.... Welcome to the third meeting of 2016. Everyone present is asked to switch off mobile phones and other electronic devices as they interfere with the broadcasting system. Members will refer to tablets during the course of the meeting, as we provide papers in a digital format. Apologies have been received this morning from Kara Helton. Agenda item 1 is to decide whether to consider item 3 in private. Are we agreed, members? Thank you very much. Agenda item 2 is our substantive look at our legacy paper. We'll take evidence from two panels today. The first will consist of academics, followed by former local authority chief executives. Over the course of session 4, the committee has dealt with or is dealing with the burial and cremation Scotland bill, the community empowerment Scotland bill, the air weapons and licensing Scotland bill, the disabled persons parking places Scotland bill, the buildings recovery of expenses Scotland bill, high hedges Scotland bill and the local government finance and occupied properties, etc. Scotland bill. Inquiries that we've undertaken include ones into arms length external organisations, fixed odds betting terminals, inquiry into the flexibility and autonomy of local government, delivery of regeneration in Scotland, public service reform which was a three strand inquiry, Scottish local government elections 2012 and the inquiry into a living wage in Scotland. I welcome the first panel today, Professor Ken Gibb, Professor in Housing Economics, Professor Annette Hastings, Professor of Urban Studies, Professor Ed Kearns, Professor of Urban Studies and Dr James White Lecturer in Urban Studies. How would you characterise the committee's legacy? Who would like to start, please? Nobody want to bite the bullet, shall I pick somebody? Ladies first, Professor Hastings. That's very unfair. I don't think that unexpected question I have to say, if we haven't actually seen sort of a legacy paper, I think we submitted some evidence on particular aspects of the committee's work that we are particularly interested in. I might clarify that you are here to help us to formulate our legacy paper and that should have been conveyed to you, which I understand it was. In broad terms, that's what we think we're here to do. I would comment on some of the work that I've previously provided evidence to you on. My submission is about the cuts to local government funding, and I'm happy to talk about that in some detail. The Community Empowerment Act was involved in your scrutiny of that. As a committee, I was very impressed that you took on board quite a lot of the submissions that were made by a range of stakeholders, particularly on how the Community Empowerment Act, our bill, as originally drafted, had the potential to amplify this advantage. It was very pleasing that those ideas were taken on board in the actual bill. In terms of looking forward, there's obviously concerns about how the provision to support disadvantaged groups in the Community Empowerment Agenda can actually be implemented, given the severity of austerity in cuts to local government budgets in particular, and I think that that would be something in terms of forward-looking issues that would be important. That would be one remark about the work that I'm aware of that the committee has been doing. Does anyone else want to come in at this point? Professor Gibb, please. I guess I would point to you mentioned the local government flexibility autonomy type issues. I would point to the major work that's been underway in the local tax commission and the work that's been done there. Clearly, in a sense, the interesting part now is to come in terms of what the different political parties and the government wish to do with the options that they've been presented to them at the same time. We have the other issue that the local tax commission dealt with or considered, the a-freeze, and we're going to have a ninth year of the freeze. That clearly raises a lot of issues about flexibility and autonomy of local government. Looking forward, as it were, I would imagine that that's going to be an important and significant part of your agenda. The foundation of the commission was obviously a recommendation from the committee. Do you think that the formation of the commission would have taken place if it hadn't been for the inquiry that we carried out into the flexibility of local government? It clearly helps greatly. The nature of the committee in particular, the fact that, unlike the Burton inquiry before it, it was an attempt to have an all-party approach, including a wider range of independence, gave it a stronger heft from the very outset. That has obviously been very important. As I say, it's a significant improvement on the Burton inquiry in terms of its credibility. Even though I would personally make the point that the Burton inquiry is a very good piece of work. I looked at two areas that you, as a committee, had looked at in your last session. One was community empowerment and the other was the delivery of regeneration. In both of those areas, there's still a lot of work to be done.  In my submission about community empowerment, looking forward, I'm aware that there's a currently a review of the standards, national standards for community engagement going on at the moment for the Scottish Government. I think that there's quite a lot to be done there because those standards have been in operation for quite some time, and a lot of public bodies and third sector bodies would profess to adhere to those standards. Yet we've been studying the effects of community engagement and empowerment processes in deprived communities, and it is possible to find that adherence to the standards doesn't guarantee empowerment for the community, so that's a bit of an issue, I think. I don't think there is currently very good evidence about what the effects of those standards are upon empowerment if empowerment is to be the outcome of the standards. In other words, the standards describe a process, but they don't guarantee an outcome, and I think that's a bit problematic because it is too easy for public authorities and other agencies to consider the job done if they have complied with the standards. It seems to me that the standards are a means to an end, in my view, not an end in themselves. That is why in my submission I said one of the issues that I would select for further scrutiny is what are the effects of the engagement standards. We have endeavoured to go around the country and speak to as many people as possible, and to have as many ordinary folks as possible come and give us evidence, often in informal settings. I think that it would be fair to say that the levels of engagement are so different in various parts of the country that we have seen during the course of our travels that there is some immense engagement. Dundee is probably the best example that we've come across, I would say, and I'm looking at colleagues, where budgets have actually followed as well. It's just the engagement, so it's not just lip service, it's an influence on budgeting. One of the things that we've seen of late is a move to participate in budgeting, I think, maybe with some influence from the committee. Do you think that that will help in terms of improving engagement where people themselves will have a say in how certain monies are spent? It's clearly important that people have a say in how money is spent. I think that one of the issues that we find in engagement processes is that people need to understand the parameters of the process. In other words, people need to be clear what is up for grabs and discussion and what is not up for grabs and discussion, so something like what is the financial envelope within which something is going to be delivered is quite important for people to know. I think that one of the issues for communities is that the infrastructure of organisations that make decisions is getting more and more complicated, and that whole process—the arena in which you are involved and local authorities are involved in other public agencies—is getting very complicated. If that is not explained very well, people often go through a process of engagement and are still unclear who is making decisions. Secondly, who is responsible for delivery, either of regeneration, which is what we've looked at, or in the case of services, who is responsible for delivery in accord with decisions that they think have been made? That is often not clear to people. I suppose that I was trying to argue to you that that side of the process is the potentially empowering one but also the potentially disempowering one. It is one thing to take part in participatory budgeting or other discussions with service providers, but then to know nothing about what happens next seems to me to be a lacunae that needs to be filled. Just on that point, and I have to say that I agree with very much of what Professor Cairns has said, but I think how we take that forward, because knowledge is power and information is at the root of that and things have to be explained. Communities have to be supported to take on board that information and work out what they are going to do about it, but that needs support at local levels. Does anybody in the panel have a view about how reductions in council budgets need to make savings? How is that going to impact on the capacity of local staff and local communities to participate as well and, as we would all like them to, constrained by capacity? If you take the example of what we have been studying, a multimillion-pound delivery of regeneration effort in the city of Glasgow, it would take a very minute proportion of that expenditure to finance support to communities to understand the processes of change and decision making. When council housing, for example, and Scottish homes housing were transferred to community ownership 20 years ago, in every case, the community received a right to independent consultancy to support them in that process. That is not happening at the moment. One of the points I was trying to make to you is that communities should have a right to independent support, because what is very difficult is if public bodies set up a process to engage and collect community views about something. I agree with you about information, but if the only information that the community get comes from the person or the body with the stake in the outcome of that process, then there is a great scope for bias in the provision of information, whether it is the kind of information or the lack of information that is given. The only way to ensure empowerment is that communities have some independent view as to what information they are receiving, what is possible in the process in which they are engaged, what are the potential outcomes beyond the ones on offer to them or in front of them. They do not know those things without a third voice that is neither them nor the delivery organisation giving them that advice. That would not cost very much money. Dr White, if you want to answer my question and what characterises the committee's legacy and Ms Baxter's at the same time, I would be grateful. I should say first that my work is primarily on Canadian cities. That is what I wrote my submission here on, and in particular on engagement with local people on Toronto's waterfront, which is a project perhaps similar in scope and size to efforts on Dundee's waterfront and also in Glasgow and other large cities with lots of vacant land coming forward for master plan. From a legacy perspective and the future work of the committee, I would say that taking some time to look at examples of best practices where communities have been involved in processes of large-scale regeneration in other countries and other places would probably bring value to understanding some of the challenges, some of the wicked problems that are faced here. The work on Toronto speaks to this idea of making sure that people are involved very much from the start of a regeneration process and therefore have information with them right at the beginning of the process and then can be involved in different ways throughout development. This is specifically in relation to development in the built environment. I think there is an opportunity with the Sharet mainstream programme that the Scottish Government are working on to take forward some of these ideas of long-term involvement in development issues in cities. My sense is that some of the Shrets are working well as individual events, sometimes privileged professional expertise just because of the types of people that show up, so ensuring that we have a way to get more local people, more communities involved in these processes, so that it is not just a talking shop of experts on different silos of the development process that would be helpful. Professor Hastings, please. Can I address myself to your question, Jane Baxter? From the perspective of cuts to local government budgets, of course we know that the English case in England, the cuts have been quicker and more severe, and there is evidence emerging from England in relation to your question. It would suggest that community organisations are finding it difficult to maintain their energy as capacity-building activities diminish and, in some places, they have been the first things to be cut. One of the ways in which many English local councils are managing austerity is by passing more responsibility on to local people, not just to participate in budgeting activity and participation-type mechanisms, but to deliver services to run facilities. Given what we are about to face in Scotland and the severity of the cuts to come, Scottish councils need to be aware of the dangers of doing that without investing the relatively small amounts of resource in developing the capacity of disadvantaged communities in particular to take on those new responsibilities. Otherwise, big gaps in services are bound to open up. I would like to make two quick points to the questions that have just been raised. First of all, on participative budgeting, I think that the evidence that people at all of our Escobar have drawn from around the world suggests that, when it is not a gimmick, but when it is a long-term embedded set of policies that have an educational evolutionary element in it, so that the people who are making decisions are involved in a continuous basis and set up their own participative structures to do that. There is evidence in South America of that, there is evidence in France of that. That is a potentially very valuable thing to do. I know that many local authorities in Scotland are undertaking training that the Government is supporting them with just now in order to make PPP a reality. On the issue of austerity and capacity, I have been working on what works Scotland looking at community planning partnerships for the past 18 months or so. It is clear that a number of local authorities on the ground at the staff who run the CPPs are under a lot of pressure. The way that the budget cuts manifest themselves is that there is a continuous process of organisational change under way and considerable uncertainty on the part of key staff as to what they are going to be delivering. That simply is not an environment in which the kinds of system change that everybody wants to see can occur. John Wilson, please. While I would be tempted to go into debate with Professor Kerns about the resources that were made available during 20 years ago during the stock transfer debate, I will resist that, because I think that there is clearly a difference of opinion in terms of what support was provided to community— Or whether or not it was independent. Or whether or not it was truly independent from the process. However, part of today's session is to look at the legacy of the work of the past five, almost five years of this committee. The question that I would like to ask the panel today, convener, is what has been mentioned of the committee in permanent and has been mentioned in the regeneration. What could this committee have done better to address some of the concerns and have made reference to the potential cuts in local government budgets, the stresses that are going to be faced, both at local government level delivery of services, but also in terms of community impairment? What do you think that this committee could have done in relation to the inquiries that were held, the discussions that we had with various academics, professionals and communities that would have helped in developing better strategies to put forward as a committee? Who is going to take that on first then? I'll say one thing that occurs to me. In the research that we've done, one of the issues for me is how individuals and their families are supported in any of these processes. I mean, there is a slight conundrum between the reformulation of the arrangements for services, which tend to look for efficiencies in times, obviously, of reduced budgets. One way of trying to achieve efficiencies of all sorts of kinds is to scale up the point at which you plan things and to try to get different services to co-operate in better ways than they had before. I think the dilemma is that in doing that, which is not something I would argue against doing, but to realise that in scaling up things so that large bodies can talk to one another, you lose the opportunity for people to lower down in the system to have input to that system. I would say looking at the effect of the rearrangements upon the ability of either of the communities that we study to engage in that process or to find an entry point into that process is one of the things that I would look for. The second is to look at the effects of austerity and other changes in the economy upon individual households. What we find is that there are lots of things planned for either spatial areas or communities and far less planned for supporting individuals who face challenges and difficulties. So the individual perspective, I think, is often lost, I would say. Okay. Anyone else want to come in on that point? I could make a point about the context in which the committee is working, rather than the committee itself, that I think a change in the policy context might be helpful for this committee's work. In its relation to the 2010 Equalities Act and the idea of the commencement of the socioeconomic duty on public bodies, which I understand the independent adviser on poverty and inequality is recommending this morning to the First Minister and is also supported by SURF and by the poverty alliance. I think that embedding the idea that public agencies must build into their policy and implementation processes and anti-discrimination policy with regard to disadvantage is aclear, is essential to making the public sector work better for regeneration areas in a more mainstream, routine way than perhaps is currently done. Certainly in the early days of the committee, there was quite a lot of discussion about the effect of means to deliver regeneration and debate about the role that mainstream agencies, public sector agencies could play in that. I am not sure that that debate has gone much further than the proposals in the Christie commission and elsewhere around the reform of public agencies. I think that there is more space to do more with the public sector and to repurpose it in a way that makes it more routine for it to be considering socioeconomic disadvantage as part of its daily activities. John Lennon, just as a follow-up, while taking on board the issue about how we analyse what is happening and how we can then try and predict some of the austerity measures that are now coming through, it could be argued that they could have been predicted five years ago because of the direction that they travel, the Westminster government that they are going. The issue about how we deal with individual households and how we get the experience of the individual household, because, like many organisations, the committee can only speak to certain groupings around the country and we rely on those groupings to try and relay some of the experiences of communities and individual households. How do we get that better? I know that, in terms of some of the paperwork that has been provided today, you have given examples of where there is work taking place in communities and with individuals within those communities. Many years ago, when I worked in community development, we used to talk about the finger deletes. They were the only ones that actually got in through the door and it was the only ones that you heard from. How do we get, as a committee and as a Parliament, to those individuals and get the experiences of those individuals in relation to developing our policies and strategies and reports for government? Who wants to have a crack at that? I would see whether there is a way of engaging civil society organisations to provide you with evidence and experience. I understand what you are saying about that. There is only so many people you can talk to. Professor Kerrms, I accept civil society. There is a wider debate about whether civil society and community planning partnerships truly represent the communities that attend community planning partnerships. How do we get the experience of the individual households where many of the policies that are being pursued by Westminster and the Scottish Government, how do we get their experience, how do we get the knowledge of what the impact of those policies are on those individual households? There are services that deal with those individuals. GP practices are one of those. If it were me, I would try to access the organisations that deal with some of those to get some of those people to come and speak to you. It is possible to get evidence about individual cases that can help. We also try to speak directly to some of the people involved to do that. I think that there should be ways that you can try to do that, except that you cannot directly yourself as 10 individuals or whatever do that, but you can set up arrangements to do that, I would think. Dr White, do the Canadians do anything different in terms of trying to engage with households and individuals? I do not think anything massively different. I think that the Canadians in Toronto, at least, are very effective at getting people involved and learning about people's experiences when there is something happening that directly affects them in the case of a large, in planning in the case of large development projects. When there is something physical happening in the environment close by that people are passionate about or feel that they have a role to play in shaping them, they tend to be more interested in getting involved. I am an expert on the wider involvement of people in Canadian society. Professor Gibb? I am aware of two local authorities in the west of Scotland who are currently trying to drive their community planning processes down to neighbourhood levels in Glasgow, with its thriving places in West Dunbartonshire and its European communities. They both face the same kind of issue. It is like a fractal—the problem of difficult to reach groups operates at every level. They are all trying to think, what is the best way to get access to people and the neighbourhood levels? Who are not the usual suspects? Who are not the activists who will always get involved to find ways that are genuinely representative of what is going on at a street level? They are all doing lots of different things, which is exactly what would come out of the community development literature—lots of events, lots of ways of trying to communicate directly with people, drawing in the services that AID was talking about. It is a universal problem, it seems to me, that we are all trying to wrestle with. In a context in which we are talking about less resources being available for those sorts of things, that is just another layer of a big challenge that is being faced. People are working very hard just now, it seems to me to crack that nut. What are the barriers to bringing those processes down to a neighbourhood level? Well, the barriers are, I guess, that you are trying—typically you have a local authority, which has a community planning level of analysis at a local authority wide level, and you are trying to in a sense replicate and get to grips with really local issues. So you are having to produce similar processes, similar modes of accountability, similar service discussions at a local scale, and you have to think through what the most effective way to do that is. In Weston-Barcher's case, they have been piloting a series of low-level planning arrangements in one area, but they are now trying to roll it out into others and they are trying to learn lessons. I guess the fact is that every local authority will have its own dynamics and its own issues to contend with. If it works in Glasgow, it will undoubtedly work in East Lothian or vice versa. There is inevitably real-time work that has to be done to learn lessons and try to make the process— But there is nothing new in all of this. No, absolutely not. One of the differences here is that it depends on what the purpose of trying to find out is about. I agree with what you said earlier about how you get the voice of ordinary people who are affected by these things and how do you, as a committee, get that or how does a local authority do that. There is a difference between saying that we want some people involved from communities in decision-making processes around community planning and there are complicated arrangements to do that and they will engage with a certain type of person. I think trying to find out about real experiences and evidence of impacts would require speaking of a different type of person possibly. Now, local authorities do large-scale things like they survey their populations to find out what people think about them as a local authority in the services they provide and they would call that some sort of citizens panel. Glasgow has many other local authorities have one so that's a panel to conduct a survey with. Now, I think there's a different type of panel that local authorities and yourselves could have which is a panel about experiences. That's not engaging people to make decisions, it's engaging people to tell you about their lives and that's a different type of panel to a panel of a thousand people but not talking about a large-scale panel but it seems to me a different type of arrangement to get the experiential evidence that you say it's difficult to grasp would be a way forward and that's what we try to do in what we do. Have a panel of people who can tell us about their lives in their own time and in their own way without having a battery of questions that we want to ask them to start with. It's a different type of citizens panel if you like. John? Dr White? I'll just add one extra point. I haven't researched this work directly but I could look into it more if the committee was interested but in some North American cities a colleague of mine at University of British Columbia where I used to be a PhD student did work on something called mini-publics and what this essentially involved was almost like calls for jury service being sent out to a community group to invite them to come along often with a small referendum for a two-day work sorry a small um a smaller honorarium to come along to a workshop that would take a day of their time so they would be invited by government to come and talk about bigger policy ideas so because often you can get community groups involved in local issues as Ken said harder perhaps to engage with the general public on bigger policy statements bigger issues and so they would send out letters to a large group of people and then have a smaller group from that then a cross section of people come and be involved in understanding a policy and where it came from and commenting on it. Just to say that we don't have to do additional work on on this issue I think in order to get at the experiences and I guess I would just amplify Ed Caron's point about the need to use to make better use of the very good social research evidence that's out there which does spend a great deal of time with the people that you're concerned about and talks not just about you know their views on a particular policy but how that really intersects with a whole a whole range of aspects of their lives and I would I would suggest that that's a way that's something that the committee could work out in the future. This is maybe a question for the next panel but I'm going to float it here anyway to see what this is think. We've talked a little bit about experiential evidence and it seems to me that people like counsellors and MSPs that are actually possess quite a lot of that because they do casework they're talking to constituents all the time and hearing about local issues and local problems and I'm wondering if there's a view that maybe some of that experience could be built into the system because at the moment it sort of exists at the side of the system it's not used to influence practice or policy but is there a way that it could be? The only slight reservation I'd have about that is just about the people there is also still the people who don't come forward of course that that's always a bit of a problem that would need supplementing to that but but I agree with you that there's probably a lot of information in the system as you call it that is experiential that's currently not recorded. Professor Good. I'd like to make a related point which I'm just thinking about as you were asking that question which is I don't actually question the view in a sense I don't understand the extent to which the different committees interact with each other on specific issues and topics so you know under welfare reform council tax benefit reduction is not part of universal credit but it's clearly of direct relevance to low income and poverty and benefits so there's an interesting I would have thought of your committee and in welfare reform committee being interested in that under the infrastructure and investment group there's the city deals work which seems to me to be both committees would be very interested in and I could imagine lots of local labor market and economic issues that finance would be concerned and so is there a way in which you can pull your knowledge and expertise that actually allows you to build on some of the things that you're experiential things you're talking about. There are interactions and of course I serve in the welfare reform committee and we've both committees have looked at certain aspects of these things and in terms of city deals as part of our budget inquiry we have looked into city deals is the interactions 100% there is it absolutely spot on right the answer to that is probably not but that's a personal opinion and maybe some of my colleagues have other views but I think that certainly that's something that needs to be improved on also you know in terms of a number of the reports and legislation it's looked at by more than one committee as you'll be aware and currently the burial and cremations bill that we're dealing with we're not the lead committee the health committee is so there is that interaction but maybe not quite enough Jane with example of that where I would ask a similar question which is in relation to the place standard I'm not sure what the committee's involvement was in the place standard but it's pitched as a sort of a joint effort if you like between public health and architecture but in our work a very important issue is the quality of neighbourhoods matters a lot to people's quality of life and one of the issues I've raised in my submission asking the committee is who is looking at how well that is working because that has a potential to either work very well or to exacerbate inequalities between communities depending on who makes best use of the place standard. Jane do you want to come back? No I'm content community I was just floating in it. I noticed Professor Cairns who mentioned individuals getting individuals engaged and a panel of experienced people this has proved very difficult for us because we tend to see the usual suspects I wonder how you would comment on that how to get how to get these individuals actually engaged in it are we doing the right thing are we going we do go out and about quite a lot and we've been to visit people we found these round table sessions pretty successful rather than the more formal ones but I pick up your point about the individuals and I think it's a good one and experience but it's very hard to get people of a variety of experience and it's difficult also because those people themselves often have a great deal of issues to deal with in their own lives and make it difficult for them to calm as and when you need them to appear and things like that the only suggestion I would make to you is the one that we've used ourselves and as you know some of our community panel are here today to observe this session and we face the same issue of how do you access people to come and speak to you in our case on a regular basis and our solution to that is to use somebody with expertise in that field to access those people for you so in a sense we use a skilled intermediary she is also here today to do that because of course we face the same issue as you you know we existing large institutions how do we access the people who are difficult to find and difficult to you know to find the time for that for you so I would say think think about a skilled intermediary I'm going to play devil's advocate here because you're talking of skilled intermediaries skilled intermediaries often put their slant on what the public are actually saying and we've had experience of this and number of occasions sorry I don't mean to use the skilled intermediaries is the voice I mean to use the skilled intermediaries there's people to access the people so that you hear the real voices sorry I keep misunderstanding I agree with you entirely Grant Cameron do you want to come back no just just going to come back on the thing about the usual suspects it's very different I think it's a skilled intermediary I understand exactly what you mean it's like it's sort of a somebody who's going to actually meant not who's going to lead the discussion but do you think we're doing the right thing in is our committee work very effective do you think in the way we're dealing with if you like in the way we're dealing with people and engagement not just you but the others do you think we've been very anybody got a view on that I know it's very difficult because you haven't seen us at the coface really Professor Hastings I do think that over time there have been big improvements in the extent to which central government has reached out to ordinary people the work of the community empowerment act there was a lot of involvement around that the fair scotland conversations there are a lot of people ordinary people in scotland whose voices are at least around the table if not heard too so I think you know there is there's still room for improvement but I think it's we're moving in the right direction in my view thank you okay yeah can we come back on another one Professor Gibb mentioned this thing about committees interacting with each other which I think is quite important because we don't do tend to deal with planning a lot whereas our infrastructure does what would you suggest is a solution to that have you any that's why I asked the question I think rather than yeah well I suppose it's thinking of effective ways of cold cold working and I think the chair made a really important point that of course you all sit in many committees so that's an important direct thing that happens but but I suppose it's it's thinking through what's the most effective ways on a on a regular weekly basis that committees can interact and share and probably develop your your agendas over a period of time in a combined manner I don't want to get bogged down in this I know this is quite important but I think the Parliament itself is changing in terms of the way that we do interact there has been much more use of committee debates during the course of this session I think that's been useful for for everyone in that regard and there have been debates that have been helped jointly between committees I think that's something that we need to explore and deal with in the legacy paper but I think you make a good point I mean I know something that happens in Westminster I presume it happens here as well but they have a committee of conveners don't they that we we have that here too that's there's a meeting of that on Thursday I'm just reminded me that we have that too yeah we'll like coffee please thanks very much convener I was elected to commandant louden district council in 1992 I think it was and you could argue that that was at a time when budgets were a bit more plentiful than they are just now but I don't have any great recollection of a a superb engagement process that really worked with communities and worked on their outcomes and developing all that and I saw the beginning of the community planning process there but my impression of that and it was still pretty much like that is that it was things that were to be done to the community right we do things to the community rather than work with them on the way up so in one of my previous walk about campaigns in my community I met a quite a wise constituent who said to me why don't you develop policy from the ground up and that kind of has I think that kind of conversation has been circulating around here in some of the comments and finding ways to to do that and so I was going to ask you does things like mechanisms like the community empowerment bill open the door for that kind of process because I don't think resources the only thing that affects change I mean or in the lack of it doesn't prevent it I mean that there's other dynamics I think that are involved and I was hoping that there might be a view and things like the community empowerment bill to see if that really begins to unlock that ability to to have policy making from the ground up and do you think we're on a successful path towards something like that Professor Kerrins first please I think that depends on its impact upon community planning another two issues I would say about that I think there isn't enough of what you described if you like community up planning particularly in two respects one which I mentioned in submission is social planning there's a lot of physical planning but not a lot of social planning how do we want communities to be composed how do we wish them to function and I think the planning has to embrace more about the private sector I think the private sector has really big impacts upon communities that are sort of not quite uncontrollable but quite difficult to control and influence and so often public processes influence the provision of public services and there's this big elephant in the room if you like as to what happens in the private sector in relation to retail, leisure, transport probably the issue as we go and our study communities again mentions to me more than any other is how do we get purchase on transport those things change we don't know they're going to change whether it's trains buses whatever and the impact upon our lives so I think the question I would pose back is what do you think the impact of the community empowerment act will be upon the community planning process and that seems to me a big question to address in the future who wants to Dr White please just very briefly I think it's um I think the playstands are really good as an urban designer I'm quite interested in the way the playstand is developing and I'm keen to see kind of its effectiveness but I think one thing it could be used for and this kind of links into sort of grassroots um policy making is is to engage people in visioning about the places where they live to capture what they like and what they don't like about places and to try and come together to have a sort of foundationary understanding about what matters about the place they are and what they want to see it be in the future we have a lot of local policy local plans and various mechanisms that support the development control process I think perhaps we could do a better job of um of of establishing a true vision that people have developed for what their city their town their neighbourhood could be and I think the playstand potentially provides that that mechanism for for understanding if it was I'm worried it's a little bit bureaucratic when I've a few tests that I have seen that it that's a bit heavy and could be made less complicated but I'd like to study it a bit more Professor Gibb please I think one of the issues that local communities express a concern about or there's a perception of concern is that they worry that some of the community empowerment terms of asset transfer is actually to some extent about public agencies washing their hands or pushing down the control and management of certain activities to to the community now they may want at one level to make changes to the way that those services or assets are used but that's quite another matter for thinking about the long-term way in which they're going to manage those assets and actually continue to deliver them and certainly in what works we've had a sense from both community planning partnerships and from local communities that there's some concerns about that the other thing is to mention again participatory budgeting because it's not just about resource allocation it's actually about the process that goes with that I think and the sense again from international research and from research in England that that can be you know a useful way of bringing more more more people into thinking about the choices over over the way that public resources get used and what services get invested and even if it's a relatively modest sum of monies I think it's going to be at least in initially that's a potentially very valuable thing to do. Professor Hastings do you want to come in? I guess I would just add that I think in terms of what I'm up policy making I think it's important to be quite transparent with the communities you're engaging in those processes around the limits to that participation what's possible and particularly not raising aspirations beyond what can actually be delivered through that process Wally? You think about things like local planning process convener where new housing developments appear in towns and my experience is that the public engagement and interaction that happens at the tail end of the process when they don't like something or they want to object to something that despite great efforts attempting to engage with the public on a complex matter like the local plan by and large doesn't happen particularly successfully and what you get in my view it's a personal view is that you get sometimes you get communities that are I've got peripheral housing lovely new housing nothing else in them but houses there's not in fact some examples in my own constituency there's not even a post box I think that's a symptom of the planning process as a whole which one is at a large scale even though you know it's difficult to engage a community in a plan for the south of Glasgow or the south of Edinburgh when they think they live in a place with a particular name for which there doesn't appear to be a planning process but then of course they look the devils in the detail and there is and it's in the plan but they didn't know that it was in the plan so I think I agree with you about how that isn't particularly an empowering way of doing things and that you need to change the order in which planning is done it's done basically from the top down and as you say at the tail end somebody realises there's a bit of development going on in their backyard they didn't know about as opposed from starting from the from a different building block if you like and that's where I think this idea of the place standard which we've talked about I think it has potential but it's currently extremely weak and let's be clear about it it's entirely voluntary and there are no minimum standards in it at all that seems to me to be a big issue for for the process as a whole it is potentially at all somebody could use provisioning and to work out what they want at a community level but currently it is entirely tangential to any planning process and I think the task for a committee like this in local government is to say can it be bought more intricately into the planning process at the moment it sits over there somewhere and it can happen be used by a community or not and nobody cares either way but it's not part of any process that is the centrally defining process that determines what communities look like in the future and it's not in that so as a tool that a community could use they would face if they came up with a view about their area on the base of the place standard they don't have a big task in their hands to say how do we feed that into a planning process that actually happened last year anyway the charrette system is the same I think the main the mainstream of the charrette is very interesting and it's sort of another innovative idea out of the architecture and housing division but again they drop in at certain points and then they disappear and what I found in my work in Canada is that the effectiveness of their public participation process on the water it was effective and it's involved a lot of people because it started right at the vision and it's continued through all the different plans right to the point where people get involved in the individual buildings we're quite good at getting people involved in individual buildings that are being proposed or housing estates because often but sadly it's often reactionary it's a negative experience about perhaps not wanting something to be on a piece of land or close to one's house the sort of nimbiest idea if we can get people excited about planning in their neighbourhoods earlier on I think that's that's the ticket okay john just a point and an interesting professor cairns comment about the private sector as a sector that we don't tend to engage with as a committee and I think we've very seldom engaged with in relation to the looking up particularly community empowerment and but the private sector is a dilemma for many there's a dilemma for local government but particularly for local communities and Dr White made the reference to the issue about communities being engaged in the planning process no the place standard concept where communities may have a different concept about how they see their community growing and the demands and the needs of that community compared to what a private developer or retailer or the local authority may see for that community so it's the thing about how do we get those elements to understand that if we are genuinely talking about community empowerment how do we get to the stage where the community can make meaningful decisions about how they see their communities being taken forward that can give you a number of examples in the present moment where in many communities in central Scotland there is major house building programmes taking place it's a private sector private sector have identified the land the community demand is they want more social housing but the private sector don't want to build social housing because it's not as profitable so how do we get that to the situation where communities can meaningfully engage and give direction to the no the place standard that can be then put into the situation where the communities feel they have actually gained something because at the present moment many communities feel they don't gain anything by being part of the process because the decisions have either been made as you said quite rightly said in the local plan five years ago or made at a planning committee six months ago or has been taken completely out with their control and the only time to hear of these developments is when developers actually go on site and start laying foundations so how do we get to that stage where we get those engagements right but I think it goes back to the net professor Hastings comment about meaningful engagement and people understanding what we mean by engagement I'd appreciate brief answers in this case we're getting tight for time Professor Gibb indicated please to make the point that another important part the private sector isn't just in development side but is also in the process of care homes and delivering social care and it takes me back to the integrative point again to the extent to which this committee is involved in health and social care and integration at local government level which must embrace the kind of role of the private sector and the voluntary sector indeed in delivering many of the services that the local government every requires I've actually got a PhD students just started working on the third sector interface role for community planning partnerships between the whole of the third sector and each local authority level and that's a looks like a particularly challenging set of issues there as well. Dr White please In relation to in how we respond to private sector development actually I think there's a case to be made for local government engaging more in physical master planning that sounds rather top down frankly but actually establishing physical visions with communities for what place is going to look like where roads are going to go where services in housing estates are going to go and playing a more active role in those private sector led housing schemes would be one method. Okay anyone else want to come Professor Kerrins please. I would come back to a point I made earlier about how how you give a community more power at a more local level through either use of place standard or the production of community plans the way to engage a private sector is both that a community can identify either opportunities there are some things that they want the private sector to do with and for them and to give them more powers of veto so there are things that I don't want the community private sector to do so much and they should have the power to try to prevent them they have very few powers of prevention at the moment commercial interests are largely able to pursue their interests without even in the face of community opposition to some things and that shouldn't be the case. Okay can I thank you very much for your attendance today I suspend for a few minutes for a change of witnesses thank you. As discussed earlier in our meeting we now have former local authority senior officials to give us evidence in our legacy paper. Can I welcome George Black visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde and former chief executive of Glasgow City Council, Bill Howitt, former chief executive of Western Isles and former advisor to this committee and Gavin Whitefield's former chief executive of North Lanarkshire Council. Gentlemen, if I could ask the same initial question as I asked the previous panel what do you think characterise this committee's legacy? Mr Whitefield. I think just from a brief review of your work over this term I think first and foremost it's been about championing the role of communities and the importance of community engagement and that's seen through the work you've done on public sector reform on the review of various bills that have come before including the community empowerment act which is always a key strand of that but also picked up from your questioning particularly around about community planning about the importance of councils all community planning partners having effective engagement with communities and ensuring that the resources that are available are targeted in the best way to support the priority outcomes that are identified through that process so I think first and foremost the role of communities is coming through loud and clear and you've put in place a framework and various mechanisms to ensure that that's built on through the next term the challenge is going to be obviously seeing that develop against the backdrop of the unprecedented challenge that's there for local authorities community planning partnerships with the squeeze and resources with increasing demand for services and reducing resources. The second legacy that strikes me from listening to the earlier evidence session there is obviously in the work that you've done to contribute to the establishment of the local tax commission which is obviously again set in place at a framework which should see changes to the council tax and hopefully a move away from the paralysis that's around the council tax freeze which is now entering or about to enter it's nine year so I think that that's something that's obviously going to be very welcomed in terms of getting a fairer system but also getting a system which can be used to start to resource and start to target some of the gaps in funding which are there for the foreseeable future in terms of public sector funding. Mr Black please. The comments I would make that the workload that are the areas that you have looked at over the last five years makes an impressive reading the list that you provided and I think a legacy for yourself will be that the challenges that you have in the future will be greater than the challenges you've had in the last five years so the experience you'll have gained in dealing with the issues over that period should stand you in good stead for what's to come. Thank you Mr Heavitt please. Thank you convener, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. Can I just reinforce I agree entirely with what both Gavin and George have had to say? For me having had the pleasure and privilege of sitting on the other side of the table you yourself and your vice-chair or vice convener have already summarised some of the key legacies that I think you will leave behind your very refreshing approach towards taking evidence, your efforts to get out and talk to people and even in the questioning I've heard today your attempt to avoid the usual suspects I'm sorry you've got three more in front of you and I hope in drawing up your legacy paper you will highlight the efforts to do that. Having sat with you I know also that you've taken a very challenging approach and I wholly endorse that. I think that's the main purpose of parliamentary committees and indeed in some senses I would suggest that if you can you should pass on to your successors the view that you can be even more challenging in the future. I think the third thing I would say and you would expect the former chief executive Collin and Leilannshire to say this but you yourself convener summed it all up when you said having heard evidence from so many different sources that Scotland is a very diverse place when size does not fit all and for the benefit of those members who are four members here who didn't know to me to the committee can I make the point that I actually spent 20 years as a civil servant sitting in Edinburgh dreaming up some of the top-down solutions that haven't worked so I have had experience in both sides of this fence and I think your questioning of the academics who were here highlighted probably another area that I would just like to finish on in passing on your legacy I hope that you will draw out some principles to guide your successors rather than focus on highlighting specific issues. I'm happy to elaborate on that if you wish but let me give you just one example that follows for a question that I heard John Wilson ask which was how do we improve engagement and the answer I think you all know anyway engagement comes best when people think it matters it's really it's as simple as that that's why in the planning process to go back to the question she asked why is it people don't get engaged until they find out that there's going to be a swimming pool or a pub or a casino landing on their doorstep and chances are they've never really understood it they've only just found out and and the biggest evidence I would suggest for that is the referendum that we had 85 turnout why because people thought their votes mattered and I think that's the level that you should be thinking about passing on your legacy the legacies of challenge of finding out community engagement and above all finding ways that people will actually feel that in expressing their views they will be heard listened to and addressed. Thank you. I want to touch upon some of the areas that you were involved in Mr Howitt and that was round about our public service reform inquiry a fairly big piece of work over three strands it seemed at the time that we were trying to build on the christie commission recommendations but often what we would find is you know what we're seeing scenarios where we were reinventing the wheel in places how do we ensure and we have attempted to do so how do we ensure that best practice is exported across the country I understand what you said earlier about there's no two places the same but there are things which happen right across the country which are almost the same how do we ensure that we export best practice how have we done in trying to make sure that that's the case how can our successors do better again I would go back to a generality if I may convener and again I hope this will feature in the introduction to your legacy paper I think the first thing that anybody has to do when they address the question of how do you change something is to have a good understanding of what the current context is and I think it will be important to your successors that you leave behind an explanation more than just the five years that you've covered I would go further than that if I were you in fact I would encourage you to go back 20 years 20 years this year will be the last reorganisation of local government a lot of what we are looking at and what you have heard today flows from that reorganisation and I would encourage you to look at that I would encourage you to look at the changes that have happened since that reorganisation I would encourage you to think about questions like how local is local government these days because there have been some pretty fundamental changes and some of the things that you've just said I think when you put that into that context you will find there's a lot of well-meaning people out there in all councils in councillors as well and I know some of you have been councillors so you will know what goes on within councils you will know the efforts that are made to communicate to represent people to speak up for people and yet if you'll excuse me making the point willy made the point as a man as a councillor coming in as a councillor felt that things were being done to the community and not for the community and yet you were the councillor representing that community so how do you I think the point I'm trying to make here is that there's a lot of good will out there there is a lot of people trying to do best practice there is a thing called the improvement service there are all those academics there are various think tanks you yourselves have tried to promote this and the your efforts going around the country I know that by your round tables by trying to get people to talk together I don't have a magic bullet on this one I don't think anyone does the the processes are there they're well tried I think what you can do is give them a greater sense of direction and above all that context in which things are happening okay mr black please I would encourage you to make contact with professional associations like so last address I don't think there's a great track record of best practice being shared across the public sector and certainly my experience there are always reasons why there's a local circumstance which makes it difficult to implement something which is working in a different part of the country but looking ahead I do think that there will be a greater willingness to adopt best practice because every public authority will be looking to redesign the services they are providing to live within their reduced finances and I do not think that people will have the time to look to reinvent everything themselves and I think there will be more of a willingness to take what works in different parts of the country and implement that and I would think that in health and social care that will be particularly the case the timescales they are and the pressures they are I think will demand that there's a more of a uniformity across the country in certain services okay mr white please yep I think you agree with all the with George and Bill of a outline there in particular emphasizing the importance of being aware of what's already in place to drive that sharing of best practice through the improvement service through Solis through the other professional associations and through the Scottish Leaders Forum and the whole host of other networks but I would perhaps point out that there's a link here with the work you've been doing on the progress on benchmarking and performance reporting in that sense that one of the real important areas going forward will be to get a clear sense of where outcomes are not as good as they should be and having that benchmarking information should provide a clear focus for the Parliament, for local councils, for other bodies to identify where as a result perhaps of best practice not having been implemented outcomes are not as they should be but a sense of we're on a journey which needs to be accelerated as quickly as possible to ensure that information is available because I think at the moment you see comments made about community planning partnerships picking up a reference that was made I think one of the inquiries is some being viewed as talking shops I certainly in my experience and I know a substantial number of my other colleagues they don't view it that way they view community planning as being at the heart of service development and delivery and focusing on outcomes but I think the challenge going forward is to get a clearer picture of where those outcomes are not as good as they should be and then focusing in on what action needs to be taken to address that. Let's look at benchmarking. It took a substantial amount of time to get to the place that we are now at with Solace and the improvement service interacting with one another to come up with what are the best indicators. Do you think that maybe there was a little bit more impetus put into that when this committee started to take much more of an interest? I wasn't fully involved in the interaction with the committee directly through Solace at that time but what I can say is that Solace I recognise for some time the importance of moving away from what were the previous key performance indicators where there are a number which were the value of which was questionable so there was a real commitment to move this agenda forward as quickly as possible. I really can't say whether the committee added any further impetus to that. The commitment I was aware was already there. Gavin is absolutely right that the commitment was there and indeed you have had two advisers in Alec and myself who were essential to driving that forward. Alec was the driving force and I came in behind him and by that time I was retired and came to help. There were two major step changes in driving that forward. One was when the Audit Scotland agreed that the Solace approach was the correct approach and that they were willing to work with them and the second was when this committee took an interest because it then became much more public at a time when a great deal of the work had been going on behind the scenes. The short answer to your question in my view would be yes and I think that as Gavin said this was entirely agreed by Solace. It was entirely agreed through the improvement service, eventually came through COSLA and everyone came on side and you were essential part of that. Do you think that Audit Scotland were an impediment at certain points in coming up with the indicators? I'm sorry by the time they got to the stage of doing the indicators, convener. I had stepped down from my role so I can't speak for the actual process. When I was stepping down from my Solace role we had reached a stage where from memory we had developed the 32 initially and at that time Audit Scotland were engaging with the improvement service to refine them. I may say that I'm not trying to defend anyone here but if anyone hasn't got involved with statisticians and working through and into the accountants and all the other people that do the bean counters, I'll be rude to the bean counters. It gets to a point that George made earlier about you have a good idea at one level and you start to take it down through all the other levels and you run into all the different views, the vested interests, sometimes perfectly valid views. I'm not decrying people here but once you start to drive something down from the top it can take a long time and sometimes for valid reasons. I think that they had concerns about how sustainable the new benchmarking would be and they were concerned that the ownership would be taken up by chief executives and would be sustained over a period because their indicators were statutory indicators rather than what you might say voluntary indicators. I think that a lot of work was carried out to give a reassurance to Audit Scotland that there was a real commitment but if I could come back to you were talking about sharing best practice indicators in my view will only be important if people look beneath the figures, look what actually is making the figures out turn at a certain level and look at the practice on the ground which leads to that and if they can improve their performance by adopting best practice from elsewhere then that will be a success and numbers themselves just allow you to open the can and have a look at what's in there. Thank you, I think that the committee has picked up on that and it is all about the service that's being delivered to the public and I know that some folk think that benchmarking is a bit of a dry topic for us to have looked at but it is all about delivery to the folks out there. Mr Whitefield? It was really just to online what George is outlined there that I didn't sense that Audit Scotland were in any way a barrier or slowed the process, they were very interested and very keen to see the matter benchmarking be put in place is as quickly as possible so I don't sense that there was any delays there as a consequence of Audit Scotland's role. They just seem to like some of the odd indicators like how many library books are borrowed per thousand people which is kind of relevant nowadays in some regards about library usage. John Wilson, please. Thank you, convener. Just to pick up on a point from what Gavin Whitefield made and that's the community planning partnerships and basically your words Gavin were service development and delivery. Now this committee over the past period has looked at community planning partnerships, we've made comments on community planning partnerships, does any of the panel think the discussions we were having here in this committee played any part in influencing the work that was being done by community planning partnerships throughout Scotland? Part of what I'm trying to examine is we're having discussions here, we're making recommendations, we're producing reports, does that have any impact on how local authorities then deliver the services? Do they start tweaking those services or do they just continue on regardless? We should add changing legislation to John's list as well. Mr Whitefield, first, please. I think community planning partnerships will draw in information from all different sources to inform how they develop their practice. Yes, the committee's deliberations and those of Audit Scotland of the other inspectorate will have an impact that they will be reflected on and they will be taken account of in developing what's best for that local community planning partnership. It was interesting in the earlier discussion about the importance of not just having a good strategic planning mechanism in place for community planning partnerships and North Lanarkshire partnership board, which had involvement from two representatives on the board from the third sector, from Strathglide passenger transport. We talked about the importance of transportation in local communities, but beyond that we'd also developed six local area partnerships where the intention was to replicate the same representation at that local level with all key community planning partners working with community forums at that local level. Beyond that, identifying one of the neighbourhoods where there has been a deterioration in the deprivation statistics in that area and a real concentration in that area at a neighbourhood level. A sense that that sort of approach is being developed across Scotland representing, recognising that it's not just about having community planning at the strategic level, the most important part is having it at a local level and making a difference at a local level. It should have been made a declaration, convener. I was a councillor under Gavin's stewardship when he was the chief executive in North Lanarkshire, so I am well aware of some of the local planning meetings and the local area partnership meetings, but if anybody else has got to do that. I've been retired for 10 years and I was your adviser on this one, so I think that I should pass this to George, quite frankly. It goes without saying that the local government and regeneration committee are an important body in terms of the work that goes on around the country. In my experience, chief executives look at what all committees of the Scottish Parliament are looking at and use that in terms of helping them and advising the council on the priorities that they should be looking at. A lot of times councils will be proactive and say that, if those are the areas that are important around the country, what are we doing at a local level and making sure that when a report comes out from your committee that they are on the mark there and they are not starting way back in terms of having considered the issues. I repeat myself, it goes without saying that attention will be paid to what you are looking at. If I was asking a question to you that if you are finding that witnesses have no difficulty in getting people to give evidence, then that, to my mind, would be a statement as to how important you are viewed around the country. If you start to get difficulty in finding people coming forward, that is when you should be looking at what you are doing. Some folk have tried to dodge the bullet and have tried not to come, but I have to say in all fairness under your stewardship that at Glasgow, Mr Black, we had no problem whatsoever in getting witnesses from Glasgow City. John. Thank you, convener. Just as a follow-up in relation to the offer that you all heard earlier questioning that we did with the academics in terms of the main thrust, it is fair to say that the committee has been trying to push engagement of communities in the process, in the decision-making process and the planning process, and part of the work of the committee in terms of community empowerment legislation that was going through the report quite rightly, I would say, argued for a strong case for communities to be involved in that right from the start. Does that element have been taken on board by the whole range of agencies, local authorities, community planning partnerships, local area partnerships and other area management committees? I think that Glasgow still calls them in relation to engaging with communities. Does enough has been done to address some of the issues that have been identified in relation to, because we did certainly, when we were carrying out our inquiry, we went out to govern and we certainly heard very vocal community activists about the role of Glasgow City Council or the lack of the role of Glasgow City Council in relation to engaging with those communities and looking at the value that they deliver as communities in terms of services, vital services in those communities, but felt that they were being excluded or from the debate or not being listened to by the local authority in terms of taking forward their issues? Mr Black, please. I would say that there has been progress in community planning in engaging with communities over the years, but clearly much more has to take place. One of the issues in Glasgow, stating the obvious, is that the size of Glasgow when I was chief executive, there are 10 community planning partnerships. That still means that you have 60,000 residents in that area, so engaging at a very local level was quite a challenge. There was reference made in the previous evidence to thrive in places and that was at an early stage when I was chief executive, but that was trying to write down what people would recognise as a local community and then engaging with that local community. The only other point that I would make is, again, looking ahead to the challenges ahead and the financial challenges that communities will be more willing or more demanding in being involved in processes because there will be a greater awareness of the level of change that is going to take place right across the public sector and impacting on their local community, and I think that they will demand that all organisations are engaging with them—health, police, fire, local authorities—in a co-ordinated way. That is where I think that local community planning partnerships have a key role to play. I agree that there is absolute commitment at a local level to community engagement, and a similar level of frustration that the committee has had regarding the fact that it can be done better, but it relies on people coming forward and being willing to engage. I think that it was interesting in the earlier session that the point that Jane Baxter made about the important role that MSPs play. MSPs are in the community, councillors are in the community, they are in the supermarket, they are in the street hearing, they are talking to people and councillors at a local level, MSPs at a national level, are the people who are then taking account of those views in shaping policy, strategy and legislation. I have a doubt that you do heart-bark to my time in Coral and Aenil and Cher. Can I use that as an illustration of one of the issues that I know that we use a committee have grappled with, particularly in the community planning context, and that is the use of the word community? Listening to the debate today, I hear some very general language about community engagement, but, as you yourself said at the beginning, Scotland is very diverse. In my time in the Western Isles, our communities were very vocal. We had 31 councillors, we had 31 community councils, we devolved certain functions to the community councils, and that gets me to the point that I was making to John. You allocate a budget to a group of people, albeit that it was very small. That was mostly about burial grounds, which have a very big issue in the Western Isles, let me tell you, and suddenly you get real community engagement. At a place like the Western Isles, there is a very clear sense of local identity. If any of you go there, you will know that. It is a very different place from some well at Glasgow or North Lanarkshire. It is interesting to hear George saying that in Glasgow he has got 10 community planning partnerships. That is 600,000 or something, George, from memory, so about 60,000 in each. Any one of those is nearly three times the whole of the Western Isles. I think that you need to be careful in the use of language here, and that is why, at the beginning, I was saying, please, in your legacy paper, set the context and recognise that something that works in one place, as George was saying, might not translate as readily. Does the Western Isles community planning partnership have regard to this committee? Absolutely, but it will do it in the way that George has suggested. It will be the chief executive in the officials of the various organisations who will bring the papers to the committee, they will have regard to it, and then it comes up from the bottom. What comes down from the top does not always play well down at the bottom, as you are well aware when you get out there, and people react to it. That is what I am saying about context. That is going to play differently in different parts of Scotland. It is important that, if that is your experience, I know that from working with you. I know that when I was working with you, we had a debate about what communities are. Communities are not necessarily localities. They are communities of common interests, and you have to have regard to them as well. It is a complex business, and that is why you, in handing over your legacy, should be drawing out some general principles and giving some guidance as to what are the issues that the next committee would want to address. Mr Howe's last comment is saying that we could go on to debate about the co-terminus boundaries of the health board, the local authority and how that works. It does not work so well in other areas when you are talking about community planning partnerships, when you are calling the place health boards and other services. I will focus on that. Once again, I draw from my experience of a community that tries to be very actively engaged. We went as a committee through the whole process of the community empowerment report, the bill and now the act. Is there a view out there that local authorities hold back from being proactive in developing strategies? I have just heard a report earlier this week or the end of last week, which says that one local authority in terms of community empowerment is effectively saying that we will just hold back until the Government issues the guidance. We are trying to hopefully give everybody who will listen a steer in terms of debates, evidence and the witnesses that we call before us to hopefully get some organisations, particularly local authorities, to become more proactive in their approach rather than wait on Government legislation or Government guidance. Those issues have been taken on board by local authorities because, as I said, my experience in what I was told last week is clearly some local authorities. Despite all the good work of the committee and the evidence that we have heard, we are still saying that we will just wait until the Government provides the guidance. People, I said earlier that a lot of what is set out in community empowerment and the backdrop to that in terms of improving community engagement, there is an absolute commitment to community planning, which community planning is already about. I do not know the authority that has been referred to. I can only refer to my experience in North Lanarkshire. Certainly, in North Lanarkshire from February of last year, a corporate working group was established to track the final stages of the bill and ensuring that the authority and community planning partnership were geared up to deal with all the consequences of that and address the opportunities that are set out there. Just before I retired, we had a senior management briefing with more than 100 senior managers from right across the council. A key presentation as part of that was on community empowerment. There was a recognition of the wide-ranging measures included in the act and how they were required to be addressed. I think that the challenge that is going forward will address the backdrop of unprecedented challenges that continue on council budgets. I think that it is a matter of degree. I would be surprised if any council was sitting completely in their hands when they knew something was going to be happening. It is more a case of that you progress that issue. It may well be that you have not finalised the detail because you know that guidance is coming. However, I come back to my point about professional associations with linkages to civil servants. We will be well aware of the main thrust of changes that are coming and should be keeping a pace with that. If I took health and social care integration—it was some time before it was on the statute books—nobody was sitting and waiting at hitting the statute books before they started making preparations, so people were progressing. I would accept that some authorities will progress more than others, depending on local priorities at the time. If I take off my ex-chief executive hat and put on my ex-civil servant hat, 32 councils in Scotland, John George's point, are absolutely valid. They will all progress at different speeds and in different ways. Going back to your point, they are all very different, and they will all have different views on how any piece of guidance or legislation will be implemented. During my civil service career, I had the misfortune to lead the team that introduced best value in Scotland. Gavin in particular will remember me for that one, I think. That was a very interesting exercise, because there you had 32 councils all behaving very differently. It took us quite a long time to get any kind of consistency across the board. The danger, convener, and as a committee, I go back to your legacy. The danger of any piece of guidance or any piece of legislation is that it becomes tick-box. That was when best value started to grind to a halt when we started to give people checklists. Suddenly, people said, yes, I have done that, and I have done that, and the whole concept of best value then ground to a halt, because what was supposed to happen was that it was supposed to pervade everything that councils did. What happened was that people were allocated jobs to say that we have jumped over those hoops. I think that it has moved on a lot since then. I am talking about the very early days, but that probably illustrates the point that George is making. I think that from George's joint smile, he has probably experienced that as well. Convener, it is just that there were 32 different interpretations of best value. That was out there probably more than that, but that is another story. George Adam, please. I was just going to say just what you said there, Bill, about the fact that my experience in local authority was when they tried to devolve things down to local area committees and things like that. As convener of one, I tried to engage and make sure that they were involved. All those seemed to be interested in the grant allocation at the end of the meeting, as opposed to what was happening during the meeting. I almost got to the stage where I had to point out that that is very important, but is it not the way that we engage with the public when we have these types of meetings where the whole idea is that they are meant to engage with it? Although they are the usual suspects a lot of the time, they do not know how to translate a council officer's interpretation of what the issue is into normal English, day-to-day plain English. It is almost a difficult way to try and it almost becomes like a tick box, and that officer is quite happy that that has been passed to all the local area committees, but the public does not really know what is happening. Is that not the problem when we do not communicate in a way that without somebody saying, getting a big acme, Looney Tunes finger and going, this is an issue, can you deal with this? Is that not the problem? I will laugh at the Looney Tunes finger there. The committee has tried to get folk to use plain language. Gentlemen, do you have comment on that? There are times where we here get papers from councils, we get them from here as well, as to be said, where you are looking two, three, four times before you are actually getting the gist of it, and in some cases not getting the gist at all. Who is going first? Bill? I think that since George addressed it to me, I will take the starter. The gentlemen in each side of me have more immediate experience of this. A, I entirely sympathise as you are well aware, convener, for my time as your adviser. I totally agree. This harks back to comments that were made by the academic panel, who were saying that it is one thing to engage, but unless people understand the context of what is happening and understand what influence they can have over it, engagement can sometimes be counterproductive. If people are called to a meeting where they think that their views will mean a change in something, whereas all that is happening is that they are being advised of a change and they might get a chance to comment on it, then you are on a sticky wicket. I think that you are absolutely correct, but that can only come down to best practice, to experience, to better education. In terms of what you do as a committee, in the community engagement that you are doing, in getting, shall we say, the lesser suspects rather than the usual suspects, I think that that is a big step forward.  However, the key point is that, as you will notice, I said that it was fed back into the system.  They have to understand what happens once you are here. That is true of anything. I thought that the examples from planning were interesting. The planning system is set up in such a way that, sitting here today, I can dream up anything that I like, go to the relevant council and get outline planning permission almost immediately. I do not have to consult anybody. I can get a start in the process. There is some discontinuity in there. That said one word of caution that I was interested in the Canadian gentleman's experience where he said, visioning things. Visioning things is one thing. Once they become practical reality it is usually something very different and you can bet your boots somebody out there that was not part of the vision. I think that we have to recognise that the systems that we have, however imperfect, have been built up over a long period of time and we have to improve them and it is getting people to understand that. That is just one final point. I am sure that my colleagues will agree. One of the biggest problems in local government, and indeed any public service, I suspect, is that most of the public only engage with it when they need it. I think that one thing that I have got to say is that appearing in front of this committee often can lead to substantial change quite quickly. I will give you an example of our visit to Dumfries and two things there. In front of the committee there was a gentleman from the Scottish Woodlot Association and that evidence led to a swift amendment to the community empowerment bill to advance the cause of small holders in forestry. In that visit, we came across a difficulty with an organisation called the usual place in a lease. With our intervention, we managed to get the council to resolve that to you. It is not just about entering the system in the sausage factory somewhere. We have to, in our legacy, also show that coming here does often make tangible change to folk circumstances. I accept that entirely, convener. Those are very good examples. My point was a general one of principle. I am sure that you will appreciate the processes of government. It is important that, in all mechanisms for engagement, we are using plain English. We are not entering into the language of local government or health or police or whatever, where people are able to go to meetings and understand and relate to the issues that have been debated and contributed to that. Part of the process is about building up capacity, building up the understanding of the system. There is often an assumption that, because somebody who is very engaged through a local community organisation will, through that engagement, already be aware of how the council operates or how community planning operates. In North Lanarkshire, one of the recent developments is an induction programme for community planning to address that particular issue and ensure that everybody is operating at the same level of expertise. I would not deny that improvements can be made in communication in plain English, but my experience is that the greater frustration people found in engaging with the system was the complexity. When you got involved in an issue in a short meeting, it was quite difficult for officers to explain the context of what they were looking at. Particularly when they got into finance and they got the difference between capital and borrowing, operating expenditure, ring-fenced housing account and what they can do under the rules that exist. I think that people find that frustrating. What we found was that, when we engaged people in part of the budget process in an all-day session, where part of it was helping people to understand the wider context, that people's priorities were affected as a result of that. If you asked them what was your priority education or social work, etc., what you might get from just a person in the street would be different than once they understood what the real choices were and the implications of that. I would not deny that communication is an issue, but I think that frustration is more trying to come to grips with a quite complex system. In that period would have been the single outcome agreement. It would have been an example of something that was important to the members of said local area committee, but they tended to just fly through it because it was a very formal, almost tick-box type. The councillors knew exactly what it meant on the committee, but it was not as easy to translate that. I kept a frustrating thing for me was to try and create a debate around it. It was difficult because you could not really hang it on to the agenda item that was there. That is the kind of thing that I am talking about, just to create the debate, so that we do not have them turning up with the burning torches like a universal horror film in the 1950s. When something does happen, they have already had the opportunity to discuss and have the debate. I think that a lot of times, if we can find a way to have the debate before it gets to the change of service, it makes it a lot easier for everyone to try and get some community buy-in, which is something that we often hear about, but we do not often experience. If I could just clarify, there were no burning torches in Glasgow. George Hitts, on a point as well, in terms of the use of those three words, single outcome agreement. It is difficult to explain to folk what that actually is. Again, it is the use of language that can often be the off-putter right at the very beginning. I am saying nodding heads. Even worse, it would probably be referred to as an SOE. The acronyms are just widespread. I recall, convener, having a discussion with your committee during our time, where we were trying to get the witnesses to tell us what they thought an outcome was. We got some quite varied answers, as I recall. I remember that session. It was somewhat bizarre, if I remember rightly. I remember the use of acronyms and initials. When Bill said best value, I used to be a community planning officer. In my head, I went to the four Cs of best value. I cannot remember what they are, but it was drummed into us. There were four Cs of it, which I cannot recall. My learning was not very good, but we used those. It was not about understanding, it was about being able to say to the mantra of it rather than understanding what those things mean. That applies to those who are charged with implementing policies and with the community that is charged with being on the receiving end of them. I am very interested in looking ahead perhaps five years from now. I know that I take the point about we should perhaps look back 20 years when the local government will establish and see how well it is working. In looking ahead five years and trying to set out the principles that you mentioned, Bill, about what we could inject into our work in the next five years, I would really like us, if we were sitting here in five years, to look back and see that we did move things on, we did see better engagement with the public and participation. All those words that sound great but sometimes do not mean very much. I am keen to find out from you if you think things like the empowerment bill will give us the opportunity to develop and make progress. My view at the moment is that the public are very much still drawn into the systems and processes that are determined by the council, for example. You are drawn into discussions and processes on their terms. In that sense, I think that the public do not feel that they control that or that they do have any power over it. Is there any way of trying to really empower the communities through things like the empowerment bill that will begin to open up processes so that we can perhaps see the community's shaping policy development from the ground up to the future? Can we, first of all, explain when I said set a context? My starting point would be 1996. I was not suggesting that you do a full-scale review of everything that happened, but I think that it would be interesting to ask some questions. I will happily elaborate on them if you wish. The difficulty that you face in the question that you pose, Willie, is that, as a committee, you have contributed to a developed parliament that has passed something called a community empowerment bill. That is not a piece of legislation. That will have a guidance attached to it. It may well have a secondary legislation. I am sorry, but I am not familiar with the detail of the bill. I know the principles. That puts it into the very system that you have just described. Yes, you, as a committee, can have people in here over the next five years. You can ask them what they are doing to fulfil the requirements of the bill, but you have to recognise that the very fact that you have put it into a legislative framework makes it part of the system. Whereas a lot of the work that I have seen you do and have been part of you doing over the last five years was breaking out of the system. It was getting people to come here who would not otherwise be here and encouraging them to say the things that they felt otherwise could not be said. I have vivid memories of the man from the east end of Glasgow sitting somewhere about there, Ui Jimmy, who was asked what was the difference between Geir and the Clyde gateway, and he summed it up in a sentence.  This lot came with a pile of money and asked us how we would like to spend it. To me, that was quite refreshing for him. He put it in a nutshell. I know that the members of the committee at that time were all very impressed by the fact that the gateway people brought them along. I am not sure that they were sure what he was going to say quite frankly. What he said was fascinating. I think that that is where your work has been so good over the past five years and where you want to push it. In a sense, you have not bound yourselves, but by having the empowerment bill people are going to be looking at what is the legislative framework. The questioning that you have been putting to us today and all the thrust that I have heard with the earlier session is that you are wanting people to work together, to learn from best practice, to interact and to get wider engagement. As I said right at the beginning, I do not have any silver bullets or magic bullets that will solve that one for you. A lot of what you have heard is stuff that has been done before, so I do not know where the magic is other than what I said to John Wright at the beginning. If people think that their view matters, they will engage. To me, that is such a simple principle that if you can take that and run forward with it, set in the right context, then you will have a big, big impact. George, please. If I look at the information that you have provided on the issues that you are thinking about looking at, council tax reform, health and social care integration, community empowerment and city deals, those are all relevant to the public sector. They are big, meaty issues, but they are also relevant to individuals. Any reform of local taxation will get a lot of attention from individuals. Health and social care integration, one of the big challenges there, will be when they redesign services that are redesigned involving people and what works for them, individuals. If you look at community empowerment, there is a great deal of expectation against that bill and probably the biggest challenge is actually delivering on that expectation. If there was one area that we were looking at that I would encourage you to look at in the next five years, it would be how much has been done or is being done on early intervention. The Christie Commission came out of my memory cells maybe five years ago in the summer. With the financial challenges that are ahead, you have got the reduced budgets, but you have also got increasing demand. If all authorities do, and it will be a big do, is address the financial challenges but do not address the demands that are coming down the road by looking at early intervention measures, then the problems in five years' time will be even greater. I would encourage you to look at that because that would lead to a greater emphasis being put on early intervention by authorities. Harking back to the conversation that we had earlier about what you have in your agenda tends to feed through to what people are looking at. That is the question about what the committee wants to see in five years' time as an outcome. I think that it is important to recognise that you look at community empowerment, you look at the health and care integration and all the items that you have identified as the big issues that I would agree with over the next five years. A lot of those are a means to an end. The end is better services, better outcomes against the backdrop of massive financial pressures. I want to be able to say that at the start of the term, if you look at the priorities that are set at a national level, when you look at the priorities at local community planning partnerships, there might be different terminology, but they all come back to better health and care, better health and wellbeing, lifelong learning, better educational attainment, regeneration and improved employment opportunities and reducing unemployment, community safety in terms of reducing crime levels and better safety outcomes in the roads and in homes and addressing inequality. I come back to my earlier point about getting in place through the benchmarking framework, through the single outcome agreements, a clear picture of where things stand at the start of the next parliamentary term and where you would want to see them at the end. The committee uses all the focus around the areas that you have identified to support that process. One area might also be a specific area that you might want to give consideration to in terms of the regeneration remit that you have looked at. You have looked at a sense of community regeneration, but Merritt links in with one of your other committees about the role of infrastructure investment in supporting regeneration outcomes, where you have projects relating to your own experience in North Lanarkshire, such as Ravenscraig and the City Deal. Rather than just looking at the City Deal and looking at all the infrastructure investment that has been made, how has that been best channeled to support the better outcomes that I have already referred to? Do you think that the ordinary man and woman in the street, in places of my constituency, in the commandant Nervyn Valley, are looking at all those systems and processes just now in the community empowerment bill and all the rest, and they are going great? We are now getting a chance to really influence things. I suppose that I am looking for the magic ingredient that makes that happen and how we can move towards that. I do not get the sense that that is the case yet. I hope that it might be, but I do not get the sense that the public are saying, brilliant, that this is really going to give us a chance to influence things that the Scottish Parliament or the local council in them. I am asking for your help here to point us in that direction, what that might be, what that catalyst might be, to get them to engage with us. He is going to take a crack at that first. I will say that it is a Scottish matter to him. We think that all of the work that we do matters to individuals. Sometimes they do not know that we are doing it, or it is too late, or it is halfway through, and how do we do it better earlier, quicker, smarter and all of that? I think that it comes back to the point about language. For example, there are two City deals. What does City deal mean to somebody who is not involved in that? If the language is about jobs and opportunities for youngsters, I think that it is easier to get people engaged in that. That is a challenge for politicians turning it back. How do they take the language that we all work in and turn it into something that is relevant to people? Bill's point about the guy from the east end coming along. He understood what it was about, the difference between gear and the Clyde gateway. In his language, he understood it clearly. That is a good example of being able to get over to people and how quiet matters to them. He most certainly did understand as well. Gavin Bill, have you got anything to add to that? Lot to add other than, again, listening to the earlier discussion about this issue, it is an area that we will have thought about. We are in a completely different place now in terms of the technology available to get that engagement through social media and digital. Rather than reflecting back on where we were 20 years ago and thinking about meetings and arrangements and how we engage with people, the technology that we have now provides massive opportunities to embrace that in a way that will give more power to what is already set out in the legislation and its impact. Just a thought, listening to Willie. I am sorry, Willie, but I think that you are absolutely right in saying that it is highly unlikely that the ordinary person in the street in the Dune valley is rubbing their hands in glee. The thought crossed my mind that maybe that gentleman from the east end of Glasgow, if we could find a few champions like him who are not officials like us, they would be not even counsellors, but people who are directly community representatives who would be willing to go out and actually explain it in language that other people could understand. That might be one way forward. Again, I come back to what I have been saying all the way through this. At the end of the day, when you go out to somebody in the street and say to them, here is an issue, it happens in a context and that context can be quite complicated. You yourself have highlighted it and George has done it quite graphically. I know that our counsellor did not get involved in this, but I know that after I retired, many counsellors in Scotland have been going through annually a budget consultation exercise where leaders, finance conveners, chief executives, directors of finance are going out and saying to people, here is where it is at, outlining the kind of choices that maybe Gavin and George might want to reflect on those. At the end of the day, as George rightly said, that is ending up in an argument about what is going into which budget. It is not getting to what you want to do or what the rest of us want to do in terms of actual outcomes. It is a budget consultation exercise, but that is engaging the public, I think, far more, because at the end of the day it could get back to my starting point, people think that it matters and the voices are being heard. That is the key to all of this. In terms of Willys' last question, without the community empowerment act being in place, there are many organisations throughout the country and many local authorities where communities are already running various organisations and are in charge of the budget. Yet they seem to be hidden from view in some regards. How do we communicate that sometimes it is not necessarily a change in legislation that is required but a change in attitude in certain places? Beyond that, the powers that be trusting local folk to be able to do what is right for them in controlling those resources. Do you want to take a stab at that? Can I be controversial?  I think that you can set an example. One of the reasons that I would like you to set a context for what has happened since 1996 is that if you go back over it, I think that you will find that there has been a process of centralisation going on across all parties, across all Governments, Westminster and Holyrood. In my view, that is contributing to a certain disenchantment, a certain feeling that it does not really matter if we vote. I can quote examples if you want, but you know them. I think that what you need to do in looking at this is to ask yourself the questions, why are people not engaged at local level as much as they should be? The answer, in my view, is because they do not think that it makes a great deal of difference. I take your point, convener. You are absolutely right and we should pay tribute to the many groups out there who are active and many of them, as you rightly say, in charge of budgets. However, at the end of the day, they all come back to the point that George described. They are working within a context and, in many cases, they are working to pick up George's point, they are working in a situation in which the grant is more important than what they are doing with it, because the grant is going to be cut year on year or whatever it is going to be, and therefore that becomes critical. If the focus comes away or goes on to the finance and comes off the outcome, as Gavin was saying, you are not getting the kind of engagement that you are seeking to achieve. It is a very difficult thing to deal with. I do not know what the answer is myself, but I do believe that we could learn a lot of lessons by looking back over the last 20 years and seeing how the changes have come about, what I am calling creeping centralisation. By the way, I am not just talking about functions, I am talking about money, I am talking about lots of things. The way in which the right support grant with a local government finance settlement has been used over the past 20 years is worth a study in itself, quite frankly. Give credit to John Swinney. Back in 2011, he got rid of most of the ring fencing. Let me be equally controversial again. As a Parliament, you have been around now 17 years this year. When you were set up, up until this year, you had a charge of two taxes, as I recall. You have never exercised the power to do that. I am not arguing against that. The one place that you have chosen as a Parliament to exercise your powers, or the Governments have chosen to do so, is in imposing a council tax freeze, which is the responsibility of local government. That is inconsistent, I would argue, and that needs to be addressed. I promise you to be controversial. I agree with all the bill that is outlined here. Going back to the earlier point about sharing best practice is one way in which that could be addressed. Also, picking up on Bill's point about empowerment, local government is arguing for greater empowerment, whether it is about focus on outcomes rather than on inputs and the focus on teacher numbers at the moment, providing greater flexibility around the use of resources, as an example there. Also, about forward financial planning, as a being counter, as Bill referred to earlier, just using this as an example, councils argued for three-year forward financial plans, four-year plans that give certainty for the organisation, certainty for service users, certainty for the employees, but the same organisations have always argued that we should be passing that on to voluntary organisations, community organisations and giving them the same trust. There is an ownership that has to be taken at a national or local government level to practice what we preach, so if we are arguing for this empowerment, we should be doing the same with community organisations and supporting that as much as we can. We talked earlier about the sharing of best practice or otherwise and talked about, I thought anyway, that there will be a greater willingness going forward for people to look for good ideas. There are plenty of good ideas around a country where local groups have taken control of services or assets, and the challenge really is to get that message out in a way that they can usefully pick it up. I think that there is also a need when we are looking at best practice to really get down to the nub of what made a project work or what made a change work. I took Bill's point about Clyde Gateway. Clyde Gateway has been highly successful not because it is an urban regeneration company, but because the leadership in the Clyde Gateway is focused day in, day out in that area, that is their single focus and the quality of that leadership is what makes it work. If you can take the model as best practice but you can add to that what really makes it work on the ground, I think that people will be more than willing to pick up those ideas in the future. Just to follow on from George Black's comment, I think that we need to, as a committee, recognise that there are a lot of communities out there doing things for themselves with small budgets because they have identified they are the only ones that can deliver the services those communities need because local government, central government, health boards and other agencies have failed them and they are now doing that and delivering that themselves. Part of the community empowerment legislation is to give credit to those organisations that are doing it and go back to Gavin Whitefield's point, making sure that local authorities and others support financially those community organisations that are delivering vital services today, tomorrow and in the future. That was not so much a question as a statement but there we go. Finally gentlemen, often we get criticised as a Parliament for not doing enough post-legislative scrutiny and often we don't go and revisit previous reports to see if recommendations have been implemented and whether they have made any change. Is that something that you think that the successor committee needs to do? Gavin, first please. I think that it's important that that process is in place but I also caution against embarking on that review process too early. I often think that major initiatives are taken forward at a national, local level and you're no sooner into the initiative than you've got scrutiny of that and I think that there needs to be adequate time given to enable the legislation to be put in place and to be effective, so to think carefully about the timing of any scrutiny so that you've got a reasonable track record of implementation to review. George, please. I think that that is a good idea and I would agree with Gavin about the timing that is essential that you, if I took health and social care integration, Audit Scotland came out with a report recently and I think that that has added to the pressure on local partnerships to deliver in the first year of operation. Now, in any major change, to deliver and demonstrate success in the first year is a pretty tall order. The scale of that change will make it even more of a challenge so I would encourage you to go back and look at issues and when you look at them the type of issue that you should look at should be relevant to the time period so don't wait six months after next April and be in asking local partnerships about health and social care integration unless you're asking them about have they got structures in place, the fundamentals, but yes I think it would actually be helpful to chief executives and leaders and politicians throughout the country if they knew that things were going to be revisited further down the line. Bill, please. Absolutely critical to any system, in my view, to learn the lessons. You can only do that by going in and regularly reviewing. I think that the caveats that my colleagues have raised are absolutely vital. My suggestion to you would be when you do this at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way, make sure that what you're doing is looking for best practice and making sure that you're going to share it and avoid the sense that there's some kind of inspectorate type approach because that can just lead to the tick box and defensive attitudes. In addition to the timing, I think that the way that you conduct such a review would be critical and I hope, again, as I said at the beginning, I'm very impressed by you for writing your legacy paper. I wish you well and I look forward to seeing the work of the next committee, but again, I hope that what you will do is set out a context and in that context, going back to review things at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way, should be one of the key lessons and one of the key principles for the committee in the future. Thank you very much for your evidence today, gentlemen, and I suspend and we move into private session.