f it. There is nothing in there that the council could address on its own, so it has absolutely got to be a community planning-led approach to that. I also suggest what I talked about earlier, so that is the data from the people living there and what their experiences of living there are right now. We also have a lot of detailed health data that shows you the outcomes of the worst in South Ayrshire, so we need to try and make sure that we are not just looking at that on the ground. How can we make things better? Strategically, how do we start focusing on public health initiatives in the area to try to tackle that longer-term sort of poor health outcomes that go along with it? So, there is a balance in that, but community planning is absolutely a place to do it. Absolutely, brilliant to hear that. Thank you so much. It is a specific and a real example, convener, about how that stuff works, not just in theory but in practice on the ground, so it is really welcome to hear those responses. Thank you very much. Thanks, Willie. That concludes our themes for today. It has been really great to get your perspectives and delve a little bit more deeply into your work in community planning partnerships. I now suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses. Thank you. On our third panel, we are joined by Dr Oliver Escobar, who is a senior lecturer in public policy at the University of Edinburgh. Mark Macathear, who today is representing the Community Planning Improvement Board, but he is also the director of strategic planning, performance and communications in the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. I welcome the witnesses to the meeting. As mentioned to previous panels, we will try to direct our questions to specific witnesses where possible, but if you would like to come in, please indicate this to the clerks. Again, there is no need to turn your microphones on or off. We will do that automatically for you. We are going to start our questions with questions from Annie Wells. How can CPPs ensure that all communities, including deprived communities and marginalised communities of interest, have a say in the design, delivery and evaluation of local services? I think that I will go to work first on that one. There are a number of, I suppose, areas where CPPs and partners generally work in those areas. You will know from some of your previous sessions, I just heard the tail end of your discussions there with Perth and Kinross, Orkney and Ayrshire, South Ayrshire, I believe. As partners, they do a lot of local work. That will range from formal surveys that we will undertake within localities across the council area as a whole, the CPP area as a whole, where they will routinely ask a variety of questions that then help to shape priorities for the area. More importantly, it is, if you like, the outreach work that takes place in communities themselves. That is where we have all got officers embedded within those communities as part of their day-to-day work, as well as when they are working under the CPP guys. I heard a brief discussion about Wallastown. There was reference to that in South Ayrshire. For example, as fire and rescue service, we have got a permanent member of staff based in Wallastown, and they do that walk the beat with their partners, constantly engaging with the community on things that are directly related to the CPP, but very often just helping out where they can. That is to build a relationship that then brings that intelligence back into the CPP and for us back up to the national level within fire and rescue Scotland. There is a range of different approaches that you see across the country, but I think that it is that engagement at the local level, that discussion with the community that gives you the best insight and intelligence into what really matters to a community and what it is that we then start to think about in terms of how we address the issues and challenges that they have got. I do not know if you have got anything that you would like to add. Yeah, thanks for having me. I think the short answer is by going back to the original purpose of community planning, which was always to find a working combination of partnership at the strategic level and community grassroots engagement. Some places have done that better than others, and we have been working at this for 40 years. Sometimes we think community planning is more recent, but the pilots were in the 90s, so we are close to the 40-year anniversary of the pilots. Now, what does that mean on the ground? Some community planning partnerships do this already quite well, but a lot of them rely on intermediaries, and that means that some communities of interest, some communities of play, some communities of practice don't see themselves represented, because they might not feel that existing associations and groups represent them. So, we need more opportunities for direct engagement, and some of the examples are participatory budgeting, and some community planning partnerships are supporting that, better digital infrastructure, and that's now accelerating as a consequence of the pandemic, and then I think there is a lot still to be done to include, to work better with community anchor organizations, because at the moment many CPPs only have community councils and TSIs represented. I think there is a role given how important community anchor organizations, such as community development trusts, housing associations, community ownership initiatives and so on, have become, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic, and right now, dealing with the cost of living crisis, community anchor organizations need a stronger seat, and that would increase the capacity of CPPs to act, because community anchor organizations have strong networks that reach deep into communities. So, there's a lot to be done, but I think we need to retain the original purpose. Thank you, that's really interesting. 40 years, whoever you've thought of. My second question is that we've actually heard that there are a few community participation specialists left in local authorities, and that's leaving a gap, obviously, in expertise. Do community participation professionals have the resources they need to build the capacity and support in community participation? So, we've sort of heard that there's a lack of, in order to achieve what users said in the first one. I'll maybe come in on that first, I think, for all public service partners. I'll also include the third sector as well as part of this. The recruitment and retention of staff is a massive challenge for all of us in all sectors. I think, particularly when you're talking about people with specialist skillsets, which are clearly for community engagement purposes, it's a very skilled area of work. So, we've all got that challenge across the board. If you look at CPPs, if you look at local authorities, yes, it is a challenge. Some are better provided than others, but what we do across the sector and we do well is we share insight and intelligence and learning and understanding about what you can do to engage better with communities. So, the community planning networks manager brings together the 32 network managers and people from across the sector. There's a lot of exchange and learning is through that, but how can we, therefore, when we don't have that skill, learn from your insight, where your CPP does have that skill, perhaps more than me? So, there's a lot of work going on that way, but as I say, I'll come back to that. We also have staff on the ground in many of these communities, and therefore we're using the insight that you'll gain from that. That's not a substitute for the specialist skills where you want more strategically organised conversations and engagements with communities, but that gives us, again, another avenue into those communities. If I can maybe pick up on something that Oliver was talking about earlier on here, because I think it also comes into this, we tend to talk about community and geographical terms. It's a place, and it is. I think the evidence that we've built up over the last 10 years tells us why the place focus should be critically important, but let's not forget that there are communities of interest and communities of identity, and they can be much more challenging to engage with, because they are not as geographically concentrated. It's harder to go in shop doors, as we were hearing from the South Ayrshire example earlier, when you've got a dispersed community, perhaps across the country, and finding means to engage with them. To get their voice heard is a challenge, and I think that's where some of those technical skill sets become more of an issue for us, because they have a harder group to reach. That's why I end up with the intermediaries, even at times finding the intermediary channels to have conversations can prove to be difficult. Yes, it's a challenge, but we do, I think, try and work across the sector to support one another and share the learning and insight and the capacity that we do have, but could we do with more? Yes, but that's probably a common refrain across every single public service and every single conversation that we've maybe wished to have right now. Yes, thank you very much for that. Yes, if I may. This is one of my favourite topics, so I'll try to really keep it short. We did a lot of research on this, and we've been doing research with committee planning workers, both officers as well as managers and people working in between, and trying to track over time their situation, the challenges they face, and so on. I think the first is to appreciate this is a workforce that is often invisible, because everyone knows what a housing officer does, or what a transport coordinator does, but when you tell someone that you're a community planning official, and when something is invisible, it's really difficult to value what they do, and what they do is that working between the broker and connecting across sectors, connecting between institutions and communities, which is often invisible work. And again, if it's not visible, it's often not valued. So we're having in Scotland this paradox over the last 10 years where we are really rich in community empowerment narrative, and relatively poor in capacity to implement the aspirations of the Community Empowerment Act and other legislation. What does that mean? Well, that means that community learning and development departments have been cut over the last 10 years, more than in the previous 20. A lot of the capacity that has been built in the early 2000s has been dismantled. There's a real knock-on effect of public spending cuts, because the first thing that tends to go is the community workforce, and so there's a real issue with that. If we are to really live up to the aspirations of the Community Empowerment Act of the Local Governance Review of the Community Wealth Building agenda of the planning framework, all these things that have at their heart community empowerment, then we need to look at the community workforce. And the final point I'll make, although we can get a little bit deeper into this. In many ways, what has happened is that instead of building a community planning workforce, people have been pulled in from other sections of councils. It's mainly a council-based workforce. Partners have not really been able to dedicate as much stuff as many they would like. So what that means is that essentially instead of increasing capacity, we just shifted capacity across departments, and then that makes it really hard, also bearing in mind that these workers do not have formal power. They depend on diplomatic skills and soft power to get things done, which is the hardest thing, not just within a local authority area or local authority or council, but also across sectors. And then you find yourself being an official who has no formal power, trying to negotiate very complex issues with chief execs and very senior officials in public institutions. And that's, yeah, it's a really challenging task, and the bar now is incredible. Thank you very much, and thank you, convener. I'm done with just me, thank you. Thanks, Annie, and that's a very interesting response there. We're now going to move on to questions on community empowerment, and those are being led by Mark Griffin, who's joining us online. I'll come to Mark first, because it is the improvement board that said councils seem to be focused on consultation and engagement, but not necessarily empowering communities to make decisions. I wonder if you could maybe set out to committee what you think the difference between consultation and engagement is with empowering empowerment, and if you've got any examples across the country of what genuine empowerment looks like. In terms of your definition, consultation is let's have a conversation but I'll make a decision, and I'll use your insight and intelligence to help inform the decision and hope that I get that decision right. Empowerment is genuinely about what it says in the tin, empowering people, giving them more choice, more control over decisions that affect them, their family, their community. It's allowing them to set the agenda about what the issues are for the public services and their locality, their community, and I think it's a spectrum that we've therefore got across the country, so I don't think it's either or, it's both. If I look back over the time that I've certainly sat with the community planning improvement board, in terms of the journey that we're on, we'd say it's improving. It's not perfect, it's not there yet, all of us, I think, set out some of the issues and challenges that we all face, but we are getting better at it. I don't think you could speak to a CPP where they will not sit and genuinely say they wish to be more empowering with and off communities. It runs through community planning, but it's a challenge, and there's no doubt about it. Some of the issues that Oliver talked about, we're doing this against a constrained resource base, and therefore there are priorities that have to be set, and that's just a reality that we all have to wrestle with every single day. But there are also challenges within communities themselves in terms of their own capability, capacity to work in that empowered fashion. I think that the pandemic taught us a good lesson. We saw some communities step up at pace to be able to work with CPP partners to address the issues around the pandemic, and that was a fantastic resource that allowed us to get into households and communities to access what people needed and get things to them and so on and so forth. Other communities struggled, they didn't have that capability capacity, so building that capability with communities to work in that fashion with you, it sounds as if I'm making an excuse here, I don't mean it to be that way. We need to have empowered individuals, we need to help people to become empowered in order to work in the ways in which empowerment obliges us to do, so there's a lot of challenges in there, different communities will get different needs, different interests, the issues we're dealing with are highly complex, and let's be honest, not everyone wants to be engaged in that kind of a conversation. For want of a better expression, sometimes we outsource these decisions and these discussions and these complexities to politicians. That's why we elect politicians to make those choices and decisions on our behalf as a community, so there's a whole, I think, complex set of issues that sit within that, but again, I'll come back to it across the piece. I think that journey towards empowerment is one that we're on, but there's still much more that we need to do in order to make it work truly for us, so we're getting there, but we're certainly not there yet. Thanks, Mark. Paul, about do you want to add anything? Yeah, if I may. On the difference, Mark got it right, I mean it's about the level of power sharing, and there are different degrees from consulting, to involving, to delegating, and different circumstances and contexts will dictate what's decidable. And in our research, we do see that some CPPs are quite good at this, but it's very difficult to make a general statement about the quality of community engagement and community empowerment in the community planning world because the community planning world is not homogeneous. Even a single CPP is not a thing, it's a network of networks. What you have is all these multiple layers, different governance levels, forums that are really close to communities, thematic forums that sit somewhere in between a local community and strategic decision making space, so these are super complex networks, and we should remember, sometimes when people think, could we do better than having CPPs? You know, maybe, but if we didn't have them, I think we'll have to invent them because we need to remember where we were before CPPs, where we had hundreds and hundreds of partnerships that now have been kind of coordinated under the banner of CPPs that mirror the local authority area boundaries. So that's where we were, so we arrived at CPPs already trying to coordinate a bit better and create a space that unified a very dispersed landscape of partnerships. So when you're dealing with all that complex network of networks and you have all these different levels and policy areas, levels of governance, then community engagement quality is going to be patchy because in some areas on some particular issues on, you know, some alcohol and addiction forums are excellent, some work with children and young people is excellent, some work on health on mental health is excellent. So you will find examples almost in every CPP, good examples of some community engagement, but never across the board because there are multiple spaces and for that you would need far more investment in the community workforce. And a final point on this, precisely because CPP is just connecting to the point that Mark made about the pandemic recovery and now cost of living crisis, you know, if CPPs were better supported and put in the place they need to be put, and I can explain what I mean by that, essentially I mean seeing a sub primary decision making and coordination arena rather than a secondary space. A lot of people involved in CPPs see that as the secondary space. The real business happens in bilateral meetings between the bigger players, that kind of, so unless CPPs are seeing as the place where business is done, then it's really difficult to create the incentives for people to collaborate meaningfully and to focus on achieving outcomes. But if we had a fully functional system of community planning partnerships, all the sudden we have a very decentralized system of governance that can really help in situations like the pandemic, with the climate crisis, with the cost of living crisis, and it's quite telling that the Scottish Government hasn't relied more on CPPs in post pandemic recovery. They don't see them as the primary spaces and you can see this in the call for public views that was there in the report. I think that that's, you know, we really need to get back to a place where if we think that CPPs are the place to articulate local governance across sectors and with communities, then they should be given that primary spot rather than being a secondary space so that then people are not quite sure if they should invest their time and money in that space. Can I have a come back in on that, CPP? Just to build briefly on what Oliver said there, I think that as an arena community planning is a fantastic co-ordination device. Again, we saw a lot of evidence through the pandemic and onwards about how it helps to bring partners together to co-ordinate activities at a local level on the ground. The real challenge, though, remains around governance, but they are not the primary governors of public services within all accountability. So again, from my own organisational perspective, we operate to a national fire and rescue framework for Scotland that sets out Scottish governance priorities and there are aversions of that to run through the whole public sector, so you get different lines of accountability across public services and community planning is not necessarily an accountability body in the same sense as I report through the board to the Minister for Community Safety. There are differences in governance that cut through this as well that create sets of issues and challenges. Oliver has got a view, should we make it the primary governance arena perhaps for public services, we could do, but it is not at the moment and that is where we are. Within those system constraints, I think that you still see lots of real progress on the ground in terms of what community planning can do, bring people together and certainly, if you go below the level of the boards down into the more functional partnerships that are there, then, if you like the day-to-day work of the CPP, you will see strength and operational partnership working, again, working with communities in a more empowered fashion than perhaps you might imagine if you only look at the CPP board at that kind of strategic level. It is a complex picture, lots of issues in there and governance is certainly one of the challenges that we face. Mark Griffin, do you have another question? I did, convener, but, helpfully, Mark and Oliver have both covered my second question and the extensive answer, so thanks for that. That was very helpful, thank you. We are now going to move on to our third theme, which is the role of the third sector in community bodies with Paul McCann. Morning, Mark and Oliver. I think that we have both engaged with each other in a number of years over in East Lothian and so on, so good to see you both. A couple of questions. One was, Mark, probably to yourself first of all, was talking about you talked about public sectors, I suppose, interpretation of community planning. One of the key things I think for me was talking about what is the difference between public bodies and that of community bodies, and by that I am talking about development trusts, housing associations and so on. What is their interpretation of that? Is there a disparity? For example, in that regard, could that be strengthened at community level organisation? Are there good examples at the moment that you could almost try and highlight to say, this model is working in certain parts of the partner? I will come across to Oliver with the same question, but Mark, just building on your last answer there. I suppose when you start to think about who is represented, which bodies are represented within community planning, you start with the statutory partners that are set out in the act, who should be around the table, and that very much drives things across most CPPs. You think that those other organisations are invited, if you like, to be part of the CPP, but again I will say, if you go below the level of the boards into functional partnerships, community safety, drug and alcohol partnerships, you tend to see more of those anchor organisations functioning at that level, and they are very much valuable, I think, at that level of the organisation. I suppose the challenge ultimately at the strategic level of this is equilibrium, what is the perfect size to have a CPP board? What organisations should be there so that we could have a cast of thousands and then try to make a decision across the cast of thousands when the way causes even more challenges than we have at the present moment in time? I do not think that there is a right or wrong answer, but I certainly think that if you look across the country, CPPs do reach out, they are not close shops in that sense, they try to engage with communities directly and with those intermediate bodies that Oliver described them. I mean, some good examples going on in Dundee at the moment around about the work they are doing to build a food strategy across the city. It is building on what they did through the pandemic period and it is very much that co-production with communities and community bodies to build that. Rent for sure is another area, there is a lot of really good work going on there post-pandemic where they are looking at the cost of living crisis, what does it mean in terms of poverty and inequality? It is at the thematic level that you will see much of those community organisations coming together to be part of the decision making, which is then part of community planning itself. I do not think that you need to go far to find really strong examples, but do they all sit at the top table? No, they do not. Do they need to? I am not convinced that they do. Is it that functional level if they are engaged, if they are part, if they can influence and make change happen, that is where the value comes from having them within community planning? That is really helpful. Oliver, just on the same point. It is interesting because a couple of years ago, just before the pandemic, we had a delegation of European partners from other countries, from Denmark, from Portugal, from Poland, from Netherlands, and we were all interested in local governance and how these things are arranged. So they came over to Glasgow and we had a peer learning exchange programme. One of the things that was quite striking is, I mean, they really liked the notion of a CPP, a place where you bring all these sectors together, where there is representation for different sectors and communities, but then they started to ask questions like, OK, so what is the budget of a CPP? You are telling us that they cover everything, from transport to environment to housing. You name it. What budget do you have? Well, they don't quite have a budget. In some places, they managed to pull some budgets together to do specific things and projects, but we don't think of them as budget holders, and therefore they don't have the capacity to invest in certain things or to bring in, or to support their sector interfaces and some of the things that they could do together. You depend on the goodwill of different organisations pulling together budgets for the specific projects rather than having capacity to be proactive. And then they would ask, and who are they accountable to? Well, each member, there has an accountability line to a different body. Some of them are accountable to a minister, some of them are locally accountable or to the electorate. So, again, the more you begin to unpick it, you see how unusual this type of governance construct that we've built here is. That doesn't mean, I do think, I agree with Mark, they have value, and as I said, if they didn't exist, we'll be creating something similar. But we need to realise that we've put CPPs in a position where they don't have the formal power to do the things they want to do. And that doesn't depend just on CPPs, which is why it's so good that this inquiry is happening. We really need to take stock of these things, but they need to be placed in the context of local governance. On the context of the local governance review or the much needed reform of community councils in the context of thinking how health and social care integration partnerships are working or are in working in some places, at least. And once you begin to look across the board, you will begin to see that CPPs will only work better, and some of them work quite well, but will only work better and more coherently if the landscape of local governance is reformed more substantially. And that is difficult because, as we all know here, it touches on so many issues that are politically difficult. But we do have still an ongoing local governance review that hopefully is going to now accelerate and land, and there are other things that are happening. And I think we need to take that wholesale picture because CPPs are only going to be as good as the local governance context in which they try to operate. I'm going to only ask one question that's on the list, so actually just coming off the back of that, Oliver. I'm really interested to hear you talking about the CPPs needing to be seen as that place where business is being done, as you've extrapolated on there. I do wonder the committee is going to be doing, we've got this community wealth building build that's going to be coming. The committee is going to be taking evidence on that and doing work on it. And it started to, as we've been doing this work, it feels like that's the big dot to join, is if we get CPPs right, is that the place that we need to be doing the community wealth building? And I see you nodding, so I'd love to hear you open up on that a little bit. Absolutely, I think it's an incredible opportunity to join the dots, because we know that CPPs work best when they have a sharp purpose, or mission to use the word of the day, Mariano Mazzucato's approach, having a clear mission. So the best CPPs I've seen at work are when they have a very clear purpose. Some years ago, in Woodworks Scotland, we were doing research and following how CPPs were helping with the refugees and asylum crisis and rehousing lots of people, CPPs in the area mobilized, clear shared purpose. Again, around COVID, those that managed to pull together did incredible work, coordinating, doing things, again, strong shared purpose. Community wealth building could be part of that shared purpose and shared mechanism. But we made the same case for participatory budgeting, which could have been a stronger catalyst for CPPs to fall into place and really connect the strategic and the grassroots and bring communities and institutions together with a shared purpose. So I think it's going to be a really good opportunity. In many ways, I just hope that my fear, I suppose, so let me put it this way. My worry is that, as it happened with the Community Empowerment Act, which took three years to develop and what we had at the beginning was very different from what then came to Parliament towards the end of those three years, I'm worried about the silo thinking that might be happening because community wealth building to work well has to go across all the pillars. At the moment, I see a lot of emphasis on the role of the public sector. I don't see enough on the community investment side of things and the community economy side of things. So I think this is going to be an opportunity to connect the dots. At the end of the final point I'll make on this. We know the research is actually quite clear on this, not just in Scotland. This is from international evidence. The one single factor that makes partnerships work is a sense of interdependence. Interdependence is the single most important factor. Without that, partnerships cannot work. So unless people around the table, virtual or physical or around the partnership board or the thematic groups, unless they feel that they cannot accomplish what they need to accomplish, unless they collaborate with the others around the table, then there's no incentive. There's no incentive to pull budgets, to change things, to go over silos. I could give examples of how you get beyond that because we've seen it, but it's pockets rather than across the board. So a sense of interdependence and something like the committee wealth building agenda can hopefully create a sense of interdependence towards a better community-based economy. Thanks very much for that. In a way, maybe you're starting to touch on my next question, which is a bit more on the ground and that's around the local outcome improvement plan, so a tool for that kind of shared purpose and so on and so forth. We heard from witnesses last week and actually even this week that the loypes are like the foundation stone and they're effective if they have a clear set of outcomes and a good data set that allows the measurement of those outcomes. Why doesn't this always happen, Mark? I'll have the first go at any of that question. I think there's a range of issues. Let's also be mindful of the context that we've been operating on, so if you take from the progress of the legislation through Parliament to when we hit the pandemic gap of roughly three years or so, we were starting to make, I think, real good progress with loypes, people understanding what it was that they needed to be doing on behalf of their community. The evidence base was building up. There was a strong focus within the loypes at that stage of inequality and how do we address the underpinning issues that drive inequality, which in turn drives much of the demand across statutory voluntary and other sectors within a community. Then we hit a pandemic and I think one of the things that the pandemic exposed way beyond the data itself was the level of inequality in Scotland. There was hidden inequality within the statistics. I think the pandemic truly exposed just how fragile some of our communities were. So there's a reprioritisation that's required at that stage because suddenly you find there are issues where the issues didn't exist before because the evidence base didn't tell us that that issue existed. Then that's followed by a cost of living to a crisis, where again the pressures within communities is significant. Therefore for partners across CPPs responding to that is absolutely critical. Do you always in that sense have time to develop the well-polished loype? No, they don't. That's not to say they're not making issues that you would expect to see in the loype, so in some cases I think the documentation will have to catch up with the practice that's on the ground at the moment across CPPs. But that sense of common purpose, going back to the points that Oliver was making there, that mission, I think you see strong evidence across the CPPs in Scotland that they understand that they have to work together in order to address some of these issues. Inequality drives issues in demand in terms of health, but talk to health colleagues and they'll tell you they know what causes that are issues that lie within communities themselves. They are not divorced from the pressures on a day-to-day basis across a community. So how do they work with councils? How do they work with housing associations as a key part of their agenda? So I think you're seeing a common purpose across CPPs. Has it always translated into well-polished documents? No, it's not. But I think the evidence still points us towards there's some really strong practice across community planning in Scotland in every locality and they have all got their own stories to tell around about that. Someone just better at writing it up than others is why with themself. I think that's a very good point, that whole piece around. Some are good at doing it and then the writing up is another piece of work that maybe there isn't capacity because the most important thing is to actually deliver the service and meet the needs. I'm going to move on to the next theme, which is measuring impact and Marie McNair has got some questions on that. Thank you, convener, and good afternoon panel. Thank you for your time. What evidence is there that community planning efforts are being focused on in most disadvantaged communities? Is there any evidence of partnerships using improvement services, community planning outcomes profiles to target interventions and budgets? I'll pop that to Mark first. I did specifically ask the community improvement services about how they track the usage of the data in the portal and the answer is no, but certainly what I've done on the community planning improvement board, I see evidence of it because I speak to people and through the various other partners in the body we talk about these issues. We do all make common use of some of that data. My own organisation uses some of that data. We also use data that's provided through Public Health Scotland increasingly, so we are all aware I think of the rich sources of data that are out there, but you also have issues around sometimes the data doesn't fit exactly with the needs of your organisation, because it's fairly generic information in terms of profiling communities and so forth, and sometimes it doesn't get to the level of granularity you need either, so there are still challenges there about how do we join up our data sets to make them more insightful and powerful going forward? How do we also make better use of big data so it's not public service data that can tell us what's going on in communities? Again, during the pandemic, we saw some really powerful usage of that type of data to tell us what was going on through looking at travelled information that we could source through Google, so there's more to be done in terms of using it, but certainly if I go back to my time with community planning, I was around when the first single outcome agreements were first pulled together, and if I compare where we were then to where we are now, there's a much stronger use of data and evidence to help paint a picture and tell us what the priorities are. It's used, I think, more about trying to define interventions rather than budgets, and again for good reasons. Most organisations, public and private, and certainly third sector organisations, are budgets by people in terms of employment. 82 per cent of my organisation's budget goes in staff, so I don't have much free budget to then put on the table for communities planning to say let's go and spend it over there. What we do have are staff that we can deploy and work in partnership with other staff from other bodies to say right let's go and work in Wallis Town or wherever the case may be, and that tends to where the evidence is used. It's more to set what we're going to do with the resources that we have in order to help address these issues within communities rather than say right let's free up some budget and go and spend it in Wallis Town because most of us don't have free budget in that sense to spend, but there's certainly a good use of the evidence, but I think it's one of the things that the improvement service is only going to pick up about how do they begin to track better the usage of the data that they are using, but certainly across the sector you see people using it and talking about it, and increasingly so again with Public Health Scotland data that's becoming available as we go. Thanks to that mark, Oliver. Do you want to come in? Yeah, if I may. This was one of the items that we investigated through. We did two waves of surveys with community planning officials across Scotland, and one of the things we were tracking was the use of evidence, and we saw across those two waves of the survey that people do utilize evidence to understand better local challenges, areas of deprivation, local assets as well, the more positive side, so we saw improvement, but it comes back to that issue of a workforce that is under tremendous pressure. Let's remember, in some CPPs, some CPPs have large teams, Glasgow has a relatively large, but many CPPs only have a couple of people or one and a half, I saw once years ago that might no longer be the case, a CPP that has half a person working for it, so now if you think about that, if then if you need to connect people across sectors, hold the space of the partnership, look at evidence and mobilize evidence to get things going, organize community engagement processes, I mean it's just, you can see what I'm going with this, so the use of evidence suffers from the shortages of the workforce, and that of course connects to a bigger issue about the public sector workforce, not just in Scotland but in the UK, and we can't get away with that, I mean without thinking about what's happened to the public services workforce over the last 10 years because it has a ripple effect on this, and the second point I would make, this also applies by the way at researchers based within councils and based within some of the other partners, and to what extent CPPs can tap into existing resource, in some places they are really good at working across the council or bringing intelligence from fire employees or from NHS, but not all of them because not everywhere there is an ethos of sharing data across organizations, that's still an issue as well, and sometimes the data is not, it can give you, you know sometimes the data is aggregated about an entire area rather than a specific neighborhood or community, and that's another challenge, which again the improvement services has been trying to address that, but it's challenging, although Scotland has struggled to measure these things for CPPs because of the same issues, difficult to get granular unless you invest in a research agenda, and if you invest in that then you're pulling the money away from the actual implementation of all the projects that CPPs try to develop. And the final point I would make on this, you know, what we saw in the service is that there was a clear focus of using evidence that was about disadvantaged communities, but we got a wasp in the building, isn't it? Okay, so when we asked specifically what do you use evidence for, they tended to say, well particularly to understand the challenges and the inequalities that our communities are trying to cope with, but then, and this is the other challenge, is that you have the loyps, right, and those tend to look quite good, I mean I had the students a years ago looking at them and on paper they look quite good, and some CPPs then have a traffic light system, used to see how progress is going, all of that, then locality plans, they tend to look okay, but then in parallel to that you have the place plans, then you have local plans developed by community groups, by community councils, by sometimes by community anchor organizations, so in the end what do you measure and how do you cope to evaluate that variety, right, and loyps are supposed to unify all of that and to create an umbrella where all these things can fit in, and that's not quite happening, I don't think. In some places it might be happening, but not across the board, there's still a lot of co-ordinating, and accepting that these plans don't have to come from public authorities, they can also start from communities themselves who bring plans to the table and then the CPP could be a channel to them, so that there is less duplication and that leadership is shared between the community sector and the public sector. Thank you. My last question of the committee heard last week about the weaknesses you already mentioned in data available in rural setting, as well as the lack of robust data on ethnicity and other equality characteristics. Do you have any views on what needs to be done to improve that? Again, there's a couple of things we can look at. Within organisations, within partnerships, we all have a host of administrative data, and I think how do we improve data collection at rural areas in relation to issues of ethnicity and the equality characteristics more generally of the people who use our services? There's much more that we need to do. I think that more positively, though, recently we've set up Research Data Scotland. Roger Halladay, former chief statistician now leads that organisation, and they're charged with working with public and other bodies about how we get more value out of all of that data that we collect. How can we perhaps take our data, cleanse it, so that when all of us write, when we talk about an area, we are all talking about the same area, the same community, and we'll get better understanding of that community as a consequence. Research Data Scotland's got a big task ahead of itself in order to make better use of that data to give us the insights that joining up could bring. I certainly also know that the chief statistician has got a strong commitment to using the collective resources that sit within Scottish Government to help support local partnerships, because they are a centre of excellence that most of us across the public sector cannot afford just because of the scale of requirements that we all have. There's partnership work that goes on in the data side of things that will give us more going forward. However, the challenges are significant. Not only does data not align, systems sometimes don't talk to one another, and trying to get to even a point of convergence across different partners where our systems might well be the right systems going forward is difficult. I might have a contractor with a contract that's got another five years to run, Oliver may have a contract with someone that's got two years to run, so we're never ever going to be in sync at a point to say we both want to get into this system. There's a plethora of day-to-day operational issues that sit behind all of this as well, but don't make it easy. Nobody ever set out to design the system that we have when it comes to data management and data analysis in Scotland, and they're in lives part of the problem. There is no design. Getting ourselves out of the morass that we're in on that is a complicated set of issues, and it's not something that's going to be easy or quick to do, but I think that the digital strategies that are emerging give again a bit of hope for that, to say, right, at least let's start a process of convergence so that we are all in the same journey and then we can start to make better use of the information and data that we do have. So it sounds like a set of excuses I don't mean it to be. It is just difficult and complicated because of the inheritance around data and technology that we're all working with at the present moment in time. Thank you Mark briefly. Oliver, are you okay with that just in the interest of time? Yeah, sure. From the university-based research on this area, it's actually very limited, which is really striking. I've been in Scotland for 17 years. This is the only country I know, and I do work in other countries as well, where attention to local government and local governance is so scarce. It has a lot to do with seeing local government as again a secondary. It's not, you know, the real business happens at national level. That's the mentality and a lack of valuing how local government is an absolute pillar of democracy, of public services, of everything else. And because of that, there's a ripple effect into the way we channel research funding to try and understand these issues better. And there are a few excellent researchers across Scotland looking at these issues, but there's not a critical mass where we can tap into that and connect it to the work of the improvement service of the Scotland and others to try and make the most of it. And for me, that has a lot to do with the undervaluing of the role of local government here. I come originally from Galicia in Spain. Local government and national government have parity in the constitution. That means sometimes they can be at logger heads. That's the case. That's true. But it's also, you know, a counter power, and they need to negotiate and work much more closely together, rather than in a top-down hierarchical way, whereas here sometimes local government is seeing us a delivery arm of the national state. I'm being a physician with that. But I'm trying to be a bit provocative because I just think local government is not giving the legitimate place it has. And with that comes a lack of attention, resource, investment, and so on. And just on the data on the qualities and race, for me, that's a knock-on effect. If you're having to choose whether you put limited research funding, sometimes it's not going precisely where it should go because it doesn't become a priority for a lot of bodies. And in the end, there are ways of overcoming this, and it has a lot to do with the sharing of data, how do you overcome silos. And we have examples, we mapped some of these examples in our work years ago, where you persuade and create a situation where partners in a CPP let go of the boundaries and open up data to be shared. But that has a lot to do with the problem of problem ownership. And I don't want to get to academic on this, but there is this mentality that certain services and certain institutions own certain problems, right? And with that comes a lack of sharing budgets because that's an issue that we are supposed to tackle, and therefore the budget belongs to us. Now let me give you a specific example, and I'll finish on this. In Glasgow, some time ago, we have reports on this, so I won't give a lot of details, but there was something called operation modulus, which was led by the fire service. It was to deal with an issue of, there were a group of young people who were getting themselves into a lot of trouble in a particular area of the city, right? Social workers were not really managing to act, the police was struggling to act, other partners were struggling to act. What it took to act was to bringing a partner, which in theory was not directly involved in that kind of problem ownership of that issue, and created a space where these young people started to get apprenticeships, a program of two years working closely with them, and it reduced all kinds of offending, et cetera, considerably. It was a small group, but it shows what happens when partners across the board don't think, is that problem mine, or yours? This is our problem, and therefore we're going to share the resources, and we're going to tackle it in ways that might seem unusual, and with that comes sharing budgets and letting go of the silo thinking, and that to me needs to come from an authorizing environment created at the national level and through the kind of inquiry you're doing here. We have a theme on the culture of public bodies, but you've kind of touched on those areas, so we're going to actually move on to the next theme, which is national and local leadership, and that's going to be led by Willie Coffey. Thanks very much, convener. I wonder if I could ask you, Oliver, you mentioned silos a couple of times in the discussion a moment ago, and last week our colleagues from Audit Scotland who came here said that CPP leadership should leave at the door their silos, egos and logos. Could you offer the committee a few comments on that from your perspective, and perhaps Mark, could you offer some views as well on that? The research we've done surveys and things like that, but I've also spent a lot of my time over the last 14 years shadowing committee planning officials and observing committee planning boards, and some of them work very well, and some of them are rubber stamping places where not a lot happens. So it's really, depending on, I don't want to name names, but there is research out there that shows the ones that are really trying to be a genuine space, and the ones that are spaces for the kind of posturing that you are alluding to. Sometimes that comes down to the culture of different organisations around the table, to the style of leadership, so it does get a bit personal. It makes a huge difference if you are a traditional authoritative leader or a more kind of facilitative leader, a leader that is less about command and control, and is more about facilitation, mediation, collaboration. That makes a huge difference, but then that's at the personal level. Then at the organisational level, sometimes people sit around those tables without being empowered by their own organisation to go there and get things going and happening in that space. They are there just to carry messages in between the organisation and the CPP. So I think there's a real issue about asking, asking the NHS and some others as well, how seriously they take CPPs and whether they can leave the logos and the egos and all of that at the door, and some of them do by the way. It's just, it really depends on the people and the culture of the local authority. Who decides who the leaders are, are they appointed from the top or do they emerge from the local people? Who empowers the leaders? Yeah, I mean, I'll have a quick go on them. I'll hand over to Mark, but I mean, there's the statutory members and those are, you know, so you will have a typical CPP board, we'll have your leader of the council. In some places now we also see opposition councillors, you will have the chief exec of the TSI, you will have, in some cases, you will have a community councillor where there's a federation in the local authority area, and then you will have kind of senior people from different organisations across business, across different sectors. So those are statutory, but in some of the best CPPs, then there are also leaders that are brought in from the community sector and the third sector, and we've seen some CPPs over the years really make a space for that, but that's a mixed blessing, because if you're from a community anchor organisation or a network of third sector organisations, you've got to really be careful. Do I put my time into a board where I might not get much done, or do I put it in other kinds of spaces, which comes back to this thing? If the CPP is the place where a lot of business, not all, but a lot of business actually happens, then that gives an incentive for that space to become more inclusive, because people will be able to invest their time there. Mark. Yeah, if I can just touch on a couple of things, I suppose the question is worth asking as well, why do we get silos? Because the thought that Scotland's observation is right that we should be leaving our silos, logos and egos at the door, then what drives us in the first place? Across Scotland as a whole, across the UK as a whole, we remain a very centralized political system, and that still sits at the core of a lot of it. There have been ongoing tensions over the decades, not just recently around community planning, but you could go right back to the reform of local government in the 60s and 70s between do you create integrationist models for public service delivery versus sectoral models, and we can come back and forward over time on that, and that's an ongoing challenge. Community planning clearly is an integration model, but it is not a homogenous model across the whole public sector in terms of policy-making in Scotland. That remains a key driver for many of the public bodies, the partners that you talk about. We still exist within a silo that ultimately is driven by a policy system that is linked into government, to a particular cabinet secretary, and that's the tramline that you're set upon as a body, and at the same time you're asked to go and integrate and work in partnership with others. The system remains fragmented, but I still think that there's a lot of strong evidence that says that despite the system being still fragmented, there is a lot of strong local partnership working taking place. There is a strong drive to integrate and share resources locally, so we sometimes have to work around the system rather than redraw the system itself, because the system again is highly complicated. There are issues of governance and accountability that cut through all of that. Not all of that is in our gift at a community planning level. A lot of that still sits within Parliament, it sits within government, and there are big questions and choices about what kind of public service system do we wish to have in Scotland. If we could get some clarity and resolve some of the issues, then that might then help break down some of the silos that you see or audit Scotland certainly see when they're looking at CPPs, so it's not all CPPs fault in that sense. Okay, right. Thank you very much for that. Thank you both. Thanks, Willie. I'm just actually going to continue on that national and local leadership theme, because we've got a few more minutes, but we've got five minutes, so I hope you can work with me on that big topic. I'm interested here if there's sufficient leadership and support at a national level to support community planning. What more can be done at the local level to ensure leadership is sufficient to meet the requirements of the 2015 act? For example, what's the role of the local councillors? If I may be kick off on a couple of things. In the national level, there's been a lot of work done, a lot of ongoing work done around collaborative forms of leadership, so you've got, for example, the Scottish Leaders Forum, which brings together representation across the whole public service system in Scotland at a strategic senior level, and within that we have set up various working arrangements where we've got issues that we go and work almost on a kind of learning basis. Let's go and tackle a wicked issue and all our work together as a group to do so. Also to support the work through SLF, there's a programme that's under way at the moment supported by the Hunter Foundation and the Scottish Government. It's a Columba 1400 programme, I've been on it myself, and again it's a very different form of leadership development, and again it's very much based on bringing people together to talk about common issues and problems, and the intention of that is you use those types of interventions to break down barriers that then hopefully break down the barriers back in the workplace. So there's work on going at that level. At local level, a lot of it comes down to resources and priorities, and in difficult times these are the things as Oliver noted earlier on, learning and development budgets tend to be one of the first things to go, so finding the capacity and the resource at a point in time when the budget is under pressure remains a real challenge for local partners and individual partners within that, but what we then typically do is we don't do the leadership development, we try and get people together to work together locally to compensate for some of that, so I don't think we're doing enough at that level and I think we could do more, but it's always coming down to who pays for it, because that's a big cost. Thanks Mark, Oliver. Great, I'll try to be brief. I think I'm living up to the academic stereotype of talking too much, so apologies for that. Two quick points. So community planning, in terms of national attention and attention by the Scottish Government and attention by national bodies, community planning is not the kind of thing where people are prepared to spend political capital. In the same way that we haven't reformed community councils for 50 years because people are not prepared to spend political capital on these very difficult issues, and then they have a ripple effect in the quality for local governance and what CPPs and other bodies can achieve, so I think there is a need, it's not the kind of thing that if you're a minister you're going to get a lot of kudos for getting community planning reform going well. The closest we got to that was when it was part of the Christie Commission agenda and we spent 10 years trying to, you know, as part of that, so I think there is still an investment of political capital, the hard yards of investing, knowing that it's not the kind of issue that is going to give you political kudos and that's not easy. And the second point I'll make, and this is my final point, for me working with local leaders in communities, community leaders as well as formal leaders in institutions, the thing that really makes a massive difference is when people start to think about power in a different way. Often we think about power as a zero sum game. If I share power, I lose power. And what we need to start thinking is if I share power sometimes I can create power that wasn't there. We see this through things like participatory budgeting and we could see it through CPPs. If I share the power I have as a councillor or as a body of councillors, if we share power with a set of partners that have capacity to act on a complex issue, I'm generating a form of power that I didn't have as a formal councillor before I share the power to act on this issue. So we need to start thinking of power as productive, not just restrictive. Power, when you share power, sometimes you can generate capacity to do things that you didn't have before. And if we get leaders across the board understanding that power sharing is part of the improvements and of the ways of achieving the things we're trying to achieve, then we get ourselves into a better mindset for these things. Not just committee planning but committee empowerment more broadly to have a chance of moving forward. Thanks very much for those responses and I'll just say that we will be doing work on, we are doing work on the local governance review and maybe we need to have you come back and speak to us more on that. And also I think what you've highlighted there a little bit connects into the work with the new deal for local government and that a new talk right at the beginning or at some point during your evidence around the parity piece and how do we get there but interesting points around you know who's willing to actually take those steps. So thanks so much I think it's been very helpful and I think it's actually helped to create a broader context to the previous panels that we've had. I now briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change over witnesses. We now turn to agenda item 3 which is to take evidence on the non-domestic rates miscellaneous anti-avoidance measures Scotland regulations 2023 from Thomas Arthur who's the minister for public finance planning and community wealth at the Scottish Government and Mr Arthur is joined for this item by Scottish Government officials James Messes who's the policy team leader and James Rees who's a solicitor in the legal director directorate and I welcome the minister and his officials to the meeting and invite the minister to make an opening statement. Thank you convener and good afternoon to the committee. The draft instrument under consideration is as you will have been able to tell quite technical but simply put it is intended to assist councils from the 1st of April 2023 in tackling non-domestic rates avoidance arrangements. The measures contained within the regulations are unique in the UK. Tax avoidance in non-domestic rates takes place when a rate payer seeks to reduce or avoid the liability on their property through activity which although permissible within the existing legal framework is not in keeping with the spirit of non-domestic rates law. In 2017 the independent Barclay review of non-domestic rates recommended that a general anti-avoidance rule be created to make it harder for loopholes to be exploited. Subsequently the non-domestic rates Scotland act 2020 provided powers enabling Scottish ministers to make regulations to prevent or minimise advantages arising from arrangements that are artificial, all of those terms being defined in the 2020 act. We committed to utilising these powers including in the programme for government 2021-22 and the Bute House agreement. The draft regulations that were laid before this committee deliver on these commitments and aim to strike the right balance between empowering councils to tackle rates avoidance whilst also allowing property owners and occupiers to engage in business practices carried out for a reason other than simply tax avoidance. The first target of the regulations is the artificial use of insolvency, of particular leasing arrangements and of shell companies. Within prescribed circumstances councils will be able to make the owners of non-domestic properties liable for the payment of rates rather than the property's occupier. In this circumstance non-domestic rates relief awarded to the property would cease. The regulations have a number of built in safeguards to protect legitimate operators. Firstly, the triggers for the transfer of rates liability are not actionable unless it is a non-domestic rates advantage such as an outstanding non-domestic rates liability. Further, the circumstances in which a council may transfer the rates liability from the occupier to the owner of a property are carefully defined and include tenancies not on a commercial basis, insolvency in conjunction with other artificial indicators and specific characteristics and behaviours of the occupier. Councils must notify the property owner of any intention to transfer the rates liability to the owner and must provide an opportunity for the owner to make representations before a final determination is made. Only if there has been a similar offence within the last five years can there be a retroactive transfer of liability from the start of a given artificial lease agreement. The second target of this draft instrument is rates avoidance through a reduction of rateable value by making deliberate physical changes to the state of the property solely for the purpose of reducing the rates liability. This can include intentional property destruction. The conditions for the use of this power are set out in the regulations and are necessary to support the devolution of responsibility for empty property relief to councils. As with the other provisions in this instrument, this is not intended to target legitimate enterprise. Where the council questions the appropriateness of any arrangement, the owner will have the opportunity, in all instances, to demonstrate the commercial rationale for doing so. The draft regulations were subject to consultation with industry experts and practitioners, including assessors and local authorities, through the Institute of Revenue, Rating and Evaluation. I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who engaged with Government officials in this regard. To conclude, tax avoidance reduces public revenues and is unfair to the majority of rate player pairs who do not engage in such practices. The presence of avoidance behaviours can also undermine public confidence in the non-domestic rate system and lead to reduced rates of compliance. I think that it is not just appropriate but necessary that we bring forward these regulations to tackle tax avoidance where we can and ensure greater fairness and transparency in the non-domestic rate system. As such, the instrument supports the principles of the Scottish Government's framework for tax and aligns with the strategic objectives contained within it. I will close and say that I hope that members will agree with me and support the draft instrument today. Could you provide any indication of the scale of non-domestic rate's income currently being lost as a result of the avoidance measures that are covered by the regulations or an indication of the number of cases expected to be dealt with under the regulations? There is limited data on the number of avoidance practices that are being engaged in. We have individual case examples and anecdotal evidence, but across Scotland we just do not have the data on the right. Is there any risk that the regulations might result in genuine situations being incorrectly classified as an example to share with you? Supposing a tenancy agreement was signed and the occupier genuinely became insolvent after that, how would the owner be able to demonstrate that that was not an avoidance mechanism? There is sufficient flexibility within the regulations so that the local authority via effective tax authority can engage with owners and indeed there is an opportunity for owners to engage following local authority giving notice. Do you want to expand on that slightly, James? Yes, absolutely. It is worth pointing out as well that in the circumstances that you pointed out in the case of insolvency there are safeguards contained within the regulations, notably that as well as entering insolvency within the first 12 months of signing the lease, the non-domestic property continues to be occupied and used commercially. That is just one. The other might be that the property continues to be in receipt of non-domestic rates relief, is continuing to receive an advantage. But as the minister sets out, there's an entire process for an individual that receives a notice to provide evidence that their arrangement is not for the purposes of an artificial advantage. Does the minister consider the dispute mechanism within the regulations to be sufficiently robust and also if an owner occupies or challenges the local authority decision regarding the rates bill but the decision is not overturned, what further course of action is open to the owner if they are still dissatisfied with the decision? I'll turn to that in just a moment. I do think that it is robust and it provides sufficient flexibility as well. I think that it's also important to recognise the impact that this will have on rate players, is that avoidance measures are fundamentally unfair and the disadvantage of those who do engage in legitimate practice. On specific points with regards to the dispute mechanism and what recourse there is, should a occupier disagree with local authority or ask James to come in? Absolutely. When an individual first receives a notice, they'll have 28 days to reply, as I said before, setting out why they do not think that their arrangement is for the purposes of an artificial advantage. Subsequently, the local authority will have a further 28 days to respond, consider the information and the evidence and provide a final notice. Where an individual disagrees with the final determination, they can apply for an internal review within the local authority. Where they disagree with the determination of that internal review, they can then pursue that through the courts via judicial review. What is the scale of the administrative budget that is expected to be faced by local authorities in implementing those regulations and will local authorities have the resources to undertake action under those regulations? Of course, local authorities are responsible for the administration and that is something to undertake. More generally, it's not specific to this, but resource has been provided for local government in recent financial settlements with regard to the reforms that are falling on from Barley. I don't know if you want to add to that, James. Absolutely. The intention of the regulations is to protect revenue. That is something that local authorities have been asking for. Further, the instances of avoidance are not so prevalent that it would potentially cost or create such an administrative burden. I thank the minister and his officials for their evidence today. We now turn to agenda item 4, which is consideration of the motion on the instrument. I invite the minister to move motion S6M-07676 that the local government housing and planning committee recommends that the non-domestic rates miscellaneous anti-avoidance measures Scotland regulations 2023 be approved. Thank you. Do members have any points they wish to make? Nobody has any points. Minister, is there anything you would wish to add? The question is that motion S6M-07676 in the name of Tom Arthur be approved. Are we all agreed? The committee will publish a report setting out its recommendations on the instrument in the coming days. The next item on our agenda for today is consideration of two negative instruments. The council tax discounts Scotland amendment order 2023 and the non-domestics rate valuation of sites of reverse vending machines Scotland regulations 2023. There is no requirement for the committee to make any recommendations on negative instruments. Do members have any comments on the instrument? No comments. Is the committee agreed that we do not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? Agreed. Thank you. We agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next two items in private, so as that was the last public item on our agenda for today, I now close the public part of our meeting.


The game we are playing is called Frack and Field. The game is played in three events. Players organize into teams of three. Each team completes one event at a time. The goal of the game is to use fractions on the number line to showcase how far a person jumped or through the discus as compared to a record for the event. For this game you will need string, painter's tape, a meter or yard stick, jar lid or something to throw, and a leaderboard sheet. For the long jump, you string to create a number line measuring 16 feet. Mark off every two feet along the string with tape. Then clearly mark the starting line in a runway. For the discus throw you string to create a number line measuring 32 feet, mark off every four feet along the string with tape, then clearly mark the throwing line. For the triple jump you string to create a number line measuring 22 feet, feet, mark off every two feet of string with tape, clearly mark a starting line and a runway. In each team there is an athlete, a measure, and a recorder. Each team member serves a single role for an event. Team members rotate through these positions. By the end of the 30 event each team member will have served in all three roles. Each team scores points by accurately representing fractions. The team with the highest score wins. In the long jump event the athlete takes a running start and jumps as far as possible beginning at the starting line. The measure watches the athlete closely and finds the marks where the back of the athlete's heel landed then measures the distance from the starting line to this mark. The recorder works with the measure to assign that place a fraction. The recorder writes this fraction on the leaderboard. If the team correctly identifies the fraction on the number line the team earns a point. In the discus throw event the athlete stands at the starting line and throws a small lid the discus as far as possible. The measure watches closely and uses the knots on the court to measure the distance from the starting line to the place the discus first hit the ground. The recorder works with the measure to determine the fraction of the full length of the court associated with the distance the discus flew. Score is in the long jump. In the triple jump event file the same process as for the long jump except the athlete jumps three times in session landing one foot at a time. The measure measures from the starting line to the back of the athlete's heel the third time the athlete's heel lands. Here are some questions to think about while playing or after play. Pause the video and read these questions. Here are some ways to modify the game when necessary. An important variation may be to condense the game to complete only one event each time you play. For more thorough instructions use the link below. Thanks for playing!