Felly, oes sydd yn fwy o'r mewn cymerty hai yn 2014, gennym yn hamdag iawn i gael'r sgwysig i'r gwerthbeth o brandingiolaeth, a gennym yn maes yn ygafolaeth y bros�au. Mae gyrsfiwn yn arweinyddio'r gyrsfiwn cyfoedd cyflosion, ac mae'n rhaid i rhau fyddwyd yn dod o gofами wrthyf yn rhaid, ond mae'n gyrsfiwn arwain i gael'r mewn cymerty, ac nid yw'r Orel evidence session on the community empowerment Scotland bill. We have three panels giving evidence this morning. I'd like to welcome the first panel, Archie McGregor, land and property development manager and Alan Thompson, head of corporate relations at Scottish Water, and John Hosey, community regeneration and health manager at Dundee City Council, and Judith Proctor, corporate lead, integration and general manager, Murray community health partnership of NHS Grampian. We were also supposed to have a representative from North Lanarkshire King's Hall, who unfortunately has pulled out of this session at the last minute, which I have to say that personally I am extremely disappointed about that situation. I welcome those of you who have come this morning and I wonder if you have any opening remarks that you would like to relay to the committee? No, in which case we will move on. Let me start you off with a very simple question. Why do you think that these new powers or proposed new powers are necessary and do you think there will be changes in current practice? Ms Proctor, would you like to start, please? Thank you and good morning, committee. NHS Grampian very much welcomed the proposals set out in the community empowerment bill, and in particular the opportunities that we see within the provisions of the bill for us to engage very deeply with communities and to co-create sustainable services for the future. We did, however, note that, as in common with some of the other submissions that you have had, that engagement goes so far. We see a lot of the opportunities through, for example, the locality working that is allowed through the public bodies bill to co-produce services with people. We had hoped for further clarity around that. We think that the opportunities that exist in the community empowerment bill are significant. We recognise some of the potential challenges for us in delivering on that, but I think that the potential in that for communities, for people across Scotland to re-engage with public services and to help to co-produce those is significant. OK, Mr Thomson, if you could just signal to me, guys, which one of you is likely to, that would be helpful for me. Mr McGregor, Scottish Water is also very supportive of the legislation giving communities the opportunity to submit, particularly the asset transfer request element of it. I think that one of the reasons it is needed is that the existing framework in which public bodies operate is very much driven, very formal process whereby asset transfers can only happen at market value. There is no existing guidance as regards leases or arrangements whereby communities can come forward and just make use of assets or apply for transfer. The only other thing in operation is the community right to buy, which of course applies to rural areas at the moment. A broadening of that principle for communities to get involved is to be welcomed. I wonder, Mr McGregor, because I am not fully aware of the rules and regulations that would apply to Scottish Water. Obviously, an asset can be sold for less than market value from other public bodies if there is ministerial approval for that sale at less than market value. Would that apply to Scottish Water too? That is correct, but I think that what the legislation will do is provide much more of a framework that will give confidence to officers to deal with requests for all communities. It was just to clarify whether the rules that apply to other public bodies apply to you too at this moment. That is useful. Mr Hozi, please. The bill is welcome because it endorses many people's aspirations to see more empowered communities. That is positive. There are many diverse opportunities. I think that some of the challenges are in, particularly in some areas of greatest deprivation, the support levels that are required to help groups to evidence need and to consult within their own communities, and the support role of others to help them to go through the process, acquire an asset and sustain it. I do not think that that should be underestimated. Can I ask you, Mr Hozi, just of general interest to your title as community regeneration and health manager? Are you funded jointly by the council and by NHS Tayside? No, fully by Dundee City Council. Okay. I think that that is useful to you. Anne McTaggart, please. Thank you, Mr Hozi, for that reason on to the next question. Some of your communities have illustrated that they do not have the capacity to take on the advantages of the provision and the proposed bill. What will your organisation do to assist those communities? We can start with Mr Hozi first, please. Okay. In Dundee City Council, we have a well-established structure for the co-ordination of local community planning. Within the eight multi-member awards, we have a local community planning partnership that is chaired by a first to third tier officer of the council, involves elected members, council departments, NHS, police, fire and rescue, and up to six local people who are representatives of key community organisations. We have a strategic mechanism in the city that will assist when we are raising awareness of matters to do with asset transfer. The area of work that I am responsible for is community regeneration. There is a direct link there in terms of the staff that are part of my management who currently have roles and capacity building across a diverse range of community groups. A multi-agency approach that reflects our partnerships is probably key to that. We do not see ourselves doing anything different in principle than we do at the moment. That just gives it a very different dimension. Okay. In Scottish Water, do you want to comment on that, Mr Thomson? I guess that the support of communities would be wide and ranging. An example could be with fisheries groups and reservoirs, where some community groups would like to buy the reservoir, but in actual fact, the potential on-going maintenance of the reservoir is not the thing that is in best interest for them. We would look to work with them and negotiate with them. If it was redundant reservoirs, we would then try and look to see if there is one in particular issues for employed people and wellbeing and a number of other initiatives. What we have agreed to do is enter into a longer-term lease, so that, if the reservoir was actually sold, the lease goes with it. There will be a range of different things that we can do to try and work with communities. What would you do proactively to encourage some of the community members? In that example, we have an involvement with the fisheries group. We have a dialogue with them and there are leases on-going, but it tends to then be if there is something that is going to happen with that reservoir and we look within the longer-term. We have community managers across the country that lease with their property colleagues as well. I would probably build on some of the comments from my colleagues on the panel on the provisions in the bill that enable us to be more impactful on the work that we are doing to engage with communities and build capacity there. NHS Grampian, as a board, has responsibility for layers of public health through the organisation. Within CHPs, we have responsibility for community wellbeing, health improvement at that level. I think that those are all of the resources that we would begin to apply to and are already applying to building and creating capacity in communities to participate in the work that we do and to co-create with us the services in the future. NHS Grampian has a duty as a partner within the local community planning partnerships of which there are three in the north-east and in Grampian. Of course, that role put places of duty on them to engage with communities. I would also point out that the committee will be well aware of the key elements within the Public Bodies Act and the creation of the bodies corporate and the integrated joint boards. We will have to set out in our integration schemes how we will be engaging with and encouraging communities to participate. Certainly, we had pointed out in our submission to the committee the need to ensure that we are being aligned with those things rather than working into parallel processes so that we can do the maximiser input there. Obviously, the strategic plan is a significant vehicle for engaging with and working with communities, particularly at that real locality level, which I think begins to address some of the challenges that we see around some communities and communities of interest being better able than others potentially to take part. I think that the opportunities with the Public Bodies Bill for us to focus on localities might enable us to target some of that work at deprived communities or disadvantaged communities there. We as a public body have been undertaking a lot of work under policies such as reshaping care for older people and I think that there are opportunities within the work that has been happening there to build on that engagement and to continue the dialogues that we are having with our communities in shaping future services. I wonder if I could come back to you, Ms Proctor, and I'm going back to yesteryear in a deprived community in Aberdeen, where NHS Grampian came out to consult about local health priorities. The folks there, surprisingly for me, felt that their main priority was tackling mental health in that particular area. NHS Grampian's priority was to get folk off smoking. The community gave its view, a fair amount of members of the community gave their view, and yet it didn't feature in NHS Grampian's priority list. Have things changed since that time, or do some organisations pay lip service to consultation and forget the views that are put over by communities? That's a very good question, and I would respond by saying that there seems to be a potential for tension between that real engagement with communities and, of course, the statutory obligations and the targets that some public bodies are subject to. I think that the challenge for us all in this, in terms of policy makers as well as public bodies, is to balance the rights and responsibilities and opportunities within communities to those other priorities that come to us. I think that one of the challenges, again, that we pointed out in our response to the consultation around the bill, was where some of those tensions have become very apparent. For example, around the requirements for major service change when services and change has been signalled very clearly by a community, but what we're seeing is attention then, because that's seen as major service change that may be a challenge politically, both locally and nationally. I think that it is challenging. I think that engaging with communities can be very, very challenging. There can be more than one view and opinion, and so we have to balance that through being really, really clear in our approaches in the way that we're working and that we're listening to all voices there. I understand that these things can be challenging, but what I feel and the committee has been right around the country in recent times, talking to folks about various issues, sometimes my feeling is that common sense doesn't come into play. If we go back to my example, if there are folks out there with a lot of mental health problems that are not being addressed, it's hardly likely that they're going to be able to give up smoking, which may be the only thing that's keeping them going at that moment in time. I know that there are targets and priorities laid down by others, but it's a pretty pointless exercise going out and speaking to folk, getting those opinions. Common sense would dictate to me that you're not going to reach your other targets unless you're going to address that issue. Obviously, participation requests themselves are going to give folks more of an ability to influence those things. How do you think that that will make a difference? How do we get common sense to come into play? The common sense element is about really understanding what it is that our communities want. I think that this is as much about a genuine dialogue, because we have to be really clear as an NHS board with our communities, the elements of service that we're able to provide and the resources that we have to do that. I think that some of the examples around participatory budget setting get us into that dialogue, that really productive dialogue, that a board, no public body, can do everything that we might want to do in everything a community or individuals within that community might want to do. However, what we can do is enter into a very genuine discussion about what people want, where their priorities are, where some of our challenges and targets and statutory duties are, and to find that pragmatic way forward that we can deliver on all of those as much as we're able to. That involves a real shift. It involves a shift in the way that we work and it involves a shift in the way that we all think about how we do that. That dialogue and that discussion doesn't happen quickly. It takes time to build or rebuild trust in communities where maybe we've not done that before. I think that element of needing to take time to do that is really important. Given that everyone welcomes us all, I'm just trying to get my head round the participation requests. What is your understanding of that? Is there practical examples that you can give where you can see community organisations coming along with a participation request? What does that really mean if we're trying to explain that to local community groups? At the moment, I should say that, in Dundee, we are in the early stages of this journey. At the moment, we would see that as something that we will accommodate and incorporate in future and help groups to see the rights that they have to make those requests. At the moment, we haven't had any requests, but we are prepared to refine our strategy once the bill is implemented and make local groups aware of the opportunities that are there. Do you want to expand on what would happen at this moment in time without the bill being in place? If a community came to you and said that we don't think that the service is being delivered right, we want to know what the thinking is round about the delivery and the budget that's gone in there, and then they want to influence that. How would they do that at present without the bill? I think that it would be interesting. That's helpful. We've got a part-time asset transfer co-ordinator post, which has been in place since December last year. It's only 10 hours a week, but that's the first point of contact for most groups and organisations. We've tried to raise awareness. This person has done a lot of groundwork to help groups to see what's coming. We've got our information posted online and we are in the process of increasing that information and directing community groups to that. In short, we would welcome, if we were approached by any given community group, we would sit down with them and talk through the issues that they see as local priorities and work out ways as to how we can take that forward. That may be something that comes to nothing or something that can go through a process. I don't know if that answers the question. We deal extensively with communities across the country. A lot of that is to do with our capital programme and the delivery of services for customers. We have a structure within our business that we have regional community managers. They work with our capital and delivery teams, but we also issue all the contacts to local councillors. We've got a public affairs department that issues contact details to all our MSPs across the country. We try to make as many channels open as we can do for customers to approaches, either with us engaging with them in the community because we want to do something or equally so back into Scottish Water. When we get those requests in, we would then lay across the business within land and property departments to then move those requests forward and enter into dialogue and negotiation with people to see what can be done. Ms Proctor, please. I don't think that there's a formal process within NHS Grampian at the moment for dealing with such requests. Obviously, the provisions of the bill would support that sort of formal process, but examples of working alongside communities would happen through our community health partnership structures, potentially, with direct requests to the board itself and, in particular, related to specific services. I can certainly imagine requests for service change and for participation where service change is proposed. There will be examples of that throughout the NHS Scotland, where we're remodelling or redesigning services and where particular patient groups will want to be involved in the design of those services and where we would seek to involve them in that and, possibly, and potentially, where we were looking to remodel or change building-based services. I could certainly see where requests for participation in those things would come through. The opportunity of having a formal process around that would, I think, hopefully make it much easier for communities to understand how they can then engage, because I could imagine that, at the moment, it probably feels quite complex to know where you would approach a board in order to participate in some service change. I'm just trying to really get to this participation request process and wonder if organisations have thought through properly, because my read net, in many ways, is that a local organisation could look, for example, at the community partnership, planning partnership in your area. If you've got an outcome there that is to improve health and wellbeing through healthy eating and exercise, and a local body thinks that you're not doing it too well, they could come along and say to you, actually, that we could basically get involved in the delivery of that service, we could have healthy eating classes and engage people better than you are, and their local football team can get involved in running sport and leisure to fit in people up. Therefore, the outcomes will be that people will be fitter, the outcomes will be that people will be in health care. That's in line with the strategic plan you have. We want to deliver that. We're placing a request to you. How do you then deal with that? That's my understanding of what could happen if the bill was passed that you've just welcomed. That's a really, really good example of how the formal participation request would operate. I would say that from a board and a community health perspective, that is exactly the sort of partnership working we've been looking to develop in CHPs, and certainly we'll be looking to develop even further through public body's work and the integration work that they're involved in and with localities. Getting community groups to take part in those processes and take on those services to help us achieve those outcomes has to be the ideal for all of us. Creating the formal routes where we can make it known to our communities how they can avail themselves of those opportunities is certainly something that, as public body's, we will need to undertake. Do you think that you would have to change significantly? One of the criticisms of the community planning partnerships is that the third sector and others feel excluded. They're basically run by the local authority and the next big partners, the NHS, on that. The idea is that at the community level, those people could come forward and say, we can hit these outcomes, we can demonstrate. Therefore, the relationship has to change. It's not about them simply being in there to do, and they've got to demonstrate that.  Does that mean significant change within your organisations if we're talking about community organisations taking a greater role in delivering these services? What does that mean for your organisation? Are you equipped for that right now? Will it mean significant change? My final point on it would be that it does say that the authority, the local authority, the health authority, whoever it is, must agree, if they can demonstrate that they're going to hit these outcomes, must agree unless there's reasonable grounds not to do so. Are definition reasonable and should there be an appeal process there for that? How geared up are you to make that shift? That would be a significant shift if the local community group comes along and says that we could hit these outcomes. I think that it involves a shift in the way that we think, but I believe that it builds on work that we've been trying to achieve through community health partnerships, local work that's been happening under the umbrella of community planning for a number of years, third sector, private sector, but third sector in particular are key to us being able to deliver that. I think that the roles of the developing third sector interfaces is really important. Whereas we also need to build capacity within communities to do this, we also need to support our emerging third sector interfaces to build some of that capacity at a very local level. I think that in terms of getting geared up for this, my response with my focus around health and social care integration is that the work that we will do in defining our localities under that legislation and defining how we engage and encourage localities to participate will be the gearing up part of that. That really gives us that clear approach to working with the resources that are in a local community and working with the assets that are there to shape services. I'm not sure if that answers all your points. That's just the final question to the panel. At the current time, I noticed, for example, in terms of Scottish Water, there wasn't much talk there about outcomes. How good do you think public bodies are in clearly defining outcomes and organising services and organising budgets based on what the outcomes are that you're trying to get? How could you do that? How could you measure that? How do you report that? Certainly, for Scottish Water, our outcomes are heavily measured and are based on ministerial objectives, so when you look at our business plan that's just been announced from 2015 to 2021, that was formed after extensive consultation with customers, customer forum, our regulators, cheaper drinking water quality regulators, but this particular business plan included customers more than it's ever done about what the customers want to see in terms of water quality, wastewater flooding, a whole range of things that customers want and also balanced against what the customers want to pay for these services, how much within that. I'm delighted to say that the plan was just agreed, which is going to see considerable benefits for our customers without also agreed the only utility in the UK to agree that our prices will be fixed at 1.6%. Until 2018, so given price stability for customers with a whole range of outcomes that we need to do right across the country, so these are very measured and targeted by regulators and agreed in a package of measures, so that's broadly speaking how the water industry works. In terms of our business plan, but your point there about how do we engage communities, I think that every organisation we've always got to be open to new opportunities, not to close things down. The point that was made about common sense I think is very apt about how do we remain alert to opportunities to work with communities, both in terms of what we want out of that, because at the end of the day we need to do certain things with capital programme, we need to engage with communities, it's not just a case of us coming along and dig, dig, build, build and everybody should be grateful, we have to engage and meaningful with our communities to make sure that when we do arrive to make improvements that we're doing in a very collaborative way, working with sensitive communities, maybe we've been in before and trying to learn from these experiences and make a better outcome for our customers. Let's look at an example for Scottish Water, which I think is probably an apt one. You've talked about all the engagement that you do with the regulators, with the Government, with your ministerial targets and the rest. Let's look at Aberdeen, where I think I can give the best example. Flooding difficulties in the merchant quarter, the green area of Aberdeen, where businesses and residents have had real difficulties in understanding what Scottish Water has been doing to resolve the difficulty. Those folks decide that they've had enough after this bill has enacted and they put in a participation request to try and influence change in terms of maybe the capital plan, or in terms of what you are actually doing to resolve their difficulty. How do you deal with that? How do you cope with that? Well, certainly the example that you mentioned in Aberdeen of the merchant quarter, we have been engaging with the local businesses and groups. We've also been engaging with the local authorities. I think that the key thing for us in these particular examples is to actually understand what the root cause of the problem is. Flooding is a terrible thing to happen for any customer, particularly internal flooding, where our capital programme focuses on reducing customers at risk of internal flooding. There's been a lot of good work over the years on that. External flooding is something that we're looking at in our next programme to actually understand and define what areas across Scotland are actually most at risk, and then what interventions we can actually put in place to alleviate the flooding for customers. We would look at it— Can I stop you, Mr Thomson? Obviously you have got Scotland-wide priorities. Ms Proctor has got priorities right across Grampian. Mr Hozi has got priorities throughout the city of Dundee. However, the folks who have businesses and live in the green area in Aberdeen are interested in their little bit. You talked about communication, an argument that would be given by a lot of those folks is that they didn't feel that they had been communicated particularly well. They feel that they have been unable to influence what you are doing. That gives them the right. Quite frankly, if you go back to them and talk the way that you've done here about your Scotland-wide priorities, they're going to turn around again and say that communication is of no value to me. How do you ensure that you gain that involvement and make sure that the communication is right for the difficulty that they have rather than talking to us about your Scotland-wide priorities? What we do with all communities, not just at Aberdeen where we've got specific hotspot problems, if you like, where we don't quite understand yet what the solution is and also how best to resolve us because at the end of the day it could be a surface water problem that is not actually a sewering capacity, it might be surface water. Our key and that would be to make sure in these communities that we give name contacts within the community that they can contact is that they're not going through the organisation and having to tell everybody the background to it. We'll try and get an ease of contact to make sure that we're engaging with customers. We will try and always put in interim measures to help customers where we can do if we don't have the fix yet known. If I take an example of Glasgow, forgive me that you mentioned Aberdeen, but to give a context—I'm not trying to be parochial—it's just to give a good example of our understanding and this is what we're rolling out to different areas. In Glasgow we had a lot of areas that suffered from flooding and the problem was everybody wanted to say, well, it's a sewer, it's not a surface water or it's a watercourses and the reality to it was nobody actually knew what the problem was because everybody wanted to pour concrete and come up with a solution that might not be the best sustainable solution. In Glasgow we agreed in a partnership with Glasgow City Council, SEPA and at that time Scottish Enterprise Glasgow and Clyde Gateway that we would spend money actually understanding what the problem was and we created integrated models of catchment models to understand what happens in certain rainfall events. The upshot of that is that now in Glasgow we have that information and Clyde Gateway are now spending £7 million on regional surge ponds. We've just announced £250 million in the city of Glasgow to improve the infrastructure and Glasgow City Council has spent money on flood prevention. Now without that information we would all have been away spending money in our own capital programmes but with the knowledge now of actually these models it's actually not about putting the water in pipes, it's about how do you manage the water above the system. So for me that's a great example now of many communities right across Glasgow and indeed in other areas when we get that type of understanding we don't be far better for communities on what the actual solution will be and it's not just a patch in repair. Okay Mr Hosey please. This question was about outcomes. I mean I guess our guide is the single outcome agreement and the delivery plan which include matters relating to asset transfer, capacity building, improvement in service delivery. So we have a framework there that is complementary to our local community planning process. A few years ago we developed an impact assessment for our local community plans and that would cover the next time we do that it's halfway through our current plans which are 212 to 217. We developed a triangulation system between where we would engage with service planners, providers, the active and engaged community, people who were already involved in their community through community councils or housing groups or representatives such as and the general public. So that would be one measure. The last time we did it we tested it and we couldn't find any other examples in Scotland where there had been an impact assessment undertaken on local community plans. Now the plans are rolling plans so as matters relating to asset transfer emerge they will be incorporated in our local plans so there's a system there which will allow us to measure how effective we are in meeting the objectives and outcomes and I should say that the plans are based on engagement with local people purely. They are not top-down actions that are in the plans, it is across the city of Dundee about 900 actions that are based on consultation with local people so we have an obligation to report to them on the progress that's been made. Before I started I dropped people's attention to my register of interest because I need to express my disappointment that North Lanarkshire Council couldn't send any representatives of so long today to speak to the written submission that they made. It will become clear later on in this session why my disappointment has been expressed in that way. Could I ask Mr Thomson and Mr McGregor directly, is Scottish Water involved in any community planning partnerships, subgroups or working groups of community planning partnerships? Yes, we are involved in some but not all and what we took an action to do was write to all 32 council chief executives to indicate our willingness to participate in community planning partnerships. We are appropriate if it was water related or anything to do with the Scottish Water activities or capital programme or integration. Clearly what we didn't want to do was go along to meetings just for meetings sake and where we weren't going to add any value and some local authorities have taken us up on that offer in certain areas and some haven't. We've got a willingness to participate but clearly what we've got to make sure is that we, you know, but will we attend those areas where we've got input and it will be meaningful? John? The reason for asking a question is that Scottish Water, as far as I'm concerned, is crucial particularly to some of the economic development work that's taking place throughout Scotland and it's unfortunate that the Scottish Water aren't involved in many more community planning partnerships but the question for Ms Proctor and Mr Hosey is that would you see the community planning partnerships having an increased role in ensuring that we actually get greater community empowerment and that the community planning partnerships should be assisting communities to identify where appropriate community asset transfers should take place because the community planning partnership is an overarching role. It brings together a number of different bodies and do you think that the community planning partnership would be the appropriate body to assist communities and, as I said, take forward community asset transfers where appropriate? Ms Proctor? Thank you. I think that to really support the empowerment of communities, we need to be looking at the opportunities for leadership around this at all the different levels that are available to us. I think that community planning partnerships are a good vehicle to be having that oversight of an area and a place and providing that direction and support for better engagement, participation with communities, but I think that their leadership role for all the organisations that sit around that partnership should ensure that all partners around the community planning table are engaged also in building capacity and encouraging and supporting engagement. It should be something that we see through all the layers from SOA down to again I'm going to bring up integration down to the locality plans that we have to develop there. We should see that sort of engagement with communities on service co-production expressed at all the layers from community planning down. I'm talking to communities. Do you use terms like service co-production? No. Co-production is quite a jargonistic term, isn't it? I think that it's a really good one. It's one that I use, but I acknowledge that it's a jargonistic word. The sentiment of philosophy underneath co-production is really sound, because it's not about consulting people on a redesign that we've decided or a tweak. It is about when we get underneath that. The very interesting thing, Ms Proctor, and I said this the other week and it was the same last week, is that if you were to go out into communities and talk in the language that is being used here today and elsewhere, it's a huge turn-off straight away. In terms of reaching communities and getting the level of engagement that's required, we're going to have to rethink exactly the use of terminology and get back to basics in terms of the use of language. I would agree with that point before I answer the question when we did the consultation to create our last local community plans in 2012. There were some issues that were raised by specifics in communities and multi-member wards. Some were city-wide, such as tackling drugs misuse, such as mental health and wellbeing. The other one that came up was to keep things simple.  We need to do things differently. To go back to answering the question, it's yes. That's definitely part of our core business. The way that the structure has evolved from Dundee with the Dundee partnership is the community planning partnership and the eight local community planning partnerships, which have local people sitting on them, is well placed to support groups to find a way through this maze. Also, some of the theme groups that exist, for example, building stronger communities, that's where community, or one of the places where community asset transfer would be located. We have the chairs of each of the six regeneration forums in Dundee sitting on the building stronger communities group, so you can't get away with jargon. It has to be pretty much factual, straight, understandable. We consistently receive that message. John Finch-East is coming out of this bill as the right for communities to make an asset transfer request. The language that is used is that the organisations that currently own the assets or the land can take reasonable decisions not to accept that asset transfer. In the panel's view, what would be seen as reasonable from your own point of view regarding refusing an asset transfer to communities? Let's start with Scottish Water. Mr Thomson or Mr McGregor? Well, any request would be looked at fully. Obviously, we are supportive of the bill, reiterate, but in terms of the framework that we would look at things in, we obviously have sites that are operational. They are, effectively, industrial sites, where rather water is being treated or wastewater treated. Clearly, if they are part of our operational infrastructure, they may not just be serving the immediate local community but, in fact, a vast tract of Scotland. If a community is looking to take over that asset, that would clearly be quite a consideration for us to say, well, is that really appropriate? We can foresee examples not just for ourselves but for any public body to the surrounding community. Perhaps areas of ground within a site are lying unused and they may request, can we use that? Can we lease it? Can we take it over? We may have, however, in our asset management plan, in our business plan, plans for expansion of that site, so it may just be that that land is being kept on hold for future use. Of course, again, we would approach this with a flexible mind. If, for example, the community was willing to simply take on the use of that site for, say, five years, and were happy that, once we were ready to kick in with our investment and our expansion plan that we take back that land, then there's no reason why we couldn't come to some arrangement with them. I think that another good example will obviously be assets that maybe carry risks with them. I'm thinking of our impounding reservoirs, which, in some cases, are close to large built-up areas. Scottish Water has, in the past 12 months, taken the decision that it will not dispose of what we call category A reservoirs, which, if there was some serious structural failure of the dam involved, would cause considerable risk to the community's downstream. We think that we should retain them. We obviously have expertise in managing reservoirs and the legislation that surrounds them. Those would be examples where we would be saying that, either we're not minded to grant a long-term lease or an outright disposal, perhaps something more short-term would be appropriate. I'm not going to go into huge depth about what is a category A reservoir, but maybe you could send us some details of what that actually means. Ms Proctor, please. I would echo my colleagues in this one. I believe that, from an NHS Grampian board perspective, every request would be looked at here. There's potential, possibly, within the broad range of services that the board delivers and that there may be a request for a transfer that aren't actually owned by the board. I'm thinking about some primary care premises that are maybe owned or delivered by GPs and independent contractors. Obviously, they would not be included in some of that, but I think that the risk-based approach that was talked about there is an important one. Also, when we're looking at any requests around that, there's that real focus on outcomes. It's this request focusing on delivering good outcomes for that community. Mr Hozi, please. I think that the question is about where we would refuse or defer a request. A starting point would be to offer support to that group. The way that we have developed an outline framework for assessment, 50 per cent waiting is given to community benefit. We would help groups who were making any requests as a starting point to see what that entailed, how they could evidence need, how they could consult with their own communities to ensure that there was a collective ownership. Our starting point would be positive rather than negative. It may well be that, once the time and there would be support built into that in a range of ways, but by the time it came to the community asset transfer steering group, which we have in place with different council departments, we would need to risk assess it in terms of governance, capacity, community benefit, financial planning, where support would have been built in before that. I guess that there may be circumstances where perhaps a starting point would be a short lease rather than an outright ownership, depending on the capacity of the group, but we would see the starting point that is being very different. Good morning, panel. I have a few questions following on from Alex Rowley's a few moments ago and the previous one. What discussions have you had or are you aware of within your organisations and with the trade unions regarding the bill? I am not aware of any discussions that we have had yet with our staff side representatives, NHS Grampian, in common with other boards in Scotland, as a whole range of guidance and statutory relationships with our unions. There will be opportunities through our partnership forums to be having those discussions, but I am not aware. That is not to say that they are not taking place, but I am not aware of them. I am certainly not aware of any specific discussions about the bill. What discussions have you taken place or are you aware of any discussions that have taken place between your organisation and the trade unions regarding the bill? Not to my knowledge, no. The reason for posing that is that we have already heard this morning from colleagues in terms of the numbers of times in which we have received the information and evidence, whereby local groups feel as if they want to contribute and have something to contribute, but at times we have heard a lot of evidence in the past and I have heard it certainly in the region that I represent that it feels as if there has been a stonewalling and it has been quite difficult for them to get involved. The bill is obviously designed to open that up, but a discussion that I had with a senior public representative a couple of years ago indicated to me that if there was a more open approach, that would have implications upon staffing for that particular public body. When you look at the bill, section 19, section 19, section 3C and the various points that are there regarding to open up discussions about the economic development regeneration, and subsection 5, the authority must agree to the request unless there are reasonable grounds. In terms of the initial question regarding trade unions, if trade unions or representatives have said to themselves that if that were to happen there is a potential implication for that public authority losing staff, would you consider that to be a reasonable ground for refusing to enter into the discussions? I would say no. I think that we do live in tough economic times and resources are, they need to be well measured in terms of how we utilise them. In relation to this, if it is a community priority then we need to shift our priorities to support that. The issue of support and engagement does not, if it is effective, come cheaply. It is time intensive, it is staff intensive and there are implications for how we manage staff workloads, but that is not to say that it is not a priority and we cannot look at what the priorities are and match the resources accordingly. I think that we would remain open to any approach from communities. Certainly the request that I am aware of today tends to be about specific pieces of land or an asset that people may want to buy or lease or whatever. They have not tended to veer into any form of consequences for staff or internally to Scottish Water, but certainly engaging with third sector or other community groups. We remain open to that and there have been a few community groups that have thought about the possibility of an asset that they could maybe look to involve people in training and become water ambassadors at some of our more historic assets. We remain open to that and want to engage because if it is a better outcome for communities and assets that we no longer utilise, then it is in everybody's interest that it is going back to the point of whether it makes common sense. If it makes common sense for us and our customers, why would we do it? However, today, ours has tended to be about site specific, I would say. Ms Proctor, I am panel be aware that NHS terms and conditions in terms of staff are nationally negotiated and governed by that. The whole range of regulations would come into force if there was significant change expected through the transfer of a service or an asset that impacted staff. Through our well-established partnership working with trade unions, that would obviously be a key focus and they would have to be partners in that. However, I echo what my colleagues have said on the panel. I think that starting with a really positive view of what that community group was trying to achieve through the asset transfer, the outcomes that we are looking to achieve and how we could support that and our staff side partners being key partners in those discussions. I can envisage the sort of service change and asset transfer that might lead to those discussions, but I think that if we took a positive perspective that we are trying to improve outcomes, perhaps then the opportunity for a board or a public body is to ensure that within the parameters of their staff's terms and conditions we may be able to deliver that service in a publicly owned building. However, I think that it is about that partnership work and that positive focus on better outcomes for people. I want to touch again on the issue around capacity within communities. We have raised a number of examples, but the one that springs most rarely to mind in my mind is two school closure campaigns or save our school campaigns within my constituency, one in a community in a regeneration community, one in an affluent area of my constituency. The contrast between the approaches that were taken, the ability of one campaign to call on parents and individuals in the community who had strong professional backgrounds, doctors, planners and the other community that required a level of intensive support to put together their campaign and marshal their arguments. That strikes me as being the kind of approach that is going to be commonplace as the community empowerment agenda moves forward. What role do you see your organisation playing in those communities of most need, where the activism and enthusiasm is undoubtedly there, but perhaps that professional expertise around things such as putting together business cases and things like that does not exist? What do you see the role of your organisation being to support those communities to ensure that they can take full advantage of the legislation? It fits neatly, because the resources that we have are deployed in areas of greatest need in trying to plug the inequalities gap, which is a long-term aspiration. Where we concentrate our resources, that is a natural role for us, is to support groups who have, whether it is a single issue to do with the school, although we need to be careful there, because our employers are the city council and we are talking about the education department. There are levels in terms of how far we can go, but we can certainly support groups to campaign and point them in a direction, but that is our core business. Our core business is to build capacity in groups who happen to reside in areas of greatest deprivation. It is negotiated, but it is not always. Sometimes it is about the balance between challenge and support. Sometimes we have to challenge groups to see things slightly differently, although we support them along that journey. It is our core business. In any of the responses that committees have received, that has been noted as an area of risk and concern. We see well-placed communities with a lot of natural resources becoming very involved in this and seeing the opportunities. Those who do not have the capacity, the capability and the opportunity are not encouraged to lose that opportunity. I think that there is a role for the community planning partnerships in their place-shaping work around that to identify, while obviously a board's role is supporting and understanding around where our communities of deprivation are. Sometimes they will be geographically placed, but I think that a board has a role and public bodies have a role in understanding our deprived communities of interest. Groups that perhaps are disadvantaged, as well as communities that are disadvantaged ensure that they are able to participate in it. The focus on locality working is really down at the level of our GP practices, our teams, our social workers, our third sector partners around that, working in those communities and building on work that is already happening there with a focus on that. My area of expertise is asset disposals and transfers. Scottish Water has been proactive in working with groups that have aspirations to take over some of our underused or unused assets. We have an example of one in Dundee where a group for several years has had aspirations to take over a historic building. They have had capacity and capability issues. This is obviously a pre-EU community empowerment bill, but we could have walked away, ignored them and just said that you do not have a business plan. We have been very proactive in engaging with the Dundee City Council. They have experience of working with community groups in the city. This group is going to rely on some water funding. They were struggling to put together some of the business case requirements to support a watery bid. The council had previous experience of similar community projects in the city. It was one where we were being a facilitator, as well as the asset owner, in bringing forward the right package of information that would help them to take it forward. I am pleased to say that it looks like it is going to come to an outcome, which is in keeping with what we are hoping to do as asset owners and the community group's aspirations. One of the things that I have experienced in my constituency is that there are examples out there of very good examples of community empowerment that have occurred without the legislation being in place. I think that the legislation is necessary because those are often exceptions rather than rules. However, where organisations have had positive experiences in terms of communities taking on assets or becoming more involved in how things operate, do you see there being a role in connecting up communities so that those communities that have had those positive experiences that are doing good things can be put in easy contact with other communities? We are often bad at sharing best practice across Scotland. We are also very bad at doing it across local authority or small community jumps between areas. Do you think that there is a role for your organisations in making sure that communities are better connected in that way? We are now going against the clock, so brief answers if possible. I think that that notion of sharing best practice so that communities who are involved in this and who have experience of something that is difficult and challenging and new can work with places that have been through this and experienced some of the pitfalls and challenges so that they are not repeating that. A network where communities can be supported in that and organisations such as the one that I represent can also be supported in this would be welcome. I firmly agree with your point. We can learn to exchange best practice in some of the things that went right and some of the things that did not go right. An example of that would be for us was major planning applications. We had water treatment works in Glasgow, big application, a lot of consideration of the community and planning and all sorts of things. We took a lot of the learning from that and water treatment works, major water treatment works outside Edinburgh at Glencoarse. We then said that we would watch all our learnings and we encouraged the community groups and the councillors to exchange that information between groups so that we could get a better outcome. That is what happened in the Glencoarse. We got a plan application for that within 10 months and some of that was actually about what did not go so well in the first one. I think that if I may on the community that one of the other aspects that does strike me when I go round the country and speak into communities is that if there is good ideas that suddenly comes forward with the early engagements really important but you can actually sometimes if you do not think it is going to happen you are as well saying to the community right from the beginning because if you set aspirations off and form groups and one thing or another and then it comes back and answers was I know at least a lot of negativity so good concise early information to communities is actually a benefit if you do not believe what is going to happen in the longer term and been open and honest with people right from there off. Mr Howe is he pleased? Very briefly, two examples, one we have regeneration forums in six of the eight wards in Dundee where there is greatest deprivation. These are forums which elect 15 local people to make decisions about funding allocations. They come together every month as chairs to meet and share with a common agenda and to find that very valuable. Overall we get that feedback from people across the city that they would like to create opportunities to meet with people in different parts of the city. As a result of that the Dundee partnership run a community conference every six months. That is not for professionals, it is not for elected members, it is for local people who sit on community councils, structures, housing, youth groups, whatever. The agenda is theirs, it is not ours. We have had a range of very successful conferences in the sense of Dundee on a Saturday morning when it suits people to talk about welfare reform, asset transfer, tackling poverty and the feedback that we get from that is very positive in terms of the connections that are made. I am particularly interested in the asset transfer that you have just mentioned. Do you have a register of your assets and also are they available to the public? Furthermore, is there an appeals process if somebody does not agree with the transfer? You mentioned that there was a short lease, for example. Do you have an appeals process in place for that? I am going to caveat Cameron's question there by saying, do you have a full and comprehensive asset register? Mr Hosey? We share it also through, we have just agreed to share it through the local community planning partnerships. We are doing as much as we can to raise awareness of the opportunities that are currently available in relation to appeals process. We do not have that. We are in the early stages of implementing that strategy and we seek advice as appropriate in relation to that. Mr MacGregor? Yes, we have an asset register of all our operational and non-operational assets. Is it full and comprehensive? I do not think that any organisation could be absolutely sure, especially a nationwide one like us, that they have everything because we have inherited assets from predecessor organisations. It always amazes me this, because I can everything that I own. Certainly all our key assets, yes. There are thousands and thousands of assets on the asset register. Ms Proctor? The board has a property and asset management strategy that is required to compile and publish, so it is available. My understanding of that property and asset management strategy is that that includes the physical assets, their condition. It has a strategy that does actually have a full and comprehensive register? Yes, it does. It is required to be published, although all boards have one. That is interesting, because I think that previous NHS Grampian struggled in that regard. Do you think that an appeal mechanism is relevant? Do you think that we should have an appeal mechanism for the asset transfer? Briefly, Ms Proctor? I think that there should always be an opportunity for an appeal and perhaps not the expert in this particular area of physical asset transfer, but appeals would seem to be reasonable if they are proportionate. Yes, I would say so. There is going to be an element that I said earlier of judgment call in assessing some of those requests. We may not always get the judgment right, and thus it is fair that it does go to an appeal. Mr Hozi? I agree. I think that the question is who and where that appeal process sits. If you are very brief, Mr McMillan, but you have to be very brief. It is very brief. It is mainly aimed towards Scottish Water. Do you have any outstanding legal issues regarding asset transfers from other public authorities to yourself? Mr McGregor? One or two, which emerge from the separation of the water and drainage functions from council bodies, do not in any way impact on our operations. It is purely separation of legal titles. Thank you very much for your evidence today. I recognise that that is a pretty long session. Thank you. I suspend, and we will have a change of witnesses. We now move on to our second panel this morning. I would like to welcome John Glover, Scotland Community Land Advisor for the Community Land Advisory Service, Martin Docherty, policy advisor, volunteer Scotland, Robin Parker, Public Affairs Office, Barnardo Scotland, Maggie Patterson, chair of the Community Learning and Development Managers Scotland and Linda Gillespie, Programme Manager Development Trust Association Scotland. We are all very welcome indeed. Do any of you wish to make any opening statement? I take the offer since it has been offered. Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee. As an organisation, we welcome the fact that there is a community empowerment bill on the table, and that is because we recognise from our own work that communities that are more connected and more empowered are more in control of their future, their destiny in the local area. They experience better outcomes, so we should have a community empowerment bill. We see some merit in each part of the bill as it is set out, but our concern or the way that we want to judge this bill is the balance that it achieves between further empowering already empowered communities or whether it tips the balance so that those communities that are most disempowered experience the most significant inequalities in Scotland, whether every community can benefit from the measures in the bill. Our view on that at the moment is that we think that there are ways that the bill can be strengthened. We have worked with a number of other organisations and if some of those things can be picked up and it can be strengthened, then I think that the bill can do more to tackle some of those deep inequalities that Scotland has. Anyone else who wishes to make any statement? One of our greatest concerns is the lack of mention of the individual, the volunteer, that seeks to empower both the community and the in terms of thematic communities and geographic communities. We have grave concerns about that and we are looking for the opportunity to promote the idea of improvements in the national performance framework, that there should be some recognition of the impact of volunteering across the national performance framework to ensure that outcomes that are related to volunteering can be properly measured to enhance our knowledge of volunteering and to create its role within our community. Anyone else? I just have a point of clarification. Although I am the programme manager of the development trust association, I am the programme manager for the community ownership support service, which operates out of the development trust association. Thank you. I think that that is very useful for us indeed. Anyone else? No, okay. Thank you for those opening statements. Mr Parker gave us a brief overview of why he thinks that powers are necessary. I wonder if you could tell us why you think that those powers are necessary and whether you think that public bodies are ready to deal with those new powers. If we could start with Mr Gillespie, please. I very much welcome the community empowerment bill and absolutely see it as being necessary to make the process easier, to actually genuinely make it easier across all public bodies. Clearly local authorities have the power at the moment to transfer and this will kind of enshrine across the whole public sector. Okay. Mr Glover. Yes, thank you for the invitation to speak to the committee. I believe that the powers are useful and necessary. One particular point from my particular role is that I am as much involved in brokering temporary community use of assets as in permanent transfers of assets. From that point of view, I very welcome that the asset transfer request provisions do not just speak about ownership or leases, but they also speak about management and use. One reason that is important is that I agree with what the Government says in the policy memorandum about that, that not all communities are ready to take on ownership. However, another reason that I am very much in favour of that is that it brings in potentially a lot more land. It is not just about the nature of the communities, but it is about the nature of the land. This was touched on in an earlier session, that if land is earmarked for a different use in the long term, it should nonetheless be made available to communities in the short term. There are some good practice examples of that going on at the moment, but it is also very evident that a lot of land that could be being used by communities has a fence around it and is flying vacant. I very much support the way that those provisions will encourage mean values of land. Are public authorities ready? Again, there are good practice examples. The Glasgow Council Stalled Spaces scheme is a good practice example, which is now being promoted across the rest of Scotland. There have been successful community interactions with various landowners, but my own impression is that more work needs to be done to get public authorities into a mindset where it is second nature to make land available to communities. Community Learning Development Manager Scotland welcomes the opportunity to come and give evidence this morning and also welcomes the bill. We have membership from across all 32 local authorities. I certainly agree with the statement in the policy memorandum that the actual experience and progress towards community engagement and community empowerment differs and varies considerably across Scotland. We welcome the bill as it is helping to reduce that inconsistency. For the community empowerment bill, a number of communities are very strong. They are aware of themselves as assets and are aware of themselves as able to make an important contribution. Other communities would very much need support to be able to take advantage of the rights that are being offered through the bill. That applies to public authorities as well. Some have experience and practice that is very much in line with the bill already and already empowers and engages communities, but that varies and the practice is not consistent. I will add to what I said in my opening remarks to speak particularly about part 3 of the bill. One of the things that the bill will enable to happen is for us to realise much more that participation and involvement in decision making is a right of communities. The way things exist at the moment is understood as best practice. It is something that most public bodies endeavour to do, by and large, to involve people in decision making. Part 3 can help to create a situation in which a community can turn around and say that it is our right to be involved in the decision. We think that we have something to bring to it. We want to be involved in that decision making process. From our point of view, as a children's organisation, involvement in decisions that are relevant to a young person is one of the rights that are established in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, something that ministers now have to take into account. They have a duty to take into account as a result of the children and young people's act, which has recently passed. I think that the other thing that I would say is just around why the bill is needed. I think that some people have said that the legislation cannot do it all. I think that that is absolutely right and something that we agree with. There is an element of capacity building and so on that needs to take place to go alongside what is in the act. I think that what the legislation can bring is firstly that if the community planning partnership section is strengthened, it can make sure that community empowerment is seen as one of the purposes of public bodies, if that section is strengthened, as we outlined in our written submission. Secondly, I think that the reality is that public bodies hold a lot of power in Scotland. That is quite rightly through democratic processes in part that local authorities have elected members and so on. However, one of the things that I think that the bill can do is make sure that we hand over some of that power and that we involve on a day-to-day basis our communities in the decision-making of public bodies because the people who use public services are the experts above all others in how those public services can be improved. Before I take Mr Doherty, the participation requests that you have mentioned, Mr Parker, the draft bill states that an organisation who is requesting a participation request has to be a constituted body. Let me throw something at you here. One of the things that we know that there have been difficulties around about, where we have legislated just recently to improve, is around about care leavers. How do you see a group of care leavers, for example, getting together to challenge and to put forward a participation request to a public body to improve the services that they get? I'm really pleased that you use that example because, firstly, we work very closely with care leavers, but secondly, it's one of the examples that we've been thinking through in our heads. Right when the Scottish Government consulted a number of times on this bill, before it reached the Parliament, and one of the first instances where there was a consultation that took place, one of the things that we said very strongly thinking about examples like your own very much was that we were keen that this bill supported communities of interest, as well as geographic communities in this case. One of the things that we're very pleased is that the bill does reflect that. In terms of the fact that communities have to be constituted, as you say, one of the things that we very much welcome clarification from the Government on, and perhaps the committee can help with that, is how constituted they see that as needing to be and meaning to be. Whether that's something that needs to be brought out more on the face of the bill or through guidance, we'd like to see that to be very flexible in how it's applied, and that it wouldn't need to be a very formally constituted group, if you see what I mean. The draft bill seems to be pretty loose, but clarification there is probably required. Mr Doherty, you talked about individuals, and obviously volunteers often work on an individual basis. Again, similar to Mr Parker, that constitutional aspect poses some difficulties in that regard. Are there also opportunities there in terms of volunteers getting together to try and increase the influence that they have in terms of participation? There would be an opportunity if we were in a flat line in volunteering. We have been at a flat line in volunteering formal volunteering rates for nearly a decade in this country, and the Scottish household survey substantiates that.  I know that you and Ms McDonnell will cover Aberdeen City, so we've seen from 2007 drops from 33 per cent down to 27 per cent. It might not seem substantial, but in terms of relative volunteering and the inequality of volunteering, it can be. If we take East Lothian, covering the regions of Lothian, we'll take from 37 per cent down to 32 per cent in formal volunteering. Fife has gone up in Fife. It's one of those ones that has gone up from 22 per cent to 28 per cent. We then have Glasgow. It follows many of its own indicators from 25 down to 24. Inverclyde from 29 to 24. North Lanarkshire from 24 to 21. West Lothian from 29 to 26. The reason why I mention it is that our challenge for us as a national body for volunteering but also to policy makers is how do we stop this, because if you don't have at least some formal stabilisation or increase in identifying as a volunteer, then we don't have an empowered community. That for us is ringing alarm bells across this bill but also across a range of other policy agendas from health and social care integration, which rely heavily on volunteering activity. There are grave concerns. We think that there are opportunities, but there needs to be a bit of clarity. You've opened up a can of worms here. I was my intention, chair. I have two supplementaries in a second. Before I have taken Mark McDonald and Alec Rowley, one of the things that the committee heard when it recently visited the Western Isles was that almost all in the community there do some form of volunteering, but they don't actually see it as being volunteering. Are some of the statistics that you have given us quite possibly, because they are from the Scottish Household Survey, as you rightly said, is it maybe the case that some of the folks who answered the questions in that didn't realise that they were actually volunteering? There is an element of that. The original 1927 was run by about 30,000 people who participated in the survey. It has slightly fallen, but the methodology has greatly improved. Therefore, I will certainly call into question the SAHS, because I think that it is a very robust piece of work. At this moment in time, it is the only piece of work that we have, and we at Volunteering Scotland are trying to work with the team who deal with the Scottish Household Survey to try to improve the question. We would certainly like to in debate with them the idea of informal volunteering. In terms of Elin Sir, the Western Isles, it is 57 per cent recognised formal volunteering. It has pockets of deprivation, but it is a very rural community, more rural than the highlands, an island community, but that speaks volumes about the opportunities, because if you are, say, at the top of the Western Isles and you need someone to forgive, giving this kind of example, the NHS read someone to clip your toenails and you can't reach your toes, you'll get someone from Stornoway to come and do it for you, who's a volunteer. Mark McDonald on that point. I'm interested in the statistics. Obviously, as you said, the SAHS is all that we have to go on, but I would be interested to know from your experiences and from your discussions with voluntary sector partners around Scotland how that is replicated in communities within those areas. Obviously, many of those local authority areas will have areas of deprivation and areas of affluence. It would be interesting to know if those who are volunteering are more likely to do so in areas of affluence than areas of deprivation or vice versa. That's so that the link between deprivation and volunteering at low levels is very clear. High areas of deprivation will have low levels of volunteering. There's issues around social capacity, social networking and use that in the broadest sense. In terms of skills levels, Ms Mcdonald mentioned earlier on about communities sharing skills. You will find in very highly deprived communities a lot of skill. It's the opportunity to use that skill and to listen to it. In the past 10 years, we have seen substantial investment in the third sector. For those of us volunteering in Scotland, that is not about the third sector, but about all sectors, both private and public, who all use volunteers. You have just had the NHS sitting here and did not hear them mention volunteers. You had Scottish Water. They use volunteers at some of their reservoirs. The local authority talks about asset portfolios. I would be interested to know if they list their volunteers that they all use. Some of them don't even know how many volunteers they have in their asset portfolios. That would be very interesting. I am pleased to hear the figures on Fife. One of the criticisms that I have made in Fife over a number of years is that the council is pretty poor at engaging with third sector organisations and we tend to associate volunteering with that. Although you have pointed out that that is perhaps not the right way to do it, how do you see the bill supporting more people getting involved, more people at a voluntary level getting involved? What's in here that's good, but more importantly, what do you think needs to be in there? The bill itself, for us as a national body, is a step forward. The practicalities, as we were told, are very much a formal bill. It's about a practical implication of a piece of legislation. One of the major things that we would like to see in terms of the recommendations that we've made in our submission is early involvement. You talked earlier on to the public bodies about community bodies. Get the community bodies in before you decide what an appeals process is. Get the community bodies in to help you design the actual process for application for an asset transfer. Involve individual volunteering organisations in the design of those local approaches to your community asset transfer. That would be a practical step forward. I don't want to stay on volunteering all the time, but I think that there's one key thing that we need to know from you, Mr Daugherty, before I bring in other folks. In terms of the United Kingdom Government's welfare reform policies, and somehow, in some places, it seems that folk are feared to go and volunteer now in case they lose benefit. Has that had an effect on the numbers of volunteers, particularly in our more deprived communities? There's anecdotal evidence that third sector interfaces, and I remember chair that you don't like jargon, but third sector interfaces of the old CVSEs, volunteer centres and social enterprise, there's anecdotal evidence from them that they are seeing increased numbers. We would need to get those numbers from them specifically, because it's difficult to get a hold of. I would say that we are starting to work very closely not just with Voluntary Action Scotland but with the Department of Work and Pensions to try and mitigate as much as possible the impact for potential volunteers. Given the right resources, they are signposted in the right direction, and it's not just I'm here because I've been told to. I just want to chip in very briefly on Mr Rowley's question. One of the things that we think that could help with in terms of bringing groups together, in terms of the bill, is that in the participatory request section, if you have a group of people who come forward and who aren't yet constituted, I think that hopefully most local authorities would turn around and provide them with support and assistance to help them to become constituted and fulfil the requirements. Something in the bill that proved that and made sure that there was a bit of a duty in some way for the public body to support that group to come together and be able to make something like a participation request would be a beneficial addition. A few questions. Sorry, I might just be dotting all over the place here. My first one is to Ms Patterson. In your submission to the committee, you spoke about direct—the bill does not directly facilitate community impairment. Throughout a lot of your submissions, you talk about national standards. Can you give me how they correlate and how they could work together? I'm assuming that you're talking about the national standards for community engagement and how that works. I think that in terms of seeing that it doesn't—in itself—is the aspect of actually sharing or the joint power that the bill still gives the community planning partnership or the public authority the position of responding to a request rather than that something that is participated in. I think that agreeing with Martin in as much as the process for participation is one that's decided by the public body. In the standards for community engagement, it talks, as we heard earlier, about communities being involved at a very early stage at the outset and that it's clear what that process of engagement would be and that it's clear what's actually there for discussion. That's the kind of thing that we mean when we're talking about progressing empowerment and about standards. A lot of—to what extent are the community bodies—do they have the capacity? We've heard a lot of evidence that the less deprived communities will suffer from within the bill. What will your bodies be doing? What will your organisations be doing to combat that? To answer your question, you represent a national body of community learning and development manager Scotland. We know, as a committee, that, having visited many places, that in some areas there's good practice and interventions with deprived communities which help to build that capacity, in other areas, that's flat. How do your organisation itself and the folks who you represent ensure that that best practice is exported across the country? One of the key purposes of community learning and development manager Scotland is to bring the community learning and development workforce together to share that practice so that in my area I become aware of the good practice in your area and that I become aware of the issues that people are facing and also learn from others' experience in overcoming some of the barriers that are there. That would be the way that we do it. As committee will be aware, there is the CLD regulation from 2013. A key aspect of that is identifying communities' needs for community learning and development. Across the membership at the moment, that's a key focus that we have. We'd be supporting our partners and encouraging our membership to use that regulation as a way of identifying a need among a range of communities. Indeed, the need for support in one community might differ from another, but the regulation requires authorities to identify and to explain why certain needs are not being met. As an organisation, we'd be encouraging our membership to be aware of the implications of the bill, to be aware of where we can play a role in supporting the identification of need for community learning and development, for capacity, for people to access their rights under the bill. As an organisation, that's very much about our whole purpose, to share practice but also to try and support the implementation of pieces of legislation, such as the CLD regulation and the community empowerment bill. I asked the last panel about the issue of community capacity and the difference between the affluent and the deprived communities and the level of support that they are likely to require. I don't think that there is any community that is without capacity and without ability within the community. It's how that is channeled, harnessed and supported. Do you think that we need to identify somebody whose job it is to support those communities at the risk of it then becoming nobody's job? Ms Gillespie, shall we start with you, please? I experience community ownership support service is just under 400 inquiries coming through. Your point about affluent communities and less affluent communities is well made. Affluent communities get through very quickly, they have access to mixed skills within their communities, they speak the language of the public sector, they speak the language of funders as well. Where in general we have found that communities are reacting to threat and opportunity, so it's the threat of closure or it's an opportunity emerges. So in less affluent communities exactly the same applies. Now through our work with local authorities we have costed the asset transfer strategies and it's an internal document and broadly if you were to access grant funding to help you through the process it's in the region of about £20,000 to £25,000. If you have access to skills in your community you can deliver through an asset transfer process with just accessing the professional services you need for about £12 or £13,000. So there is also a financial element in terms of straight support for less affluent communities where more affluent communities just get through the process. Mr Glover. I very much agree with everything that Linda has just said. The certainly the message that came from the previous panel was also one that I hear from the network at the time and that more disadvantaged communities do need more support. I agree with Linda's point about language both in terms of officialdom and also trying to understand something like the community empowerment bill. It's not an easy read for someone who's not used to dealing with legislation. In dealing with local authorities something which I know a lot of groups have difficulty with is just finding the right person to speak to in local authorities. So I'm very much an enthusiast for the idea that there being a named officer in a local authority who communities can engage with. Within my remit all local authorities have an allotments officer and that's often the person that the groups I deal with are interested in. But what I find is that there isn't consistency across the 30 local authorities as to whether it's the state's department, the park's department. If a community wants to take on a bit of land it's not consistent with who in a council you speak to to try and get places. Cancel is Mr Glover but obviously this bill covers other public bodies too. Do you think the other public bodies should also have named officers in this regard? I think those, certainly those who are major landholders, I would support them for instance Scottish Water and NHS Trust should have named contact. I'm not sure if it's so relevant for some of the more minor bodies. In terms of the participation request I think the legislation itself is quite difficult to assess and would be particularly difficult for the less affluent communities and I think that another difficulty with that and that creates a barrier for less affluent communities if that's what we're calling them is the process itself. While the participation request allows me the right to say can I participate in your process if that process itself is also quite complicated and inaccessible, having the right to participate in it is only one step forward. I may also need support to access the process and to take advantage of the process so I think that is particularly difficult for less affluent communities. For example the legislation would require me if I had a concern about the process that you had outlined for me to participate then I have to put that concern in writing to you so that's a barrier for me from the start so I think it is a barrier for some communities and yes there is a disadvantage there. Is that not where your members come in in terms of helping some folk? I'm keen to stress that although we're talking about affluent and less affluent communities and some of the less affluent communities we have folks who are equally if not more articulate and capable than those folks in affluent communities. That's why I said that the terminology that's being used but that is certainly the case. The capacity of communities varies not only in relation to their affluence but nonetheless there are some communities who would find it difficult to access their rights and do need support and yes that is the purpose of our organisation is to support our membership to give the best quality support and the best informed and directed support as they can. Clearly resources are limited across our membership and across other public authorities as well to do that. Mr Parker please. I absolutely agree with your point there Camino in terms of one of the things we did when we were looking at the Scottish Government's last consultation on this bill over Christmas time. We did we put together with some of our frontline staff things that from our experience on the kind of frontline in working staff of what matters in community empowerment one of them was always taking a strengths-based approach and recognising the assets that already exist in a community but I think as I think Mr McDonald said to the previous panel sometimes it's a particular kind of expertise that's needed particularly perhaps for some of the provisions later on in the bill so some of the asset transfer ones that probably is an organisation we're less familiar with it's those kind of things that you need in order to take those up. Speaking specifically to the participation request provision which is the one that we felt we had more expertise to be able to provide our experience on I think one of the things there is something that is missing from that section in terms of a duty on the public body to support any kind of group coming forward to go through that process I think I'm caricaturing it a bit that section but that section at the moment reads a little bit like there is a opportunity for you as a community group to come forward to ask things to say you would like to but all the decision making still in that section is on the public body side of things and that's one of the reasons in the work that we did together with Oxlam and Poverty Alliance we thought that that section one of the first things that section absolutely needed was some sort of appeal mechanism that made sure it wasn't just the public body that decided how that process went about and the last thing I think I'd say I don't think you can have well building a specific person into a bill is maybe something that's a bit more difficult but I think something that could certainly happen is something that made it clear to public bodies that community empowerment was part of their purpose would be really beneficial and making it clear which organisation that does that. I think one of the things that Maggie mentioned the national standards for community engagement putting that on to a statutory basis as part of this bill would really really help with that because I think that would send consultation is is by and lies there's a lot of really good consultation that takes place by public bodies but what the national standards on to a statutory basis would do is make it clear that it should always be high quality genuine involvement that takes place. What Maggie and Robin has said first of all in terms of a named person really should be a strategic element of every local authority community plan and partnership every NHS board to have this as part of their vision about how they involve either individuals through volunteering or community volunteering involving organisations. The idea that we should have another named person on top of 32 local authorities 15 health boards we can't remember how many special boards we have all the other various public bodies I don't think would be a benefit to anybody but there should be an enforcement in all public bodies to be fully cognisant of what the powers of this bill are what it means for them and how it is carried out in their actual physical day to day activity. So when someone's picking up on the phone and someone makes a request about an asset transfer they think oh I know what that's about and it does relate to me because my organisation wants to empower communities wants to make them healthier wants to make them more sustainable and more resilient so it really is about making sure it's in the culture of these organisations not necessarily about naming specific individuals in terms of the participation request again I'm backing up Maggie if you don't involve communities and individuals at the beginning you might as well not bother if you want to design a participation request design it around the people who need it and that's the local communities that would be my advice if you're taking any element of that forward because the more you do to empower them at that early stage the less problems you have down the line in terms of governance processes and you have more tangible outcomes and that's why we would really like to see a national performance framework something in terms of volunteering. Maybe I can crystallise this a little bit further with an example so before I got involved in elected politics I was involved in a group of sports clubs who had come together with a view to taking on an area of land with the view to developing a sporting facility the convener will be familiar with this and what happened was that because the land was held by local authority there was a view from local authority officers that they did not want to be seen to be too involved in terms of support for business case grant application etc because they would then have a role to play in terms of asset disposal asset transfer and that led to the group falling into the trap that many groups fall into of self-proclaimed experts in how to get funding how to approach things attaching themselves to the group and offering poor advice which led to things not really moving forward at all and lo and behold nothing has happened so I guess my view would be where that vacuum exists and it will undoubtedly exist where there will be a view that there is perhaps a conflict of interest for a body to be too involved in the support for our community initiative because it will have a role to play in terms of the transfer of an asset should we have more more robust guidance perhaps in place around who communities can go to and who and for those public bodies to be in a position to advise communities we cannot be the ones to deal with this in terms of the support you need but here are the people you should go to the people who can give you that advice and give you that support to avoid those kinds of scenarios a very long question I'd appreciate a brief of answers please if possible Mr Doherty we'll start with you this time Talk about me opening a can of worms Mr Doherty what I would say chair is that it opens up various issues for community groups and also I recognise for public bodies such as cost implications and nevertheless there has been substantial investment both this administration and previous administrations in the third sector support for this type of approach um so my approach would be more about how do we collaborate you know how we working together on the 32 community planning partnerships in this country to make sure that these groups are actually supported there is substantial amount of work undertaken in the community planning partnerships of scotland and it needs they need to recognise a better collaborative approach to make sure that communities are involved supported and there is a less a nature of duplication and critically in terms of public bodies who might feel off-put about being involved in that that element of support during a community transfer openness and transparency might be the way to tackle that and if they're open and transparent I can't imagine there'd be any reason why they wouldn't want to support a community group of which they're supportive of so there's a certain amount of risk aversity and duplication you would say I would I would say so miss Gillespie um I think that's a very interesting example actually and I would I would say maybe in the last year there's been a quite a shift and I know most of my examples are based on local authorities but you know certainly more than half of scotland's local authorities now have asset transfer strategies in place with the decision making through different groups and you've got you've got very good practice in places like East Ayrshire which have you know brought together teams of officers to support community groups through asset transfer and they're quite different from the decision making within the council and then you've got the south Lanarkshire approach which is about bringing together the external bodies mentioned and bringing them together to support the the community groups going through asset transfer so it is beginning to improve actually in terms of those bodies that don't necessarily have the range of skills available to them that local authorities do that that's something that's still to be developed how they will actually approach their asset transfer processes when they don't they're not necessarily in the position of assessing various aspects of it miss Patterson please community learning and development manager Scotland is at the buck of their membership is our local authority employees and the kind of conflict of interest that was mentioned there is something that historically for our capacity building workers our community workers has potentially been an issue but that probably has declined over over time and certainly as an organisation our role is to support community capacity building staff to affirm that their role is very much supporting the community to take forward the actions and the to progress issues that are theirs rather than that of the of the worker and to try and create that division or wall etc between the fact that they're a local authority employee but the the wishes of the community group are going in a direction that affects other parts of the local authority so certainly in the way that the professional practice has been developed it's been along those kind of lines and I think also in response to your your question around capacity building for this our workforce would recognise that we don't necessarily within ourselves have all the skills to to support community groups to to progress asset transfer requests and we would call in and arrange and facilitate support to those community groups by other local organisations like the the CVS or indeed Linda's organisation came and spoke to our membership so that we would be aware of the support and services that were available nationally to our local groups who wanted to go down the route of asset transfer. Mr Gulliver, please. I agree with what has been said by other panel members about conflict of interest. The reality is that local authority officials or other public body officials, if they are trying to support a community group, may find themselves in a conflict of interest situation with their particular role. I think that particularly in the context of asset transfer, in almost every case there is going to be a degree of negotiation and you can't really negotiate with yourself. If you're talking about negotiating in terms of a lease, you do actually need two informed parties having a dialogue about the terms of a lease. I think that there is a need for support services for communities outwith the public sector landowners themselves. As has been said, the service that Linda and her colleagues supply within the limited remit, the service that I supply, is one that is needed and will need to be developed as the wants to bill is passed and as we work towards commencement, I think that we will need to work up the third sector support services to make sure that we are ready to hit the ground running in relation to asset transfer and participation requests. Mr Parker, please. I think that I would only say that, again, I think that one of the things that always matters in any type of community empowerment, whether you're talking right across the board, right across all the provisions in this bill, it's always important to be clear about which agendas, which parties have within that discussion. All the cards have to be out on the table, otherwise it's not an empowering engagement for either side. I think that others probably have more of an expertise to bring to this in terms of the asset transfer type parts of the bill, and I think that it's more of an issue with those kind of things because it's much more of a legalistic dialogue and an outcome and so on. I think that it's a little bit less of an issue with the participation request thing, whereas it's much more of a co-production. It's getting alongside each other and taking those decisions together kind of process. I think that we're looking towards. Thank you. Cameron Buchanan, please. Thank you very much. Good morning. I just wanted to take up a point with Mr Glover. You mentioned in your submission that the bill does nothing to promote the community use of privately owned land. Are you advocating that it should be either purchased or leased, and what is your opinion on that? The second part of the question, please. You said that nothing in the bill is introduced. Does anything to promote meanwhile community use of privately owned land? Are you advocating that we should either be allowed to purchase it or lease it? I didn't quite see what your point was there. Where are you using the expression meanwhile use in the context of temporary use? The point that I'm looking at is privately owned land, which is perhaps land banked for future housing but which is not being built on at the moment. Whilst the bill extends the right to buy, if land is intended for housing, then it's probably not going to be in the public interest for the community to buy it. Whilst the bill allows participation requests and asset transfer requests to be made to devolve public sector authorities, there's nothing within the bill as it stands that increases the chance of a private sector landowner agreeing temporarily to lease or to licence land to a community. Although there are a few shiny examples of good practice, my experience generally is that there is reluctance on the part of landowners to let communities use their land temporarily. There are various reasons for that. There are issues in the planning system in which landowners might be concerned that they will prejudice their long-term planning use for the land. There are certainly valid concerns about whether a landowner will get their land back if he lets a community group on to it. If he agrees at least for three years, will the community group leave voluntarily at the end of three years? If not, as a landowner, what reputational damage will you suffer if you have to go through legal processes to regain possession? The issues in the law of leases, particularly in the processes for terminating leases, are quite obscure and that scares people off. I think that there are issues of professional risk aversion in land professionals such as surveyors and lawyers may well be saying to their employers, no, do not let the community on to your land because it will just cause you problems. Contamination is another issue where people have concerns about where liabilities for remediation may lie. I think that there are a range of other things that could be done not necessarily within the bill, but that could be done legislatively to try to promote more community use of privately owned land. A lot of that is with the scope of the bill, so if you could try and restrict it to the bill, please can.  Are you in favour of an appeal mechanism if a request is denied? If you permit me, convener, to make a fairly technical answer to that. I thought that the bill was satisfactory because although there is no appeal provision on the face of the bill, normal administrative law will still apply, so that, because we are looking at discretionary decisions by councils here, if a council takes an irrational decision, that will be challengeable under the normal rules of administrative law without the need for a special appeals process. In considering that point at the stage of the last Government consultation on the bill, I could not think of a way of improving on what the common law already provides in terms of an appeal process. To that reason, participation requests process, but I suppose the question where I am trying to come with for this is that how serious, for example, local government will take this and what can a priority it would actually have? I suspect that if you go into many communities right now and you talk about outcomes, even amongst many of the community groups, they will not be that aversa on what the outcomes are if they are indeed any local outcomes. Given that local authorities are under immense pressure, their social work budgets are overspending, their education budgets are overspending. In Fife's case, they are projecting £70 million in service cuts that they have got to make over the next week well. CLD, for example, will be seen as perhaps one of the Cinderella services. Is there a need to go further in terms of the bill and the legislation that forces community planning partners to go further in terms of engaging with local communities, particularly around looking at local outcome plans? The element of collaboration across differing community planning partnerships differs across all of them in terms of the relationships with NHS boards and other public bodies. From our interest, the sooner that you involve either an individual or a group in the process of planning, the better it will become and the easier it is to design services that meet their needs, not the needs of the public sector, the third sector or the private sector, but your community's needs. If you are designing that service around them, you are meeting their needs. Let me see that as a good thing. It is not a conflict against the I am not disagreeing with you. I am totally committed to the principle of this. Given the current financial climate and the difficulties, I can understand why local authorities are looking at scarce resources. I am asking, do we need to go further with this and do we need to put more into the bill to force local authorities to properly engage around outcome plans? If there is an unwillingness to have a change in the culture of engagement with communities and individuals, I do not think that no matter how you change legislation, you will not see an improvement. What you need is people to change. Individuals, either with organisations or in community groups and in the third sector, to be willingness to work together. I do not think that, in any shape or form chair, that any piece of legislation could force people to do that. I find it very difficult. Legislation cannot do it all on its own, but it can help to stimulate culture change and play an important role. On the first principles, the people who use public services are the greatest experts in those services. That applies whether public spending is increasing or decreasing, whether it is difficult decisions or whether it is happy decisions to be made, so that principle always applies no matter what. In terms of what is in the bill, I will be interested in the minister's response and how the Scottish Government might respond in terms of how they see that fitting in with everything. How I see the participation request there is a backstop when other things have been exhausted, communities can turn around and say, no, it is our right to be involved in these kind of decision making things. There are ways that this bill can be strengthened in terms of this to make sure that participation is not just for Christmas or when it is requested. It should be right throughout the time. I think that there is not a silver bullet in terms of community empowerment, but I think that the national community engagement standards are quite a shiny projectile in this regard. I think that putting them on to a national standard and making sure that that is something that whenever engagement is taking place, it is done well, it is done genuinely, which is the vast majority of cases, but making sure that is always the case. I think that one of those times that should apply is when community planning partnerships, the bill requires them to draw up, it is not called a single outcome agreement anymore, it is called a local outcomes improvement plan. When they are drawing up local outcomes improvement plan, I think that one of the things that we need to see community planning partnerships doing much more in balance is at the moment that their main purpose has been to do joint planning between different public services and to be fair to them, that is where they have been driven, is to do that kind of thing. That is a good purpose, it delivers better outcomes, but the other aspect involving communities in their local public services and how their local public services are planned, that is something that community planning partnerships have done less well, I think that it is fair to say. I think that therefore making sure that when they draw up that outcomes improvement plan, that is through a participative process with all the members of the community in that area, I think that that is really important and something that should be built into the bill. I agree that it is possible to go further in strengthening the bill and perhaps through regulation as well, so that the way that the bill is implemented is more in the spirit of what is intended here. The examples that have been given already and the one that I mentioned to, for example, in terms of participation, it is the process as much as anything else and there are limits to the extent to which you can legislate for the process, but perhaps you can regulate a bit more and say, well, the process will be like this. As you mentioned yourself, terms like local outcome improvement, et cetera, are not ones that are necessarily tripping off the tongue of our community members, so I suppose that it is about making sure that the processes are clear enough and that jargon like that is translated to what does that actually mean for you? Why would you, as a community, want to get engaged with that? I think that that has to happen on a number of different levels, yes, in terms of perhaps making those concepts more explicit within the bill or the supporting regulation, but also in the expectation that support would be put in place for communities to access their rights, or you can just about the processes being one that are inclusive and transparent and involve communities from the very outset? Can I play the devil's advocate here because you talked about strengthening regulation and one of the things that many of us have faced, particularly those of us that have served in local authorities, is, sorry, we can't do that because the regulations don't allow us to do so, so do you not think that there should be a level of flexibility? That may be the case. I suppose that I am thinking that my closest experience recently is with the CLD regulation, and it is quite explicit in asking, and I am putting a notice on, local authorities to identify needs within the community. It is quite explicit as to the process by which the three-year plan that we are obliged to put together has come about, and it is quite explicit in terms of what that three-year plan should contain. As an organisation, we see the benefits of that in enabling us to do what we do as community learning and development managers in Scotland, and hopefully it will be possible to have those benefits without the constraints and flexibility that you mentioned. My slight concern with Mr Rowley's suggestion would be that, if one requires public authorities to be more proactive, one could end up with a situation where the public authorities are imposing its will on the community rather than deciding what it wants to do. My preference would be to treat that as an implementation issue, whereby it would be one of making sure that the mechanisms are in place for sharing good practice so that successful community engagement in one part of the country can be shared across the whole country. I am here from an asset transfer point of view, but I work within the Development Trust Association Scotland, in which the bulk of the members deliver services in their communities. I would be very much with John that it would be in the guidance, rather than in the legislation, that you would encourage a wider communication and consultation. Stuart McMillan, please. Do you have any views on the assumption that requests will be accepted, unless there are any reasonable grounds for refusal? Let's start with Ms Gillespie, please. I think that that's most welcome, and it puts a very positive spin on the bill. I think that that will make it considerably easier for communities to move forward. I agree that it is quite a brave, innovative bit of drafting to expressable that way, but I think that it is the right way to do it. In terms of both the participation request and the asset transfer request, that is helpful. In terms of participation request, it is positive, but it does not negate the need for some sort of appeal process. Secondly, I would say about the decision process. That section talks about the basis on which the decision has to be made. One of the things that I think is missing from that is any aspect of social inequality and poverty. Mr Doherty, I agree with what the rest of the panel said, and I agree specifically with Robin in terms of an appeal process. I don't think that any community group would either have the ability, in terms of a new one that is starting up with limited resources, to challenge any community body, any public body in the courts, if they had to. I think that it is quite unreasonable for very small, volunteering-involving organisations who will be leading on this to challenge any public body in the courts, so an appeals process would be most welcome. Section 19, subsection 5 of the bill, talks about also that any reasonable grounds for refusing it, unless there are any reasonable grounds for refusing it. What would you suggest would be an unreasonable ground? I think that that is a very difficult question for panellists, Mr McMillan. Does anybody want to have a stab at that? I wouldn't be keen myself, I have to say. Mr Gliver? I think that a plainly unreasonable ground would be where a member of the public body wishes to use the asset for their own benefit. Anybody else want to have a go? Ms Patterson? In terms of the participation requests, within the bill there is a clause about the participation theoretically lasting about two years and that there cannot be another participation request on the same subject. One of the things that concerns us is the fact that community engagement and community empowerment is an on-going process. It tends not to start and end, and if indeed the area in which that engagement or empowerment had been requested was still an on-going issue, it does not seem unreasonable—I am just in answer to your question. It does not seem unreasonable for a community group to say that the thing that we were involved in last year still seems to be an issue. We would like to continue to be involved. I can see why that might be there. I know that it is there in the asset transfer element of the bill because it might be vexatious to quote from the memorandum requests for asset transfer. In the case of community engagement and empowerment, we would like to think that outcomes could be transformed and that we could achieve health and wellbeing in a short time period, but that tends not to be the case. That is something that could be unreasonable to either end the participation prematurely or, indeed, if there was a reason to continue to engage, that that would be withheld. The first question is to Ms Gillespie, and I hope that it is open to the rest of the panel to answer that. Ms Gillespie gave some examples and two local authority examples in one of your answers on what you consider to be good practice. Could you give or hint at some of the areas where there is less in good practice currently in existence in terms of community engagement? We are seeing a much more nuanced approach from smaller local authorities that have smaller communities, more clearly defined communities. The East Asia example talked about that very nuanced approach. This is about sustainable asset transfer, where you are talking about a larger local authority and a metropolitan area, then the ability to define communities that those particular local authorities can find it quite difficult to articulate how they would define their communities and how they would transfer those assets. There is also an element about the value of assets, which, when you come into cities, makes it more challenging for local authorities. I would say that the more metropolitan local authorities are taking a more cautious approach to the development of their strategies. Those are generalisations rather than specific examples, but one thing that came up a bit in discussion with the last panel that you had was about the point in which the process, the engagement, takes place. It is very important that it happens at the start of the process, otherwise the community can get left with it. There are two schools that we can shut, and we think that we should shut this one. What do you think? That is not really a genuine engagement. If you start at the beginning of the process and you work through, this is a difficult decision that we have to make, how can we best make this together? That is a much more positive engagement. One of the reasons why I think that the start of the whole process is where the outcomes plan for the community planning partnership will be. That is where you have to have a really participative process for folk to get involved in. Second, groups can be described as hard to reach. A term that we much prefer as banados is to talk about groups that are easy to ignore. Building into this way that public bodies can be made to think about who those groups are and be made to make particular efforts to involve those groups is particularly important. Lastly, on the previous point, what is a community? We are talking about community engagement in terms of the bill, but what is a community is not something that has really come into it. Often, we can make easy thinking that the whole of a local authority area or something like that is a coherent community where clearly it is not. Often, we are an organisation that works a lot with families. Families often have a sense of a community that is much more the size of a school catchment area. We have also got communities of interest that we talked about before. That is a really strong sense of community for a lot of people. That is something that is not in the bill, but something that should be reflected in this whole process is thinking about much smaller-scale things. One of the things that the Public Bodies Joint Working Act did was to make organisations think about, across a whole local authority planning area, but also much smaller community levels. That should be something that happens in some community planning partnerships. In one of the responses, Mr Glover made reference to the public interest test. That is quite important in terms of applications by communities in terms of asset transfers. Who does the panel think should apply the public interest test? An example will give you Mr Glover made reference to land that is set aside or land banked by either a developer, housing developer or, in some cases, a large retail supermarket. Who should make the final arbiter in relation to whether or not it would be in the public interest to transfer an asset to a community or retain the right of the housing developer or another entity to keep the land banked? That is outwith the scope of the bill, and it is land owned by private authorities. We are dealing with the community empowerment bill, but you could answer the question, forget the land banking by private developers' aspects. In terms of land owned by local authorities, where local authorities have identified, it would possibly be better used for private housing development. Who do you think should be the arbiter in those decisions in terms of the public interest? You turned out for that around well. Ms Gillespie. The decision should be with the elected members with the local authority. I agree with Linda on that. One area here, which hopefully remains within scope, is worth considering this question in the context of what are sometimes called arms length companies or what the bill calls public companies, which are companies that are wholly owned by a public authority. I have been speaking with one of my stakeholders about a specific site in Edinburgh, which is in that situation. That has led us to the view that the bill is perhaps wrong in the treatment of those publicly owned companies. As the bill stands at the moment, the part 3 and part 5 would only apply to such a company if it has been specified in a statutory instrument. Our consideration of that point has led us to the view that it should be the other way around. The default position should be that the parts 3 and 5 apply to public companies unless they have been accepted by a statutory instrument, because it is not possible for communities to necessarily identify all the right companies. It is possible for those companies to put their hands up and explain why it is that they should not be subject to the provisions of the bill. The role of our organisation is to support community bodies to seek whatever recourse or challenge that they had available to them, so that we would not comment on that. Mr Parker, I do not think that I have a view in terms of part 4 and 5. Thank you. Mr Doherty, do you have a view? I agree with you that the process has been designed with the assistance of the local community. I would agree with Linda that the fundamental decision lies with the elected members of the local authority. Thank you very much for your evidence today, folks. It has been extremely useful indeed. I suspend now for a change of witnesses. We now move on to our final panel. It is for this morning, but it is now this afternoon. I would like to welcome Dewi Morgan, who is the chair of the Aberdeen community council, Ryan Corry, project manager of real-time music, Theresa Aitken, Glenboyg neighborhood house, Alice Bovell, St Mary's Centre Dundee and Yvonne Tosh of Douglas community open spaces group Dundee. Welcome to you all. I understand that some of you have already said to the clerks that there was a lot of gobbledygook earlier on, which I have a big bugbear about. I agree with you. If we move into that sphere, feel free to try and intervene and slap our fingers for it. Would any of you like to make any opening statements at all? If we start with Dewi Morgan, please. First of all, I'm afraid I'm not chair of the web admin and newsletter and general letter writer of the old Aberdeen community council. But we do applaud the Scottish Government's wish to encourage the subsidiarity and local decision making. While the proposed bill could potentially open up new avenues for community involvement, there's a real fear at community council level that this might simply get used and abused by local authorities to offload their costly facilities and services to an unpage and largely unwilling community group on the basis of take it over or we're just going to close it. With particular evidence to the participation opportunity, will a local authority or development body really be prepared to take into consideration the basically parochial opinions and desires of a local community? The record so far is pretty abysmal. Ms Setkin, you indicated. I'd just like to say that I'm really disappointed that there's no representative from North Lanarkshire here today because this is a really important time for us in North Lanarkshire when we're just about to develop the community asset transfer policy and I think it would have been really important for someone to be here to represent us. Thank you for that. That has gone on the record and we will write to North Lanarkshire about the situation today. Anybody else want to contribute at this time? Okay. Ms Boval. Introduction. I'm actually here today as an organisation which has already worked as a community to have a community facility built in an area where the council were resusing to build one so I'm talking about basically the tried and tested community engagement that we had to go through for this to take place and also other community engagement for other services in the area. Thank you and that's very much appreciated because some of us have had the opportunity to hear more about that when we visited Dundee previously but anything you wish to add we'd be certainly grateful for. If I could maybe start off round about existing powers, do you think that currently public bodies adhere to what they should be doing at this moment without the community empowerment bill being in place? Mr Morgan, if I can maybe turn to you first because you previously wrote to the committee about issues that you felt were not being addressed properly by the local authority in this case? I think that they adhere to the rules of what they have to do and that's it. They will not go a step further than that. On planning applications they will send out the weekly form because that is what legislation has said that they shall do. No more will they do what we have to do all the running. Do you have a view on that? I think that they do just what they have to do. There's no consistency and I totally agree that we have to do all the running. You can meet with officers and there could be deadlines for information to come back and the community's got to do the running. The deadlines aren't met. There's no consistency or accountability from the community, yes. I have very limited experience in that area but I echo my colleagues here that it's just as much to get by and I would say that it doesn't always seem to be joined up to anything greater. It's very much by a piecemeal basis. Ms Tosh? We are different in Dundee because the councillor, we are actually quite lucky, we do get a lot of help. We have to fight sometimes to get it, to get the right person to help with but in the long run we usually do get help quite easily and we do sustain so that's a big help. I feel the communities in which the local bodies should be led by communities. If communities are inundated with lots and lots of information that they haven't actually asked for or training that they haven't actually required, you could be drowning them in it and that way you lose your volunteers. You want to keep volunteers, you want to treat them as very responsible people who can make decisions and not bombard them with education from those bodies. Information, yes, that would be great having more information but as my colleague said in Dundee we are quite lucky we can access people through communities officers who will help us with every individual aspect of what we're trying to do. Mr Hozi said earlier and obviously some of us when we were in Dundee have heard about certain things that go on there and one of the things that was mentioned is that forum that meets every three months I think it is where it seems to be pretty community driven which obviously leads to the exporting of good ideas and probably creates a camaraderie so that you can get what you want for your communities. Do you think that that works well and do you think that that would work well in other parts of the country? I think that it could work well in parts of the country but the community have got to do some work themselves on this and make their voices heard. They can't just go along to a committee like this and not speak up for themselves. They've got to speak up for themselves, say what they require, if it be something to do with the environment, tackle that with the person who's there, if it's something to do with education, with social work, with NHS, tackle that with the people who are sitting around that table. Also take a note of the person's name so that outwith those three monthly meetings you can contact them and say but you said at that meeting that you would do this for us so we're keeping you to that so I think that is a good way of contacting people. I think that you talked about the names before so that accountability continues. Ms Tosh, do you? Yes, I totally agree with that because on the RC local partnership if we have a problem in our community we go to the committee and we will speak to the people directly that are in post on those different departments and then as Alice says we'll get a note of their names and then we get back to them and if they don't get back to us in a reasonable time then we go forward and say to them you were meant to come back to us why haven't you and if there's a good enough reason then that's fair but if they've just forgot then we'll phone them again and we'll keep going. Good. Mr Cary, do you have a view on that because obviously it seems that Dundee has got it slightly different from other areas. What specifically? In terms of bringing communities together and then having that level of accountability that's been talked about if you feel that you can answer the question then. I think my experience was that one of the terms I read in one of the previous meeting papers was sharp elbow syndrome and I think that really struck home with me in my experience that I think over time it's usually the sort of same faces who would be involved in those processes and that would be my experience. I think the other point I would make is that to a certain extent maybe in some cases the wrong thing is being incentivised in terms of an example again just my own opinion community lemon development partnership meetings. I think that the incentive was to just have the meeting and not actually be accountable for results of action set in those meetings so you tend to find organisations that are asked to go along to certain meetings just for the sake of it and the difference that you have there is if you work for a public sector body nobody's thinking how much that costs if you work in the voluntary sector or other areas everybody here can tell you how much that costs and how much it impacts on the organisation to be going along to these meetings. Ms Aitken. I think Dundee's got a great thing going there by the way when I was listening and I thought that that was really good, the forums are a good idea. I think what we find is there are too many layers people don't know what layers have got to go through to get to the partnership basically you know that there's different layers that you have to go through and there are community groups out there that maybe haven't got the knowledge and understanding to take them up to the level and to find a person that they actually have to speak to. I think you know because we've been a