I welcome to the seventh meeting in 2023 of the local government housing and planning committee. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take item 6 and 7 in private. Are members agreed? We're all agreed. The next item on our agenda today is to take evidence from three panels of witnesses as part of our community planning inquiry post legislative scrutiny of the community empowerment act 2015. This is our second session in this inquiry. The inquiry is looking at the impact of the community empowerment act 2015 on community planning and how community planning partnerships respond to significant levels such as the significant events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current cost of living crisis. We are joined in the room on our first panel of witnesses by Michelle Cromby, who is the corporate strategy and community planning manager at Aberdeen City Council. Jennifer Lees, who is the business partnership manager at North Lanarkshire Council, and Bernadette Monahan, who is the director of community empowerment and equalities at Glasgow City Council. Online, we are joined by Yvonne Bauer, who is the executive officer of place and community planning at Easton-Bartonshire Council, and Shaw Anderson, who is the partnership and development manager at Glasgow City Council. I warmly welcome our witnesses to this meeting. We will try to direct our questions to a specific witness to start where possible, and if you would like to come in, please indicate to myself or the clerks. Yvonne and Shaw, as you are appearing virtually, could you please do this by typing an R in the chat function, and then we will bring you in. There is no need to operate your microphones on and off, as we will do that for you. Each committee member is exploring a particular theme on this topic, and Annie Wells will be starting our discussion this morning by asking some questions about the challenges that communities face. Good morning, convener, and good morning, panel. We heard last week that inequalities can be a moving target, and lots have changed over the past eight years. In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing your communities at the moment, and how do you prioritise which ones the CPP tackles? Being a Glasgow MSP, I will go to Bernardette first, please. I think that over the last few years, in particular, communities have dealt with the impacts of Covid, and some communities have mobilised really well, and organisations came together and really responded in other communities. I think that services and provision that we had just kind of shut down, and we know that through our locality planning model, which we refer to as thriving places that currently operates in 10 areas across the city, so I think that there was a kind of a mixed bag to that. A lot of our communities depend on local services, such as libraries, community centres, and obviously they were all impacted. They all closed down, so that kind of lifeline was missing for a lot of people. I think that some of our colleagues across the council family struggled in terms of budgets, etc., to reopen a lot of those facilities, and we're still working our way through that. I think that it was really communities feeling that they were left without support, and a lot of local provision that they had.  We do have, as you know, the Glasgow Communities Fund, and we fund a lot of very local grassroots community groups, community centres, community organisations through that. The demand for phase 2, which will start in 1 April, was far outstripped. They might have funding available. The fund, it's a discretionary grant fund, and that fund's available. It's £49 million, and it's available over three years. We will review what we've learned from phase 2, but I think that one thing is really thinking through the purpose and criteria of the fund, and how we can actually best support local grassroots organisations, but also make sure that there aren't gaps in provision locally. It's part of the assessment process. We had sector review panels, and they gave us some really valuable feedback about geographies, so I think that that's really important to us, but I suppose that on the positive side, the funding that we were able to give to organisations was that it wasn't everything that they asked for. It is a three-year award, so we don't have enough money to support the need, but we can offer flexibility in terms of organisations who've been successful actually use the award over the three years, and they can underspend in one year, overspend in another, et cetera. I think that with limited resources, we're doing our very best to try to make sure that we can support as many community organisations and services for local people as possible. I think that in response to the question, one of the things that we've tried very hard to do is build the capacity of our communities, and this is very much consistent with the Empowerment Act 2015. We're looking to equip our communities with the information and data that they need so that they can influence the decisions that we make. Primarily, but not exclusively, people at that time tend to think about money, but we're also going through the approach that was taken to our decentralised multi-member ward structures to empower our citizens to influence the way that people provide services. Now, that won't happen overnight, but we believe that we're well down that route and down that journey. That's very much consistent with the Empowerment Act 2015. It's also targeted—all what we do is targeted to try to address the trends problems we're having with Glasgow in terms of poverty and inequality, so that very much is our focus. We were allocated £23 million in the last financial year—£1 million across each of our multi-member wards. The intention has been and will be going forward that our communities more directly influence how that money is spent in their communities, because our communities know better than we do as officials what they need and what they require. That's one of the key things that we're trying to do. It's also consistent with something that Glasgow City Council is involved in called open government, which is an international approach to trying to make things more democratic, and the strand that Bernadette and I have a responsibility for that is participatory democracy, not when it runs off the tongue with a waste of Scotland axi, but participatory democracy is an or key strand. I hope that that is helpful and we have a bit of answer to any questions that that money has generated. My next question is short, so I have a touch on that. The 2015 act put a duty on CPPs to tackle social economic inequalities. To what extent can CPPs and their partners tackle the cause and not just deal with the consequences? I'm going to go for a different angle and I'm going to go to Michelle to see what's happening up in Aberdeen. Thank you for that question. I think that CPPs are critical in tackling the underlying causes of social economic disadvantage. In fact, I think that that's where there's a space that they can support that more preventative approach. Communities are very good at galvanising and coming together and they've been amazing during the pandemic and even now in the cost of living crisis, and we have really been able to nurture our relationships with them during this time. But I think that there is a sense over the last few years that there's a feeling that that's community planning for real or that's what community planning should be. But that crisis response doesn't allow us to prevent that disadvantage and inequality happening, so we have to work as a partnership across all our services. In Aberdeen, we take an approach where we analyse our planned improvement activity as part of our local outcome improvement plan and our locality plans in terms of three tiers of prevention, so from up, mid and downstream, so we've always got that kind of balance. Following the pandemic, we did add a new priority outcome to our local outcome improvement plan that was to reduce suffering due to poverty, and that was in recognition that there was a short-term response that we had to make. But the rest of our 15 priority stretch outcomes are about prevention, and, as I said, there will be various tiers of activity there about how preventative they can be, but we've always got that eye on the longer-term goal to try and prevent these inequalities from existing. Thanks for that, Michelle. I don't know if anyone else wants to come in on that, or we can move on to the next. Thank you, convener. All right, we're going to move on to questions from Mark Griffin, who's joining us online. Thanks, convener. I might come to the volume first and give you a chance to answer this one. Just ask how community planning partnerships have helped to marginalise and disperse communities to build capacity with themselves, build confidence amongst themselves to challenge decision making or influence decision making, so that they are able to engage fully in the community planning process. Just to ask as well whether communities, particularly marginalised or disadvantaged communities, are aware that community planning partnerships even exist? Thank you for that question. We use our SIMD data to identify challenges and also the work around our locality plans in our loyp. We're very much engaged with a small local authority in eastern Markshire. We're very much engaged in capacity building and engaging with our communities and particularly those in the locality areas. We use a CLD, a community learning and development approach, and join and work with our partners in the HSCP and in the third sector. For us, it's all about access to services and empowering and building and learning from those with lived experience. One of the examples that we've got is our community grant scheme, which we've boosted going forward for 2023-24. We're working with our community so that they have the ability to apply for that and can build their own capacity in their own areas. One of the things that we've done in North Lanarkshire Council is that we have established our community board development portal. We have nine community boards across North Lanarkshire based around our eight towns, and the ninth board, Northern Corridor, encompasses the villages that straddle the M80. The community board development programme was custom written and developed based on training needs analysis that we did with our community board members, so at a practical level it includes things like what is your role as a community board rep, how to chair a meeting, but it also goes on to look at the different partner agencies and their responsibilities and also participatory budgeting, finance, meeting skills and so on. The other thing, just to pick up on Mr Griffin's question, how do we engage with communities who maybe don't even know that community planning exists? It's important that, on all of us in our work in local areas and with local people, we identify those touch points when we're working with people, be it in schools, be it in our health centres, and to find out at those opportunities what matters most to them and how can we, as community planning partners, use Michelle's word, galvanise around the local issues that matter most to local people? We work with a wide range of partners. We have a very vocal community council collective that's working to help shape what our new citizen engagement framework is going to look like around the area partnerships that Shaw spoke about, the 23-area partnerships. We have contact with our third sector colleagues. We're working on a better relationship implementation group and that's council family members with third sector leaders looking at an action plan that we'll sign up to jointly that will shape how we work going forward. That came on the back of the move from our previous grant fund to the new Glasgow communities fund and the learning that came with that. We have disabled communities work streams that came from our social recovery task force, the Glasgow Qualities working group, the BME task group, but the reason I suppose that I'm saying all that is that I think the points really well made. How do we get beyond the existing third sector networks and community groups, community councils that we have and really reach people who haven't had the opportunity to engage and I think that's what we're aiming to do through the new citizen engagement approach that we take. We're working with our colleagues in the Centre for Civic Innovation, colleagues in neighbourhoods regeneration and sustainability and what we're trying to do is put in place something that will give as many local people as possible the opportunity to engage through our area partnerships and initially make decisions around this new neighbourhoods infrastructure investment fund that Shaw mentioned of £23 million, because what we're conscious of is we don't just want people who turn up to an area partnership meeting to have the opportunity to make decisions on how local devolved budgets are spent and resources are targeted and we really want to go beyond that. So we're aiming to have our framework in place by June and test it out in three pilot areas where we run our original participatory budgeting pilots and then roll it out beyond that. I can certainly bring more information back to the committee at the appropriate time on progress with that. Thanks very much for that. Shaw, you wanted to come in. Very pointed one and a very important one. There's not much point in us having many colourful documents and big strategies if it's not of relevance to our communities. So we are seeking and one of my colleagues mentioned at the expression touch points where we can get up close and personal with our communities and where it is relevant for our communities to engage with us and by relevant they have the opportunity to influence and shape what we actually do. I'll give an example of that. On Saturday past, we had 51 community councillors giving up their Saturday morning a meeting with council officers to work at housing and planning issues. That's maybe a statement in itself that people in that number are giving up their Saturday morning unpaid to work with us. We also, when we respond to requests for locality plans, were very active in the castle community of Glasgow just now responding to our community and said, we're not engaging effectively with you as a city council. We feel you've let us down in matters pertaining to the local supermarket, local transport. So we've got a team now working with local elected members and local community councillors and other community activists to try to address those issues. So I take the point because the point is very well made. If we do not have relevance to our communities and our communities don't think there's any point in engaging with us, then all we've got is strategies and documents. In response to that question, I believe that we're doing a great deal. I think that there's a need to do much more. In many ways, the legislation was significantly interrupted by Covid. A lot of our community councils almost stood down, forgive the language, because it wasn't intentional, but through Covid, the work digitally equipped to continue. Covid was a big pause or provided challenges and also provided opportunities. That's a bit of a long-winded answer to the question. We need to do more, but we are doing a great deal already in terms of engaging effectively with our communities. I think that engagement is effective when it changes things. I think that we are going to be doing quite a lot of in that regard, but maybe one of the outcomes of this inquiry will be that we get a better focus on that and better quality and we learn from each other. Mark, do you have any more questions? Yes, thanks. My second question is probably directed to Bernardette, given your role in Glasgow City Council. We heard from the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights that CPPs may be raceblind when it comes to tackling inequalities. I just want to see what you do in practice to ensure that all communities of interest and identity all get their voices heard in community planning. Thank you very much for that question. We work very closely with Creror through our Glasgow Qualities working group. In fact, we had at our last meeting, they talked us through their submission, which I think is very, very fair. I think that there could be more of an equality focus in terms of place-based work and that's something that we'll factor in to the strategic appraisal that we're going to do of our current locality planning model with a view to refreshing it and developing a new model because it did start back in 2013, so it predates the community empowerment legislation. I think that the point is well made about more of an equality focus. When we are looking at the framework for citizen engagement, we need to make sure that it reflects the equalities and the demographics in a particular community and that that's borne out as well in the people who engage, so we work closely with Creror on that. They basically looked at our performance management framework that we're developing for our new community action plan, and I think that they felt that it was very bottom-up. We have data from a lot of our partners that we can use basically to give us an indication of which direction we're going in, but I suppose as well just to mention that when we had our social recovery task force, we did look at the themes that came out from an initial discussion with all the partners and equalities very much featured in that, so we assigned work to particular existing community planning groups and structures that we had, including the Equalities Working Group or BME task group as well. All those workstreams did was focus on a framework of 10 questions that we gave them. We had an academic advisory group that we've now formally made part of a community planning structure and that was to allow them to set priorities going forward. We also had really good information that was produced by that academic group. It was initially Glasgow University and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, but they did some micro briefings for us and that was about the disproportionate impact of Covid in particular on BME communities, on women, on disabled people, so we're working very closely to look at not just at the disproportionate impact in relation to Covid, but obviously there's a disproportionate impact in BME communities in relation to hate crime and poverty as well. All those things we will take forward and factor into the review that we'll be doing of our current locality planning model and as I said we have regular engagement with Creror and through our Glasgow Colleges Working Group as well. That's me, convener. Thank you. When I move on to the theme of the role of the third sector and Paul McClellan has got some questions on that. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. It's really just talking around about the role of the third sector and a shared cross-party group on social enterprises, so I have quite a lot of interaction with them. It was fair to say that it was mixed across the country on and about how they thought their involvement in community planning was, both at a, I suppose, a local authority level, but also down to the locality planning plan. I know there's questioning on that. I just wondered what your thoughts were on that. Your experiences, how you involve them and where you think across the country it could be improved, but it was very mixed signal we got from the third sector in the gut. Jennifer probably comes to yourself first of all, that's okay, and then open up beyond that if anybody else wants to come in. Okay, thank you. Our third sector interface, voluntary action North Lanarkshire, is represented on our strategic leadership board as a community planning partnership, and also community and voluntary sector North Lanarkshire, which is an umbrella organisation for various community groups across North Lanarkshire, so they are both full strategic leadership board community planning partnership members. We rely heavily on voluntary action North Lanarkshire. The council provides funding of £191,000 per annum. Yes, that's the TSI. We rely heavily on them. We provide revenue funding, NHS Lanarkshire also provides funding, and Van El, the TSI, acts as the community development support, so they will encourage and facilitate and support community groups and individuals to become involved in the local community boards and wider community activity. They also manage our community solutions programme with £1.1 million funding per annum from the health and social care programme, and community solutions is designed as the name suggests to provide support for people who have mental health issues or people who are disabled in the local community and to allow and enable them to play a full and active part in their community, so we'll have a number of social enterprises funded through that community solutions budget. Voluntary sector North Lanarkshire Van El is also involved in helping to assess our community grant funding applications that sit on the panel, so I know from reading some of the other submissions to the committee that the experience of TSI's is mixed, but in North Lanarkshire we have a productive relationship. I want to ask one of the questions for me as well. How do you build that capacity? I know there's a TSI, and obviously you've got the third sector below, but how can you almost build that capacity within the sector itself? I suppose to try and develop itself, not just its core actions, but how does it develop itself in community planning? I would say that our position is very similar to, as Jennifer has explained in North Lanarkshire, but the three things that I would pull out directly answer on your query. Our TSI is a core member of our community planning partnership. In terms of the building capacity, it is a co-chair of our community empowerment group that supports communities to be able to thrive and be empowered to take forward action in the community. They have taken a leadership role with that. In terms of the actual involvement in our community planning and improvement activity, it is quite unique that the third sector, the TSI in Aberdeen, has been critical to us supporting communities to be upskilled in quality improvement, which is a tool that we use in Aberdeen to understand what impact we're having. Our TSI has had that role in working with third sector organisations so that they feel that they are more confident and upskilled to be able to operate in that environment. A third example of a unique relationship in Aberdeen is our joint work with business partners in the city. We try to encourage businesses to get involved in our improvement activity and to understand the impact that they can have and support that they can give to communities. Those are the three areas in which we are very strong working with the third sector in the city. I think that you touched on how do you improve public outcomes through community planning, through the TSI or the third sector or whatever. How do you engage in that? It comes back to the point that you made, Michelle. It's almost trying to make the community aware of where the improvement needs to be, what it needs to do, how it plays its role in that kind of stuff. So, I just wondered if you yourself have a chance to come and just touch on that particular element, but working with the third sector as well in terms of that, actually delivering right on the ground, if you know what I mean. I think that, as has been said by colleagues, we have third sector representation in all our community planning structures. The strategic partnership, which is carried by our political lead, the executive group, which I chair. We've also got our Public Health Oversight Board and other groups that report on community planning, so we have third. It's trying to flip it round to the communities themselves, if you know what I mean. The third sector is not so much at the community planning level as such, but almost down at the grass roots kind of stuff. Almost trying to say, right, okay, as a community, we know we need to improve this, and this is what we need to do as a third sector organisation working with the community planning almost up above it, if you know what I mean. So, how does it flow from there to almost, I know we're talking about the lousy new sector, but how does it flow from the community planning, talking in the office kind of level down to the local community, which I think is a key point for me. I hope that this answer is part of your question, but we do fund a range of third sector partners. We have a third sector capacity building working group, so we fund UCVS, Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector, SEMVO, Council for Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations, Voluntary Glasgow and Community Enterprise in Scotland. I think that's the core group, and that group is critical at the moment because obviously a lot of organisations who applied to the Glasgow Communities Fund will have asked for more money than they will have received, and some who have had the funding for the last three years may not have been successful, in fact won't have been successful this year, and that's nothing to do with the quality of applications, unfortunately. They were of an incredibly high standard. It was just such a competitive process, and we just didn't have enough funds to fund everything, so we had to come up with a formula to make best use of the resources that we actually have. We rely on our capacity building partners in particular to provide that grassroots support. We also have what we call People Make Glasgow Communities programme, which aims to go beyond asset transfer, so it doesn't necessarily mean that people will go down the road of ownership, and so far I think we've had something like 556 expressions of interest, so a lot of that is about local organisations looking for premises, wanting to take on a community centre, whatever and run it, and it's a five-stage process, but one of the challenges of course is that utilities costs are going up, staff salaries need to increase, funding is not always available, so it's working through those with all our partners to think about how can we actually try and not set an organisation up to fail if they take on an asset, but how are we going to support them to make sure that they make a success of it, so that programme is much more flexible than the community asset transfer approach, but there are challenges undoubtedly. The Glasgow Communities Fund is a discretionary grant fund, it's the council's money that you could argue, it doesn't have to put it out the door, but we depend on the third sector to really reach grassroots organisations and provide local services, local community, community grassroots services that the council just couldn't provide for a range of very vulnerable people, and I think it would be an absolute misnomer to think that we don't need to fund the third sector as a really strong and really equal partner going forward, because we do. The other thing is that the third sector brings a lot of resource into the city, it's not just the money that we provide, so there is a huge amount of money that comes in. We have regular discussions with our colleagues in the national lottery community fund, Robertson Trust, and we do talk to them about where there are gaps and what we are able to fund and conversations about where they might want to put resources as well. I don't know if that answers your question. It's spotting exactly what we're trying to do. I mean, you people come into the cross-party group, and one of the feedback from Glasgow is that it's very supportive, and I think the key thing of us is the support infrastructure that's there for organisations, one in terms of the funding, but two, if they're not successful, how do they then adapt and change in whatever in terms of that, so no, that's been really helpful. I don't know if, for sure, Yvonne wants to come in on that. I will not go one question. I know, but we're going to have to move on just in the interest of time, but if other folks want to come in and you get the mic, so to speak, you can tuck in your answers there, but sorry about that, but just we've got quite a bit more to go to get on with. So I'm actually going to come in with a theme of local outcome improvement plans and locality plans, and I'll start, I'll direct the question initially to Yvonne, and because some of you have already started to touch on plans, just as the nature of answering the questions, but I'll start with Yvonne. I'd be interested to hear what processes your community planning partnership follows when developing your loypes and locality plans, and if you think you'll do things differently when developing new or refreshed plans. Thank you. We are currently finalising the refresh of our locality plans, and our locality plans that are for most deprived areas in eastern Martinshire, and that's been a sort of consultation and engagement process with all our community planning partners and with the community that has spanned since the middle of 2022, and it's to reflect the cost of living and also reflect the recovery from the pandemic. So that has involved engagement, focus groups, we called Bletherboxes. We had our community development workers working with development workers from the EDVA and from the HSCP. Everybody all hands to deck, and we've also had face-to-face workshops with partners to test the themes, so we're quite progressed on the locality plans. Coming from that will be the refresh of our loype, which we'll be, hopefully, later on this year, and it will, again, reflect where we are. We also have had an extensive budget consultation exercise at eastern Martinshire for the budget now for 23.24, and it has put up priorities, so those will also be core to the loype going forward, but in the background, in relation to data, we are looking at SIMD and we're looking at a strategic needs assessment and also our governance around the CPP framework. Thanks, Yvonne. Shaw, would you like to come in on your methods, your processes for community planning partnership in developing the loypes and the locality plans? That was when I was going to defer to my director, and I'll do a very, very brief intro, and then hand over to Beledith, who's probably a better place than I am. But it's devised to say that the refresh that's under way this time, we believe, has been heavily and correctly influenced by the social recovery task force, which was set up in response to the pandemic. We're in the midst of a refresh, we're in the midst of also adapting our performance management framework, but in terms of the detail on a day-to-day operational basis, Beledith is more appropriate to probably answer that one. Apologies if I've just given my director a hospital class, I don't think I have. Thanks, Bernardette. There's a few things there. I mean, our existing locality planning model is thriving places started in 2013, and it was a 10-year commitment, largely a partnership between the council and the health and social care partnership. Essentially, between us, we fund a community connector post that's usually hosted by an anchor organisation, so each area is different. There have been different experiences in each area. We did an evaluation quite a while ago with What Works Scotland, and I think they felt that we need qualitative information and stories about the impact that that might be having at local level. It's fair to say that, given, as I said, Covid, there have been, I suppose, some areas where things have not progressed and other areas where things have really, really just gathered a pace of steam, but since that was set up as the local model, we're aware that the commitment was 10 areas, and there are other areas in Glasgow, as we know, in terms of SIMD, where there needs to be locality planning, so participation requests, for example, is one route where that's happening. There have been quite a few new developments as well that we want to take on board, so one is the new model for our area partnerships, which essentially used to be area committees, and when they became area partnerships, essentially received reports. We are moving away from that. We've reshaped the area partnerships. We've reshaped our sector partnerships, so they will still exist in the three sectors, but not made four times a year, come together twice a year, and focus on learning and sharing information and practice around common themes. The local area partnerships will be responsible for producing a local area action plan. That won't displace work that's already gone on through thriving places or work that's happening on the neighbourhood's regeneration and sustainability side of the council, where we have the local planners, we have local development frameworks, work that's also going on through Glasgow Life, where they have a locality planning team, which will closely work with our area partnerships. We've had those developments more recently, and we've also had the report of the Independent Place Commission, which was looking at particularly the impact of place on health and wellbeing. What we want to do through the strategic appraisal that I was talking about is really take the learning that we have so far, look at all that we have in terms of resource and what's going on across the council family, and in a sense create a locality planning model that brings it all together. It's not just about our responsibilities under the Community Empowerment Scotland Act. It's what's happening in terms of place-based work across the council family, and how we actually bring that together and take the learning and the positive factors of our current locality planning approach into that new model. I think that's where we're at is really looking at. We have a model and it's effective in those areas, but there is a gap between the areas where locality planning is happening and where it isn't. The question is really how do we move beyond that now and address locality planning in all areas of need across the city. Thank you very much for that, Bernadette. I have two questions, but I'm going to just ask one again because of time.  Last week, the Accounts Commission stated that a number of partnerships have not published locality plans despite being required to do so by the 2015 act. I'd be interested to hear how locality plans have worked in your area and how has your CPP targeted interventions to those areas needing the most assistance, and you have touched on it a bit, but if you wanted to elaborate. We have published locality plans and we refreshed them in 2021 in parallel with our local outcome improvement plan. We use population needs assessment. We undertake that as the foundation of our Loip and locality plan development processes. We're looking at a range of data to identify from there where the data is pointing to priority need. Of course, the development process is about engaging with partners and communities on the ground. In 2021, we took a change of approach learning from the 2015 act and where we'd been with locality planning. We found that our landscape was quite clittered because as a CPP, we were meeting our duties under locality planning. At the same time, our health and social care partnership were also implementing a locality planning model that did the same but different. There were different groups around it and communities were getting confused by what locality planning was. We did undertake a review in 2020 to develop an integrated model. I think that it is the only integrated model in Scotland. We did do benchmarking at the time to understand if other council areas were having the same issues with their locality planning. My understanding was that they were having the same issues. We have tried to take a bold step in developing an integrated locality planning team across the CPP, which is facilitated by council officers and the health and social care partnership. We now have joint locality plans that seek to meet the duties of both the community empowerment act legislation and the IGB legislation. We have those plans across the whole of the city, but they also identify those priority areas of need for specific communities. What we are trying to do is to have a much stronger connection with those locality plans and partner organisations. What we found before is that there seemed to be a bit of a split where we had partner staff around strategic outcome improvement groups. Communities were doing the same kind of addressing the same issues but within their community, and it was just a bit fragmented. As I said, we have just done that in 2021. We are still experiencing some teeth in issues with it. I think that the pandemic did not help. It disrupted our groups. There have been some resource issues around locality planning, but we are very much committed to the model and overcoming those resource issues. Communities just want support and for us to be working with them jointly to address their priority need and to see that in the core master locality plans. I think that we are in a good place, but there are definitely areas for improvement going forward. Thank you very much for that response. It sounds in general just around loyps and locality plans that from the three that I have heard from, that it is very much a living, breathing process that you are very much keen to engage with it and really make it work. It is not just something that got handed out after the 2015 act and you really want to keep it living. I am going to move on to the next theme, which is going to be introduced by Marie McNair on measuring impact. Last week, the Accounts Commission said that it is still difficult for CPPs to demonstrate what impact they are having. Does data at a local level allow CPPs to demonstrate the impact that decisions and actions they are having on inequality levels and other outcomes? I will pop that first to Shaw. Thank you very much. The key word here is probably attribution. How can you attribute what to which structures or mechanisms? I think that we can demonstrate and I think that you have already begun to, in many ways, answer your own question by saying that it is the local data that will inform that. One of our key frustrations—perhaps it sounds if I am going off message, but I do not think that I am—one of our key frustrations can be that the macroeconomic impact is what we are doing. We might well be doing the right things in our own locality or within the city of Glasgow, but the stats would indicate failure. I will illustrate that by the macroeconomic influences on, for example, child poverty. I believe that what we have done in Glasgow in child poverty has been quite innovative. It has been driven with a purpose and with clarity, and it has got a clear focus. However, if you just look at the cold high level stats, they are almost all going the wrong way, despite what we are doing. As I said, the key word for me in terms of impact is attribution. Are we doing the right things? Are we establishing and forming the correct, meaningful working relationships across partnerships and with our communities and with our third sector partners? In many ways, I think that we are. I think that it is a ffiendishly difficult thing to attribute to specific activities, or actions or even legislation that is changing things for the better. I think that that sounds like a cop-out, but I think that I can justify saying that. I am a great believer that, if we cannot measure it, we cannot manage it, if we cannot manage it, we should not be doing it, so we really need hard facts and figures. However, knowing exactly which mechanism or what behaviours or what piece of legislation is having the most impact is very complex. The closest we come to meaningful answers in that way are to work as locally and in a granular way as we can. What is the impact on the ground? Is the day-to-day life of our citizens being impacted in a positive way? Are they better off? Are they more cash in their hand? Are they access to better services in a meaningful way? I am not certain that that is a direct answer, because I have constantly struggled on a personal basis with that word of attribution and impact and how we can be really clear about what is having the most impact. I think that we can point to trains and activities in terms of empirical evidence. I think that that gets more difficult, and it probably would be fair to academic colleagues on that one. I hope that that answers the question in some way. Thank you. I will move on to my next question. I was just wanting to sympathise with Shaw about the attribution. It can be quite difficult, but in Aberdeen we, as I mentioned before, use quality improvement. It has changed our approach to how we use data to understand impact, which is absolutely critical. There is so much data that, if you are just looking across at trends, you can get lost in a sea of what difference are we making. Using the fundamental principles of quality improvement, we set out within our local outcome improvement plan our 15 stretch outcomes that identify exactly how much it is that we want to improve and buy when. We break those high-level, longer-term stretch outcomes into specific improvement projects with those aims. Those are the projects that we believe that will allow us to achieve our priority outcomes. To this point, we have achieved five of our stretch outcomes that we set in 2016. Those are ambitious stretch outcomes, but we can point to the things that we have done that we believe have made a difference, and those things that have not made a difference and that we have had to change tax. Data has been fundamental to it, but it is also involved in communities in that improvement work. We are in quite a confident place where we can understand what impact we are having. It does not mean that we have cracked it because there are complex issues, but it gives us some confidence to keep pushing forward and to make a difference where we can. In addition to the qualitative data, it is important that we use case studies and examples of feedback from community organisations and local areas where we have worked. That does not always lend itself to numeric indicators, but it is equally as important feedback on where we are improving outcomes. We are now going to move on to our sixth theme, which is the culture of public bodies, and Miles Briggs is leading on that. Good morning to our panel. Thank you for joining us today. In the submission, Aberdeen states that their CPP had secured a commitment of partners to divert resources for shared priorities. Have other CPPs also had that experience and how that collaborative workings, as part of the 2015 act, have been able to take place? As I mentioned, Aberdeen, do you want to outline more information about how that has worked between them? Just that commitment to our local outcome improvement plan and those specific improvement projects that are referred to, we have partners taking a lead on each of those projects and then bringing in partner colleagues together. We have certainly got the commitment of partners. I think that, although the act places an equal duty on partners, it does not necessarily result in an equal contribution of resource. There is variation across partners. I think that so much of it is about identifying where the priority areas are and seeking partners' involvement and that they know what they are being asked to lead on. That is helpful. I think that one of my concerns around where the act has not really progressed is that it outlines a process but not necessarily then a real outcome for people to focus on. Do you think that how that could be improved within the act to actually get to empower communities and get them to the outcome that they all want to see, rather than sometimes the process stopping them from doing that? Do you want to add anything to that? Just thinking about how we work with other public bodies and partners, one of the questions in the inquiry response was about have we achieved that kind of shared leadership. It is fair to say that the council probably is the dominant partner, but what we have done is changed the way that we work particularly on our executive group, strategic partnership, to say to all the partners, please set the agenda. If you have challenges and issues, bring them to the table. Use the collective experience and knowledge that you have around that community planning table to help move things forward. We have seen that working. That has been really quite good where we know that there will be conversations and follow-up off-table, and then we can pick it up at future community planning meetings. We have shared resources in kind, and we have a local authority liaison officer within our team from Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and we work closely with them. We have individual meetings with them. Indeed, we are looking at bringing together a range of public bodies to look at more inward focus, but it is about given the budget pressures that we all have, how we can make more effective use of our own resources and buildings and work more collaboratively. We have that work starting as well. There are other examples of really good collaboration. For instance, the police are a key player in our public health oversight board, and they have reshaped the approach that they take to policing and to solving issues and seeing the problems through a public health lens and how that approach in working with a greater number of partners can help them to achieve much more effective outcomes. That is working particularly well. I think that our gambling harms group is very much focused on lived experience and what that tells us. I suppose that there are resources from partners, but not necessarily money, as it were, but more about how we work collaboratively across the partners and how we do things differently. We have examples of really good partnerships. Things like the Glasgow Life have a live well community referral scheme. Again, that is working across partners and working with partner agencies. It is in one word at the moment and is due to be rolled out. We have Glasgow Help, which was a helpline that was set up within a few days of the pandemic, and that was initially a partnership between Council Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Health and Social Care Partnership and Glasgow Council Voluntary Sector. We have now tried to test that model out by scaling it up and seeing if we can use that as a way of making sure that people get to the right services at the right time, rather than having to navigate their way through various community and council departments. We are testing out that model to see whether that works and how that might go forward. The community learning and development action plan is closely related to our community action plan and is built into the community planning partnerships work. There are lots of examples of good collaboration. I am not quite sure that I have answered that question in terms of resources, but we are making a conscious effort to facilitate the community planning executive group, but we are not setting the agenda. We are saying to partners that this is for you to bring your challenges in particular to the table and collectively find a way that we can move forward on those challenges. I think that that has worked quite well. It is obviously still work in progress, but it is working well. We are finding that partners are sharing their data with us a lot more in terms of what they are achieving. That is helping us to build from the bottom up a much more comprehensive performance management framework to show where trends are going in a positive direction and where they are going in a negative direction. It is all work in progress, but it feels like we have moved a long way from the council being the dominant partner and setting the agenda and bringing papers and potentially recycling papers around all our community planning structures. It feels more proactive. North Lanarkshire Council has an annual programme of work that sets out how we will deliver the plan for North Lanarkshire, which is our overarching loyp. 80 per cent of the actions in that programme of work are delivered in partnership, so it is not about additional resources. It is about partners looking at the issues and where they can contribute and support that work with existing resources and by doing things differently. As was evidenced in a piece of work that police housing and social work did in Craig Newke around antisocial behaviour and drug fewds in the local scheme. In terms of the main challenge then to that shared leadership, is it then that final resource? There is resources being able to provide in terms of administration and support services, but then the cost of delivering an outcome. I know sure in Glasgow City Council's submission, you did state that the local authority does remain the dominant partner in your CPP. Is it that financial barrier then in the end, which is stopping some of these projects moving forward? It is not necessary what you have said, suggest it is not willingness to try to let communities take things forward. It is that final financial issue. In part, it is the capacity issue in some ways. The two really, really big structures are health and councils around the tables. Sometimes it is capacity. If I was just to try and compartmentalise it into two things, I think that we are really quite weak and remain quite weak in terms of joint approaches to capital investment, the big structural chunky joint capital investment things. I am not convinced that I may be controversial here, but I am not convinced that we are very good at that. But on the more operational day-to-day service design allocation of staff time to common purpose, that synergy approach is pretty strong, I think. It is perhaps not surprising that councils would become first amongst equals because of their capacity, because of their reach. In many ways, what I was going to say has already been said by Bernadette and Jennifer, but a really good example for me that I refer people to as the activities of Police Scotland colleagues on our public health oversight board. The local chief superintendent realised the impact that mental health issues had on his ability to deliver a police service, so it might be almost counterintuitive to see the police lead on an issue such as mental health, but I think that that is the fruit of community planning in many ways, because we better understand what each other do and that that collaboration and partnership space is identified so that you can see the police taking a very key role and viewing policing as taking a public health approach to policing. To compartmentalise it, I think that we are weak in terms of capital investment and the big structural financial decisions that we sometimes make. I could reference that and give examples that have passed, but I think that we are really quite strong in some of the operational aspects. I hope that that helps answer that. Thanks for that, Jennifer. Sorry, do you have another point? You want to show us covered it. No worries. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks, community. Thanks, Miles. We are going to move on to our last theme, which is with Willie Coffey on national and local leadership. Thanks very much, convener. We have been in that space. They are talking about leadership for a little bit. I wonder if I could just develop it a little bit with you all just to get your views on this. We have taken evidence over a number of weeks on from a number of partners and it is a mixed picture. I would say that they presented to us about the success of community planning and where particular locales. They put their finger on leadership, local leadership and the drive, determination, innovation, all that stuff to drive that stuff forward. It is not about structures and plans and documents and stuff. It is about doing things that the communities want to have done and the focus on leadership. What are your views on that? Do you recognise that as important? Do you see it in your own authority? What can we do to take that forward and make sure that we really deliver the leadership that we need? I will start with Jennifer, if I may, please. As I said, in 2018, we had the community planning local outcome improvement plan and the council had its own business plan. The council and the partners came together and produced and adopted the plan for North Lanarkshire as our single overarching plan, so that provides that strategic direction. In September 2019, our strategic leadership board had a development day and looked at the community planning board, which had grown in size and involved all the statutory members attending more or less all the meetings, which meant that very often we had 26 or 30 people in the community planning board room, we had different faces, there was not that level of consistency in knowing one another sitting around the table, so we recognised that partnership working was actually taking place at the level below through our children's services partnership, through our community justice partnership, through our tackling poverty officers group, and we decided to let those partnership working arrangements, because they are community planning partnership working arrangements concentrate on their thematic issues, be they poverty, be they climate change, be they children's services, and the community planning partnership board would become a strategic leadership board similar to the model in Aberdeen and Glasgow, and that strategic leadership board comprises police, fire, health, health and social care partnership, the voluntary sector that I have spoken about, Scottish Enterprise, the council. There are eight organisations represented on the strategic leadership board, and that may not sound many, but remember, SPT, SIPA, are involved at the level below doing the partnership working, and that strategic leadership board provides very clear strategic decisive leadership. Pieces of work come to us, yes, for reporting and accountability and oversight, but also when there's a hurdle that needs overcome, or when there's a bit of strategic direction and leadership that needs to be given. There is a real experience of trust and working together between the strategic leaders, and that was very much heightened through Covid, when they were all serving on the local resilience partnership, so they have got that ability to work together at pace and at scale. Our strategic leadership board is chaired by Police Scotland and Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, our advice chair. Thanks for that, Jennifer. Other views on that, I'm particularly interested in leadership at the local level to drive a lot of the initiatives that come forward. We had some great experiences that we learned about through Covid, that emerged because of Covid, that communities feel these are the things that we should be doing now, not perhaps the things that we were doing as part of a CPP process prior to that, so that was a surprise to many of us that they want to keep this, and it was local people driving that with support from local councillors officials and otherwise. Do you see that working? Bernardette and Glasgow and Michelle and Aberdey, do you see that taking place? Sure. I suppose at the level that Sean and I work at, which is the community planning executive group, which is operational. It largely depends on relationships with key partners, and there is more turnover in some key partners than others, but we meet regularly with all our partners around that table individually. For instance, the chief executive of GCVS, I meet with them regularly, and we have those conversations as well, so it is not just that we facilitate the executive group meeting, I chair it, but that is not the be-all and end-all. The work largely happens off table as well. In terms of strategic leadership, we have the strategic partnership, which again is the policymaking bit of our community planning structures, and that is chaired by our political lead. Councillor Christina Cannon has elected member representation on it, as well as on the kind of statutory partners in the third sector, so that is very much about setting the policy in direction. We had our social recovery task force running from about July 2020 until the end of January 2022, and what was agreed with the strategic partnership was that the work of that task force would fold in to the strategic partnership, so, essentially, the work now is oversight of the development of the new community action plan. It is basically all the work streams that were part of that task force are on a rolling programme basis. We will come to the strategic partnership and we will report on what they are doing around the priorities that they set out, and those were priorities that we were asking them to think about. What could they really do that would be impactful and make a difference, so I suppose that they report into the policymaking part of our structures, and that works quite well. As I said, the academic advisory group has been expanded. It now includes all the universities in the city, and that has a kind of formal locus as a subgroup of the strategic partnership. Again, what we are wanting to do is use what the evidence is telling us in terms of setting priorities and moving forward. We know that various academics, for instance, are engaging with different people in the council at different levels around child poverty, and we want to try to unpick that a bit and perhaps have some sort of workshop or event around how we really shift the dial on this. Obviously, it is a kind of top strategic priority for the council in the new council strategic plan, so there are various ways that we work, but the strategic partnership largely, as you were saying, is the policymaking arm. That comes to the executive group, which is more operational, and our job is to go, I suppose, and make sure that it happens and report back on how we deliver on that. Thanks for that, Bernadette. Michelle, I want to be in a different perspective to add that we just share those experiences. I share all those experiences. I think that leadership can sometimes be seen as being at that strategic level, but improvement means leadership at all levels. One thing that I can say that we have done in Aberdeen, and I am not sure if it is different, but just to bring it out, is that I think that often there is a turnover of whether it is staff that is working on improvement or even community members. There can be a lot of change in people, and what we have tried to do in Aberdeen is put in place a system that allows anyone who is picking up the baton or taking on that piece of improvement work to understand where we are at and what changes we have already tried, what changes are successful and to allow them to carry on from there. That is something that has been really important for all of our priorities at a strategic and community level. We have documents that we call project charters that set out the issues with the current system, the changes that we think will make an improvement and a plan for testing those changes. It does not matter who comes in at that leadership level, whether it is strategic or on the ground, they have that starting point that they can pick up with that and take that forward. I think that that has been absolutely critical to maintain the momentum in Aberdeen and to achieve the improvements that we have achieved so far. Just to pick up on your community leadership question, Mr Coffey, our community boards are representing the towns and we make the point with the community board members that they are not necessarily there to represent Croy tenants association, they are there to represent Cilsaith community board. As community board members, they are accountable to that wider Cilsaith town and Croy village. I agree with all that has been said. Finally, we have had some recent success with some projects and programmes where we have co-produced them with members of the community that are from anchor organisations. We have been capacity building for some time and we are very active during Covid, so that is a bit of a good news story that they are now engaged to that level that they will work hand in hand with us. That concludes our questions. Clearly, we could spend a lot more time delving deeply into the work that you are doing.  You have lots of measures in place and from talking to all of you, it seems that it is working and it is moving in the right direction. Thank you so much for spending some time with us this morning. I now suspend the meeting to allow for change of witnesses. On our second panel, we are joined in the room by Kevin Anderson, who is the service lead for policy performance and community planning from South Ayrshire Council, and Susan McCarty, who is the community planning officer from South Ayrshire Council. We are joined by Lee Hackston, who is the community planning team lead from Perth and Kinross Council, and Fiona Robertson, who is the head of culture and community service also from Perth and Kinross Council. On-line, we are joined by Anna Wheelan, who is the service manager in strategy and partnership at Orkney Island Council. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting. As mentioned to the first panel, we will try to direct our questions to a specific witness where possible, but if you would like to come in, please indicate to myself or the clerks. Anna, as you are appearing virtually, please do this by putting an R in the chat function, and there is no need to manually turn your microphones on and off as we will be doing that for you automatically. We are going to start with questions from Annie Wells. Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel. I want to touch on what challenges face communities. We heard last week that inequality can be a move-and-target and has lots of change over the last eight years, but what do you believe are the biggest challenges facing your communities at the moment? How do you prioritise which ones the CPP tackles? I think that I will go to Lee first on this one, if you do not mind, Lee. I suppose that you got right to the root of the problems straight away. I think that the multiple initiatives that are around just now, whether it is through funding or whether it is through communities telling us what the priorities are, you can be stretched so thin that it is really difficult to respond as well as we possibly could. That can sometimes be exacerbated by the way that funding is provided, specifically for particular issues as opposed to a broader spread. Unless that is sustained over long periods of time, because a lot of those issues are deep rooted and have been around for a long time, three- and five-year funding programmes just do not cut it. If that is added upon by additional issues coming forward, that can just make things even worse and more challenging for us. However, trying to find the key challenge and what is inherent in trying to focus on what we can do collectively is the main thing through community planning partnerships, because we all have our own individual responsibilities as public sector bodies, but how we do that collectively through community planning partnership and focusing on what only we can do as opposed to the business as usual gives us a key insight into trying to challenge those multiple issues that we are all trying to deal with at the same time. I think that there is a cultural aspect to that as well in terms of how the individual partners around the CPP table can hold each other to account to make sure that they are actually contributing as effectively as they can to those deep-seeded inequalities that we are all trying to deal with. I think that your question was also around the specific issues that we are facing, so from a Perthyn Cynros context, obviously the geography of Perthyn Cynros is varied, so we have one large city, some small towns in a very, very large rural area, so the needs are not the same. That adds another layer of complexity to how we deal with those in terms of what the very rural parts of Perthyn Cynros are facing compared to the centre of Perth City. It is a challenge, but the community planning structure is one that is set up to try to deal with that as best it can. I do not know if Kevin Orr Susan will want to come in or Anna, or anything further to add, no? I suppose just to add that in terms of the immediate pressure right now that seems to be overwhelming when it is the cost of living crisis. I think that in areas that already were suffering multiple complex disadvantage, it has actually just made things a lot worse, so it is not a case of trying to do lots of new things, it is trying to just actually put the extra emphasis into the stuff that we are already doing in some of these communities as well, but it is certainly pressing. Actually, because it cuts across so many different services and parts of people's lives that community planning is the place to actually try to address that. That brings one nicely to my next question, so we will get some further information here, but the 2015 act does put a duty on CPPs to tackle social economic inequalities, so to what extent can CPPs and their partners tackle the cause of social economic disadvantage, and not just deal with the consequences. For example, we heard last week about the growth in work poverty, so I do not know if somebody wants to give me a wee bit further information on that. I think that it is a shades of grey matter of degrees in terms of the impact that we can have, and I understand why the question is worded in the way it is, because we are often dealing with just the consequences, and it is hard to get ahead of yourself and into that prevention space. I will point back to local government and community planning. It is the best space to try and do that prevention type of work, and it is challenging when you are firefighting all the time. I think that there is a sense sometimes of that cluttered landscape within community planning when you have various national, local priorities playing against each other, and how do you find that consistency of focus through all those partners and trying to bring them together? We try to do it through a cross-cutting agenda impact assessment. They say, are we always thinking about climate change? Are we always thinking about poverty? Even that is quite hard to try and pull everyone together in that same direction. I do not think that I could definitively say whether we are dealing with more than just the consequences right now, but I certainly think that we are in the right place to start moving into that more preventative side of things. It is certainly true that the last few years have been a lot about firefighting and dealing with immediate issues. Our response to that within our community planning partnership was to come up with a two-year emergency recovery loyp, if you like, where we focused on the immediate issues. However, the one that we are developing at the moment, which will come into effect from 1 April, is a much longer term loyp. It is a seven-year one this time. We are being quite ambitious because we are focusing on 2030, which is the target that we have adopted for net zero. That is enabling us to include both immediate measures to tackle our top priorities and also longer-term preventative measures. The three priorities that the partnership has chosen for this new loyp. It has chosen things where the partnership itself can make a difference, not the big issues that are being addressed mainly by individual partners. We have picked the cost of living, which is a very obvious one, and there we have immediate measures to address the problems that are happening now. However, we are also looking longer term. We are looking at things like exploring minimum income guarantee, which we are very interested in in Orkney, because we could be a little pilot area for that. We are looking at things like community wealth building, and that crosses over with our second priority, which is sustainable development. Finally, we are looking at local equality, which I know got a lot of discussion in your session earlier this morning, where we still have parts of Orkney, which are not doing so well compared with other parts in terms of the usual socio-economic indicators. We are now going to move to community empowerment and questions from Mark Griffin, who is joining us online. I just wanted to ask what experiences have helped to marginalise and disperse communities to build capacity and confidence, so that they are then able to engage with their community planning process. On an even more basic level, is there even a public awareness of what community planning is, what it does, what it can do to support communities? Can we come to Kevin first? Yes, I am happy to answer that in terms of the first part. We have a duty upon us to make sure that we are listening to communities and what we are doing. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to do in our more marginalised communities, and it is about building capacity within those communities to help to play a part where they want to. I think that we also need to be realistic about how much time people want to give to these sort of initiatives. We are always keen to have people come on and speak to us, but they want to see deliverables, to see things changing in their community, and that constant string of consultation can sometimes work more than help situation. What is key is not making it so formal in terms of the interaction that you can come and engage with. People will engage if they are there for another reason. We do a lot of engagement at our food banks. We do a lot of engagement at events aimed at younger people, so that we are not just getting the usual suspects, the idea that we can get a breadth of input into what we are doing and that feedback on people who would not normally find that sense. What was the second part of your question, sorry? Just about whether there is even an awareness of community planning and what benefits it can bring, do people even know that it exists? I would hazard that, and say probably no. It is probably not up the list. I think that even people within certain parts of local authority will not really know what community planning is. I think that it is quite a corporate entity where it is trying to organise at a very strategic level. Obviously, when it is delivering on the ground, it is usually the partner services who are delivering on the ground, so it is not really badged this community planning, I would say. I would not say that communities are particularly well versed in what community planning partnership is doing and what their aims are. Thanks. Anyone else in the room or online want to contribute to that? I think that the questions and the challenges that Kevin Reyes is right, but things are changing partly through the act, although I would make the broader point that it is really important to see the act in a broader context as part of a whole system within a much wider framework of legislation around public service reform, all of which has this thread around community empowerment and community participation running through it, the role of the third sector interfaces, the role of audit, scrutiny, regulatory bodies. Thinking about community planning in that broader context is really important before we come to consider the question of whether communities genuinely feel that they have skin in the game, if you like. In Perthink and Ross, we have seven local area partnerships, which are the local delivery tier of community planning. In all cases, they are now chaired by a community representative. They make decisions about grant schemes and we are rolling out local area committees. We have a pilot in CanRoss down in the south of our local authority area, which is quite significant in terms of the devolved decision making powers that it has, and we will be extending that model to other parts of Perthink and Ross over the next two years. Do the public communities know what community planning is? Possibly not, as Kevin Reyes says. Does that really matter if the language and terminology make sense to them in terms of opportunities to take part in things, decisions, bid for money through participatory budgeting and other schemes? That is the key bit. We have put quite a lot of emphasis through our social media channels and other routes to publicising the opportunities for communities to get more actively involved in what is going on in their locality, and that is what matters, I think, at the end of the day. We have struggled with this, of course, like every partnership. We have had a lot of success in using our third sector interface voluntary action orcney as a trusted intermediate and advocate for marginalised communities. An example of that was when we were developing our first locality plan, which was in 2018, where the development was in the two years before that. That was for the ferry-linked aisles. Geographically, they are far and away our most marginalised communities. We went with VAO voluntary action orcney to visit all of those islands. We used two techniques to include different community groups and community interests and to keep them engaged. One was to conduct a place standard exercise for each island, and that helped to focus on the priorities that that island wanted to see addressed in the locality plan. The second one was to do jointly with that a participatory budgeting exercise, again for each island, and then one crossing the islands. VAO was very successful in gaining two rounds of funding from the community choices fund for that. That enabled the islands to put some of their proposed actions into effect. We have also seen VAO take a lead in helping to communicate with disempowered communities on a more generic level. Most recently, for the cost of living, we have set up Orcney money matters, which is a unified pathway to joining together the various voluntary sector agencies to support people in struggling with the cost of living crisis. My other question was about comments that the committee received from the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights saying that they have a concern that CPPs may be raceblind when it comes to tackling inequalities. I just wanted to ask witnesses how do you ensure that communities, including communities of interest and identity, people with protected characteristics, those that are marginalised, and how do you ensure that all their voices are heard in community planning and that community planning is aware to issues affecting particular interest groups? It is a challenge. One of the tensions within community planning always is the emphasis on spatial planning matters and thinking about geographies of place alongside communities of interest. Again, what I would say is really important to see, understand and actively use community planning as a mechanism because it is a mechanism within a wider systems approach and thinking about, for example, the regulations and the legislation around community learning and development, where community planning partners, including the local authority, have to be really active around understanding unmet need. Therefore, the engagement with communities of interest equality groups is particularly important in that context and others. A couple of other things, I would say, in Porthing Cross we have an equalities forum and the interface between our equalities forum and the CPP is quite key. Also, as other witnesses have said, the Covid experience really brought to the fore the fact that inequalities, inequalities and how they affect communities of geography and of interest has been a very significant moving target in some parts of Porthing Cross. I am thinking of some very detailed emergency response work that we did in one part of Porthing Cross where we were dealing with a whole range of households and individuals and families from a very wide range of ethnic backgrounds. That really tested our metal in terms of our understanding of the equalities issues and the different communities that we are here to serve. However, it is that whole systems thinking, though wanting to sound too theoretical about it, that is absolutely key. The loyp is the foundation stone or should be the foundation stone in terms of data and evidence, understanding communities, their diversity, their makeup, the things that are shifting and changing. If the loyp is right, the loyp is based on data and evidence, and the loyp is not focused on business as usual. It is focused on what the CPP can do that, as Lee said, only it can do. Those should be the touchstones for how we go about our work. Thanks. Anybody else want to come in on that question? Certainly, I suppose that touching on our loyp, our loyp actually does focus on communities of interest as our priority areas. We are looking at improving outcomes for older people, particularly around supporting people living with dementia and looking at social isolation and loneliness. I suppose that, for us in South Ayrshire, we have one of the highest population of older people in Scotland and, potentially, within Europe. For us, forward planning, we have to think about that ageing population as well. Again, communities of interest, we are looking at care experience to children and young people and young carers. We, as a loyp, look at communities of interest. Equalities are part of our team. The equalities officer sits within our team, so we work very closely with how the equalities officer is. That sort of engagement is something that we have been looking at within community planning and how we can get it better than we are already doing. We are looking at community engagement and setting up a new group, which will be led by our third sector interface, and it is formalising that community engagement to ensure that we are guiding engagement community through various routes. That could be locality, specific thematic, specific community groups, communities of interest and general consultation. It is something that we are continually looking to improve. Add on to that as well to something else that I think is useful when trying to engage with more modernised communities as we have adopted the trauma pledge as a community planning partnership and understanding that sometimes our systems are built in such a way that it may be pushed people away from engaging unintentionally, but actually applying what we do through our trauma informed lens and understanding the different experiences of people is really helping us to get a better understanding of what we need to do better. That sort of self-reflective bit of it, but it's been really successful and all our partners are really brought into it as well, so it's been really helpful. Thanks very much for adding that. Mark, do you have any more questions? No, no more questions, convener, thank you yet. Thanks very much. It's interesting to see more and more organisations, councils are looking at that trauma-led approach and it does seem to be bringing good outcomes. I'm going to move on to the next theme, which is the role of third sector, and that's going to be led by Paul McClellan. Yes, thanks, convener, and good morning panel. Like a couple of other colleagues who were previous councillors for 15 years, I also chaired a cross-party group on social enterprise. It's a real interest, I suppose, in the third sector, and I suppose it's really coming down between where the community planning sits within local councils and where it sits in localities, where the third sector almost comes in, and how do they feel involved, and the feedback that we've got from events that we've had is very mixed across Scotland, in terms of that. So it's trying to look at consistency, I suppose, models of good practice and kind of where you see the third sector playing that role, not just in being part of decision-making but also delivering some services as well. I don't know who wants to take that one first of all, and Susan, you might be coming to yourself first of all, but that's okay. Yes, so Volentary Action South Airshire of Assa, so that's our TSI, and they're a very active member of our community planning board and within our community planning structures. And certainly, the pandemic highlighted that crucial role of the third sector within community planning and supporting our communities, particularly around that initial response. You know, Assa has been instrumental, certainly leading in some key pieces of working, I think, from the pandemic, things like the volunteer strategy. They've developed a volunteer strategy for South Airshire. They're going to be leading in that one. They've been leading on some of the response to the cost of living crisis, and I think we've concluded that part by the evidence, and they've developed a booklet for all homes within South Airshire, which has been absolutely brilliant, and the feedback that they've got from the communities well to actually have something posted through the doors has been really, really good. You know, they've been leading the development of the cosy hubs. They're crucial for us around that engagement, particularly with wider community organisations and people they support within the communities well. And actually, they deliver in some of the key projects within our local outcome improvement plan. So, yeah, I would say that, you know, the third sector and ensuring that the third sector is very much part of the work that we do, certainly does happen, I would say, within South Airshire.  They've got lots of, you know, fordums that align to some of our community planning structures, as well around older people, our children and young people, they're looking at climate change now and sustainability. So, yeah, really very well engaged. Yeah, thanks. Anyone else want to pick that up, please? Yeah, thank you. Similar experience to Vasa, I think you said it was, we have an interesting acronym, PCAVS, for our third sector interface in Perth and Cynros. For the last 18 months to two years, the community planning board has been co-chaired by our third sector interface, which I suppose reflects the value we place on their input and the fact that they can bring a different perspective to all the issues that are being discussed around the table. I mentioned in my response to the first question the geography of Perth and Cynros and the challenges that I can provide, similar to the TSI in terms of a significant area to cover with very different issues and how they can use their resources to the best effect to make sure they're representing that third sector voice, as it were. But what I would say is that a proactive third sector interface can play a very, very important role at that strategic level around the board table, but also at a very local level in terms of supporting communities to build their own capacity, skills and confidence to get involved, not just in community planning as a process, but in general community empowerment activity, which all kind of adds to the same greater whole. So they're a fundamental partner in Perth and Cynros. I think that that's important because these were some of the good examples that came through and used as an interlink between local authority, but also the local community. If that's kind of missing, there's a real element of that. From an island point of view, I don't know, from the Orkney's point of view, does that make it more difficult, for example, in that one? Does that, I suppose, a TSI be a slightly different scale, but does it make it more difficult or easier, for example, in new involvement? Well, our TSI has been an absolutely core member of our partnership right from the very beginning. They are hugely influential and important in what we do. I know many CPPs—well, all CPPs, as far as I know, are in the same position—and yet TSIs still feel somehow like a second-class citizen because they're not specified in the act as a partner. Obviously, that's because the act can't place a public duty on a body that isn't a public body. However, one thing that we suggested in our response to the inquiry, our written response, was that perhaps the act, as well as the schedule of statutory partners, could perhaps have a list of partners who have a right to be invited to participate in boards, so that it would be up to them, but they would then have that statutory right to be there. On that, convener, I'm just trying to ask one question. On the point that was mentioned about the TSI's becoming a statutory partner, would that be something that you would support from your own local authority point of view? I mean, it's certainly something I'm talking for myself, but certainly something that I would think would make sense, but I don't know from your own point of view what your own points of view would be on that. Even just from what we've described so far, they're so integral to what we're doing, and if I'm honest, we probably treat them like a statutory partner already without it actually just being down there in the law, but certainly they're so integral to what we're doing that we treat them that way. Yeah, I know we explained some of my own TSI, but it's invaluable about what they do. Do you yourself, Lee? I'm not really sure, to be honest. Legislation in this context, as in other contexts, is your tool of last resort, really, or it should be? In the relationship, would that be something? Fundamentally, like colleagues in South Asia, I think stroke hope that our third sector colleagues would see themselves very much as equal partners around the table, not least because they co-chair the CPP. I think the focus around the list of those who are duty-bound to participate in community planning probably needs to focus around national bodies and their role, which you may be going to come on to. I can't see that that recommendation would do any harm. Equally, it's fundamentally down to the quality of the relationship at the local level, in a parity of esteem. Yeah, I suppose that Kenny came back at the start, but it was very mixed. There were some TSIs that felt that had good involvement in the council, and some third sector organisations didn't feel had a good relationship with the TSI, so that might be something for the committee to take away and discuss. So, I'm now going to come on to lights and locality plans. I was interested here, Fiona, you saying that lights are the foundation stone and that they should be focusing on what CPPs can do. So, I'd be interested here about the processes your community planning partnerships follow when developing lights and locality plans. We heard in the previous panel that there's quite a lot of refreshing and new plans happening now, so I'd be interested here if you've got ideas of doing things differently. Maybe I'll start with you and then hear from the others. Sure. I think the big shift for us, again partly catalyzed by Covid, but we were moving in this direction anyway, has been, as I think everyone's aware, when you're writing a 10-year strategy of any kind, it can be a risky business because in terms of looking forward in a meaningful way to how the world needs to be in 10 years' time, that can feel, particularly when you're trying to generate grassroots input into the LOIP, that can all feel quite distant and theoretical. There is a balance for the CPP in developing a LOIP, which is strategic, takes an area-wide view, is clear about the priorities within the priorities, but it also makes it real and is sufficiently focused on the issues and the challenges in the here and now. During Covid, we took the decision as a CPP, as we've done with a number of key strategies, to write a one-year delivery plan, which is constantly reviewed and rolled forward, because there were significant issues for us, even thinking back two years ago, where we just did not know how things would unfold. We had a short-life working group, which was led by one of the CPP partners, STS, Skills Development Scotland, in this instance, which developed our new set of priorities for the LOIP, which are very much focused around, again, in common with other colleagues, as you would expect, tackling poverty, mental and physical health and wellbeing, digital participation and engagement and inclusion, which emerged as quite a big issue for us and skills and employability, again, as part of our Covid recovery thing. It's a dilemma to be managed, rather than an intractable problem, between the area-level strategic part of the LOIP, which can't be too distant and managerial and theoretical, and what is actually happening bottom-up grassroots and how you join up the two. I've got another question, but I think you've already answered that one, too, which is about the level of involvement in the development of LOIPs from communities. But you said that TSI certainly are on, I think it was you that said that, they're chairing your seven local area partnerships, so are they involved in the agenda setting as well? Yes. Great. So, just somebody from South Ayrshire wants to come in on that question. So, in terms of the actual development of our current LOIP, neither Susan or I were in post at that point, so we don't have too much detail in that, but we are getting to the stage where we're looking at our next iteration and we're exploring maybe the idea of some local LOIPs. I know that the L stands for local already, but actually, instead of having just one LOIP for the entire geography, we'll split that down into six area-based LOIPs with smaller outcomes on there. So, again, they'll really be derived from what the community feel that they need and what they want and how they can feed that back in, but also what the data tells us, and I think that's difficult sometimes when you're trying to make a strategic plan and you have the needs of the community that are very apparent right in front of you, but actually when you get into the data, whether it be health data, whether it be early social behaviour data, then you can really see some longer-term trends in there that you need to start addressing as well, so it's getting that balance right between finding the big strategic goals that we need to try and meet for our localities, but also what's important to communities and that that's always going to be a tough balancing act. And to what level are communities involved in the kind of agenda setting do you imagine as you go forward with that work? So, it's theoretical in our own minds at the moment, but I would expect that they would be involved in the setting of the LOIP priorities. I think there would have to be a sort of role, this is what we think, what do you think and trying to get a balance of it in between there, but it needs to make sure that it's strategic enough, but also has that resonance with the local communities. Thanks, and I think you already touched a bit on LOIPs, but if you want to come in and share anything more about the Orkney Islands work. I did, yes. I mean, in terms of our current LOIP, the process started over a year ago with a major public consultation engagement exercise, Orkney Matters, and that was a joint collaborative exercise across a number of different service areas and partners, because we don't want to be constantly consulting our communities over and over again for different plans. So, the outcome from that exercise, which visited a number of different geographical areas, islands, communities of interest, young people's groups and so on, and those who have seldom heard, that huge information resource has been used to develop both our LOIP, our new council plan and a number of other partner plans that have been in development lately as well. Having gathered that huge amount of information, the community planning board met and did what it periodically does, what it calls a horizon scanning exercise, and it looks at that information, it looks at everything that's coming in in terms of legislation, what different partner strategies are wanting, things like our net zero target. That was a subject of a great deal of discussion, whether we should go for 2030 or not, and we did. They also think about what can the partnership add value to in terms of selecting strategies. It's not every area that it can. It has to be things that can only be delivered through a partnership approach. That's how we came up with our three, which I mentioned earlier, the cost of living, sustainable development and local equality. The next stage of this now, having drafted our LOIP, put it out again for another consultation in draft form, although we know that you don't often get much back in the way of response to that sort of thing. We did get about 89 responses, which is not too bad for a small island area. The next stage now is for our delivery groups to take those strategic priorities away and work them up, and two of them are well under way already, and the third one will be getting going very soon. Can I just clarify? The delivery groups are at what level? Are they place-based or theme-based? They're theme-based. They are assigned a strategic priority by our board, and they take it away and work it up. The LOIP contains the basic things that the board wants to see delivered. For example, for local equality, we have things like a locality plan, which supports local community-led development plans. We don't want to duplicate those. We want to find ways in which we can reinforce them and help deliver them. It's been assigned to look at things like digital connectivity, which will meet the needs of every user in every community, because we still have areas where our 100 has not reached. We know that when something says it will reach 95 per cent, we are the 5 per cent. We know that. We also have things like transport connectivity, which again meets the needs of users within what is achievable in the timeframe. Even in seven years' time, we are fairly sure that we are still not going to have our completely new ferry fleet, although that is looking a lot more hopeful since the ferry task force started to address that very recently. We want to see an improvement in the population, the demographic balance, the resilience and the wellbeing of our most fragile communities. I know that that is absolutely core to the national islands plan. In terms of measuring that in the long term, we want to see a long-term improvement in the ratings of our most disadvantaged communities in the SIMD. I thank you very much for that detail. You can start to touch into another question that I have, which I may direct to folks in the room. Last week, we heard from the Accounts Commission that a number of partners have not published locality plans despite being required to do so in the 2015 act. I would be interested to hear how locality plans have worked in your areas and how has the CPP targeted interventions to those areas that are needing most assistance. Within South Ayrshire locality, planning is known as place plans. That was a bit like confusion around the language. We are not directly involved in that place planning process, but there has certainly been a tremendous amount of engagements taking place within our local communities using the place standard toolkit. That has been taking place since 2021-22. Engagement outcome reports had been published during the summer of 2022, setting out priorities and comments from the early engagements. Times will now be taking to write up action plans or place plans for those areas. I think that the plan is that there is going to be somebody brought in to support that process. I think that they are hoping that by early 2023 that action plans will be developed and published for our local communities. However, as I say within South Ayrshire, they are known as place plans. We are going to do some work around the language. I am conscious that there could be confusion because there is also a local place plan that is part of the NPF4. That is what we are doing. However, in terms of locality plans, there is a work taking place in Wallace town. Kevin probably would be better place to talk about it than me, but that is looking at the development of a team around a community model. When I look at the community empowerment legislation and the guidance that we have, I meet that as our locality planning requirement. There is extensive work that is taken place to bring the team into the community and to develop an action plan to support that community going forward. Wallace town is one of our most deprived communities in South Ayrshire, so there is a huge strategic piece of work that has been taken place. I do not know if you want to pass over to Kevin to talk more about that, if that was okay. The Wallace town works largely data driven as well. If you look at where the poverty inequalities are coming from in South Ayrshire, it is quite concentrated in Wallace town in the wider Air North area. It has really been data driven for us, which has been useful to try to explain why we possibly need additional resource in a different approach in this locality. I think that that is the real strength of locality plans and the locality planning is understanding that, okay, South Ayrshire is not a huge local authority, but it needs very quite wildly to different parts of rural and urban areas. I think that the ability to use that data and work out what is different is the real strength in locality planning. The stage that we would love to get to, instead of our resources being dragged into these areas of high demand and high need that we start planning at the start and say, well, we know that this is where we are going to need to focus our attention, so let's budget for that in the first instance. I think that locality planning gives you the platform to go on and do that, so I think that there is real potential to grow that out, and that is why we are looking at those local loypes. That is six locality plans that are much more focused on those specific areas and what they need. Thanks for that detail. There are a couple of things that I would maybe say in response to that. The Accounts Commission report and findings are interesting and important to be curious about the reasons why not all local authorities and CPPs will have necessarily published those plans. One of the points I made earlier on around understanding community planning in a broader context is the role of the scrutiny bodies and the way in which scrutiny practice has evolved and changed along the wider community empowerment agenda. A couple of other more specific things. We have a number of community action plans in place that have emerged across different localities of Perth and Kinross in the last couple of years, funded largely by leader funding, rural economic development funding, for the most part, and in other routes, in other cases. What is really important, and I think that this is a genuine challenge, is to make sure that that local action planning process is happening consistently and is, again, going back to one of your earlier questions, engaging with some of the less vocal communities of either place or interest. Well-mobilised communities with strong local infrastructure tend to be the ones that come forward first with that kind of local action plan, which is used to inform the loyb bottom-up. We have a couple of areas in Perth and Kinross that the CPP board has identified as priorities for some quite deep locality working and locality action planning, one out in Eastern Perthshire, which, again, I mentioned in one of my earlier answers where we've had some quite significant issues that have come to the fore in the last two to three years, and that local action planning process has been really important there, we're just about to bring that work to fruition. Final point, not to dominate this, but again, this tension which colleagues in South Ayrshire have referred to around spatial planning and the emphasis through MPF4 on spatial planning and the requirement for place plans, which do have the place principle understanding what is the place about through its skin, what is its aspiration, what does its community want it to be and become, but sometimes inevitably that spatial planning agenda does drive the agenda in a way that is not necessarily easy for the CPP to reconcile. So I think there are a few things on the back of the Accounts Commission finding for us all to reflect on and be curious about. I think that's an interesting point that you raised that tension between the spatial planning, local place plans and the locality plans and the more kind of delivery of service, isn't it, in a way? It's all connected somehow and then it becomes quite complex in the thinking through to pull in all of those threads. I'm going to move on to the next theme and bring in Marie McNair with measuring impact. Last week's session, the Accounts Commission stated that it's still difficult for CPPs to demonstrate what impact they're having. Does data at a local level allow CPPs to demonstrate the impact their decisions and actions are having on inequality levels and other outcomes in a poppet first to Kevin, if that's okay? Thanks very much. The data is absolutely critical. It is. I think that we've become on a bit of a journey recently in South Ayrs in terms of our data. One of the best things we did was start working with our list analysts at the NHS to get some really, really good, rich data on our localities and they can take that down, so that has been really, really helpful to us. I think that's fair to say that's changed our approach to what we're going to do. Data is absolutely key. The challenge we have is when you're trying to deal with some of those very real, on-the-ground things that we want to see make a difference and are dead easily measurable towards some of those longer-term life expectancy, healthy life expectancy difference you want to make to your more modern life communities. Regardless of whether it's that local priority or that strategic priority, the data is absolutely key to doing it. I think that we're much better at demonstrating those immediate impacts, demonstrating where we are over the longer term and those bigger challenges like poverty and equality. It's much harder to measure and there's much more that can influence them externally, which is difficult. We're often wrestling with the idea between contribution and attribution in terms of what we've done as a community planning partnership because it's difficult to attribute changes in child poverty to the community planning partnership, but certainly from a contribution analysis point of view, we do make a difference and we no make a difference, but it's difficult to capture at times. Thank you. Lee, do you want to add any further? Yeah, thanks. Quite similar in many ways to what Kevin had said. A lot of the data that's provided, obviously crucial, a lot of it is quantitative and can sometimes miss the qualitative element in trying to get that balance right between ensuring that the community voice is heard because often that's not captured in bare statistics. We do have a small data team within Perthlyn-Kirranos council and there are other teams within other community planning partners, but certainly there is an issue longer term in terms of how that information is collected and shared and perhaps some kind of joint resourcing between partners would make that straightforward and give us one foundation of evidence that we could all use. I liked Kevin's turn of phrase contribution and attribution. The word that I heard on my head was causality. We could quite conceivably make a significant impact, but can we actually attribute that cause to something that we've done as a community planning partnership? The data probably wouldn't show us that, but within our gut we probably know that something that we've done has made that difference. It's maybe some kind of broader impact studies of the work that CPPs have done in terms of how they've evidenced the impact that they've made over a longer period of time would help inform us and other community planning partners in terms of how we do that going forward, but at the same time you currently do so much analysis, if you want to is very good at using the phrase avoid paralysis by analysis because sometimes you can spend so long considering the data that you forget to actually get down to the actual action bit, so we need to be clear that the data that we're using and collecting is the best data that we have. It tells us where it is that we need to focus our time and our resources, and then we go on and take the action that we think we need to take collectively to make the impact. Then over a period of time you'll hopefully see that dial being shifted, but I mentioned earlier that a lot of these issues that we're dealing with are very long seated and it's going to be almost impossible to be able to show a change in those issues over a short period of time, whether it's one to three years or even five to ten years, so we need to be patient with that. Absolutely. Thank you, Lee. Anna, do you want to come in further on that? I will, yes, thank you. Yes, on islands of course we're dealing with microdata and that has problems of its own because firstly it's not often reported nationally in any form we can use, and then secondly even if it is very often it'll be redacted because the numbers in any one minority are too small. We regularly have to explain that we can't report, for example, on protected characteristics in subjects such as child poverty because the numbers are so small that it would be intrusive even if we could report them at all. We're always looking for sources of data that are useful to us and a very good one that's recently become available to the National Islands Plan Survey, which has been done specifically to track progress on the National Islands Plan. That was done in 2020 the first time. It will be done again this year and then after that every two years I hope. What makes that one so useful is that the data is being reported as we requested on all the islands in such a way that we can split out our ferry link tiles from our islands joined to our mainland effectively. The big divide that we have is between the ferry link tiles and the ones that are joined by causeways to the only mainland. That is useful, but, as Lee said, qualitative reporting is very important for us because that is one way that we can assess whether we are being effective and it's a lot more useful for benchmarking purposes. My second question is, obviously, some submissions to the inquiry spoke about equalities in terms of equal access to high-quality public services. What impact has the 2015 act had on the quality of public services? Are you confident that people in your area have equal access to public services, regardless of where they live or the community of interests? I know it's already been touched slightly on some of the responses, but if anyone would like to sort of add in further and well, I've got you, Anna. Would you like to come in? Well, yes, since my mic is still on, yes. I'd say no, we do not have equal access by any means and that's why local equality has been selected by the partnership, as is one of its top priorities this time round. A recent example would be something that was brought to the attention of our community planning board, which was the issue of first responders on each of our islands, which is at the moment a collection of very ad hoc arrangements, and so we're looking for a partnership solution to ensure that there is equal access to these services whenever they're needed. Thank you. Anyone else want to come in? I think it's very difficult and the question is around, well, a couple of questions. One is, you know, do we mean equal access? Do we mean equitable access and the role of the CPP board in strategic resource management, if you like, making sure that the resources at its disposal, money, people, skills, property and other physical assets are well aligned to the priorities and that the priorities in turn are well informed by good data about socioeconomic disadvantage? And Perth and Kerwell's is not unique by any means and has, you know, brought this to life beautifully in her evidence to you, but in a very big geography, in a very diverse geography, where you've got quite a small population widely dispersed over a big rural area, you know, only a third of our population lives in Perth. The rest lives outside Perth in one of our towns or, you know, we've got over, I think, it's about 154 Hamlets villages, et cetera. How you make decisions about equitable distribution of resources that is well tailored to particular locality needs is a huge challenge and some very tough decisions for the CPP, both as an individual partner, level and collectively, about how those are best used. But the role of communities themselves, and we spoke about community empowerment earlier, is key in this and increasingly our dialogue with communities is about where the CPP increasingly will focus its resource and its time and maybe pull back as public finances continue to tighten in areas where the community is well mobilised and best placed, sometimes better placed to take the lead in addressing a particular issue. Thanks for that contribution. Nothing's other than that. I think we'll just pass it back to yourself. Marie, I'm now going to move on to the culture of public bodies with Miles Briggs. Thank you, Camilla. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us today. My questions relate to what you've just touched on at their funeral around diverting resources for shared priorities. I wonder if you have any examples of where a change in culture and partnership working has facilitated that. I was interested to hear from Anna, you had individual island plans, and I wondered how these are then shaping how resources are allocated. I don't know if you want to come in on that, Anna. I would say, as yet, it's not happened simply because I mentioned the individual community-led plans as one of the things that will feed into our local equality plan. I do have some interesting examples of sharing resources. One is that our partnership support team is jointly funded by the five facilitating partners and has been for about six or seven years, which I think is perhaps unique in Scotland. We have recently twice run a funding exercise whereby the board has asked voluntary action at Orkney to take the lead. That happened first of all during the pandemic when VAO brought to the attention of the board the fact that some of the third sector bodies that people were depending on were really struggling. The council allocated a sum of £300,000 to be distributed by voluntary action at Orkney. We drew up some criteria around a bidding round. The decision-making, not just the management, but the decision-making was also done by their finance and audit committee with support from myself as a council representative. We ran the exercise for a different reason. Very recently, we are in the middle of a second round being managed in the same way, which is in response to the cost of living crisis, which has hit our third sector organisations very hard again. We are using the island's cost crisis fund, which the island's team managed to pull together. We are hugely grateful for that, and that, again, has been allocated to VAO to distribute by a similar mechanism before to ensure that our third sector agencies, who are right on the front line in supporting people through this, are adequately supported themselves. Thank you. Does anyone else have anything to add on that? I suppose what I was interested in and I think everyone has touched upon this today around your councils and the relatively urban and rural dynamics, and both have been competing—I think that Lee Yoo said that the needs are just not the same. How is that then facilitating a different model where sometimes you will have fewer people who maybe can take forward different projects, or, interestingly, you might not have a council owned facility in these communities? How do you put together that support is my question, or how do you facilitate the community to take that lead? That's a huge question to which there are many different answers, but I'll just try and say a few things maybe to stimulate thinking. Very unfortunately, poverty and the cost of living crisis has been probably the one single thing that has really catalyzed some of these discussions about where we need as a CPP to focus our attention on what we can do that only we can do and where we may need to disinvest or pull back. Our conversations with communities about, for example, local asset transfer, which can be a very powerful tool and way of shifting power away from public bodies into the hands of communities, but also protecting assets, particularly in small rural communities where otherwise they might just become deteriorating assets. That conversation around cost of living crisis, increasing prevalence of poverty and our data and evidence has shifted quite significantly around that in Perthyn Cymruolth. It has stimulated a lot of very different conversations, much more hard-edged conversations. The council has established in the last six months, although this is a council initiative, its interface with the CPP is really key, a poverty task force, which is a multi-agency task force, and that is stimulating, I think, a very different thinking about how resources are best used, but it is a huge topic, Mr Briggs, so probably not one that I can cover adequately. Does anyone else have anything to add on that? The budget is a real challenge. My experience with community planning is that partners are very willing to share resources in terms of staff time and rearrange their staff around that, but actually putting money together in a pot is much more difficult and we have tried a few times, and it can be quite frustrating when you think about the money that is around the table at times that we cannot put a small pot together. Likewise, under the current budget round that we just had there, it is probably one of the things that would have had to have gone if we did have it in the first place, so times are really tight. If we are moving towards a more locality-based model of service delivery, the budgets need to align for that as well. When you see where localities have been really successful is when there is a budget attached to them, it does not have to be a huge budget, but when there is that decision to go and make those decisions locally and act on and be very responsive to the needs of communities, that helps. The closer we can align our budgets to localities would give us more flexibility in how we deliver services specifically to those needs. Have you seen improvements when you can see that as a co-location of services, especially in rural communities? I grew up in Bankfoot up in Perthyr, and looking back at what was there during my childhood, it is all gone from the police station to the nursing. To now actually co-locate in the new church centre, there is lots going on there, but it has all had to come together. I do not know if that has been a benefit for some services, but then a detriment to another. I just wonder if there is any data around how people then change their accessing of these services as well. I do not know that there is much data so far, but you do that kind of co-location and thinking about one public estate increasingly is a big… I know the centre at Backfoot that you mentioned. We have another example, again out in Easton Perthyrshire, where a community-led initiative to repurpose a local health centre using town centre regeneration money. That has just opened in the last few months. It is community-led, but the opportunity to co-locate public services under that roof is something that we are exploring. In terms of shifts in behaviour, shifts in demand and need, I am not sure that there is much evidence around that yet, although it is a very good question. Lots of local authorities distinguishing from CPP role obviously have the community campus model. We do in Perth and Kymos, and that has seen some quite significant shifts in behaviour and expectation within public services and communities about where you can create that hub model. It does not work everywhere for a variety of reasons, but the role of physical assets in communities, whether you are talking about a small community hall or a much bigger facility in a larger urban area, is really important. It is sometimes overlooked. A small addition to that. Your question touched on resourcing at a local level. One of the things that has been successful in Perth and Kymos has been that the in the main council funding has been a portion to the local action partnerships that Fiona mentioned earlier. In the main, to allow them to invest in projects that help to deliver their locality action plan. We have seen some positive results in terms of two examples. In eastern Perthshire, there was a view locally that there was an issue around the provision of youth work in youth facilities, and they used a significant amount of their budget to support additional work in that area. In the south, in the Conroshshire area, one of the issues that was highlighted was Wi-Fi access, and the local action partnership decided to use a significant amount of their money to pay for Wi-Fi installation in village halls so that there was improved coverage. I think that that has shifted the dial, but again, as Fiona alluded to the data, I do not think that we would be there, but we know in ourselves that that has made a positive difference. Now we are going to move on to our final theme, which is national and local leadership with Willie Coffey. You might have heard the previous discussion when we were talking about leadership at national and local level, and I was trying to focus in with the other panel on how local leadership works. I wonder if I could turn the question around a wee bit for yourselves and ask you, where does your local community think about the leadership that you show in the community planning partnerships that you ever asked them? I will start with Perth first, then maybe Orkney, then South Ayrshire. I am interested in examples of local leadership and how that drives the CPP process and what the community thinks of it. Do you ever ask your local community what they think of the leadership that you show in driving the CPPs that we ever asked them? I cannot say that we have ever asked that question explicitly in my time in the council, but what I can say is that there is a very strong culture within the CPP statutory partners and certainly within the local authority to be visible and present within communities. A model that we have been developing because we have the local action partnerships and have had them in place for some years is a lead officer, which may be a council officer or it may be from another CPP partner who is meant to be the go-to person within that locality for the community to pick up with in terms of troubleshooting any issues, understanding new issues or problems or challenges as they are emerging on the ground. We have alongside that, I think, through the process of developing the loypes, the community action plans, which I mentioned earlier. In fairness, it is a pretty two-way street in terms of the dialogue between public authorities and communities about the quality of local public services that are designed and delivered in their area. I think that your question is a good one. What is also important in that dialogue with communities is that it is honest, open and, perhaps most importantly, sustained over time, so that it is a process, not just an event, to reach for a cliché. That is what has credibility and integrity for communities is that they feel that the individuals may change inevitably over the long term but that the public authorities and the public services that are rooted in those communities are in it for the long term and that they have a stake in the success of that area. I hope that I will hop up to Yorkney and ask you, Anna, what does the local community there think of the engagement and leadership shown to drive the CPP process up there? It is an interesting question. It is the other way around from what we were expecting. I think that our community is probably less interested in who is sitting in the chair than in what the CPP is actually achieving. We do have strong leadership from many of the partners within the CPP. It is difficult to answer the exact question that you are posing because that is not the one that we were led to believe that we were going to get. I will come back later when we move on to the question that we are expecting. I will turn to my colleagues in South Ayrshire. Just about how do you engage with local people and what their views are of the whole leadership process that you engage with them on? Other authorities, it is not a question that we specifically asked. I think that the knowledge of what community planning is is not particularly strong in communities. For me, the key measure of how well we are doing in engaging with communities is trust. I know that that is a difficult thing to measure, but if our communities are approaching us, if they are seeing the benefits of that co-location, if they are seeing the benefits of our trauma informed practice, then the trust will continue to build. We have seen some of our more marginalised communities where that trust has gone, promises made not kept. If we work collectively with that sense of building trust, not just between the council but between all those partners involved, we can really start making that difference to communities. Once the trust is there, it is much harder to break. In terms of prevention as well, we do not want to see people in a crisis. We want to have systems that allow people to come and speak to us in accesses. Trust is an absolute key part of that. That is how I am trying to measure how well we are doing. That is a difficult thing to do, but you see it when we do that co-location is that people coming in, just to speak, people coming in to engage that maybe we would not have done in the past. Again, I think that that is not an exact measure, but it is certainly a sense that we are moving in the right direction. Thank you. The other question I have is just because I have got my Ayrshire colleagues here, but this question can probably be asked of any community with areas where multiple deprivation issues are mentioned, such as Wallace Town. Part of it is affectionately known locally as White City, as I am sure you know. A few years ago, that community wanted the demolition of its own houses and to start again. How does a community planning process engage with that kind of issue to try to turn that around? It is the same story that could be around in Scotland and other communities. How have you engaged with that community through the CPP process? To influence that outcome and to try to turn it around? We established, trying to think, a couple of years ago that there was work done with our community planning executive at the time of the community planning board and made a workshop session around Wallace Town and asking partners how we could support communities and what we could do to improve outcomes within that area. What we did was establish a Wallace Town strategic delivery partnership that supports to our community planning board. The main aim of that group was the development of a team around the community model, where that was bringing services into Wallace Town. It was a book that Kevin touched on about that co-location. Fire service, Police Scotland, NHS Health and Social Care partnership have committed to bringing staff within the area. Co-location, we have got teams going out on joint patrols, that they are doing joint visits. We have got members of the community very much engaging with officers within the area. Police are very much focusing on that wellbeing role. It is all around that link between poverty, health inequalities and those poorer outcomes. There is a lot of work that has taken place. It is very much a multi-agency project. All partners are very much equal within that process. As Kevin touched on, the food banks are now engaging with the members of the community that they would not necessarily have engaged before. What they did do early on was that it was called a street week. That is for every single door within that community. Every single door was trapped within that community. We were both involved in that process. We spoke to members of the community and we had a questionnaire. We actually asked them how they felt about living within the area. There were very, very mixed results. That feedback has gone out to the community. They are about to do that again. I think that the next couple of months they are going to go back around the doors again and speak to the community and say, what difference have you made? As part of the Wallace Town project, there have been several subgroups set up. There is a community voice group that is to encourage members of the community to come forward and participate within conversations with services and to look at re-establishing some of those local groups. There is lots of work taken place with our thriving community service around parents and family, supporting children and young people. There is work around the cleanliness of the area, so environmental hit squads are going in. The feedback that they are getting is tremendous. They are cleaning up the local area, shaping places for wellbeing. They are looking at air as an area and linking into Wallace Town and looking at the place and how the impact of improving place can have on health inequalities in those outcomes. The other group is focusing on the co-location services.  Kevin is probably better to speak about it than me, but it is... Thank you very much. Is that set of actions driven through the CPP process? Would you say hand in heart that that community now does not think the way they did a few years ago, or have we still got a journey to travel? There is a journey to travel. It did not happen overnight, the issues in Wallace Town. I have always said to partners that this is 10 years before we can really say whether we have been successful or not, but there are lots of interim steps in between there that we need to keep an eye on. The first part of your question is it coming through community planning? Absolutely. When we went and we spoke to it, we did that street week, so about 1,000 households, we got about 450 in, so it is a pretty good sample size. We just asked them what it is like to live in Wallace Town, and what are the experiences o