Good morning and welcome to the 8th meeting in 2015 of the Finance and Committee of the Scottish Parliament. Could I please remind everyone to turn off any mobile phones or other electronic devices. My first sight of my business today is to see that evidence is part of our continuing focus on preventative spending. This will consist of two separate evidence sessions, and in our first evidence session we hear from Caroline Gardner, auditor general for Scotland and Douglas Sinclair, chair of the Accounts Commission. Members have copies of the Audit Scotland report, community planning, turning ambition into action. I would like to welcome both witnesses to the meeting. I understand that there will not be an opening statement and so we will go straight to questions. Obviously, I have given evidence before to the committee car line, it seems just about strange this morning, for some reason it seems further away than normal. That is just a feature of committee room 5. We will go straight on to aspects of your report. You said in your report that Audit Scotland found that the current pace and scale of activity is contributing to an improved focus on prevention but is unlikely to deliver the radical change in the design and delivery of public services called for by the Christy commission. Obviously, you go into that in greater detail in your report. I am just wondering for the record if you can tell us if that is still your view and what specific measures you would like the Scottish Government to take forward in order to change that and deliver the radical change that is required. Thank you, convener. I will kick off and Douglas Maywell wants to add to what I say. I think that that view came from the work that we have done on community planning. We have now ordered eight partnerships across Scotland between us and produced two national reports on it in the last couple of years also, but also from the range of other work that we have done in other areas of public policy. We are referring the report that you have before you today to the progress that we have seen in terms of reshaping care for older people, for example, where there has been a very clear policy commitment for a while that healthcare needs to be radically reshaped to meet the growing elderly population here in Scotland, to help us all to live at home independently for longer and to recognise the fact that resources are constrained for the foreseeable future. There has been a lot of effort put into that, policy shifts, change funds and a focus on that happening, but our work shows that the amount of money that is shifting is very small at the margins. The change that is happening tends to be small-scale pilots without the shift that is needed to turn that into radical reshaping, which is needed in that area of policy for older people. The other priorities that the Government has set around early years, around reducing reoffending and tackling inequality more generally. Lots of the building works are in place, but the change that we are seeing is at the margins rather than really stepping back and saying, of the £4.5 billion that is spent every year on older people, how do we use that better to get the outcomes that we are looking for? As I said, how could the Scottish Government ensure that we actually do take this forward more expeditiously? We have made a number of recommendations. I will summarise them in two groupings. The first I think is to make sure that the planning that is done for outcomes is done more effectively. There is a huge amount of support and consensus around the outcomes approach. They are well embedded in public policy making now, both at government level and for each of the 32 partnerships across Scotland. What we are not always seeing though is the planning that says, if this is the outcome that we want to improve, what is it that the Government and each of the partners at a local level will do to change that. There is a number of reasons for it that I am sure will explore more with the committee this morning, but that planning is issue number one. Issue number two is getting much better at shifting resources. I know that the committee has focused on, in the past, at disinvesting, stopping to spend money on areas that are less effective so that we can release that and shift it into areas that will make more of a difference. That is not an easy thing to do. We are in a period now where demand is outstripping the growth in resources available and it is much harder to do in that context, but it is all the more critical if we are going to get the benefits that are proposed from prevention, both in terms of the quality of outcomes for people, but also making sure that the money that we have can stretch to cover what is needed. The committee found, and we looked at this in terms of budgets, that disinvestment was a real concern about it and that it is very difficult for organisations to go down that road. We will explore that in further detail, but Douglas, I am just wondering if you want to add one additional point that I would make in our report. One of the recommendations that we made was the need for the Scottish Government and COSLA jointly to develop a framework in order to assess how well community planning partnerships are actually improving and to report on that improvement. There is a lack of an accountability framework at present to assess how well community planning partnerships are doing and how they can learn better from each other. I think that that is one of the more important recommendations in our report to develop that framework. In your report, Caroline, one of the case studies that you looked at was North Ayrshire, which is the area in which I represent. It was actually a community councillor meeting on Monday night, and there was a meeting in Llargs on Thursday to look specifically at this, and councillors were asked about it. I have to say that there still seems to be a real lack of understanding as to how that is actually going to work on the ground and the kind of timescale in which it will be delivered and indeed how community organisations are going to be able to interact with that. Is that a concern that you have? We do. I think that that is one of the points that we identified in our report. The national community planning group has refocused its position in terms of community planning. We are very much focused on reducing inequalities, but one of the things that has got in the way has been the statement of ambition, which has said that community planning partnerships should behave like proper boards. Will they not be proper boards? If you were on a board, you can get rid of somebody, and they are proper board, they are voluntary partnerships. I think that there has been some confusion within community planning partnerships about what their role is. You have brought together a range of organisations, each with their own accountability and counsel to the community, to the health board, to the Parliament, to the police, to the chief constable and so on. There has been a confusion about roles. There has also been a confusion about whether they are about place or whether they are rare for national priorities, and also a confusion about where they can add most value. Our view is that they can add most value where budgets do overlap, drugs and alcohol, where they can make that money go further. One of the things that we have found in our community planning audits is that those community planning partnerships have invested time and effort in building a relationship of trust, and building a relationship of confidence to each other are the ones that have succeeded most. Those who have not done that, where relationships are poor, particularly between the council and the health board, have not made the kind of progress that they should. I think that there is an important lesson in there for health and social care partnerships to make the same investment in building trust and respect and understanding each other's roles. You take the point that has been, for example, that compresses me a councillor, who will understand a non-executive member of the health board. They are not one and the same thing, and yet they are put together around the table with the same responsibility. I do not think that that has been unpacked, discussed and addressed sufficiently. That is an issue. One of the things that we have said is the need for the national community planning group to look again at the statement of ambition, to take away any excuse for community planning partnerships, not making the kind of progress that we would like to see. I think that just building on what Douglas has said, it is worth saying that we think North Irishers are doing pretty well. They are one of the better community planning partnerships that we have looked at in terms of using data that they have drilled that down to six neighbourhood areas to really understand the challenges in each area. In some instances, there are very small groupings of 20 households to understand where the need is and what they can do, and they are starting to do good things in terms of involving local people in those discussions about what matters and how you might change them. What we are not seeing more widely in many places is that really clear prioritisation about what people are going to do. I think that the one place that we saw that in the last round of audits that we did was in Glasgow, where given the wide range of problems that Glasgow is facing, the partnership is focusing on three specific priorities around alcohol misuse, vulnerable people and youth employment. They have used the data to identify that those are the priorities. They have recognised that they are interlinked and that they often affect each other and that alcohol abuse can make employment much more difficult. The partnership is focusing on what people can do to shift those indicators with the planned expectation that that will improve outcomes for the most vulnerable people in Glasgow. We think that prioritisation and the planning that goes with it is part of the trick to unlocking prevention. One of the things that you have said in your report is that the discussions about targeting resources at the priorities and shifting them on subrentive activity are still in the early stages. We have been talking about that for years. The committee alone, since the last Parliament, five years ago, has been discussing preventive spending. We got a quote in a budget scrutiny that says, by 1 ccp, that we are now on the precipice of the next step. I think that we all understand the challenges. We have discussed these on team times, your report goes into them in great detail. We have got lots of information about the difficulties, but how are we going to break this kind of log jam, this bottleneck? How are we going to get these things moving forward so that in another five years we are not still talking about preventive activity still being in its early stages or moderately to medium stages? We really need to pick this up if we are going to see the long-term changes that we all want to see. I will kick off with two things. First of all, we are seeing a real shift between people talking about their budgets as abstract things, as lists of numbers around budget headings analysed in different ways. Instead, we are starting to sit down and talk about what that money is spent on—the number of teachers, youth workers, buildings, people and assets of other sorts that are available. We are starting to think about how those people can be used better to improve the outcomes that people are working towards. That is much more productive, because the money is not an end in itself. It is buying people and assets and all the other things that we know are vital for changing outcomes. People tend to get a bit less defensive about it. You are not talking about giving up £1 million in a year when your budget settlement is very tight. You are talking about pooling the things that people are already doing and maybe shifting what people do and how they spend their time in the way that they are organised. I think that there is much more potential in that to move it forward. The other thing that I think is increasingly clear to us from both of our perspectives in audit work is that the pressures locally are getting tighter and tighter. In a sense, I think that increasingly there will be no alternative. That does not make it easier to do it or more pleasant, and there are risks associated with it. If we look at the challenges around health and social care and again care for older people, it is increasingly clear that the pressure that we are seeing from growing numbers of older people with lots of long-term conditions that need to be treated and cared for and very tight budgets between health and social care mean that carry-on doing what we are doing just is not sustainable. I think that the trick is to manage that in a way that gets the most change out of it and limits the risk from it. I hope that the integration of health and social care will change in that particular example, but it does need to join up to the wider reform agenda to avoid opportunities again for getting most from what we are spending collectively. I agree with that. I think that there is also a bit of focusing in those areas where collectively it is easier to make progress. It is a bit about recognising that the council is still around the schools, the health board is still around the health service, but where budgets overlap saying that health improvement, economic development or inequality are experiences that those community planning partnerships that are focused in those areas have said that what is our collective spend say in economic development? How can we make that go further? I think that that focus down into those areas where there is overlap helps to build the kind of trust and confidence that I mentioned earlier and brings about results. One chief executive described community planning as the art of the deliverable, and I think that there is a lot of truth in that. It is a kind of concept that everyone will agree with, community planning. It is common sense. Preventive spend is common sense, but there are difficult things to do in practice. As Caroline has indicated, given the budget pressures, the savings that are identified rather than going to create a pool of money to try with me for preventive spend is going there to balance the budgets. That has been true of even change funds where money is being diverted to prop up budgets. One of the issues that would help is to try and improve scrutiny skills of councillors, for example, and health board members, so they are more challenging of the reports that they get on performance to say, well, if that is not making a difference, why are we doing it? Why are you not pulling your budget with other partners? Particularly in an era of coalitions, the importance of scrutiny, the demise of service committees, I think that scrutiny is even more important now, scrutiny for value for money, to make sure that the pounds that we are currently spending are achieving the targets that the council of community planning partnership has set out. Scrutiny is not desperately well-developed in community planning partnerships. Challenge is not desperately well-developed, it is one of the findings that we made. I think that there is real scope there. I think that there is also a need for more encouragement of good practice on the ground. We talked about community planning partnerships, but we also read to remember that there are lots of examples of very good partnership working between officials and officers of different organisations, often with nothing to do with the community planning partnership. I think that the encouragement of that by leaders of the councils, chief executives and health board is really important that they make a statement that one of their commitments is better sharing of resources, that the community planning is about the fact that no single organisation can solve the problems of an individual or indeed of a community. Works Scotland, you are giving evidence after yourselves have said, and I quote, everyone is in favour of the idea of prevention. If you want to stay a career on such an uncertain business or invest public funds in preventive measures, that is one of the issues that we have to face. I think that one of the things that can get in the way are targets. The target of A&E targets, for example, is the real issue of how do you stop people getting into A&E in the first place? That is the preventive work. I think that there is a debate to be had about the balance between targets and outcomes, and if we are wanting long-term change, then the focus needs to be absolutely primarily on outcomes. Gavin, you wanted to come in with a supplementary question. It is on that point about Mr Sinclair. I think that the idea of improving the scrutiny skills of councillors is obviously a sound one, but the way you set it up suggested that there are reports going to councillors saying that this is not working and they ought to be scrutinised and more. When I do speak to councillors, a lot of the reports that they get from officials, reports do not say that this is not working, and the reports say that this is actually working pretty well. It strikes me that there are very few departments who are actually prepared to see what we have spent money on and have not worked and are not working. I did not say that and I agree with you. I think that a lot of officers have still come to terms with the fact that it is the job of councillors. It is a key part of the job of councillors to scrutinise their performance, and it is one of the duties of officers to ensure that elected members have the necessary information in a form and in a comprehensive nature to enable them to ask legitimate questions. It is not one-way ticket. Officers have as much responsibility as do councillors. It is true to say that many officers do not like being challenged, but they need to be challenged. It is important that councillors have the skills and have the confidence and have the information to discharge that role properly. I have just got one area to touch on before I open out to committee. Audit Scotland has said that CPPs need to, in a quote, understand what is a successful shift to prevention, look like. How should that look in your view? I think that it picks up something that you just quoted from the what works Scotland submission that you have. That is the challenge that, for lots of these outcomes, we do not know what works. The evidence is not always there. The outcomes by their nature will take a generation to achieve. If there is good practice in one place, it is not at all clear that it will work somewhere else if you have different geography and demography and all the other things that affect it. I do not think that it is as simple as saying that here is what works, we just need to spread it externally. We need to get a better at really understanding what it is that we are trying to achieve in the local part of Scotland that we are responsible for, the CPP or, for some things, a smaller area than that, a neighbourhood, to look at the whole range of things that might tell us what could make a difference, the evidence where it exists, good practice from elsewhere, the understanding and insights of the staff working locally and local people and voluntary sector organisations and everybody else, and then be much more systematic about planning what it is that we expect to improve the outcomes that we want to shift and how we know if it is working or not and can therefore carry on doing that or disinvest again and try something else. I think that we have got some really good examples from things like the patient safety programme that the Government is leading and the NHS that that sort of approach works. In that instance, I think that the evidence probably is a bit better than it is for some of the other outcomes that we are focusing on, but the same approach of, in a really targeted way, identifying what action you think will make a difference, monitoring it and either investing more or pulling back, I think, is a key part of doing it. There may be a precedent in looking at benchmarking in councils where you create families of councils, like councils of a similar nature, so that the council can compare their performance with a rural council. You could think of families of CPPs. You with me have similar CPPs and the same thing. If that CPP is able to do that, why are we not able to do it? There is still this huge resistance in Scotland. If it was not invented here, we are not going to do it. There is a quote that I often use in the recent report on Welsh public services that good practice is a bad traveller. Sometimes there is an unwillingness in Scotland to learn from each other to say, well, if they have done it, why reinvent the wheel, why not just pick that good practice up and run with it? I am now going to open up the session. The first colleague to ask a question has been Malcolm to follow by John. I was going to refer to that last point that the convener made about needing support to help them to understand what a successful shift to prevention would look like, but I read through the whole report, which I found useful. I was just trying to analyse what the nature of the problem was, and I divided it into positive statements about progress on the prevention agenda and the more negative ones. The only positive ones I could find were that all SOAs demonstrate a strategic commitment to the prevention agenda. Then it also said that CPPs are starting to focus more on preventive activity, so they were signs of hope. However, on the other hand, we had discussions about targeting those resources, their priorities and shifting towards preventive activity are still in the early stages. We even had a statement saying that there are also differences of opinion about the extent to which community planning should focus on prevention and inequalities. The Scottish Government did not come out totally unscathed because it said that the Scottish Government needs to demonstrate a more systematic approach to implementing its outcomes approach. At present, many performance management frameworks are still heavily focused on inputs and processes and lack of clear prevention focus. I was just trying to analyse exactly what the problem is, so going back to the first point that the convener has already introduced, clearly there needs to be more national support, but should that be the heart of what we now focus on? Are there still problems that are prior to that in terms of the attitude of community planning towards the prevention agenda? Does everybody accept it as a concept? Is it really the evidence and support that we should focus on? Are there still some other problems in there as well? My view is that there is very strong consensus that prevention has to be the way to go, both as a way of making the resources fit the needs but also because it is better for the people who are all here to serve to solve problems before they happen rather than spending a generation dealing with the consequences of them. As we say in the report, there is space to make better use of the support for improvement for prevention that is available. At the moment, it tends to be lots of small-scale interventions that are not particularly well joined up. There is a lot of resource there, but it is not all aligned and driving in the same direction. I do think that picking up the point that Douglas made earlier that there is also something for government to do to step back and make sure that the outcomes that it wants to achieve longer term are consistent with the short term performance management arrangements that are in place, as we say in the report. One example from my report on the NHS that was published before Christmas, we think that there is increasing evidence that although the reshaping care for older people strategy is absolutely the right one for 2020 to have much more care provided at home, allowing people to live independently in good health, the combination in the short term of very tight financial targets and the heat targets. I mean that there is not very much room to really step back and think about how you can take resources out of some services and reinvest in the ones that would avoid admissions in the first place or help people to be discharged more quickly. Now that is not an easy thing to do either politically because there is a lot of focus on those targets at the moment or professionally clinically and in terms of social care. I do not think that we know in an area like Lothian for example how much would you need to invest in home care, in geriatricians working in different settings, in rapid response to avoid admissions in the first place for older people living at home in order to be able to reduce the huge amount that we spend on people who are in hospital for more than 28 days unnecessarily, people who have very bad outcomes because they are admitted when a problem could have been prevented. Does that need to pull back and really understand better what the problem is and what the possible solutions might be in preventative terms? I think that that is true for older people services but also much more widely. It is a kind of combination of understanding the evidence better but obviously you have referred there to the very difficult financial constraints so presumably it is a combination of the two. Absolutely, I think that you need to do both but my sense is that the improvement support needs to be operating at a more strategic level to really understand the scale of the problem, Scotland-wide and at local levels, so that we can start to make plans for the sort of reinvestment that this committee is talking about and understand what the consequences of that would be for the short term. Why is there a sentence about there are differences of opinion about the extent to which community planning should focus on prevention? Is that what was the evidence for that statement? It comes from the eight community planning partnerships that we have jointly audited over the past three years or so and I think that it comes back to the point that we also make that each of the partners has got different accountability arrangements. As Douglas says, the partnership itself has no formal status, it is not accountable to anybody, the council is responsible accountable to its electorate, the health board is responsible to the cabinet secretary, the divisional police officers are accountable to the chief constable and then to the SPA and those people are being driven by their own performance management frameworks as well as by whatever the CPP has set as its own priorities and those sometimes pull in different directions and don't always focus on prevention. So there's a kind of multiplicity of objectives, so it's just one among many kind of things. I think that there's also one of the key messages in our report that all the bodies involved in community planning need to play their part in full and by that I mean that the national community planning group needs to be clear about what its revised approach to community planning with that focus and prevention and equality is actually means for the statement of ambition, I mentioned that earlier. Secondly, that the Scottish Government and COSLA do develop a framework in order to assess the performance and pace of improvement of community planning partnerships. We're not measuring that at all just now and thirdly that community planning partnerships need to invest more in building mutual trust and capacity but also to start making the difficult choices about moving resources into prevention. You need movement on all three fronts at one at the same time. Okay, that's time for me. Okay, thank you. John, to be followed by Mark. Thanks so much, convener. In the What Works Scotland paper, they talk about the whole question about prevention and the same practice prevention explicitly or implicitly has been around a long time and most public policy has a preventative dimension including much policy that may not be labelled preventative. That makes me think that are we actually or is anybody all that clear as to what is preventative and what is not preventative? I think you're right that there's room for more of that clarity and I think for me that licks back to the point we make in our report about the need for more planning for outcomes under the framework of the Scotland performance. Everything that's in there is an outcome. It's all about making life better for the people of Scotland in different groups and in different ways. But in our audit experience, the extent to which that's underpinned by the detailed planning that says in order to do this, everybody who can influence it has agreed what they will do and how it hangs together, varies. From two recent reports of mine on renewable energy, we found that the Government had a great record of being very clear what it wanted to achieve, what the levers were that it had and how it would measure that over a long period of time. That's not to say that it all happens like this because they're complex things but the clarity was there. In relation to housing policy, we found there was less clarity and less alignment of all the people with an interest in it. That may be because housing is a more complex problem to solve but the underpinnings of the outcomes, we think, varies and there's scope to increase the clarity about it. If that's the outcome you want to improve, what is the best guess, if you like, about how you will do that based on the evidence, on experience and on the insights of people doing it? How will you measure and monitor that to make sure that it is moving in the right direction? That's what I think we're looking to see in terms of really being clear about what the preventative activity is in shifting each of those outcomes and understanding better the choices and trade-offs that are involved in that. I think that a lot of us would, our gut feeling would be that housing is a pretty good one for preventative spending because you're going to help, probably help education, probably help health, probably help family budget so that whatever studies there might be the gut feeling would be it is. Whereas something like a hospital, I have more questions about because I mean we're spending, what is it, £700 million on the Glasgow south south 842? I'm connected. A large amount of money on the new hospital on the south side of Glasgow. Now can we call any of that preventative or can we call it all preventative or can we call none of it preventative? I mean have you got a feeling on that? I think it's exactly the right question. I think if you ask a group of health care professionals and social care professionals none of them will say we don't need hospitals now and we won't need them in the future but I'm very interested in if we take what we've got now and then say in 20 years' time or actually under the policy in 2020 we have a vision where lots of the older people who are currently being admitted to hospital will not need to be. Do we know how many of those older people are there because there is currently no alternative and how many are there because they need exactly what a state of the art hospital like the new southern general can offer? Of the people who could be somewhere else, what is it that we need in terms of geriatricians working in the community, in terms of different sorts of care settings, in terms of investment in housing to make it safer to stay at home for longer or to use telehealth to monitor somebody's well being, in terms of home care workers, in terms of genuine community support from communities themselves? Do we understand how much of that demand is avoidable and what we would need in order to be able to avoid it? I think the answer is no. Now we're not alone in that, that's not a criticism of this government, it's hard and complex stuff but I think that's the work that's needed in that one example and in the range of other things where we also want to improve outcomes by preventing problems in the first place. I'm going to make the same point about crime, the criminal justice system, producing communities responsible for the police but the causes of crime are right with the control of the police, I mean bad housing, poor education, bad parenting skills, poor health, bad planning, that's where community planning can make a difference in terms of preventive work. How many people have got into the criminal justice system because of these factors further back and if they've been addressed further back then hopefully the number of people who commit offences would have been reduced, that's the essence of a longer-term approach to community planning. I just wonder if we need to do any more studying, I mean the suggestion seems to be that we need to look at this more and we need to understand it more and all the rest of it but I mean we are agreeing broadly that we all want preventive spend and I mean your own report early on it says discussions about targeting these resources at their priorities and shifting them towards preventive activity are still in the early stages but I mean if we're serious about shifting resources do we not just have to say right the spend on hospitals and accident emergency next year will come down 2% and that money will go to preventive spending or GP practices or wherever we want to put it, do we not need a bit more kind of hard edged somebody making that kind of decision? In a sense yes I'm not suggesting we need more research evidence or more studies or anything else what I think I'm saying is that in each part of Scotland we need that very clear understanding that says this is what we're going to shift and here's how we're going to do it now it may be that in some parts of Scotland the answer is to say we will collectively agree we'll spend 2% less on the hospital as a whole or on A&E and we will we will take that out and spend it on something else but that that needs to be a collective decision that's based on an understanding of what that's likely to do to A&E waiting times to demand for social care to be able to respond quickly to keep people at home the problem sticking with that example is that if you don't do that thinking then actually you can't take 2% out of A&E because people will keep on turning up at A&E who have got real needs. A&E because we keep putting more money in there? I would say not I would say it's because we're not putting money into the alternatives we know we've got in the report we published last year on reshaping care for older people a great example from Perth and Kinross where the councillor's worked with the health board to really use the data to home in on the relatively small group of older people who do keep on being readmitted to hospital and getting stuck there to work with their GPs to understand what would help to keep those people at home and then to invest a quite small scale into the sorts of services that the GPs the home care workers the social care managers think would be needed and you can see the trend in the data that helps you avoid those admissions and to keep people safer and with a higher quality of life at home now the challenge comes when you try and take that money back out of the health service and put it somewhere else because the focus is on how many patients are being treated being discharged from A&E within four hours on the length of time that people are waiting for elective treatment I think you can make small changes at a local level in exactly the way you discuss but if I was the chief executive of the health board I'd be very concerned about something which was going to blow my performance against those heat targets out of the water without having an understanding of what the impact might be and without there being a wider acceptance that we need to think about whether all of the things we're trying to achieve are coherent and consistent. So should we as the politicians then just make the decision that for the next five years we're going to be relaxed about A&E targets all being missed because we're going to put that resource into I mean is that leadership that we need to give? I'm not the politician and I am an accountant what I would say is I wouldn't... Allegedly. I wouldn't say let's be relaxed about missing the A&E targets I'd step back and say is 95% within four hours the right target is there a clinical reason for it would it make sense actually to say 90% within four hours and work towards that or indeed to differentiate it for different types of people could you come at it a different way and say do we really understand how many of the people who turn up at A&E need to be there or could be there at a much lower level of support using NHS 24 more effectively or GP walk-in centres the public audit committee has been looking at our work on A&E recently and actually there's very poor information about people who self refer to A&E and the reasons why they're there it's the sense of not knowing enough at a local level about what the demand currently is so that you can identify what can be diverted altogether and what you could treat better by going upstream and doing prevention I mean that is a fair point on the question of going back to the CPPs I mean if a CPP in any area decided you know we as a whole would really like that kind of shift you know out of secondary care into primary or whatever I mean does the CPP have really have any power to make that decision I mean it's interesting there's a provision in the 2003 act which allowed the CPP to apply to Scottish ministers to become an incorporated body to become an effective statutory body none of them have ever applied to become to become so and you know one part of the CPP cannot dictate to the other its priorities there you know councillor's priorities the health board's priorities it's at the margins it's where the budgets overlap that they can make a make a difference but I still feel I think we both feel we can still make a huge amount more difference by by focusing on those areas where budgets do overlap and that's a that's a that's a that's a first step but effectively then you're seeing each member of the CPP has a veto over its own budget or whatever unless unless they're I mean unless they're I mean point there unless they're prepared to agree right and then they've got the issue say the health board representatives what that does in terms of their accountability to the minister what authority do they have in the CPP that can gain say what the minister wants to do that that's where it gets really really difficult one of the one CPP which is which is well advanced as I think to something I can come to that point in time they want to move further forward but there's a limit in terms of the degree of discretion they have as a CPP you follow what I'm trying to say yes in terms of ministerial direction or indeed the priorities of other partners around the table so I mean we could take one well take Glasgow for my case where all the other partners agreed that there should be a shift out of secondary care into primary care but if the health board felt under whatever pressure that they couldn't do that then it's not going to happen is it there's nothing to stop the agreement being made if they all sign up to it they clearly got that but it's got to be a hundred percent it's got to be a hundred percent and I think it would be a brave chief executive a health board who was willing to say don't worry that the heat targets are what I'm held accountable for but I'll manage them because it's very clear that that sort of shift would have an impact on the short term targets and the the need to break even every year on revenue and capital and it's that that the chief executive has held to account for by the cabinet secretary now that accountability is very clear and there's nothing wrong with it what I think we've questioned in our NHS reporting is whether the short term targets and the financial targets are compatible with reshaping care towards prevention for older people okay thanks so much okay thank you Mark to be followed by Richard thanks I want to maybe just touch a little bit more on this discussion around inputs versus outcomes and whether we're we're looking at the right things I mean in terms of that shift that that that you feel needs to happen who do you envisage leading this discussion because I think you know surely you would accept it's very difficult for a government for example to turn around and say actually we probably shouldn't worry too much about this target area our focus should be over here because you can you know you can see the narrative that would follow from that what what what few do you take on where the leadership on that discussion needs to come from and how do you achieve buy-in to that discussion I think it has to operate at all levels clearly government has got a central role in this government policy directs and should be directing what all of the other public bodies do and what they do in partnership and I think the outcomes approach in setting those clear directions on the longer term view has been a really strong move that has helped to build people's thinking about what public services are for and how you make best use of the 40 billion or so we spend on them every year I think for government itself as we say in the report there is more to do to make sure that the policy making towards those objectives is aligned is joined up and really understands what the impact of individual policies will be on each of the outcomes to get that joining up but equally I think as we've been discussing at a local level at the community planning partnership level and more locally than that there's work that can only be done at that level to really understand what the needs are there what resources you've got what the local characteristics are in terms of remoteness and rurality and deprivation and so on to work with I think across the piece though there probably is a type of leadership that we need more of in this context which is saying with the resources we've got we cannot do everything we have to make choices and here are the choices we're making we know that politics is is not easy that's what all of you do every day but I think there's something about opening up the conversation with the public about the choices that we we have to make as a society about the different trade-offs that are involved in that and about why for example although we all have a very strong attachment to our local hospital that may not be the best place for most of us most of the time there are some things that can only happen in a hospital but for most people other sorts of care and support are likely to be better I think the challenge is to move away from the short-term response of government and the other political parties the opposition parties to always focus on the thing that we're losing rather than the thing that we're gaining in a shift prevention is a tough one to crack and it's not something that I think we can help with much apart from providing more information to inform the debate. I appreciate the point but perhaps just at the very end there I mean I remember from my time in the council chambers that you had your statutory performance indicators which were obviously the things you had to measure there were the key performance indicators which obviously linked to key council objectives and then there were discretionary indicators which members would occasionally request information on at meetings now remember one particular meeting asking about an indicator and saying why do we measure this why are we measuring this and the response was because we have to you know that what there didn't seem to be a defined you know the which wasn't really the nature of the question I was asking but that was the response that came back we have to measure this has there been enough work do you think done looking at the sort of broad suite of what is measured by local government by health boards etc and a real evaluation of of the value of those measurements because I think that's the kind of work that would really help in any discussion that does take place is having some kind of bedrock of work there that says here are the things that are being measured here's the essentially the value of those measurements in terms of the preventative agenda and the shift that we want to see can I maybe kick off on local government carline can come in on the rest of the public sector I mean I think they the point you made we hope we measure it because we're told to measure it it was probably true in the past and the council commission never felt comfortable about specifying performance indicators because the ownership didn't lie with councils you with me they were doing it because the council commission told them to do it so I think three or four years ago we said to Silas and Cosla you take ownership of this you take responsibility for benchmarking you develop the performance indicators I think there's still a bit to go in terms of making sure the indicators are what the public necessarily want to know you follow me and to reflect what are priorities for the council for the public for example there is no performance indicator on the cost of burials that's an issue that is close to people's hearts for example but that's improved and they've developed families of benchmarking councils and I think what we've seen is that is an ownership that's been taken by local government they resisted it to some extent to start with they're a bit wary about the fact that the information about the performance were being the public domain well it should be in the public domain the public are right to know how well councils are performing in not only against comparable councils but over time is the council is the council actually improving so that's been a positive shift there's still a way to go and I think there is scope for developing performance indicators in relation to community planning as well and there's been some initial work started in relation to that as well so I think if the ownership is with the councils and we can transfer that similar ownership to community planning partnerships and community planning partnerships actually start saying well how are we performing how do we compare with a similar community planning partnership that's a direction of travel I think we should all support I agree with that entirely following from our report the national community planning group is leading a review of the various frameworks which the partnership bodies are all either using themselves or are required to use in terms of performance monitoring reporting and accountability with the aim of looking for opportunities to rationalise it first of all and to make sure it is measuring the right things that's a really positive move and it clearly will need to be able to flex to reflect the local priorities that individual partnerships have set themselves I think it also needs to really link into the non-partnership frameworks like the HEED targets like the targets that Police Scotland are operating to just as a couple of examples where there is a risk at least that the targets at an individual body is operating to conflict with or are in tension with those that the partnership is working to because we need to be clear about how we're going to resolve those tensions okay so in in just over a year's time there will be a Scottish election a year subs following that there will be a local government election and obviously the very is much more preferable or much more easy to go to people and say here is what we have done and here is what has been delivered rather than to say here is what we have done and here is what we expect to be delivered in five to ten years time do you think preventative spending is a hostage of the electoral cycle I don't think it makes it any easier we can see currently the focus there is from all parties on things like A&E waiting times being looked at previously quarter by quarter monthly increasingly at even sort of shorter intervals and I guess in future in real time as technology makes that more possible I think there's something very important about all of us exercising the leadership we were talking about before not to lose sight of those measures but to think about them in the context of the bigger outcomes that we're trying to achieve to understand the trade offs between them and to not let the short term temptations get in the way of the ability to do the longer term things for the good of the people of Scotland that we're all here to support we're never going to do without politics nobody's suggesting that and it brings all sorts of benefits and consequences with it but I think trying to move the debate on to the longer term one to be clearer with people about the choices that have to be made is what politics is all about and the trade-off in there is one of the counterweights there is to that the focus on what you can measure today rather than what might be different in 20 years time register before my gene thank you convener you've both talked about the the need to shift resources the difficulty in doing now the difficulty in taking some of those challenging budget decisions but additionally to to that area where there needs to be progress it's the more that could be achieved through more innovative approaches to funding through partnership working or indeed through I mean for example a few years ago all talk was about social impact bond remember where you would throw a public sector agency could borrow against the anticipated savings through for example and projects to reduce re-offending and approaches like that that doesn't seem to have flown from what I can see now wondered why that wasn't and to what extent you know the public sector agencies government in general is doing enough to look at more innovative approaches to defunding preventative measures we we've talked a lot about politics this morning for obvious reasons and I think that the sorts of political considerations that have come through our discussion several times today are one of the reasons why things like social impact bonds are very difficult to make work in practice the uncertainty that comes with it the inability to bind future governments the the lack in many cases of a real alignment about what people are trying to achieve how far the financial return and the social return at the same thing I think is something we don't understand well having said that I'm sure there is scope for more innovative types of funding in different ways in different places there's a lot of thinking going on I know in government and some some good examples of early innovation around different types of bond financing for housing to to open that up and to get more investment in in ways that compensate for the market failures that are at the heart of housing problems in the UK and to allow more investment than the constrained short-term picture would allow for so that's one example that probably wouldn't work elsewhere there have been examples like the change funds for early years and for older people services we think particularly in relation to older people where we've done a fair bit of work that the way those change funds have been used really isn't thinking about how you leverage change from the relatively small amount that's available in the change fund each year about 300 million over four years against the 18 billion over the same period that's being spent on health and social care so I think if you were to say this is the amount we've got to lever to lever change where would that have the most impact rather than where can people respond most easily you might be able to get more change as a result of that again it's a good example of this inconvenient thing that there is no one solution that fits all but absolutely accept the point that we need to think about how we do things differently if we're going to square this circle we've got so in terms of innovative approaches to funding mechanisms to financing that kind of approach again it's short-term thinking is saying that it's a key problem or inability for government or cpp's whether to have a a longer term a 10 year approach to that kind of that kind of measure I think it's partly that and partly also the the fact that we haven't yet got a clear enough understanding of the bigger picture that we're trying to change there's no doubt that the 70 million that was spent in 11 12 on the change fund for older people made things better in some place it's no question about it I think there's a big question about whether it helped us very much in terms of reshaping care in the ways that the convener and mr mason were asking about and I think we need to be thinking about innovative funding in terms of that ability to really leverage change rather than to do good things at a local level or as Douglas has suggested in some cases to prop up budgets okay thank you thank you gington followed by Gavin thank you thank you convener i think it's slightly um following on from what you've just said but earlier on you was at garland to open up the discussion with the public much more and that's one of the things that really interests me because in the area that I represent there are some extraordinary the good examples of at a very local level of people taking action themselves to address a problem and a real commitment I think to be involved in finding answers to problems but I wonder my experience hasn't been absolutely thrilling of community planning partnerships and their relationships with the public not that they themselves aren't making things work but often um and I wonder if this is right that they that they have an obligation to kind of present a report to the public or what they're doing or to hear some of the problems and somehow go away and solve them rather than have that genuine kind of dialogue to listen sometimes to you know ordinary people and what their solution might be I think you're spot on I think I think doing what you're describing is the driving force behind the community empowerment bill and I have to say we haven't seen many examples of that really open sort of sharing of a problem honestly this is this is what we're trying to reconcile we've got this much money we have these many older people who are this much older than they were in the past and here's our vision of what have how we could do it better tell us what you think I think people in public services for understandable reasons are often wary of talking about the problems as opposed to that the successes around it I understand why that is and I think it tends to be self-perpetuating in my experience where people have been open about the challenges people members of the public the community understand that we all face the same sorts of issues on a much smaller scale in our personal lives we recognise that public services can't do everything that we might like them to my predecessor as auditor general bob black back in 2012 I think took part in an exercise of citizens juries where he was presenting information about the public finances and likely trends in future and the sorts of choices that were likely to come from that and actually the experience of the people who took part in it was that they found it fascinating to understand more about why we can't carry on building hospitals like the southern general around Scotland and expecting that to be the answer to our health and social care problems and got very engaged in so what could we do differently what matters most to me what is it about the hospital that I value how could I get that somewhere else there are community groups that can do that I think technology makes it possible to open it up much more widely than it has been thinking about the role that the churches and faith groups can play as part of the solution in all of this I think there's room for much more innovation in that way than we've seen so far and personally I don't think there's an alternative I think we are reaching one of those stages in the development of our society where we have to be more frank about what is most important to us and what we're going to trade off for that otherwise the politics gets increasing Mr Arwell I think I agree with that I think to some extent the debate between councils in particular and their communities have been but one dimensional it's about the choice of cuts rather than what reviews and how services may be provided in a different way there are some good examples of that ornate community planning partnership through the council have been discussing with local communities about the possibility of local communities taking on some of the responsibilities of the council to keep the service going and the need for that because budgets are getting tighter and tighter and the choices are getting harder the need to engage even more with communities as to their views not only about priorities but how the service could be delivered in a different way is even more important now than it ever was I think councils are being good at satisfaction surveys they're not being good at looking at the user experience what was the quality of your experience of working contacting the council how could that be improved what we can learn from that how can we make improvements to that I think it's really important for councils health boards all public service partners to develop more of that listening mode to the community and to understand that they've got interests and they understand the realities of finance but they've given an opportunity to influence the shape of services which is precisely what Christy talked about that services should be designed around the individual in the community rather than by the producer just following on from that if I may convene out would do you think that there's a need to be much clearer in our communities about about these agencies and how they operate and at what because there's as we all know there are some community councils that work exceptionally extraordinarily well really and achieve quite a lot in their community with very little and there are others that people just don't kind of engage with and how do we see the role of that kind of democracy right through the whole piece and how how would you suggest that that should be written in you know from a kind of government level then to to encourage councils to make that shift away from you know the public consultation meaning do you want your library or do you want the snow clearing or whatever to to a much greater engagement well I mean there are there will be new duties in the community empowerment bill on on each of the partners involved in community planning I think one of the weaknesses it seems to me in the bill is what happens if one of the partners doesn't play their full part there doesn't seem to be any default powers in the bill to say well that wasn't good enough where's where's the accountability in relation to that that's why I think we're we've argued that the coslin the Scottish government do need to develop this this national performance framework so you can to some extent hope community planning partnerships to account for the way that they actually they actually perform I think that that would be that would be helpful part of it I suspect is the way that in which we train professionals in the colleges and in the universities that the customer isn't seen as the most important person in that process you know dealings with panning officials can be you know about inflexibility rather than actually seeing the problem from the point of view of the person who's applied for planning permission I just think it's the need to improve the quality of training and the understanding within public bodies about who comes first it is that it's the user you are not going to satisfy the user every time but the point should be to try and find a way around the problem rather than simply saying no we can't do it that's a that's a difficult process and it's it's not made easier because to some extent you know councils in a difficult place they have to balance the budgets by law so they're looking for savings and I think they look for savings first rather than saying is there a different way of doing this which can achieve some saving but also keep that service going perhaps in a different way and that's a mindset that takes time to change every department from every organisation who has given evidence to us will effectively say you shouldn't touch our budget because what we do is preventative spend is there an audit scotland definition of preventative spend and if not should there be there isn't one I would say and you won't be surprised to hear I don't think there should be I think for me it comes back to the conversation we had earlier about the organisations themselves when they're claiming that should be able to show how it's preventative we were having a conversation earlier about the fire service for example now we know that in Scotland there's been a huge reduction in deaths from fire over a long period of time and that's a huge success story and it raises important questions that the fire service is grappling with about what it's for now I'm not sure we know enough about what's led to that reduction in fire deaths whether it is the great work that the fire service has done to go out and advise on fire safety whether it's different building standards whether it's the greater use of oven chips rather than chip pans I don't know that I'd be interested in whether the fire service does but without that information or parallel information I think it's a push for organisations to expect you to believe that their spending is preventative that's not to say you can pin down every pound but you should be able to say we do things but we do these things because they prevent those things in the way that Glasgow is starting to be able to around its community planning process okay uh I wasn't I didn't think there was a definition but I just it just strikes me that unless we sort of get to some form of consensus on it then we'll just accept everybody's definition and it's harder to move forward just specifically then in terms of the the work you've done I mean you know this committee has been pretty interested in disinvestment I mean you referred to in one of your first answers I mean over the the work that you've carried out have you seen any sort of positive specific examples of disinvestment you gave some good examples of collaboration and where services overlap people talking about how they can make the money go further but do you have any good concrete examples of disinvestment I think the best example I can refer you to is the one I touched on earlier around reshaping care for older people in Perth and Kinross there's lots of anecdotal evidence around but we've looked at that one quite closely and I think what's really interesting about that is three things one the extent to which it is based on really strong and local almost individual data to understand where where the problem is and where you can make the most difference secondly it's very collaborative it's not doing it to people it's sitting down with the gps and the gps with that with their patients with the people who are affected here and talking about what would make a difference and thirdly it really does require very close joining up between the council and the health board to understand how the whether money will come from where it will come from short term if there aren't reductions in the spend in the hospital this year as there may well not be and what the understanding is in the longer term to make the bigger shifts that will let you reinvest that's a really strong example that I think depends on each of those three factors I'm sure there are others but that's what I point you towards one I would mention was in Folkirk where the health board again the health board on the council it came together consulted with local communities in in bonus if I remember correctly and enabled people in consultation with them to live much longer in their own homes you with me thus reducing the the demand on public money can I just go back your point on definition if you have you've ever definition of that everybody will claim everything we do is preventative you know it's it's it's a slippery slope I think that one you know say actually that the Scottish Government and the cosla in their statement of ambition guidance has said that in their view preventive approaches are defined as and I quote actions which prevent problems in these future demand on services by intervening early thereby delivering better outcomes and value for money which is quite simply put in of course the what works Scotland they've they've also got a definition provided by nesta which says preventative approaches are those which intervene to cover the development of social issues and challenges when preventive programmes are targets at solving well research problems and a strategically ledden delivered that they can have an enormous impact on service delivery providing a cost effective use of taxpayers money so I think we've got a good idea what we're actually trying to achieve through through those two definitions give her that ends my question so thank you very much Gavin thank you and thank you to colleagues around the table I just want to ask before we wind up this session if there are any further points that either of you would wish to make to the committee okay well thank you very much for your evidence this morning fascinating I must say I'm going to call a suspension for a couple of minutes to allow a natural break for members and a changeover of witnesses okay I shall reconvene the session we will now continue consideration preventive spending by taking evidence from Professor James Mitchell and Professor Kenneth Gibson from what works Scotland I'd like to welcome both witnesses to meeting and I'd like one of them to make a brief opening statement gentlemen thank you chair I'm just going to say a few words to amplify on the executive summary of the paper that we provided to you so just to start by saying that what works Scotland's a collaborative venture from the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh but is really a network of academic and practitioner partners across the Scotland we are involved in essentially trying to use develop and use and understand evidence to make better decisions about public development and reform we're funded by the ESRC in the Scottish Government and essentially we start from the the Scottish approach to public policy as being our kind of starting point and clearly prevention is absolutely at the heart of that and as we say in the executive summary and as was discussed in the previous session our view would be that prevention is by no means a new idea but it is something that's now central to that Scottish approach there seems to be as we've heard this morning a large degree of consensus about the aims and objectives of prevention the problem is when you start to dig into it that's where it starts to get much more complex I won't say any more about definitions the chair has just talked about them I think the point I would make though in addition is that we see prevention as a question as a kind of wicked problem a kind of classic wicked problem it's a hard thing to pin down and how you define it it's a hard thing to work out what exactly you want to do about the problem as you understand the problem the framework of the causality between the nature of the problem and the solution can often be difficult to unpick and really it's situationally specific it depends on the place you're looking at it depends on the sector you're looking at it depends on the time period that you're looking at it and that means that there probably aren't general silver bullets or or single answers to these questions but I need to empirically examine each issue in each realm as you go along around a set of general principles so in the paper we look at a number of illustrations of evidence of the sort of areas that there is academic and other gray literature evidence about and James can talk about them later on if that would help for my part I've been quite interested in the economics of prevention and looked in particular at some of the interesting work that health Scotland have done recently about thinking about health inequalities and how you could use prevention to try to address some health health inequality issues suggesting that there are cost effective routes into that that there are ways of achieving that without reduce you know at the same time as reducing inequality but that as again was indicating in the previous sessions often hard to find savings to target those savings to ring fence them and then to actually use them in a preventative way that's that's where often the challenge comes we also I think under point one ten in the example somebody would like to stress this caution about sort of short term ism that because of the wicked problem nature of a lot of prevention issues it's actually hard to pin pin down a kind of timetable for outcomes and we think that one of the ways in which prevention can be made progress we can make progress with it is to embed it into the kind of culture and the nature of organizations as a process so that by changing the kind of mindset as somebody said previously actually is probably a more compelling way to move forward to make prevention part of the everyday life of public sector delivery but it's about how you how you embed that within institutions and it's about how you embed that in the leadership of those institutions and how you make it part and parcel of the way that parties collaborate as in community planning partners there's a really interesting discussion by the new economic foundation about the kind of principles of prevention and on our last page we've pointed to on those four bullet points on page 14 which kind of point to the kinds of challenges that exist for trying to make prevention embedded into the system and to transition towards that greater use of prevention and that's about trying to measure the benefits the cost the trade-offs of prevention compared to standard practice to better understand the barriers to prevention culturally, socially, economically, politically it's about trying to build alliances around prevention which involves the leaders of organizations, politicians, citizens the public debate and it's about also stim stimulating a wider debate about the whole purpose of prevention there's a lot more in the paper but hopefully that gives us a flavour to get us started okay well thank you very much for that and as you're probably aware the way the committee works is I'll start off with some opening questions and I'll open out the session to colleagues who may explore specific areas in greater depth first thing I'm going to ask you about is a follow-up to your opening statement with regard to embedding and you talk about the need to embed prevention I'm just wondering why isn't it embedded already I mean it certainly is I mean as you alluded to it's been talked about for years I mean our committee's been dealing with it for five years ourselves why isn't it routinely in Scottish public life I think that's that question it's a very important question and it gets to the heart of one of the big issues for us and that is that there appears to be a consensus and I think there is a genuine consensus in favour of prevention and therefore a paradox why is it not prioritised why are we not moving forward and I think we do need to ask you know what's going on here and I think one of the reasons is that prevention sits alongside other competing demands in public services enforcement and kind of triage immediate response and so on and forth so there's all sorts of pressures on our public servants and prevention is only but one and I think it is often not seen as the number one priority partly because it is difficult to measure difficult to show that it's being achieved and I think in truth we are politics operators we we prefer to to look at the easy things to measure we look at targets we heard Caroline talking about the heat targets and so on I mean we we we could go didn't go into the chamber today we could look at the press today and we could look at the kind of issues in the election that's coming up by waiting times it'll be targets it will be police numbers and such like and so I think our political culture and I don't know if this is a fault of any individual certainly not political parties certainly not parliament I think to do with our culture is that we tend to focus on on these matters at the expense of excuse me why I'm struggling here today at the expense of prevention and I think tomorrow's I think one of the biggest challenges is kind of changing our culture both in terms of the political culture but also the culture and again referring back to I think was Douglas was saying earlier the culture within within our public servants and how we train our servants and how how we deliver services how we think about these things so I I think there's a lot of talk I think it's genuine consensus and the in favour of prevention but ultimately I'm not sure that we really do prioritise it I don't think we reward it I think it's very difficult to do these things well give me what you've said actually there and given that seemingly endless discussions we've had in committee over this particular issue trying to move this issue forward year in year out with a whole host of different organisations and Scottish Government local authorities you name it is there an argument that you know budgets to deliver prevention have to be ring fenced I mean but there are obviously change funds etc but there's been discussion made about you know they're often used to subsidise other issues and named as prevention is there a way in which we could deliver additional resources or specific resources that can't be touched for anything else in order to deliver these long-term benefits that we all want to see but I mean it's understandable when budgets are extremely tight and people have to deliver on all the measures that we've already discussed this morning that that people have to deal with the immediacy rather than think about what's going to make Scotland a better place in five or ten years so is that is that a potential way forward is it you know are we going to be and as I mentioned in the previous session five years from now having the same discussions I think five years we will be having the same discussions because it's an ongoing thing I do think ring fencing may be hopefully for a different level one would hope so one hopes so you know I was listening to the previous session I do recall sort of discussions there about housing I remember 20 plus perhaps 30 years ago when Harry Burns was in Glasgow he made the point about the need to improve Glasgow's health by putting money into housing and that was a pretty radical and bold move from a man within the health sector so I'm very conscious that this is something that we've been struggling with for a very very long time and I think comes back to that paradox we all agree it needs to be done so well it doesn't happen I think ring fencing to get to the core question is certainly worth looking at but I think to two observations on that first I think there's always the danger that we will have people in the public services who will label something as prevention and carry on doing whatever they were doing before and that might sound cynical but I think you know that that is that's the reality out there and also I think you know that it won't solve every problem I think it's got to be part of a solution and it may be not the most appropriate in certain circumstances I think a cultural change is important I think the institutions we need to look at I do think there are undoubtedly and I'll pass over to Ken here I do think in terms of the finances we have a major problem because we we have structured our finances in silos and I think it's quite rational for people working in local government and health and police and so on and forth for the reasons that Caroline Gannon gave earlier to to to respond up the level within there within their organisations rather than to think collaboratively and preventatively you know I think there is a major issue there so I think we I would like to see a bit more experimentation frankly and I think we should try to encourage at local level and I think it really is at a very local level some innovation I mean we don't necessarily want to have to have a massive overhaul of of financial structures but we do need to look at this and identify perhaps local areas where people are willing to do this and you know and certainly in the past interestingly the islands have often been amongst those who've been most innovative in this respect most willing to to take up the challenge I'm not sure if others they want to take up the challenge I'm putting here but I I think you know we do we do need to see some of that that kind of innovation but Ken maybe on that I mean I guess what I would say additionally is that there are from an economics point of view there are issues about incentives about who has incentives within say a community planning partnership to to act in a in a collaborative way given what James has just said about the kind of nature of individual organisational budgets and the kind to build for that and as was made the point made earlier about the sort of lack of the statutory basis of cpp's which which kind of compounds that problem so what are the incentives for people to behave in this more collegiate way so that you know you can ring fence and you can make these kinds of sayings that that's a that's a challenging thing thing to do and it might be worth but what should incentives be sorry to interrupt you what should incentives be what I mean by that is how can you encourage people to for instance I mean one of the things we've james and I've been talking about recently has is the idea that in other other walks of life for instance the construction industry sometimes in effort to save money you might have a pooled savings fund so if you can cut costs in the in the construction process the partners to that savings fund can benefit from from from from the savings so I'm just I'm just thinking really in the principle the idea that other ways in which you you can pool benefits and redistribute them how can you encourage individuals to change the way they want to be in one key issues the annuality of budgets I would have thought it's clearly much harder to make these kinds of decisions which are about longer term timescales when you're dealing in such a short term but budgeting context so there's a sense in which you know the overall the overarching public finance structure mitigates against what's what's been trying trying to be done and it creates a kind of present bias that people don't want to take these kind of longer term decisions I used to work in a large private sector company and they had a star suggestion scheme how you can make the company more efficient and nobody put any suggestions equals hundreds but they then put and they changed it so that you could get up to 10% of the money saved in your salary if your suggestion was adopted by the company that absolutely have a launch of suggestions poured in many of which were implemented which saved the company money you know so that so you know I do appreciate the I think it's a context specific thing and it really depends on the type of issue that you're going to come absolutely now obviously scrutiny you talked about you know and I mentioned myself the fact that you can have these right even if you set up a ring-face budget people could just name it prevention do exactly what I've done before so you talk about in 110 about scrutiny might be more fruitfully deployed to investigate the embedding of processes that promote prevention supports implementation and help transition losers from the process so effectively what we really need is really much more effective scrutiny and how these but how prevention is actually delivered and how budgets for example in terms of disinvestment etc redeployed if we're going to actually see changes was that something new? Yes and I think probably I mean we were I think we were quite struck by the Dundee partnership model which we've put in the paper and in the discussion around that that was in a sense also about trying to get an organization in its totality across its staff from its leaders through its through the implementers in the street level bureaucrats as it were that they all had a sense of how their budgets were divided between broadly preventative and broadly not non-preventive upstream and downstream spend and how people could think it just going through a process of developing strategy for organizations and for delivering operational levels of it to think in those terms is part of that culture change that we've been trying to pursue so it's a long-term long-term game. Okay and in 1.7 you say the economics of prevention suggests that the cost benefits trade-offs of prevention have to be clearly understood in each instance the implication is that they are not at present is that right? How do we actually change that? I mean Jim talked about culture changes but how do we actually ensure that that these benefits are clearly understood? I think well I mean looking at the literature from the health inequalities work that Health Scotland has done it's clearly very difficult that there's a number of steps that you would kind of want in principle to achieve and that is exactly about that it's about isolating where the prevention savings can be made holding on to those prevention savings and then reallocating them and that makes a lot of assumptions and their evidence reviews suggest that there's quite a spectrum of ability to do that not just in Scotland or the UK but across the world as well but as the new economics foundation also said I mean this is a necessary condition is it well it's an essential step of trying to trying to get get there I think our view would be it's very uneven I think one of the issues I would make here is that when we emphasise prevention we're often asking public servants to do themselves out of a job because if they succeed it's conceivable we will not need those services or at least not necessarily the services themselves but other services take for example one of the interesting successes here and that's the fire service fire service has been successful we can argue as to the extent to which this was preventative or other factors as we heard earlier though I do think there's evidence at Scotland we've seen a significant shift to prevention certainly in the behaviour of the services the old days when a fire officer saw his or her job as climbing into big red land with blue lights flashing and being a hero putting out the fires that remains part of the job but a huge part of the job that's shifted over a long number of years is to get out into the communities and to prevent now there's a danger for fire officers and I think we'll have to acknowledge that that if they succeed there may be questions raised as to whether we need so many fire officers so many fire stations do we need the number of watches and such like and I think people are you know very much aware of these issues so I you know I think I think all credit enormous credit to the fire service for that shift I think one of the consequences of this is one has to look further and say well what the consequences of being successful I think all credit again to the fire service because they are reconsidering they're constantly looking at what is the role of the fire service broadening out and actually viewing their service not simply in narrow terms as we did in the past but their public service and I think one of the things relates to the other work we're doing I think we've got to try to shift to towards a an understanding of public service within which people will have specialist expertise whether it's fire officers, police officers or in various health aspects that much more embedded kind of notion of a public service is I think hugely important and I hope we'd contribute towards the general shift I think these things are all interlinked the collaboration prevention efficiency and so on okay now I know you're a couple of happy young dudes but I'm just wondering where the wicked problems kind of freeze came from and what that actually is I think it was originally an article that was written in 1972 yes well I mean essentially it's been used in different ways it's one of these ones which has been defined in different ways essentially it's understood in public policy to refer to to problems that are multiple in nature they're not either resolved and indeed there will be many different perspectives competing perspectives on how to resolve them in that respect that's why we would see the whole prevention agenda as a wicked problem okay I'm going to open out the session now to colleagues around the table first person to ask questions will be John to be formed by Mark thanks convener and I suspect we're going to ask some of the same questions that we asked previously you can maybe give us a slightly different angle on the responses I mean we've had this mention of cpp's and I think it was yourself was it professor good who said you know this question but who is the incentive to act collegiately I mean I got a pretty clear answer in the last session that cpp's are voluntary that even if nine out of ten agree on one thing they can't force the tenth to do anything so should we really give up on cpp's and take leadership from Parliament or give them more powers? I certainly wouldn't give Parliament the power with all due respect to parliamentarians I think this is something that has to be addressed at the local level not least because these wicked problems are plural and diverse and will require local responses so I have to say that I would not be giving Parliament any more power in this respect I would be devolving if anything I think there is an issue in terms of how we encourage collaboration I wouldn't get rid of cpp's I would I would like to think that we could move towards a situation in which cpp's are encouraged for whatever to to work much more collaboratively the model we have is a voluntary model effectively and that carries with all sorts of problems there are also problems I have to say if you were to create say a multi-purpose authority give say local government responsibility for all of these that may solve one problem but it would undoubtedly create other problems so I think we've got to be careful but I do think you're right in identifying the nature of the inter-institutional relations is a key part of the problem because I'm at the stage I want to see some action and I mean the phrase again was used we need to empirically examine which suggests you know kind of yet more studies I mean my suggestion was you know could somebody make a decision somewhere that we're going to take say 2% of the A&Es or hospitals and put it into primary healthcare now at the moment the cpp couldn't make that decision if it wanted to so either we've got to make it here or presumably we've got to give them more powers that they could make it would both of these be options then well there's certainly options and I think ultimately that's something that may have to happen I don't think that involves giving the Parliament more power you've got the power to do some of that already I mean I do think Parliament government has a responsibility here and I think there's a question here about for example he targets which are really coming from the centre I mean he targets and many of his targets many of his objectives are coming from the centre and I think coming back to my starting point about the competing nature of public policy prevention is only one I think if there isn't an emphasis on prevention if we are expecting health boards if we're expecting local government to deliver on x y and z teacher numbers in schools for example then you know you're going to limit what they can do otherwise my inclination would be to give local authorities more autonomy frankly to make decisions but also I think we need to look at the relationship between outcomes and targets I mean there's an ample literature on this that people will play games when it comes to targets there's also evidence that when it comes to targets targets are proxies they don't necessarily deliver outcomes and I think we've got we've still got some way to go to understand the importance of outcomes we talk a lot about outcome based public policy we don't do it as much I mean we all sit in this committee and have a sensible discussion and we all agree on this and what you've just said we all agree with I think but then we go into the chamber and we'll shout at each other and I can't do anything about that but it does raise an issue I think you raise a very important issue I think it's about leadership and I think that that is something and I would love to see this committee continue with the work it's doing and then go into the chamber united as one and making these points and I think it would a enhance the status of committees and be would probably move this debate on I'm not naive enough to think that's going to happen just because I'm suggesting it or any else because you're under other pressures as well you've got an election coming up in other areas we have shifted the budget I mean the obvious one is from revenue to capital expenditure that we have and I think it's been pretty much agreed across the board that we're just going to take so much off revenue which we could be spending on nurses or could be spending lots of things but we're putting it into infrastructure and buildings and I think that has been seen as a good thing would it be there for you know if I stand up and say let's take 2% off A and E and put it into community health would that be a good way of doing it well I wouldn't be in any way qualified to comment on that particular instance but you would need to agree as a committee and I think if the committee was to do that that would be that would be worthy of enormous praise frankly if you would agree on something like that um to move in that direction that would be a phenomenal result frankly I would love to see that I won't comment particularly on the 2% example because I don't know enough about that but absolutely I think that would be wonderful yes it was off the top of my head and Professor Gibb you haven't I don't know I just want to go back to your initial question about the localism versus the parliament thing and I think it's interesting that the cpp's in a sense reflect this notion of a place based policy a whole place based policy that that local level is the place where you can see joined up different kinds of services trying to trying to work together and it kind of seems intuitively reasonable that you would you need to do that from a bottom up basis where you can understand an actual place rather than try to attempt to do that from from Edinburgh as it were the other thing is that what we're finding in our case studies and at least three of the four case studies we're doing in depth is that the case studies themselves the local authorities are delving deeper into the local level so in Glasgow and West Dunbartonshire and Fife I think that they're all that and Abadish of Four actually they're trying to develop neighborhood level analysis of different kinds so they actually see the need to almost kind of reconstitute cpp relationships and ways of thinking about problems at an even more local level rather than going going in the other other direction and that's more engaging with local communities there seems to be some trade-offs here unfortunately I mean that's the way it is I mean I very much agree with you the idea that we should be pushing the power down I mean do you think do we need to do you think cpp's are going to get there eventually then if we just give them a bit more time like 20 years or should we be giving them more powers or a bit more clout or something like that I think I mean I think that when my reading for audit Scotland has been saying for a number of years is that there is progress being made and there is improvement that's perhaps uneven but there are things that everybody's getting better at I think in a sense yes more power in that cpp boardroom to as it were to get things done sounds to me to be quite important as a way forward I'm not quite sure I haven't really thought through how exactly one does that and how working practice but that seems to be the direction of travel certainly okay that's great thanks so much it's just following on what John said should cpp's be funded directly as opposed to through their constituent organisations for prevention well I mean I think that's the notion of top slicing is certainly worth looking at I think just top slice budgets how that would be done that would be hugely controversial and people would say it's I mean everyone's quite willing to do that I have to say I didn't mention top slicing I think they would want that money in addition to what they would get you know for the normal delivery of services but you slice the money they would get and take a section of that which they would have been given anyway I'm not saying anything else I don't think you can do it we've got to remember they have to deliver services of course and we we've got to protect those services and while we're focused on prevention here there's an awful lot of other things that has to be done and the question is how do we shift that and perhaps as a case for taking an element from those budgets which where it is possible and again let's be very clear here some services have been caught much more harshly than others local government has suffered much more so than health I mean there's a real question there I mean we're going to be discussing this this takes us into the issue do we ring fence national health service spending I think that's a hugely difficult question but we need to look at that and perhaps we should be taking an element of that certainly if you speak to people in local government that's their view I should would expect but I think we do need to look at that and I think we would then need to monitor it very carefully to ensure that there is evidence that they are making the effort to shift to prevention and I stress evidence that they are making the effort because it won't always be obvious because prevention you know it can it's difficult to prove that it's happened and it can take time and so on and so forth which is again one of the reasons why there's reluctance to go down this route okay thank you mark to follow Markle thank you convener so your organisation or your approach is called what works scotland presumably you're also what doesn't work scotland and you have a role in terms of not just highlighting good practice but also highlighting the stuff that isn't working and do you consider that such a message will be as well received as saying yeah this is great and we should do more of it do you think it will be as well received do you say this is wrong when you should stop doing it well what I think we've found so far is that there's a general enthusiasm and desire for more evidence about the things that people are trying to make decisions about and thinking about the routes that they should go down and I think they understand the logic of what you just said you know entirely that don't want to we don't want to go down the wrong the wrong road as it were so I think we're all clear in the what works scotland team that we're very interested in trying to differentiate those those two things and trying to build up build up evidence in a sense way because you know that you want to prevent waste that's that's part where this is all about true but at the same time we're all human and local government national government health service are all human organisations and nobody likes to be told that the issue that the policy that they've developed is either not working or or at worst counterproductive so how do you see that being being a conversation that we can have that says you know this is not helping the preventative agenda you need to stop doing that I think across the public services there is a reluctance to admit mistakes because then they can be people can be under fire as it were I think I think we need to create safe space in which conversations can take place I'd strongly take the view that we'll learn a lot more from mistakes than we will from what doesn't work from what works because actually it's not always always what works something might be working we don't know what it is that may be making something work but we cannot find out what's going wrong so I think safe space is hugely important I think one of the interesting things to do is to look at a policy or a process as it has developed and reflect on that and I think through that reflection you can learn a great deal it is much easier I've got a number in mind I don't want to get to name them but I can think of a number where there has been significant progress made but along the way mistakes have been made lessons have been learned I think it's much easier to take those examples and to learn from that and I can certainly think of examples where people I'm engaged with at the moment are in very much doing that we started here we're here how did we get here what where do we go wrong I'm very interested in that and seeing how we can learn from that and that can be lessons to be learned for others and I think that that's hugely important part of what I think weak we need to do in the academic community developing that as well do you think there's a bit I mean I spoke earlier I think you were in for the session with the audit Scotland and the accounts question I spoke about the the potential for the electro cycle holding some of this progress hostage because you're constantly looking for gratification within a defined timescale as opposed to a longer term you know saying saying to somebody you'll not see the benefits of this for five to ten years doesn't sell as well on the doorstep as look at what we've delivered over over the last four or five years but in terms of that approach do you think there's a risk that where mistakes have been identified or progress has not been as fast as might be anticipated that perhaps things which could have been very good have essentially been cancelled or thrown out because they weren't making progress quickly enough is that a risk that has been borne in the past I think it's a risk certainly a risk I think the electoral cycle um let me preface this remark I'm saying I'm very much in favour of liberal democracy but I do think that elections do create some difficulties and actually I think we need to broaden this out into I think the public engagement issue that was discussed in the last session is really important um elections are all one part of it but um if I was in your shoes and frankly I'll never be in your shoes and I was contesting an election I know I would be doing this you will be doing um and trying to score points um off your opponents that's natural and I think we've got to try and find space beyond that we can't we can't wish away um that which is there in terms of the electoral cycle but we've got to try and find space and allow people the opportunity to to to learn lessons to explore where they could improve and I have to say you know you know I think a lot of that actually does take place I think there's a lot of that does take place and there is you know fortunately a degree of consensus which we can work with um I'm very much in favour of that consensus and building on that and learning critically um to move forward. In the previous session we heard you know about this problem about trying to get a multi-parliament consensus over over the the retention of the same policy and how hard that is and I think I think that that's that that misalignment between the short run search for you know wins quick wins relative to what we increasingly seem to be thinking is that a lot of these prevention measures are take take a long time to happen means that the only the only way through that in a sense is to is to build political consensus around some of these issues the all or the alternative is as it happened in England in the a dozen years ago when there was a Labour government with a large majority they could pursue policies which they imagined would last for 10 10 years so for instance they they restructured rents and social housing and that was a 10 year 12 year plan to do that they could reasonably think they could do that because of the time scale they had but we don't have that luxury and as it turned out the coalition government kind of unpacked it on your own picked it anyway but you need you need that much longer time scale it seems to me and so you need a consensus to make that work but you need the evidence in the argument before you can get there. I should probably should since Professor Mitchell clarified his remarks preface that my question was not from the basis of wanting to see autocratic dictatorship or before anybody makes a press release to that effect. Can I maybe just to wrap up then on my questioning the the other question that I was asking earlier was around how that discussion is led in terms of getting us to the stage where we talk more about shifting the focus in terms of inputs versus outcomes in terms of what we measure in terms of how we measure and the difficulty that there is for any government of whatever colour in being the ones who are seen to lead that discussion do you see the evidence that you're producing as being a kind of bedrock that could lead that discussion or allow that discussion to be led without it having a sort of political tinge to it? Possibly but there's ample evidence out there on the value of prevention I think this is I throw this back to you I mean this is this is about leadership and it can't just be from government centrally or indeed locally it's I mean if let's test this is this really something in which there is consensus is this something in which there is agreement and I think the test will be to see for example how this committee takes us forward. I sometimes ask myself you know when I want to be very interesting I haven't done this but might go and do it and look at how how members of the Scottish Parliament behave in the chamber and what they speak about what they ask questions about what proportion is on kind of enforcement types issues target type issues and to what extent do do you prioritise prevention in your speeches and your statements I mean I find myself saying that partly because I feel provoked into saying it but be interesting I think we've all got to reflect on what we do in terms of this prevention agenda and I I think I mean one of the stated goals of this parliament um whether its committees should be consensual the new politics we build and and try and take things forward I mean um I guess can I suggest that maybe one of the challenges is for you to leave well you've been doing a lot of work on this as you would as you've been saying you've been doing this for years but can this be taken a stage further can you this be stepped up I don't know so I apologize I'm throwing this back that's all right I I see the challenge being thrown down I'm sure we'll accept it okay Malcolm's you follow by Gavin I think there is actually a lot of rhetorical consensus around this and has been for some time but obviously that doesn't amount to very much if it doesn't translate into policies I mean I was interested in Professor Mitchell's thing about local authorities more autonomy to make decisions maybe that could be community planning partnerships as well and possibly that means easing off on some of the other targets but even within that framework surely you need to have you know clear national objectives otherwise I mean who's to even say that prevention is going to be on their agenda at all and I suppose I suppose that I'm thinking given this is such a massive agenda I mean is there a case at a national level for actually you know focusing on a defined number of prevention at preventive because I mean the thing is there are so many and even in your paper there are so many different examples of preventative spend and some of them could actually be you know contradictory if you take your health examples you could focus on you know reducing relates of coronary heart disease but that if you do it in a certain way that might actually increase health and equality so do we need to actually say like these are our top level preventative objectives for this parliament and let local people work out the way to do it but that's what we're all going to concentrate on you know rather than try and do everything I think that's a really interesting question I think it relates to the relationship between the national performance framework and the single outcome agreements I think it's right to have broad outcomes at the national level but there needs to be a local dimension because that which is most important will differ from area to area and I think that's where I think we need to allow some of the more that the priorities to be set but I do think that we haven't really I don't think we've quite got that relationship between the national performance framework and the single outcome agreements quite right in a sense these two developments occurred separately and I think there is an attempt to articulate the two together and I think there's still work to be done there but yes I think we need to look at that um I think of course there is a danger of too many priorities as well and but um and that's where I think the national level is is you know dangerous because every local authority every local community will insist it has a priority and be right to do so and if that's added into the national one then the list becomes endless and that would not be a good idea so I think I think broadly it's preventionist would be one of the priorities I think we should have up there but permits at the more local level to define these and to work at how these should be achieved. I mean can you distinguish between those I mean because people commonly say oh well the difficulty about this is it's all going to materialise so far into the future that politicians aren't really interested but I mean can you distinguish between I mean there's been a lot of work although the finance committee wasn't necessarily very generous towards all the work on early years in its recent report but I know there's been a lot of activity around early years prevention and people are accepting that a lot of that is to do with many years down the line and so on whereas things like the problems in A&E I mean you could argue that prevent the activity around that could produce results pretty quickly I would think so do we need to distinguish there between what's going to inevitably take a long time and what isn't? Yeah absolutely I mean in the early years the international evidence would suggest that you will get a quick hit reasonably soon I mean not months but within a few years you can start to see some some quick hits and one of the interesting things is that we've often assumed it would take years to see an impact and the smoking ban the impact of that came much faster in some areas than was anticipated so I don't think I mean I think it does differ from measure to measure but also I think you know I think we've gotten careful here you know I think we do need to have the longer term but actually we can achieve quite a lot in the short term as well I guess there is also a question I mean are we moving to prevention simply to save money or to improve life chances? On Chris Stear that I remember that commission we were very clear that we did not see the shift as simply about saving money it was also and crucially about improving life chances I guess I raised that because some of the tenors of this morning's discussion maybe because we had audits in Scotland seemed to suggest it was only about finance and on evidence I mean I suppose that's obviously what you're in the business of providing us with and so on I mean do you sometimes have to do things I mean I know that the example of the smoking ban that there was some study but do you sometimes really have to do things in advance of the evidence and is it a danger if you're always going to have evidence-based policy that you pick on the micro things and not on the macro things? That was certainly a danger that if you are over-reliant on evidence and what's valuable you may not do a lot of things that perhaps you would probably want to do so pilots, pathfinders things of that kind would seem to be a sensible way of building evidence before making huge commitments to programmes that would be a little obvious thing to say. I think evidence is important but a theory of change is important you have to understand why you're doing it and the example I often give is Robert Owen when he set up those schools in New Lanark didn't have evidence but he had a theory of change he understood what was likely to happen and he went with it and my goodness wasn't he right so I think we've got to be careful here because evidence is often plural contradictory and sometimes it's just not going to always be there so I think we need a theory of change as well and understanding what we expect to happen there are very good reasons for it but you're right I mean we shouldn't just hold back otherwise nothing would ever happen and that's why I often give the Robert Owen example. Just returning to a question Mark McDonald asked he asked a viewer also what doesn't work Scotland and you said of course you are I mean is it your plan then as an organisation to publish in an unsweetened format case studies are examples of policies or areas that just simply haven't worked? I'll tell you what I intended to do because what was a very broad organisation I'll continue to do what I've always done and that is be as constructively critical as possible constructive criticism works better than just destructive criticism I'm certainly not in the business of saying point in the finger and saying that you know you got that wrong because I wouldn't want anyone to do it to me because they could have a field there and I don't think it's at all helpful so it would be constructive but I strongly take the view we can learn from experimentation and where we might we are still struggling with a lot of this and I think one of the key things is to learn from others where appropriate but without holding yourselves back if we've got a theory of change but spread that as much as we can. Two things I would also say is that we have a thing called the evidence bank which is a part parcel to what we're doing where we're going to basically have a website we have a website with evidence reviews and rapid reviews which look at specific issues issues which come to us from our cpp partners and our other partners involved in what works and we that will provide you know objective balanced reviews of specific specific issues and topics and also ideas ways of trying to do things in a different way how do you best share information across different statutory partners where they maybe don't want to share information or they have some institutional resistance to it so how do you how do you learn from that and also at the same time we have our four case study partners of cpps but we'll have a number of extended other cpps who we're working with and we're going to share information and of course we want to share trying to understand better why some things don't work and how we can improve proving that and the more people involved in that the better so there'll be a series of processes which will be some will be in a website and published some will be about the cpps working together and will be will be will reach the public domain in different ways can i add one little thing sure so think about against one of the ways i would approach this is in terms of um i don't it's not my job it's other's job to go out there and look for uh someone not doing their job properly and auditing them such like i think what i'm interested in is why people behave as they do and assume they're actually behaving rationally are their structures are their impediments that force people to behave in a way that doesn't put prevention for further so much of the discussion this morning has been around that i mean i'm not saying you know the fact that you guys perhaps are emphasizing other things than prevention and your public statements and your speeches and such like i'm not for a moment suggesting that's irrational i think it may be quite rational we've got to understand that and then consider how we can move forward so it's within if you like a broadly broadly a rational actor model uh framework that i would operate and i think we would operate okay thank you um professor mature you said in an earlier answer community planning partnerships should be encouraged stroke forced to work collaboratively i'm just wondering in terms of in terms of getting the balance to what extent would you emphasize encouragement and to what extent would you emphasize forcing this once it slips out i think the answer is i think there has to come a point when encouragement and it just doesn't work and it's just not working at the pace of speed and so therefore we need may need to say right come on um we need some action and force it such like i think um in a way the threat already exists people are well aware this is likely to happen at some stage um one would like to think that that alone will make people behave rationally and change but it may not but there must come a point when i think we have to say this system is fine and good for certain purposes but we're not advancing as far and as fast and so therefore we may need to um i don't like the word force i wish i hadn't used it but yeah i think we may need to intervene like to say yeah fair enough okay thank you okay thank you that is a concluded questions for the committee i'm just wondering if there are any further points you would like to make to us at this time okay i just i think i will go away and just check up on on how MSPs behave in the chamber i think it's a really interesting one because i think your role in this i would stress is hugely important it's a committee you've prioritised prevention over so many years you've put it on the agenda and i think my challenge if i may is to encourage you to take it a step further to see if you can go up a gear or two can i can i leave that i don't want a question on it but yeah i think that'd be quite an interesting speech just to look at that because i do think it is an impediment the kind of political culture okay well thank you very much for your evidence today thank you colleagues to questions so i'm going to call a break until 1130 to enable members to have a natural break and also to have a change over all witnesses okay i shall now reconvene the session our next item of business today is to take evidence on the implementation of the devolved taxes from Eleanor Emberson chief executive of revenue scotland john king registers of scotland and john kenny's Scottish environment protection agency i'd like to welcome our witnesses to the meeting and members have copies of written update from revenue scotland so we will move straight to questions and you've been here many times before so you know the drill i'll be asking some questions first and then we'll we'll colleagues around the table we'll we'll follow um i actually think it's an excellent report very comprehensive i must say but there are a number of issues i'd want to pick up on the first one is in paragraph 13 when you talk about being confident you'd love the it system operational staffing and all other elements that need to be in place the collection management of the two taxes by first of april can you just confirm that the all these are now therefore in place and all the elements of the it system are now developed and we're carrying on with the testing which as you know we were doing from way back in december we've been involving external users in testing since january we'll be doing further testing with external users next week but very confident that's all going very well and no issues coming through that are causing me any anxiety in terms of staffing we now have all the staff i'm quite confident we have enough staff to go live so even if we have further recruitment in hand but even if we got nobody else i'm quite happy that we have the staff we need in order to go live on the first of april that's great excellent i'm very pleased to hear that and i notice that in paragraph 16 you talk about external user feedback during testing and since support law fund has been overwhelmingly positive i'm just wondering if you can give me just an example of two of some of that feedback that you've actually been receiving the committee may be aware the convener of the law societies tax committee so i'm just trying to find my reference had had seen the system and had commented that it was intuitive and easy to use the feedback we've had overwhelmingly is that it's a lot it's a much simpler system it system to use than the one for sdlt and those who've been testing it have given us some suggestions which we've taken on board to improve it slightly but generally speaking that's been going really well yes i saw as a building vernos comments actually on it on the how user friendly the system is now you see in paragraph 17 you talk about about the system being open for external users and it may reveal additional bugs or issues has anything been identified in that regard it's not the the bit that i'm talking about we as i said we're going to do further round of end to end testing of all aspects of the system next week involving external users and it's after that that we intend to open it up to a wider group and i mean the testing that has gone on so far has certainly revealed some small issues things that we were able to tidy up make clearer makes likely easier for users i would expect that we would continue to find things like that trap one or two error messages that we're confusing it's it's at the level of refinement the system now and we'll see what comes out when we open it up to a wider community but we don't anticipate any significant problems it's stuff and i'm not neglecting the two johns they are just not many questions for you i'm afraid but colleagues around the table might we'll just proceed with yourself for the time being it's just in terms of taxpayer contact you talked about um to 26 of febru the support desk had handled an average of 33 calls with steady progress and signing up numbers i'm just wondering what the kind of capacity is in terms of call handling and if that's something you anticipate will be an issue you think it will be it should be okay if you get any indications as yet we've done our planning on volumes of calls we could handle 250 to 300 calls a day if we had to we could scale the staffing up um we've looked hard with with colleagues at the sorts of levels of calls that we could get we do expect to take higher numbers around the end of march beginning of april you know we would expect that and we'll make sure we have extra staff online ready to answer calls if necessary it since i wrote the report it's been continuing at a similar level okay now moving on to paragraph 30 talk about the change in the cost of it procurement the maintenance and you say that vat is not going to be recoverable was there an understanding that it would be recoverable at one point and how much is the vat that's not being recovered there wasn't an understanding that the original basis of costing so a lot of this goes back to the estimates in 2012 and the figures that were worked out then and then the figures that were developed later and we are we have been costing everything on a slightly um what can i say artificial basis uh and it was made clear all the way back in um uh in 2012 that we were costing on the basis of vat become being recoverable on the it system it's quite clear to us now that it won't be um so i have included the vat on the it system um i do have to apologise to the committee in the table of costs that i've sent you um there is a slight inconsistency in the treatment of vat uh we have included vat in the it system costs and i think in some of the costs um that we are paying to uh registers of scotland for set up we haven't included or we think we have not included it consistently for colleagues and registers of scotland and sepa the impact of that would be i think a maximum of 24 000 pounds out of the 21.2 million so i hope it's not materially misleading but i can write to the committee and correct the figures afterwards okay now that's i sort of want to know those figures i mean but the the it system sorry you asked me about the it system it's of the order of 200 000 i can come back with the precise number four yeah because obviously i mean the it costs have gone um the figures i have from 1.5 million to 2.266 million and the most even if all of it vat was imposed on all that would be one six there would still be an increase in there but overall you seem to have come in about 1.1 million pounds below um you know the 22.3 million pounds figure that was that was mentioned almost a lot more than the 16.7 that was hoped for initially but why is there such a significant difference in terms of the revised totals for for example the the kind of staff set up costs i mean that's now 3.742 million compared to a budget of 1.8 million which is a difference of 100 percent actually um though there are a number of reasons um what as i was attempting to to explain um in my report at paragraph 31 um the comparison back to the the 16.7 million and the 22.3 million is is becoming increasingly strained yes and as the committee's aware those those estimates were done in 2012 on a flat cash basis um the inflation etc yes there's nothing to do with inflation and there have been several scope changes as the committee is aware we're now um Scottish landfill tax and land and buildings transaction tax are different taxes to their UK equivalents and there are costs associated with developing those taxes that meet the needs in Scotland um it's not at all clear what if one were to go and ask HMRC to set up today what we are actually setting up it's far from clear what they would actually be charging to do that because uh their their original costing was based on relatively minimal changes to their it to their systems and so on because they were costing like for like on existing UK taxes um so the scope changes are significant as we discussed with the committee in uh December November and December um the set up costs have been higher than my earlier estimates and but we're no higher now we're at 21.2 million which is where we were in December and I'm confident that gives you a good handle on what the costs are for the set up of these two taxes okay well thank you very much for that um I'm going to open out the session to colleagues around the table and the first person to ask questions will be Gavin okay morning um this is a quick question about the overall status of the project because the Revenue Scotland report talks about amber green but I think that's from a November gateway that's right whereas the registers of Scotland report talks about the project overall being green um or at least the tax administration programme board is reporting a status of green so the the project as it stands today is is it completely green or is it still kind of green amber with a presumably small number of amber uh we have five elements at amber out of around 600 individual deliverables this week as we've highlighted before we do this every week if anything turns amber or anything turns red we take action to bring it back but there are five there are five elements that are sitting at amber today that's a slightly different basis of assessment what the gateway review report do is they follow a kind of template of of an assessment and and different categories um I have to say I have never ever seen a programme of this level of complexity be given a green gateway report um a few months before it goes live I'm not I'm not saying it never happens but I've never seen it happen okay but the five amber you referred to that that's comparable then to that I think there were 17 amber last year so that's the same figure okay all right thank you um in relation to testing um you wrote to the committee after your last appearance saying former release of the full system will take place once unit testing involving external users users is completed we would expect that former release to take place in late january or early febury as I indicated to the committee um did mean did that happen along the lines of yes everything has proceeded along the lines that I set out okay um in your report then you make reference to the letters or s e t s yes which I think is the the acronym for the the lawyers and stakeholders signing up to um LBTT or landfill or both it's the name that has been chosen for our our online tax collection system it's being called scottish electronic tax system s e t s it's simply because people like to have names for it systems of course they have to have names of course I mean but you put some numbers on it and I think you've suggested that 483 users from 116 firms have signed up with 52 in process how many in order for the I guess a system as a whole that we're in I mean the tax system is a whole to function how many users do you think need to sign up I mean how many lawyers are there effectively likely to be using it based on your 90 percent of online calculation I mean it's 483 pretty close to what you think is is likely to be needed or where are we not yet but I think I should ask john king to come in here because the best understanding we have is based on registers of Scotland's figures yeah I mean it's the same pretty much the same user base that will be having to sign up and register for land and buildings transaction tax I'd have to sign up and register for various of our services interestingly in terms of solicitor community it's quite a it's quite a small concentrated community there are five firms which account for about 14 percent of all our registration business the top 100 firms well 100 firms account for about 55 percent and 600 firms account f