish Government to deliver the efficiencies and plans that are necessary for your organisation and how adequate has that been? Mr Turf did respond to that. I am just wondering why Dundee did not respond to that. What is your view of that? Do you feel that you are not getting the guidance and support on that? No, not at all. I suppose that, as local governments, a tear of government with responsibility for discharging its duties. I think that we try through COSLA and our own politicians to work closely with the Government on implementing and responding to consultations on policy direction. If I go back to your previous question, I suppose that I would say that what the council is aspiring to do is very closely aligned to what the Government is aspiring to do. There is a local aspect to that in terms of what is right for Dundee. In my experience, when we have needed guidance and support on particular aspects, the Government has been there to provide it and to engage with it. However, as an autonomous local authority, it is for us to make decisions within the parameters that we have given about how we deliver services. Thank you for that. In terms of question 9, the question is how, if at all, is your organisation working collaboratively with other public sector organisations to produce joint service reform plans for the public body landscape and use of resources for submission to the Scottish Government late this year? The reason that I was surprised about the not applicable is that you talk about the Single Islands partnership and I would have thought that you would be working with the other public bodies on the island, for example NHS, etc. I am sure that you do work closely with that, so I am just wondering if you can give us a wee response to those questions now. Yes, convener, I am happy to do that. I genuinely think that that has caught up in our rather answers on public service reform and the local outcome improvement plan and the community planning partnership. We probably answered it rather literally in the sense that after all local governance reform, all public service reform was effectively suspended during the Covid period and we are now delighted to see that being reactivated. One of the first things we did post Covid was to invite the then Deputy First Minister to talk to us about single public authority and public service reform, not as a good thing in itself but also as part of financial strategy. We have an active community planning partnership. It tends to focus on specific pieces of work but its overarching strategy is about retention and growth of population. That is everything for us and the population has remained stable. The projections are not good, but one has to watch the projections too because they have been quite inaccurate over the years. The population is stable but it is not good in terms of working-age population retention and that is common to rural Scotland. That is everything for us and that is the focus of the community planning partnership. However, I hope that the answer to that question is caught up elsewhere in the submission. Okay. At times again, so I will not push that any further, but I thank you for that. I will open up the session to our colleagues, the first person to ask questions is John Tafor, by Douglas. Thanks very much, convener. I mean, just maybe to pursue that a little bit with yourself, Mr Burr. Is it a single island partnership or authority? In my mind, partnership would mean that you keep umpteen different bodies but you work together more closely, and authority would suggest that you come down to one organisation that would run the council, the NHS and everything else. It is an authority. It recognises, though, that people did not join NHS, for example, to work for local government. NHS, for example, has its own remit, its own clinical priorities. That is not for an elected authority to manage directly, so our model and that has been public record, although we will need to and will be delighted to update it now that the review of local governance is back on track. It recognises that there will be a national health service within that, but it is saying that the resource available to the western isles, how that is distributed, how that is managed, how delivery of it is structured, should be through one elected authority, which is the model in many other parts of Europe. It must be said in Scandinavia. Do we have to have a national health service that is the same all over the country? You have a health board in Glasgow. Does that mean that we have to have a health board in the western isles? We get raised all this time. There is a postcode lottery that is different here and there, but it seems to me that it has to be different here and there. I do not think that there has to be a health board in the western isles. There has to be agreed national health outcomes in the western isles. How they are delivered has to be as much as possible in support of the islands that they serve. There may be different outcomes based on different needs, but there is absolutely room within a single island authority model for NHS to do what it does and has to do and should be doing within that model with its own employees. However, it is the wider resource at the moment. We have, frankly, too many organisations serving 27,000 people. A further impetus, if anyone were needed for this work, was the national care service. I should not say about the outcomes and the aims of the national care service, but the structural issues that would impose a third public sector body with a chief executive and all the rest of the apparatus that is necessary is serving 27,000 people. If anything promoted the need for public service reform even on grounds of efficiency alone, to say nothing of democracy and financial strategy and outcomes, it was that. It is an authority, not a partnership. We have a partnership already. We work constructively, but partnerships do not solve the amount of money and resource tied up in structures. I might come back to you afterwards. We had the health board in and there is one health board for AERSHRs, but three councils and three HSSCPs. If you look at that, that is seven bodies. Could we cut that down? I think that the health board would quite like just one HSSCP for the whole of AERSHR. Yes, they probably would not give that evidence. I am not sure if she said that. You could say the same in terms of the police division. That covers the three councils as well, but it is the same as the FAM rescue region. There are opportunities to declutter some of that, but in practice and through our partnership arrangements, that is pretty much seamless. We do not see that there are any barriers in there because the three councils work into a single health authority. In fact, we have done a self-assessment of how productive our partnership has been. It has scored really highly from all partners who see the work that we do. That went back as far as 1996 when the reorganisation happened. That partnership has been built up and is a real strength for us. The lines on the map might show that there is one health board, three health and social care partnerships, three councils, etc. In terms of delivery, we have worked to a point where the partnership work is really effective. There are opportunities in that. In fact, we share our road service with South AERSHR councils, so East AERSHR and South AERSHR have a single road service. There are opportunities in AERSHR that are a bit broader than that that we look to make the most of, if I think as well, but other shared services. We have a shared corporate fraud team across the three councils, three internal audit facilities. There are opportunities, but to answer your question directly, we can and will be doing more around all of that. You mentioned the police, and we had the police at committee. One of the things they said was that the radical reform of taking all the police separate boards and putting them into Police Scotland would not have happened unless there was a real drive from the centre. I am just wondering around the areas of local authorities and HSCPs. When you look at reform, are you really just looking at tweaking what is there, or would you ever consider a merger with another council? I do not think that anyone can ever write off any opportunity, but, as I said at the moment, our partnership arrangements are such that we are really effective, really productive. We have got real challenges in our communities, but we are determined and we have a shared outcome agreement with those partners, with police, with fire, with health, etc. We are all heading in the same direction in terms of outcomes. The structural arrangements, how we do that, is a secondary issue. They do not really matter so much. For us, we blur those lines because it is about providing services, providing better outcomes to our communities. At the moment, we are trying to do that within the structural arrangements that are working for us. We have challenges. We have got some of the most deprived areas in Scotland, within East Ayrshire and North Ayrshire. We have our challenges, but the structural issues are not getting in the way at the moment of us providing services. Mr Emma, you have got slightly different situations in the city. We have started off with the health board and the council, and now we have got the health board and the council and the HSCP, or the integrated joint board. In a sense, the landscape has become more complicated, has it? Personally, I think that we have... What is important is about focusing on the outcomes. From an elected councillor perspective, you are thinking about from Dundee, what are we doing for my community, for mine here? It is interesting, if you think of the Ad Hebrides and you think of 27,000 people and you think of 150,000 people in Dundee, and the fact that we have three councils and one, you know, the Tayside health board. So it is more complex. Could you have one council? Would that be more efficient? So I think there are efficiencies. Would you lose some of the democratic accountability? Then you might, because what people are focused on in Dundee, I think if you were in Angus and Perth, you might be concerned about losing some of your identity and being a bit swamped by the city. I think you are right about radical reform. I think that if you think about where businesses went and where places like Scottish Water went, they centralised and nationalised and they streamed and the banks have done, they have taken everyone out, they are all in the centre. So there is an issue if you live in Lewis and Harris about jobs being sucked down out of the islands and the rural places, because you can deliver of service more efficiently out of it. So as councils would at the heart of our communities, trying to build wealth in the communities, provide jobs in the communities. In Scotland, we have 10 assessor boards and four assessors are carried out in-house. Do we need all of those bodies? Could that all be streamlined? I think the challenge is that radical reform requires strong leadership and it requires a direction and this is what we are going to do. So the centralisation of police has given us probably a more efficient and coherent approach. Would you have got that while you had all the police authorities? No. Have you lost something in terms of local accountability for police services? I think you probably have a bit. Those are things to politically weigh up about how we want to deliver services, but I suppose we shouldn't be afraid. We need to be thinking about our outcomes. So how is this helping address to go back to what the community was saying? How is this a helping to assess child poverty? Do we need these bodies or are they acting as barriers? Have we got too many leaders and not enough people on the ground doing things? Accepting that it's not, you know, for us it's 1 per cent of cost to management, so actually you're not talking about a big bulk of costs, but if you could save half a per cent of that, still a contribution in terms of some of the challenges and putting resources where they're needed? Okay, thanks. I think that's my time, so I'll add that. Thank you, convener. In terms of back office though it is still a significance, there is a lot invested in structural delivery that I think could, on a local basis, be successfully merged. It's all about looking at the best solution for local areas, but what heartened me most about the recent revival of the review of local governance was the involvement of NHS in it, because I think that there is genuinely a difficulty for non-elected bodies in participating in discussions that might suggest their own change or even demise. They're usually there with a statutory purpose and a board and a very clear mission. They don't really have the power or authority to do that. Local government can make these suggestions because it's government, just as this Parliament and Scottish Government can. Other organisations have to be enabled, encouraged through leadership to be part of that debate. Otherwise, it's genuinely easy for them to say, we can't be part of this. You do what you want, but we can't be part of it because we have a statute and a mission and a commission. Your population is quite small. I love the western Isles going there and so on, but does there come a point when you just don't have enough people to have your own council and you should just go in with Highland? I genuinely don't believe so. This isn't self-interest here. The days of the western Isles being managed from Dingwall in the case of Lewis and from Inverness in the case of the rest were not happy days in terms of service provision. Indeed, when Corrine and Yellen, as it then was, was formed in 1975, some of the road conditions, the housing conditions, were among the poorest in Scotland. We are also a natural unit where an island is area. I think that to merge the council with a mainland authority would not be good for the islands. I'll not be pushing that, I was just being Dibble's advocate. Thank God you're not pushing that then, John. Next colleague task question will be Douglas and Fall by Michael. It's really to go back on something that Mr Emmett said ready to start. It really sort of got my interest, was about back office services. Maybe there's more scope for that to be shared across all two 32 local authorities. Can you give me a bit more idea of what you know what you're thinking is possible around that, Robert? I think if you look at some of the functions that we carry out, so if you think about rates collection, for example, we're all collecting rates. We're following broadly national policy and legislation. We're using similar systems, similar approaches to the work that we are doing, so you could potentially have a single national function collecting rates in Scotland now. Some of my colleagues might not like that idea, but that might be a more effective way of delivering a service for Scotland. Now, it's not going to save an enormous amount of some of money, but if you think about the IT support for that, the technical support, the development, et cetera, that goes with it and allows you to focus on it. You might have different policies in different areas, but you could still have a similar system. Now, it's challenging because we're all at different 32 people, all doing councils, all doing slightly different things at the moment, so that's where I was talking about strong leadership. If we want to make progress on those things, there has to be a real push to do those things. The rewards aren't going to solve the problem, they're only going to contribute to helping it. I suppose there are other things. The other one that I just perhaps highlighted is the scientific services, so Tayside is one of four councils that run a public analyst function that is for across the country. They will be much better run in my mind as a national part of a national function rather than as an adjunct to a council. It's an important service that we have in Scotland, but it's not one that is best suited to being run by some councils and not by others. There is territory there. Collaboration is hard, and councils have slimmed down over recent years, so the capacity and pace at which we can take change, we need to look at how we can invest in delivering transformation. How do we make, how do we get those changes to happen, along with all the other things that councils are busy doing, is also a challenge for us. I personally believe that there are opportunities for us there to move some of that forward. It's nothing new. It's been, those types of things have been talked about for a decade or more, probably since Christie. Do you think that we can go a step further and look at some functions as a whole, potentially finance, potentially HR, IT? Do you think that there's scope for maybe a centralized unit for that functions that can then provide services to each of the 32 local authorities? I think that there is. As long as we don't, there's two bits, I suppose, not to lose sight of them. The first point is around where the jobs are. I think that if you're a council and certainly in the islands where, if you were to say, we're going to centralise the payroll function in Dundee, then that's not going to be popular, but virtual working and the way we're working now means you could potentially have a national agency that has outreach offices and we can do things better. I'm very much thinking about how could we take advantage of some of those things and maintain our focus on what's our priority. Our priority is not employing people to run a payroll, but paying our staff is important. It's about the outcomes that are in our plans around poverty and economic development and net zero and things. How do we focus resources on those? I'm not saying that it's easy because all the easier things have probably been addressed and we've looked at them. The things joining up and collaborating are harder. Like I said earlier on, we're doing a piece of work at the moment with a neighbouring authority looking at what can we do, what are the opportunities to do things collaboratively on a test basis to see whether we can go further with that. Not that it'll be the answer, but it'll be part of the answer. Ian Malcolm, do you think that that's a possibility that should be looked at? I think that we have to look at all possibilities openly, but we have to do it on the basis that there is genuine equity, not just equality of opportunity. For example, there are hard to fill posters now and say that there is internal audit. There is a shortage of internal auditors. Would a national service be an answer to that? It might be, but we have thankfully moved from the idea of centralisation of people in services in, say, a warehouse somewhere in central Scotland delivering to the whole country to the fact that you can be in Stornoway or Ewist or Barra and deliver an internal audit service to other councils. Any development of that kind, and I think that we have to be open to new things, particularly whether there's a service gap, that has to be sensitive to all the areas of Scotland and to provide an opportunity for people in all the areas of Scotland to be part of that service without having to move or be lured to a central location? I also had the opportunity to see some of the evidence that has been presented to the committee, and I did notice that Audit Scotland provided some information about where the reductions in budget have been across the country. One of them, which showed the corporate services or the support services, was actually a greater reduction there than other parts. I suppose that the issue there is the capacity within those services to deliver that change, that shared service, that collaboration. Usually, those are the services that would provide the IT infrastructure or the HR or the management systems that support all of that. If councils are actually reducing the amount of resource that they have in there and it becomes even more challenging then to deliver that transformational change or those collaborations or those shared services, so that approach would require more investment again to be able to do that effectively. I guess that you know the point that was initially made when we're talking about maybe a central pool of people. It doesn't mean that it's centralised. It could actually mean more people working in remote areas. It could be to our advantage, and I guess that would cut out duplication, would cut out costs, because that's what the whole public sector reform is about, is to reduce the cost. I think that you mentioned, Robert, about ERP systems, for example. Is that still taking place where there's duplication across all 32 local authorities? Should that really be—how do we change that? I think it is challenging. Old councils will have their own ledger and their own systems for doing things. Personally, I think there is an opportunity there, but it does require really strong leadership. It requires, if you like, a burning platform, a real push— A mandate, then? A push to do. That's a difficult question. Maybe to bring around some of those changes, and if you think about some of the changes in the police, you have to have some direction and not too much opportunity. I think that if you're going to bring about change, it needs someone to be saying, we can do this better, that we can demonstrate that we can provide better services to the public. We've got to be really careful that there aren't people with vested interests trying to protect the status quo for some reason and not looking at the bigger picture about what we need to be focusing our resources on, because it's not running systems. That's not why we're here. If we keep that in the front of our mind, you'd say, well, why wouldn't we? There are challenges, because everyone's on different systems. Can we harmonise everyone? Even if we tell everyone, how long is that going to take? There are some—one of the best things that Cozzler introduced was the My Job Scotland portal, where everyone advertises their jobs in the same place. That was a quick win. Because it was a new service, it was even going to say, well, we weren't all developed this, we'll all just use this. I think that almost all councils buy into that service, and there isn't really any debate about it. It's just the best thing to do, so that's where we want to be. This is the best thing to do. I guess, for a new system, it's easier. As you said, if you looked at having a finance system, everyone was going to be using the same finance system, would there be difficulties around, well, hold on, I want to protect what I've got in each local authority? I suppose there shouldn't be. People should be thinking about, how do I serve my council best? You know, councils have all got their own unique aspects about the services that they deliver, but a lot of the back office functions. There's an efficient way to pay an invoice. It doesn't vary depending on whereabouts you are in the country. That's where we should be making sure that the transactional processes are as efficient as possible and as digital as possible to go about what we were talking about before. Can I do things digitally? Why is it different to apply for council tax in one council in another? Some investments probably needed to bring about some of that change and say, how can we do it? How can we do it better? Instead of 32 councils developing an online solution, have we got one council? Perhaps it needs some very strong leadership, I think, to bring about that level of change. When it comes to online solutions just now, do you each have the autonomy to, you know, let's think of parking permits. It probably doesn't affect everyone here. Parking permits, for example, can you each go and develop your own system to put that online? Or is there some guidance from the centre or how does that work? The council has made its own decision about how they thought they wanted to provide a service locally, so if it was, you know, applying for a permit for, I don't know, a garden waste bin or something. Now some councils are signed up through, is it Mike of Scotland? So there is a common platform for signing. You can have one account and you can access services across different councils, but not everybody is signed up to that, so that's an optional thing, rather than a mandatory approach. Because I guess when it comes to digital strategies that we spoke about earlier, you know, the reason that saves money in the long term is to put everything online and to reduce them at a staff, you have, I guess, dealing with a sort of manual process. So in terms of headcount, for each of your local authorities, have you estimated the impact that your digital strategy is going to have on your workforce reduction? I think we've quantified that our workforce strategy would be where we would see the connection between our digital ambitions and the impact on our workforce, but the digital strategy, as it stands, doesn't have within it a target for reducing, it has ambitions around efficiency, it has ambitions around cost saving, et cetera, but it doesn't quantify what that would mean for workforce. The workforce strategy, in its most general terms, is where we would expect to see that direction of travel. In terms of your cost savings from your digital strategy, what sort of costs does that save if it's not pupil cost? Well, it also provides us with an opportunity for redeployment of staff into other areas, and that was the experience through the pandemic when, as I said earlier, by necessity, we moved a lot of that activity online and it freed up resource to do other things, to support communities to be actually physically in communities in some respects as well, dealing with all the various grant applications that were then being processed. So it wasn't so much a reduction, it was more that it was an opportunity to relocate, to put the resource where it was needed. Last question I had, convener, was around multi-year budgets. I'm just trying to work out what that would actually mean for local councils, because when I was a councillor, yes, we didn't know exactly what we were going to have for the next couple of years, but we had a pretty good idea. So what do you think that multi-year budget will give you that you don't have just now? I think because the financial situation of councils is now so precarious that it is different perhaps from previous years. We have projections at the moment, which are quite alarming in terms of their reach. For example, and we talked about headcounts a moment ago, I have been managing a reduction in headcount in the corridor over the last 12 years, and that has reduced from about 1900 full-time equivalent posts to 1600 now. That's about 500 jobs, that's about 500 people, that's of significance to the economy. The type of planning that we need to do now to take account of those projections, and that is why certainty is required. Some services are now so marginal that a sudden reduction beyond projections could put some of the non-statutory services, particularly in some jeopardy. Unless we tie that up with public service reform, which is partly looking at cost but is really about the retention of a strong public sector in each locality, in my view, unless multi-year budgets are part of that, I don't think that we can do it very effectively or as effectively. What would you like to see? Would you like to see the exact sum that you're going to get for the next two years, or would you like it tied to the inflation rate? If you look at the last year, you're probably getting more than you were expected to get two years ago, but that's been eaten away by the pay deals and everything else. I'm trying to work out what certainty you would like to see. I appreciate that. I'll go back to comments that are fair and that Scottish Government, too, is subject to one-year budgets, but I'm looking at it practically. My council's revenue budget about 10 years ago was about £120 million. It's now 102 million. I'm not expecting that to be restored overnight, but I am looking for some kind of indication that it will at least keep pace with real inflation, and that commitments that Governments seek to have us deliver will be absolutely fully funded, and that there will be preferably, as part of a deal with local government, a recognition that public service reform is not going to be delivered overnight, advanced though we are, along that route. There needs to be some stability for the next two to three years while we look at delivering a more efficient public sector locally. As Robert Emmett said, that is quite complex, because it will be different in the Western Isles from Dundee. The principles will be the same if they are focused on keeping a strong public service in a community that has capacity for community leadership. My biggest fear in all this is that we lose, collectively, our capacity for leadership in our communities and to be effective advocates for our community and to deliver effective change, as well as looking after people and doing what we're meant to do. I think that indicative figures would help planning for councils. The UK Government produces indicative figures periodically about those in the next few years. That's what it's looking like. Having an idea that we all accept circumstances change, inflation, where we are now with inflation, was not predictable before Covid, so we're in a more unusual period. However, this is what you can expect to get next year if things stay the same, and there will be changes. I think that we all accept that there will be political decisions and political policies that will come through, and some of them might come through relatively later the day. If you look at the public information that's available right next year's budget, it's difficult to work out where we're going to go. We've just started thinking about next year, but at the moment we've got the medium-town plan, which indicates that there's about £1 billion gap, but not how it's going to be addressed. We are trying to judge what the savings might be, what we might have to find, and where that's going to go. We don't want to have a discussion about cutting services, but we don't need to cut them. That's just going to create alarm and discontent amongst what we're doing. We need to have some idea of what can we expect and what should we be doing, and then decisions about where we might be investing or disinvesting. Where we might be focusing on priorities and can follow that. I think that there's always going to be a caveat that circumstances might change and Covid amply demonstrates that. You might have some flexibilities coming down the line. I'm thinking of the workplace, park and levy and the tourist tax potentially coming down the line. Do you see that as ways of plugging your budget just now, or I always thought previously that it was intended for additional funds? Do you see that now as a change to keep the lights on? In Dundee, I don't think that either of those are going to make a significant implication. I think that the tourist tax set, and if you look at the councils who probably have the biggest return from that, are spending significant amounts of money on services for tourists. Highland usually stands out as the most one, but if you look at the impact of tourists and the successives that some of the advertising they've done and the number of visitors they've got, the costs of servicing those will probably drown out the additional revenue that you might get from a tourist tax. We're not expecting it to be such a significant, but maybe I'm underestimating the popularity of Dundee after the big weekend, but not such a significant levy, more of an extra, and likewise with parking levy, that's not something that we're looking at as a council at the moment. I suppose it's fair to say that in terms of local taxation, rates and council tax are the areas where there's the biggest ability to generate income and to influence behaviour. Thanks, convener. Can I start by declaring an interest of two immediate family members working on the Children and Family Service at Dundee City Council, which brings me to Mr Emmett? You talked about the early years provision and the expansion in that and the number of people, but at the same time, the number of additional support needs teachers in Dundee has almost halved since 2010, so dropping from 165 to 93. That's in the context of teaching staff dropping across the board in Dundee, despite the number of pupils remaining roughly steady. It doesn't feel that strategic in terms of delivering better outcomes for kids from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. I think that it's a challenge. I think that you probably know that in terms of spending ahead in schools, the more efficient end of the scale, and I think that my colleagues in education would say that if they had the resources, they'd want to see additional support going into schools, particularly since Covid, and maybe where we obviously have additional resources on the back of that in terms of teachers and people in the classroom assistants, the needs of young people have increased and the demand has increased. The challenge for us, I suppose, is what I would say is that the council recognises that as a priority area. One of the areas that we did explore in the budget for this year was whether or not we might look at teacher numbers and we came away from that. I think that the council recognises the importance of that. I think that there is a challenge in terms of the resourcing, so if you look at the envelope that we're working within and the resources we've got, I guess that's where we've got to. I think that what the picture on staffing shows us, and I don't have the detail on ASN teachers that you've obviously got to hand, but that children and families has been valued at a higher rate than perhaps some of the environmental services. I'm not surprised when you look at the figures that corporate services, for example, have been squeezed because that's where I'd expect councils to be squeezing out efficiencies in terms of delivery of services. So I think that there is a challenge, particularly across Scotland, I suppose, about how we get the best outcomes and how we invest. I suppose that that's a policy matter rather than a... Absolutely. The purpose of this inquiry is really, so my comment there is not necessarily to criticise on that issue. We could have that discussion elsewhere. I suppose my concern in this is about public sector reform and the process that it's driven. You've described that this is an outcome that is to be delivered by Dictat, the Scottish Government. They want to see a focus in this area, they want to see a focus on early years, as you described earlier on. But if, at the same time, you're cutting provision for the next stage, dramatically cutting provision for the most vulnerable children and no sign of that recovering, that doesn't feel like a strategic approach to it. You as a council have to respond to that instruction, but it doesn't feel like that's a strategic approach to public sector reform. That's a comment from me, but I don't know if you would reflect on that process. I think the only thing to say is that what's important for us in the public sector is to be investing where our priorities are and recognising where that investment is. I suppose I touched on taxation just before, but I think that if we're going to have public services at the level that we want them, we have to think about how they are going to be funded and what the opportunities are to raise revenue, to pay for the level of services that we wish. If we wish to invest even more in early years because we think it's important and prevention, which is important, and I am concerned that as we go forward, if we have to make more savings, it's going to eat into services which have a knock-on impact, then we have to think about how those are funded. As a council, we'll be thinking about income and charges and what opportunities there are to raise funds to make sure that we can still deliver services, but that's a bigger conversation. My point about public sector reform is that we can change the bodies. Ian Tuft was talking about it before, as the efficiency around, and that's why I'm quoting our management figure about 1 per cent, you're at the margins in merging organisations, how you deliver services on the ground and the people on the ground, what makes the biggest difference. That's not to say that we can't do some of the work that we are doing better, we know that there are areas where there's always scope for improving some of those things, but some of that is a big policy question about the level of taxation and the level of public service, and we rightly should be under scrutiny that we're being efficient in what we are doing, but once you've got to a level where you've got the right number of people in the classroom, there's not a lot of leeway in terms of further improving that. You mentioned the changes to the number of children going into placements, which is a very expensive thing to do for young people being removed from their families and put into placements. If fewer of those children are put into those placements, will there be an increase in support in terms of the social workers working with those children if they are not put in? When you're balancing that budget, hopefully reducing the cost on one side, are you seeing a linked increase in terms of the resource of social workers to work with those children when you're keeping them in house? I mean, that's something that must be a live discussion at the moment. Absolutely, so what we are likely to have, so if you've compared with someone in a secure placement or something, then the cost of that provision locally will require investment. It's not just about the cost though, it's about that's likely to lead to better outcomes in the long term, retaining someone locally, but you've got to put the support in. There's a couple of active discussions at the moment about different ways of providing that support and creating the capacity. I know that in my former council, we'd spend a lot of time creating local capacity so that there were alternatives to secure placements. When you went to the children's panel, you weren't in a position where they were saying, well, the only thing we can do really here is very expensive. Actually, there's a range of measures which might suit the circumstances of the individual and will deliver the outcomes that you want. Now, that's all very easy to say, but we've recently appointed a new member of staff who's working very hard to look at how can we put in a strategy which will deliver all of that. I don't know all of the reasons for it. Dundee's costs in that area are disproportionately higher than many other councils, and it's quite difficult to get to the bottom. That shouldn't be an excuse, but there may well be specific circumstances that give rise to that. You mentioned, and colleagues mentioned that, but I think that it's the figure that you've brought forward about 1 per cent of costs being in terms of that executive function. I find some of the discussion about shared services, like it's missing the point in some respects, in terms of it's a very small number at the top rather than the bulk of the costs that we're talking about. Has there been discussion in, for instance, across the Tayside region about a shared leadership team, so for instance, a single chief executive, a single director of finance? We're having some of that discussion about what opportunities there might be around that, so I would say it's early days about thinking about what we could do and how might that work. I think that there are challenges, particularly around the chief executive role, because of the support that's needed to councils from a political sense, but I think that we certainly think that there are opportunities to be explored there, and there may be things, but you're right to put your finger on this. This is one of the potential that might help, so that 1 per cent, if you can save a tenth of it, then you've made a contribution, but it's not going to be a panacea, it might just help. I think that there's a bigger challenge about the number of bodies that might be where you've got competing objectives and you're not all necessarily in the same space, so we've all got to be focused on the outcomes, and Ian described it better. We're saying that if the partnership is working and you're all properly focused on the outcomes, then the barriers aren't there, you can remove the barriers, but sometimes the barriers do pop-up and make it more challenging to deliver services when you've particularly got different targets. There was also mention, I think, of the evidence about the medium-term financial strategy published by the Government. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that what that told us was that there was a significant funding gap looming, but it gave a little sense of how to address it. Fraser of Allander said the same, Spice said the same to this committee. What have you learned from that medium-term financial strategy as organisations about the challenges and the opportunities that are in front of you? Did it illuminate? Did it help, Ian Tuff? There's probably a question for our section 95, rather than myself, but what it has helped us do is develop our medium-term financial strategy aligned to that national position. It goes back to the point that Mr Lumsden made earlier about why I have a medium-term financial strategy. A lot of the outcomes that we want to deliver for communities, you can't deliver them in a year. You need a longer-term period to be able to make a real impact. It's an answer to both your questions. That's why you need that certainty or at least those projections with some certainty around them about where you can direct your resources to best meet those community outcomes, to best deliver services. Having a national medium-term financial strategy helps that, but that one is just as open and as part of the problem is that there are so many movable parts in that as well. There are so many variables in that national one as well as at a local position. That statement told us that there was a billion pounds funding gap in the coming year and then rising within three years to £1.9 billion across Scotland between the projected policy perspectives of the Government and what used to be the other. So, Malcolm Burgess, let's just tell you the size of your black hole. Yes, I think that's right. What it told us was that it told us of the need for significant reform. The point that you made earlier about outcomes is that it's a good argument for a single public authority in those areas that want one, because if your focus is say population retention and growth, what makes that happen? Jobs, skills, housing, looking after having a good service for children and young people, if the whole resource of the whole public sector in a locality can be devoted to that end without having to, let's say, negotiate the structural landscape and the priorities of each statutory body, which at a time of financial constraint, the tendency is always to retract and say, I have to do this and I don't have any capacity for that. It made that argument for significant public service reform very strongly, but, as to the black hole, I think that's correct. It identified a gap which we know about and which we are all currently trying to fill through use of what reserves we have left and so-called deficiencies. That cannot go on, and that's what the report said. There is a gap between expectation and statutory duty and financial reality, and we have to be more imaginative about how we address that, hence my plea for indicative budgets to at least allow us the space to work through these issues, which will require primary legislation, hopefully in a local government's bill towards the end of this Parliament, but that's not going to solve the next three to four years, so please let us have an environment that allows us to be creative as well as does managing. My question is the same question that I've asked two previous panels and it relates to what I think is the fundamental tension at the heart of this, namely that there is this difficulty of trying to bring together the mandate situation that the Scottish Government would like to see across all public sector reform, namely their targets in place, against the targets that local councils set because they feel they are the best people to know the local circumstances. That's the central problem that we are grappling with. I cited the example of the national care service because the Scottish Government rightly has said that the current system can't continue for all sorts of different reasons, but what the Scottish Government has proposed has, generally speaking, not been very well received by local councils. I just wondered if you could comment on that, not on the politics of that but on the difficulty of trying to bring the perspectives of national government together with those of local government to ensure that services are delivered in the best possible way. Namely, it's a challenge to bring your own perspectives together in the way that delivers better improvement. I'm happy to try to answer that. I think that that would be a good way forward. I think that back to 2007, there was a concordat with local government and there was a local agreement between the Scottish Government and each council. Personally, I thought that that was effective because it talked about what the Government legitimately wants, but also what local government has equally elected partner wanted and what could be delivered jointly. I think that that's an approach that merits reconsideration because that is more than a local outcome impact assessment. That's really about saying, we will do this in this area. That's a helpful comment, Mr Burke. Would you want that, let's say that there was a new type of concordat? Would you want that negotiated by government with each council or government with all 32 local authorities? How would you see the negotiation working to ensure that people in local government are satisfied that they are offering the best delivery? I can see the advantage of a common approach across Scotland, but certainly locally it would be what matters. One cannot presume ever what communities will want. I think back to our own budget consultation, which my colleague Robert Emmett led for us some 10 years ago or so. We thought that we knew what the priorities would be within Lewis and Harris. The priority of the community was economic development. Within US, it was community transport so that people could have the freedom to move around, to access services in what's a very sparsely populated community. One shouldn't presume. I think that local engagement about how government has its outcomes and rightly so, but how are these best delivered in our area will be genuinely very different to elsewhere. I could give housing as an example, which is a really positive thing, which could be delivered better, but that local agreement is absolutely essential. It gives the parity of esteem between the two parts of elected government in Scotland, which the Scotland Acton visaged all those years ago. Mr Tuff and Mr Emmett, would you like to see that as well? Yeah, I think that common approach should be helpful, but it's still having room for that localism, for reflecting what are the priorities locally. If I think again in the touch on Police Scotland a couple of times today, so they have those national strategic priorities, but at a local level each local authority is required to have a local police plan, which reflects your local priorities. I think that it's a similar approach that we could get to. The national performance framework, for instance, again is something that we cite all the time and that we want to align to, but only where it's things that are important to us at a local level and you can see those connections. Things that are in our local outcomes improvement plan are a nod towards what the national performance framework is, but it's still very much dominated by what are the local issues for us. I think that that approach is proven to work already. I'm thoughtful about where decision making is made and it being made at the right level. I don't think that we've always got it right, but who should be making the decision about how resources are deployed in a school? Should it be the head teacher? Should it be the local authority? Should it be the national government and deciding whether you need a teacher or whether you need to buy a resource or whether you need a psychologist? Those are decisions that—where is it right to make those decisions? There are some decisions clearly that should be made at a local level and other ones that should be considered at a national level. There are some policies where we wouldn't want 32 national ways of doing different things. Any framework, we shouldn't be afraid to be having that conversation. Who should be making this decision? At a national level, you should be saying, that's a matter for the local council on which they stand and fall, or they should be saying, no, that the policy on income tax is a national policy, that's a matter for the Parliament. Perhaps just some conversation around which things sit where and who is accountable for them would help us in terms of driving forward. We can make difficult decisions sometimes and they're best to be left to be accountable for at a local level. If you're rationalising schools, for example, that can be a difficult, painful process. Very few people would go back 10 years and say, oh, I wish we hadn't closed those two old schools and built a new one. That would have been a difficult discussion at the time but actually won for the local politicians. If it wasn't popular, then they wouldn't get back in. That's the reality of democracy. Thank you very much. It's hard not to get back in sometimes when you've got multi-member wards. Michelle. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I'm going to come to you, Robert, first because you're the only person that's mentioned this word thus far, and that's AI. Obviously, such is the speed. The exponential growth and use of AI change is likely to be foisted on both local councils and, indeed, on the Scottish Government, and we know that. In terms of thinking how AI can assist public sector reform and, indeed, the general provisioning of your services, what active consideration are you giving to it thus far and your approach? If I can come to you first and appreciate it, it's a slightly different question for yourself, Malcolm, but, obviously, being the home really leading light in terms of Abertau University, if you could give us a flavour. I'm happy to do that. At this stage, the main area that we've been looking at is around customer services and our interaction with the public. It gives rise to a whole host of things, not least the ethics around how you're using AI and decision making, and I know there's been some discussion around that. We were actually doing work with a leading business looking at this, and one of the things—for example, they were struggling with—was understanding the local dialect. I'm hoping we'll get past that, but I think the pace of it is probably faster than, if I'm honest, we have been moving at this stage. If you think about the developments in the course just of 2023, they have probably outpaced most people who are looking at thinking about how we can use this. I think about our ability to respond efficiently and effectively to customers, or to become better, our ability to join up the pieces of customer inquiries or to become better, because if you've got access to the data and you've got access to the processing power, I think it's untapped, I suppose, would be my short answer, but also we need to be careful with it, because I think it does open up lots of doors around, as I said, ethics and around data protection and various things, and also the risk that it'll go off in completely the wrong direction in terms of how it might respond to people. However, I also think—and I've been having this conversation with our executive director of children and families—about where does it set an education. I know it's a challenge in terms of, is this your own work type of situation if you're getting someone to write an essay, get a computer to write your essay for you, but also does it not help us with what about learning language, what about access to information, what about marking the work? How can we tap into that? I think there's something there. I'm not qualified enough to know how revolutionary it will be, but there must be opportunities around that, but we need to tackle with them with care at this stage would be my sense. Maybe in a year's time I'll have a more better understanding of how we can do something. A follow-on to that, one of the critical enablers for its utilisation is sound collection of data. I fully accept what you're saying about how you use that data ethically. How aware are you of that as an enabler, as a council? You mentioned customer services at the moment. That's almost the wrong way around, because the whole point of AI is that it's going to blow up a lot of our—it's driven by process—the functions that we've developed. It's going to break all that asunder. How actively focused are you on collecting data, as a minimum, given the massive kind of processing power that AI can utilise off the back of that? It's an active conversation for us at the moment, because we're mindful that there are different parts of the councils working in different ways with data, and we're trying to look at how we can bring that together. We're conscious that we have a huge amount of data. I don't think that we always make the best use of it. Sometimes it's sitting there, and we're not looking at it. When it comes to decisions about what services we have in the future and who's using those services and what are their needs, they're really important. Do we understand the impacts of changes that we're making in services? Who are the people who would be impacted by the change in the services? We have a lot of information. There's a huge amount of data about school performance around attendance facilities and around council tax and all those sorts of things. We're using it carefully. Sometimes it's a hindrance, so we've got loads and loads of data and we're not using it. It affects the way another time, because we're really careful about following the law and making sure that we're doing absolutely everything right, and sometimes we're too cautious. Again, I think that there are opportunities that we're not capturing, and also making sure that it's evidence-based decisions that we are following. You'll know yourselves that sometimes people can become quite passionate about something and can lose sight of the facts. The value of a service is not always underpinned by the number of people using that service or the value of that service to them. Decisions, particularly when they're difficult, need to be evidenced, and that's where that comes in. I'm hopeful that it might be able to take the legwork out, so if you could be confident that you can ask AI a question and it'll come back and give you all of the answers and you can believe them, then have you saved yourself a day's work? I haven't tried it, but can I get it to write my budget strategy for me, and what will it be suggesting? It might uncover something that I haven't thought about, because it might say, well, actually, if you looked at what they're doing in Cronan and Yellen Shea, you might pick up something that's been done differently. So it's got applications. I don't think we even know what questions do I ask it yet. If I'm like, well, I certainly don't, maybe you're ahead of me. If I can bring in yourself, Ian, and I'll come, and then I've just got a follow-up question from that. I did ask it a question recently, and it was, can you provide me with a job outline for an AI researcher, and it produced me a perfect job outline and advert that I could go out and use? So it has practical uses, but I think that Robert is absolutely right. The pace of change with AI is something that we've not caught up with, certainly where I work. I think that we need to understand what it can do, but we also need to understand what the risks of it are as well. And I think your comment about the management of the information that it provides, the governance around that information, whether it's GDPR or whatever, I think we need to understand that better. So that's a journey we're on just now. So having used it once and got a great result, I think there's something in it for us, but we need to understand it better. And so are you taking any active steps to develop a strategy even to or the research that will help frame a strategy? And I'm thinking again specifically about how it might be utilised in public sector reform, which is all future focus. Where are you in terms of developing your knowledge as a council? Once I get someone appointed to that position, I'll just get the job description written for them, that's the approach. But it's very much one of the emerging issues within our digital strategy. I know I've mentioned that a couple of times today, but it is a priority area for us to look at. Malcolm, I appreciate the scales that are markedly different for you. Do you understand that? Yes, we will primarily work through SOLIS and the improvements service and other agencies in developing our own strategy there, but it has changed what was thought of as digitalisation. And I think that the question we always have to ask is how does it empower and who does it empower? That's my test for new technology such as that. The lawyer side of me always says is how safe is the evidence, but I think Ian Tuff has given a very good example of what it can do in terms of time saving. It has that evidence base and provided it is something neutral to which let's say human beings can apply their critical faculties. I think it is part of a digital efficiency strategy, but we have to ask how does it empower people? In principle it should empower the less articulate, the less able to participate more, but will it? I don't know. We shouldn't see it as a threat. We should see it as something to be managed and be wary of in its negative aspects, but, like all technology, it usually has more benefits than disbenefits. In terms of what sort of guidance in terms of public sector reform to ensure that you include that, are you receiving from the Scottish Government? Are you sensing a sense of urgency from the Scottish Government that this is something that you need to be looking at? Have any conversations taken place? Ian, you've blanked. I'm not aware of any, as Malcolm mentioned. I think where we have seen some advice and guidance through our professional networks, through COSLA Improvement Service, et cetera, I'm not close enough to what's perhaps coming emerging nationally Scottish Government, but certainly our professional networks are very much looking at where there are opportunities for this. Is that the same for both? Apologies, were you just talking about AI? Yes. At national level, we're working with COSLA, but I suppose it's a fast-moving space and there's still a bit of catching up going on. I would say that it is right for national and local collaboration across the whole public sector on this, because the issues are largely the same. Thank you very much, Michelle. That appears to have included questions from the committee. Are there any further points that each of you would like to make before we conclude the session? A final word perhaps about public service reform, just in case. I don't think anyone in the questions have been very illuminating, but just in case it is thought that it is largely about local governance or local government, it's about empowerment and improvement, and I would say that it's about sustaining public service. Thank you very much for your evidence this morning. It was very helpful to the committee. We will continue to take evidence after the summer recess. As that concludes our public evidence-taking, the next item on our agenda will be in private, so I will call a five-minute recess in order to allow the official report and our witnesses to leave.