I welcome members of the press in public to the second meeting of the Public Petitions Committee in 2015. I would like to ask all those present to ensure that their mobile devices are either switched off or placed into flight mode so that they do not affect the work of the committee. Colleagues, can I take us to agenda item number one? Firstly, that is the question that we take agenda item number three in private. Can we agree on that? Colleagues, can I now take you to section and agenda number two, which is evidence from our two panels this morning in the Auditor General report for Scotland's report entitled, Community Planning, Turning Ambition into Action. The committee will first hear from individuals involved in the community planning partnerships. I'm delighted to firstly welcome Councillor Jenny Leane of Aberdeen City Council leader. I can also welcome chief superintendent Adrian Watson, local police commander at Aberdeen City Division Police Scotland, Susan Webb, interim director of public health NHS Grampain, Councillor David Parker, Scottish Borders Council leader, Alasdair MacKinnon, regional director for south of Scotland, Scottish Enterprise and finally, John Rain, chair of NHS Borders. I welcome our panel this morning, your most welcome. First of all, I refer you to the report that we are discussing this morning. I will ask the first question and this morning a number of my colleagues will follow. Can I take you to section 24 of the report and the reference and the statement from the Auditor General report, which says that the community planning partnership boards are not yet fulfilling their role effectively, strategic oversight and challenge still tend to be happening at local levels. Below the CPP board, many boards are overseeing the community planning process but are not showing a leadership. Pretty robust statement from the Auditor General on that respect and I wonder if any members of the panel would care to respond to what we have as what is a robust statement. Do you like to come in first of all? Govinda, could I perhaps give you a perspective from my position as NHS chair in the Borders? I should preface my remarks by saying that I can only speak on behalf of borders. I am not familiar with the way community planning partnerships do their business across the rest of Scotland. I read the report and I have read the transcript of the discussion that this committee had in early December. I must say that it was quite depressing reading, I thought, particularly the transcript. The overriding message that was being delivered was one of failure to deliver, and that is not the experience in borders. I think that we do borders to disservice if we did not draw your attention to some of the progress that has been made. I think that what did help the borders is that we were a pilot study for the Audit Commission 18 months ago. We volunteered to have our community planning partnership work reviewed and validated. It was a bit of a mixed report. We were told that we were good in parts. There has been a long history of joint working, but there were a number of improvements that we needed to make. We needed to set an ambitious vision. We needed to identify priorities where community planning could make a difference. We needed to ensure that our partners on the strategic board and in the whole work of community planning actually did fully understand their roles and their responsibilities and clarified ways in which partnership decisions were then reflected in the formal governance arrangements of the partner bodies. That was very good. It was salutary stuff, but what it did do is that it led to a programme of improvement. It was actually quite a good wake-up call for the borders. The response, as I perceive it from my position, has been a very proactive one. The operational and the governance structure of the partnership has been substantially developed. A fresh impetus has been brought to bear. We have a board that functions well in my view. A joint delivery team of chief officers and others programme groups for the key themes of economy and low carbon, reducing inequalities and future services reform. We have agreed a vision. We have agreed an approach to performance management, which is now being piloted. I noted that Douglas Sinclair spoke about a fallow period when he addressed you in terms of the long waiting time to see results from community planning. I do think that that fallow period has come to an end. I would not want to weary you today with a range of initiatives and things that are going on in the borders, but we do have a lot of projects and initiatives that are relevant for community planning, which contribute to the strategic objectives of community planning and our projects, which over time can be monitored in the sense of being able to determine whether they are actually delivering a benefit. Things are moving in the borders. David Parker, I am sure, as the chair of that board, would want to endorse that. Counseling, from your perspective in terms of your own councils, is that something that you would like to specifically respond to in terms of section 24 of the report? I think that, from our perspective, part of it is a fair comment. I have to say that we have had unlike borders, it seems that they have had quite a settled period. We have obviously had changes in personnel at levels from various partnerships, both in the council with the chief executive position changing, the leadership of the council changing in the middle of last year, and also with NHS, we have obviously had chief officers from the air and chairs of the board. I think that we need to reflect on that and that has obviously had an impact, I would say, at our board level. However, as I took over the chairmanship of the board in the middle of last year, I feel that, in that time, we have been making progress around that. We are working hard within the board to identify the areas in which we need to be taking action, and that is why recently we have decided to have a refresh of our single outcome agreement, because we feel that it will not help us to achieve the outcomes that we hope to. It is not outcome focused enough, so we are doing a refresh of that at the moment, with a rewrite planned along the lines of that. At the end of the day, it is about the delivery in the communities that we should be working towards, and we feel that that maybe has not been reflected in what is going on, but, having said that, we have good partnership working, and we have good examples, which we will be able to reflect on today. I am optimistic about moving forward, and I think that we have a common goal within the community planning partnership in Aberdeen to achieve better outcomes for our communities. We will be working towards that. As we have touched on, the reports that we have seen here make fairly depressing reading. CBPs have been around for 10 years and more, and the progress that has been made just reading the Auditor General's reports is fairly minimal, and yet, this is such a vital exercise to get CBPs working in order to have effective outcomes locally. We have the November 2014 report, and we have the March 2013 report. As far as I can see, there has been fairly minimal progress, according to what the Auditor General is telling us. Now, one of the key areas that seem to be not working is the way that CBP partners are engaged and sharing resources, or, more correctly, not sharing resources. I have been interested to hear from the panel what their experience on how effectively these resources are being shared, and whether it is practical that they will be shared. The Auditor General touched on the word trust. Does that trust exist among the partners to enable that to work effectively? Just to give that practical example and Jenny touched on it as well, we will try and cite a few positive experiences. I take on board and respect what you are saying in terms of that strategic overview. It is a real challenging area for us all, and there is much more still to do. However, if I can delve into the realms of community safety from an Aberdeen city perspective, that trust that you speak about and that support across the partners in understanding what the priorities are for Aberdeen around safety is clearly demonstrating an example that I would give you around about a community safety hub, where we have all supported financially and with resource up front to deal with the agreed priorities from the communities across the city through the community safety partnership. We now have a community safety hub, a living and breathing one, where there are staff from right across the partnership working on a daily basis addressing the strategic priorities of community safety, working right back up to community planning and dealing with issues that really matter to folk in Aberdeen day in, day out. That has taken on some evaluation from the Scottish Government and other interested parties, and we seem to be heading in the right direction. That is a commitment and a will from all partners that are represented around community planning. It is one that a pilot work can build on both locally and nationally, and we are starting to see that tangible benefit. The objective of evaluation suggests that crime rates are going down, but that is only one indicator. People are feeling that bit safer and other positives that I could go into. However, that is one that I would cite as falling from community planning because I needed that buy-in from our partners. Without the community planning vehicle in Aberdeen, I do not think that we would be where we are. It is certainly my view in terms of resource sharing. I think that there are good examples of resource sharing. It really depends on what definition we are talking about. If we are talking about a pooled budget that the CPP controls, that is a little bit of a red herring. What we should be looking for is to do community planning partnerships, lead to better partnership working, and are there positive examples of where we are sharing staffing resource and financial resource, albeit that the individual organisations hold the budgets themselves because of issues around accountability and other issues. In the Borders, we have a joint community safety team that has staff and resources from all the different partner agencies in it. It was one of the first in Scotland and has done extremely well. We have a joint dementia service, a joint mental health service, a joint adult with learning disability service. We have the Borders guarantee, where 100 places will be given to young people and children coming out of care to make sure that we can give apprenticeships or training examples. All the partners are contributing to that. There are many examples of very good quality joint working. We have avoided some of the governance issues. I think that one of the big issues with pooled budgets and issues of that is that you get into debates around who is accountable for what and you get into arguments about which governance model do we set up to monitor the money. Actually, that is a red herring. What community partnerships should be doing is focusing on making sure that we are delivering jointly together and we are working in partnership and delivering services together. Certainly, in the Scottish Borders, we are doing that. We can cite many examples of key services that we are delivering or very localised services that we are delivering in our region. We are talking about sharing services here and sharing resources, but there is more to it as far as the CPB is concerned. We are talking about shifting resources to our preventative activity. That is one of the most significant and key areas. Is that happening effectively? Yes, I am happy to respond to that. What we do not have is aligned budgets or integrated budgets as far as community partnerships are concerned. That is probably a bit of a red herring because the community planning partnership is a voluntary enterprise. It relies on leadership and that was touched upon in the Audit Commission's evidence to you that leadership has gone wrong in certain parts of Scotland and there was a suggestion that, in one particular area, the leadership of the community planning partnership was not functioning well because of the lack of leadership or the lack of good relationship between local authority and health board. In terms of leadership, I think that we have got that right in the Borders and that is reflected through the organisation. That has been helped by the work that we have had to do over the last 12 months or more to set up a shadow health and social care integration board moving towards the creation of the real board as from April. That has brought together local authority and NHS. It has led to a better understanding of the issues that we both face. It has led to a better understanding of the respective roles of non-executive members of health boards and local authority elected members and the different accountabilities. I think that there is a better understanding. I think that community planning partnerships will make progress very much on the basis of consensus and leadership without necessarily having to identify and allocate budgets to the partnership. I think that we need to know what the partners are spending and how, perhaps over time, those expenditures can be aligned to specific strategic objectives of the partnership. However, I would find it very difficult because of the different accountabilities and governance of the partners. It would be extremely difficult to get into the position of having budgets that are integrated or terribly closely aligned and any control by… I am astonished to hear you say that, because the whole thrust of CPPs is so that we can align key budgets. I was a little alarmed when you were talking about membership being voluntary, and perhaps you can expand on that a little. It is not the way that I would read CPPs. The CPP is a non-statutory body. The partners participate and under the community empowerment bill there will be a duty on partners to participate. I am not aware that there is a further duty to go down the route of integrated budgets as there is… In regard to the CPPs, is voluntary to join or not join? Oh, no. I think that we, as partners, know that we need to be part of. However, it is about being part of the partnership because you want to be. I know that we are aware that we need to be, but it is because we recognise that we have an important part to play as a health board in the objectives of the community planning partnership. Mr Rennart, is a key part of the CPP? Just in terms that can be focused on in the report and the content support, and obviously we can elaborate on some of the points around that. Just one final question, please. A key part of the CPPs is to align budgets. We are all heading in the same direction. You seem to be indicating that it is not possible. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that. I think that it is possible for and practical for the partners to be transparent about their budgets. When there is still the opportunity to make a difference to the allocation of money within budgets, that exposure should be there at the community planning partnership so that influence can be brought to bear for budgets to be concentrated on priority areas. Just bear in mind that we live in, as we all know, financially constrained times. Local authorities, health boards and other partners have their own mainstream services to deliver. We have our heat targets, as you are familiar with, to deliver. Our concentration has got to be on delivering health improvement, efficiency, access to treatment and quality and safe to patients. That is not to say that there is conflict with those targets and what the CPP is seeking to do, because the first of those targets under the heat regime is health improvement. That very much aligns to the work of the CPP. What we spend on health improvement measures and on inequalities, addressing inequalities, is very much aligned to where we want to be as a community planning partnership. I was on the committee, along with several colleagues, when we had the 10-year report, so, given that the legislation was passed in community planning in 2003, we had an auditor general report in 2013. That report was very disappointing and, convener, I will be very brief, if I may. CPPs are not able to show that they have had significant impact in delivering improved outcomes. CPPs are not clear about the key priorities for improvement and, as a result, no consequences for not participating fully. As a member of the committee, we have a duty to look at the public pound and how it is spent. I was quite excited to see the 2014 update on the 2013 report card, which was very poor. If I may say, I was a bit more than disappointed. Little evidence that CPP boards are demonstrating any leadership, many CPPs are not clear about what they are expected to achieve. CPPs do not yet know what a strategic approach to prevention will look like, no coherent national framework and, finally, Scottish Government guidance is not clear enough about the role that CPPs should play. I am aware of all the changes in Aberdeen in the past year, but the fact is that we have a 10-year report and we now have a one-year update on the 10-year report, so we are not just looking at what happened in the past year. We are looking at your report card for the past now 12 years. To be honest, it is not good. For one, I think that I used the word, it is very frustrated at the lack of progress in the last evidence session that we had with the Auditor General. I am actually just as disappointed to hear from you today about what you are going to do going forward. There are plenty of excuses here, and even Douglas Sinclair, I asked him if the leadership needs to come from national government, and he said yes. Why is not this happening? There is no doubt about the benefits to—I am not concerned about people working in silos—the benefits to the service user and the NHS patient, etc. They do not want to be buffeted around from one organisation to another. Why are we still struggling to get public services in Scotland to work together for the benefit of the public pound and the benefit of public services here? Why do we have such a disappointing report? You are quite right that, when you look at the report, since it started in 2003, it is disappointing what we see on paper. The difficulty is that we concentrate a lot on the financial aspect, in my opinion. It seems to me that the focus is on if we had a joint budget, then everything would be okay. What is clear from the report that we have got is that it is the buy-in from the leadership of the various organisations that will move the process forward, not a pot of money sitting in the middle. I think that we have seen it with things like I was being involved with the early years collaborative, and that is a similar approach. We can all see the benefits of early intervention, but it is getting the commitment and buy-in from people to provide not just the financial aspects involved, but the capacity, i.e., in staff and resources in order to push those things forward. I have seen that myself from being part of the early years champion in Aberdeen, the frustrations that staff have on the ground that perhaps they do not feel that they have got that support and buy-in from leadership. We all have to take responsibility for that. I cannot obviously speak for borders, because the reason that you have the two of us here today is, obviously, because one is coterminous with NHS and Aberdeen is not. Susan O might want to come in, but I think that that has caused NHS difficulties in the respect of trying to service three different community planning partnerships and the involvement and buy-in of staff in relation to that. What I would say is that because we concentrate a lot on the financial aspects, we maybe do not sell ourselves enough when we come out to say the good practice that we have going on. We have obviously heard about our community safety hub, and although it sounds like we are dealing with issues of antisocial behaviour, I actually think that there is a lot of preventative work going in there by the co-operation that we have from staff who sit round the table in relation to that. From both our council perspective, police, fire, we have NHS, social services are there, and we are picking up very early on families who are perhaps in difficulties and things from those discussions where we can work with them going forward. I think that there are a lot of preventative aspects going on both within our community planning partnership and, I am sure, across the country. The other thing is that it is about the outcomes and how we measure those. We are data rich, to be honest. All the organisations are collecting lots of data, but it is about joining that data up. It is about sharing that data to make sure that we can improve the outcomes for people going forward. I do not think that we have done that very well. In the past, that is the reason that we are obviously looking to make improvements around that. That is why we have brought analysts from our various different partnerships who are sitting round the table to try to make sure that that is better as we move forward. I think that we have got work to do. I cannot speak for what has gone before or before I was part of it, but what I am saying is that the people that I think we have sitting round the table in Aberdeen now have a commitment to make improvements and improve the outcomes for people in our community. It is also about getting community buy-in as well. When I see what has gone before, that has maybe been lacking. We have tried to do that more in Aberdeen. We have our fairer Aberdeen board, which used to be fairer Scotland board, where we have community partners who are people from our most deprived communities sitting round the table and deciding where that money goes to. We are also very keen to get involved in the participatory budgetary schemes that are on the go. We have obviously put forward our people for training in relation to that. I think that we have a commitment going forward. If you ask me, has progress been quick enough? Probably not for our communities, but we need to deal with where we are now and how we move forward with that. I also think about the integration agenda that has helped our cohesion with our NHS partners, because we have set up a, well, we are now into the shadow board, but we had a TLG before that. We have appointed a joint accountable officer, which I think helps to bring the two organisations together. I think that that will align budgets, as we have spoken about earlier, because at the end of the day we cannot carry on doing the same as we have done before, especially in healthcare, because just the ageing population that we have, the budgets would be a third more than we would expect them to be at the moment. So we have to be looking at that preventative aspect as we move forward, and that is what we need to do when we get round the table. Susan Webber, do you want to come in on some of the points that... Sorry, can I just say that the issues raised by the auditor general in the summary, I actually gave you five, I tried to keep it as brief as possible, but we have got to analyse this and to see how we take it forward. I wonder if you could address some of them. Is it national leadership? Do you know what is expected of you? There are lots of criticisms here. It would be helpful if you could tell us how you are moving forward or what you think of the report, what needs to be done. Can you briefly come back in on that point and try to be succinct, as you can in the number 11? In my opinion, I do not think that it is national government that needs to come in, because I think that the whole point of community planning is that it is about locality, it is about finding solutions and outcomes for the people living within communities that will vary across Scotland. I think that the leadership needs to come from within the community planning partnership. I do believe that we have a clear vision in Aberdeen now. I think that we are working towards that, but we need to refresh our single outcome agreement, because I do not think that it is not indicative of the outcomes that we need. It is about demand led rather than outcome led, in my opinion. Are you supposed to tie in with national priorities as well? Yes, I accept that. I thought that your point was about should the leadership be coming from the national level, and I do not think so. I think that it should be done at a local level. I am new to community planning within Aberdeen City as of this year. Having read all the audit reports, it was helpful for me to get an overview of where we are doing well but also where we can improve. From an NHS perspective, we are very committed to community planning. I think that the integrated joint boards have helped us because we have got local managers, board members involved, but we, through the NHS board, are able to pull across three community planning partners. We have supported, in terms of the data that I agree with Councillor Lain, the joint strategic needs assessment. All three of our partners have pulled their intelligence resources together to undertake the joint strategic needs assessments. We are pulling our resources around evidence reviews to ensure that we are focusing our resources on things that will make the biggest difference and that we are committed to evaluation across the region so that we can learn from different approaches. We have touched on budget. We have a number of examples where, although we have not had universal shared budgets, we have a number of budgets that have been put on the table for community planning partners with communities to agree the best means of dispersal. We are able to identify some clear outcomes as a result of that investment. I guess that one of the challenges that I find is that I am also aware of a number of examples of good practice. However, when you speak to individuals on the ground, they may not necessarily badge those as community planning. That is just people working together. That is clearly, as we move forward, being clear of our priorities, the actions that are being taken and that we are able then to demonstrate that they are as a result of community planning as opposed to partners just working together. In the summary of page 4 paragraph 3, many CPPs are still not clear about what they are expected to achieve. That was two months ago. How can you measure outcomes and achievements when you do not know what you are expected to achieve? The issue is that each of the individual partners is very clear about what we have to achieve. I think that the process that we have outlined in the city is about trying to work through the multiplicity of approaches to agree the key things that, as partners, if we work together, we will achieve more. From that, I guess that I am talking moving forward. As I have only recently joined community planning, it is our intention to identify how we will measure so that, a year from now, if we are called back to this committee, we will be able to demonstrate the differences that we have been able to make. Before I bring in the superintendent, can I just briefly comment on that same question? I am very happy to comment on that question. I think that, in 2013, after the audit report that took place, we sat down as a community planning partnership and said that we have to deliver the SOE and other issues of that nature, but what is important to us locally? We set as a community planning partnership key priorities that we intend to deliver locally. There are four of those that we are concentrating on. A lot of our work now is about delivering on those four priorities and making sure that the partners are looking at that. We are also developing a performance framework so that we can look at those priorities and then measure ourselves against that. We have already taken a pilot of that framework to our community planning partnership in September last year. Very much, as Jenny was saying earlier, we have decided to tackle the problem locally. We have decided to focus locally. If we are going to get changed and make the CPP work, then it has to be driven by a local commitment. I would want to be very clear. I think that there are absolutely good examples out there of joint working that has come about as a result of the CPP. We have a number of joint services and a number of examples where we are working with the partners very effectively to deliver. It was to be brief. It was just to go back to both points. I suppose that you have been around the bloc in community safety and community planning more times than I care to remember. I share some of those frustrations. I think that it is rather subjective at times through leadership people who are bought in who are not round the table. I suppose that you ask, can national do more? Yes, I think that the share in the best practice is probably getting that out to the 32 local authorities and we are all receptive to hear that, the sharing of what is the experiences that are working in the borders and can we transfer them up to Aberdeen etc etc. I think that there is more that can be done there. I think that going back to the Aberdeen example when I better place than we have ever been and I say that when I have been involved in this for about 10 years now. I think again being subjective I have got a chief executive in place that, like me and like the others here, believes passionately in community planning. We have got a structure but it is down to leadership to breathe life into it and give that scrutiny and all that is expected and the questions that were rightly asked. The proof will be in the pudding as we work through that. Certainly, early indications are that we now have a structure. As Jenny rightly says, we are refreshing our single outcome agreement. It will be far more focused. The qualitative will correlate with the quantitative and we will work through that but there are still challenges out there. I accept the points that were made. I think that it is important that we stress that we see these challenges day in, day out. Thank you, Tabish Scott. Audit Scotland has expressed some concern about priorities. I wanted to start by asking both Jenny Lang and David Parker as the chairs of their respective community planning partnerships what is the main public sector challenge that you face right now either in Grampian or in the Borders. Who wants to come in first, Jenny Lang? I think that probably in Aberdeen it is a financial aspect to be frank with you. We are the lowest funded council. You have heard us say that on a number of occasions. NHSs are in a similar position. It is difficult because we have competing priorities but that should be making us work harder, in my opinion, because we need to make sure that the finances that we have go as far as possible. If that means partnership working, then it can achieve more for the money that we have, then that is the line that we should be going down. I think that that is what we do at the heart of what we are doing both in the council and other public sector organisations and also the voluntary sector as well because we have not spoken about that yet. We have representatives from other areas but the voluntary sector is very important in Aberdeen. It is a committed partner within our community planning partnership. We need to be working closely to ensure that we are delivering for our communities and closing the gap, which is the equality gap within Aberdeen because we have areas of great wealth but also areas of great poverty. That is difficult and challenging for us when we are moving forward. Can I just tease that out? I totally accept that as your analysis of your biggest challenge. Is it therefore the community planning partnership in Grampian's number one objective? Do you all come together to discuss how to tackle that problem that you have identified, presumably right across all the agencies, as the most significant challenge that you face? Is the community planning partnership, in other words, the forum by which you take action on that, collectively? I think that that is where we have all the partners around the table. We obviously have partnership working. I have mentioned the integration with NHS but that is where we are working with one or two partners. Whereas the community planning I see, we have all partners around the table and that is where I think we can evolve and actually produce the plans which we can all be working in order to make the differences within our local communities. I apologise to David Parker. I wanted to contrast the assessment of finance being the underpinning problem that you face in the Grampian area across the agencies with, at the moment, national priority, which is integrating health and social care. Which is number one? Do you, for your community planning partnership? I think that they go hand in hand to be perfectly frank. One thing that we have not mentioned is the health village that we have in Aberdeen. I think that it touches on the preventative aspect. It shows where we have worked very well with NHS to produce a facility within the centre of town, which is offering not just diagnostic services but preventative services where people can come in and there is health and social care advice and things within that. I think that it is about us being smarter with the resource that we have, whether that be the capacity through staffing or in actual fact buildings that we have to co-locate services and get economies of scale in that respect, as well as how we utilise our budgets to the best degree. However, it is about preventative spend, in my opinion, in early intervention. Does that mean that national policy around integrating health and social care is on the agenda for your community planning partnership on the regular cycle of meetings in terms of how that is going and how that is progressing? Yes, we have that both at the board level and at the management group level as well. We had a meeting just this week where we were obviously looking at the draft integration scheme that we are currently consulting on. Because of all that Scotland's worries about all this, do you find that model as pushing partners very hard on whether they are delivering on something that is, after all, a key objective of government? Yes, I think that it has helped to bring us the cohesion there and bring us together as a partnership. Thank you very much. I wonder if I can ask David. I am very similar. I think that every local government leader would tell you that the financial challenges and the financial climate at the moment is driving all of our thinking and it is the thing that we concentrate heavily on. In terms of the CPP, one of our key priorities is reducing inequalities and trying to get preventative spend. We are doing a lot of work with the partners now where we have done a huge audit of mapping out all the equality issues that we have in the borders, looking at all the services that we provide and trying to target our resource to the families and communities who we are all working with. That is involved in a huge sharing of data and a huge amount of work. In terms of health and social care integration, it is a very significant priority. It is not one that I would say is a challenge. We have a very good relationship with NHS borders and the partners in social care and health. That is coming together very well. The big issue with all of these issues is that change takes a very long time. The one thing that I have learned in all the years that I have done this job is that change can take quite some time. Actually, the challenge of getting joined up services and working together just takes a while to deliver. It is almost trying to keep pace of all the changes that we are needing to make to deal with the financial issues that we have at the moment. That in itself is as much a challenge as anything. Do you find that where Government decides to introduce a policy like integrating health and social care, David Parker, that that then goes to the top of the list, as opposed to local priorities, where you may have decided in conjunction with your health board colleagues in the borders that you were going to do X, Y and Z? It absolutely can. I mean, there is no question that national policies from Government can mean that we have to shift resources. Social care and health is a great example where a significant amount of work has been done in that area. We have been waiting for the legislation to move on. We have been waiting for guidance to be given on different aspects of things. Certainly, that can have an impact on what we all do. There is only so many hours in the day at the end of the day. NHS, housing and social care, whatever, you have still got your co-services to deliver, plus all the local priorities that our community planning partnership might agree and what Government is seeking to try to deliver. There is only so many people in so many hours in the day. Can I just do the final question? Are we asking you to do too many things? I have always felt that we have an awful lot of legislation in this country, and that legislation comes along quite quickly. Certainly, there are times when some breathing space in the agenda would be appreciated. Thank you very much for that, Canada. David Torrance. I will come back in later. Thank you, convener. Good morning, everybody. Can you tell me how much engagement community planning partnerships I have had with local communities and local stakeholders to ensure that they are delivering for local needs? Mr Wain, you are indicating that you want to come in there, so you might want to… I am very much coming in on that. You can maybe capture both points at the same time then. Okay. If I can revert to the earlier question, which was what are the pressures that we face? In the NHS, of course, it is funding. It is also in the borders demographics, older age population, high demands on the health service, and that pushes us to obviously look at redesigning services using our money in better ways. But the whole issue about the benefit that community planning partnerships can bring is the way in which we can actually use resources, maybe in relatively small ways, to better effect. If I can give you one small example, which is on the table at the moment, and is now likely to be funded by small amounts of money from health, from police, from the council, and that is the issue of dealing or looking at how we might be more cost effective in the way that we deal with problem families, problem families in the sense of the very few families that exist who create a lot of demand on the public service, not just health, police, resource, education, care, maternity issues, education and so on. We have a project now, which is under the community planning partnership, to identify those particular families very much in conjunction with the police. It is really a case of saying, let's stop and consider what is going in to support these families and to reduce the impact on the public purse. Let's see if we can do this in a better way. Let's see if we can co-ordinate the amount of effort that goes in. Let's see if we can improve the lives of those family members. These are clearly going to be a very tailored project. It will focus on one individual family, a large family, overcrowded housing, all the kind of social issues that you would expect in that environment, and the relatively small amounts of money that are needed from all of the partnership bodies to contribute to provide a co-ordinated resource, a social work co-ordination. Personally, I think that's money well spent in a small way that is using our resources in a more effective way. It depends on the outcome, of course, and once this project is under way it's going to have to be measured to see what it delivers, but it's a small imaginative scheme. It's not unique. It happens in one other area in Scotland and it happens in England, but that's a way of using our collective strength and skills and experience and professionalism and resource, bringing that to bear on a particular circumstance and being more creative in the way that we spend our money. I appreciate your point, but you also get the opportunity to respond to David's question. David Parker will talk about community councils and area forums. There are area forums now established across the borders. I've given a commitment that the NHS will be part of those forums. Non-executive board members will attend those forum meetings, so we have that dialogue. In a way, communication starts at the top. We've recently initiated a process where the NHS will come and present on some of the issues that face us to the full council. We were in the council chamber a few weeks ago, a medical director and myself, speaking to the whole council about our current issues, about our need to redesign our clinical services, and this is engagement at that level. We've done that before with the clear benefit of improving dialogue and with the consent of the council, because it has a busy full council meeting agenda. That kind of communication at the top needs to be reflected down across the communities of the boarders. Don't underestimate the difficulties. I want to ask both councillor to respond to that and perhaps councillor Lane. We have had engagement with some communities around the community planning partnership table, so one of our priorities in relation to inequalities in some of those communities, such as Langley in Galashales or Burnford and Hoyke, where a significant amount of work is going on to tackling inequalities. The community planning partnership has been very active in those communities and it is delivering joint work. In relation to the wider boarders public, I suspect that there hasn't been that degree of engagement that maybe people would seek. We are currently developing, as part of our area forum network, a new approach where we are going to have local community planning plans that will link to our community planning partnership. That is very much at the beginning of its development just now, and it will be rolled out later on in the year across the five area forum areas in the Scottish Borders. Again, we've got various things. I'll maybe start with an initiative that was obviously at Aberdeen City Council in relation to our budgetary issues. We have priority-based budgeting, and we've had that for the past five years. We undertook a great deal of engagement with not just local communities but key stakeholders around that and the issues in shaping that budget up. Based on that, we've obviously got other things. The city voice is a panel that we use three times a year. We go out to them with questions on various aspects in relation to community planning. We've got the civic forum, which is a member of our community planning partnership that represents community councils and other community groups operating there. We support them in the work that they do. Regeneration Matters is a group of community representatives that we have from our regeneration areas. We obviously engage with them on various aspects. As far as community engagement goes, we have various means in which we are doing that, and we would want to build on that and continue to use that as we go forward. Thank you. My question will be focused on the Audit Scotland report, but the panellists will be aware of the Local Government and Regeneration Committee that they have undertaken a tremendous amount of work on the public services reform, and they produced a report in June 2012. Some of the questions that I will pose can emanate from that particular report, but my questions will be focused on the Audit Scotland report. On paragraph 25 of the report, it talks about the issue of the partners need to create a more effective leadership challenge as a scrutiny role in CPP boards. It goes on to say that support is required for CPPs to develop the skills and culture that are needed to create effective challenge within CPP boards. What support do you think is required to assist with that recommendation? Does anybody want to direct that to the panel? Is anyone in the panel who wants to specifically respond to that? In which community planning partnership works, we decide what our priorities are. We have various different groups underneath that of officers across all the organisations who are delivering on those priorities and doing the day-to-day work. They report back to the CPP board, giving progress on the work that is being undertaken and what we have asked them to do. We monitor that and the board challenges that when it is appropriate. We have very good working relationships. The partner organisations are very clear about delivering the priorities that we have set and what needs to be done. Certainly, since 2013, very good progress is being made on them. The board will ask questions about priorities and bits of work that are not going to timescale, but I do not recognise the issue around the difficulty with the board scrutinising the work of the CPP. They very much do that. They are very interested in it. Certainly, we have been very careful to try to develop the new performance framework where we have very clear indicators of how we are delivering against our priorities. That is something that the board certainly wanted to do. Anyone else to the panel? Can I elaborate on that a little? The Scottish Enterprise is involved in 27 of the community planning partnerships across Lowland Scotland. We have 18 of our most senior staff involved there. I personally am involved with four. That might sound rather strange to say, but I do not know that much about health and social care because it is not my background.  For example, quite a lot of the conversation around borders community planning partnership is around the issues about health and social care in relation to demographics and increasing demand on public services. In that environment, I have found myself in the situation where I have asked the question about what are the opportunities for the local community in relation to that ageing population, what are the opportunities for businesses to provide services to the local community or what are the opportunities for the area as a whole in terms of people coming to choose and retire in the borders? Similarly, in Dumfries and Galloway, there are similar conversations, but an example that I would give you is that, as you probably know, there is a new hospital about to be built in Dumfries. The community planning board has obviously been involved in the conversations around that. You probably also know that the contract has been let to Langer Rock and they are going to use a completely innovative construction methodology, which involves off-site construction. The knock-on from that is that the local construction industry skills are not appropriate for that construction technology. The community planning board there has had a conversation between NHS and the council and the college, which has resulted in Dumfries and Galloway, developing new courses that are about technician skills for people to be able to take on employment within that construction project. That would not have come about, I do not believe, if that had not been discussed at community planning. It came out of the blue to be entirely honest, but it is an important aspect to community planning, which is all about the conversations that happen around people looking at things from a non-conventional angle. Anyone else? In terms of Aberdein, the experience is very similar to the boarders. Particularly in the last year, I have seen a real step change in terms of the leadership within the community planning Aberdein. That scrutiny is reflected in the minutes, so there is an evidence base there as well. You can see that we are almost turning the corner in many respects and we are making the challenge across the partners. I think that there is some foundation being built around collaborating for outcomes. That is local courses up there for all our leaders and potential leaders coming through. To engender that trust and build on it and nurture it across the partners for once we are coming on the table and learning together on these strategic issues and the shared priorities that matter to the local communities. It is stuff around about the training, the strategic and the tactical, the middle management level. It has really been quite interesting, because you are starting to see the fruit of your labors as people come through now. The trust has been built and it seems not quite a seamless transition at times, but focus has come around the table. Speaking as one, it is part of that team Aberdein ethos sitting under the 2022 vision. A lot of that is just management words, but we are starting to see it as a play through with some of the stuff that we are now doing around about the single outcome agreement. Some of the initiatives, very good initiatives, we are doing in terms of getting upstream and trying to play out Christy with the preventative spend around the community safety. We speak about the hub, the work that we are doing in Tory, and about domestic abuse. All the partners are rallying to the cause. I have not necessarily seen that enthusiasm and vigor two or three years back. It is certainly going in the right direction, but it is that training underpinning the right people now in community planning Aberdein to take us on that course. The report highlights the issue of data and the better use of data. I accept that the different organisations will have their own systems that they operate with, so there may well be challenges, but has there been any work being looked at or examined to try to utilise the data that each of the organisations actually has to actually better use that? Are there any technical solutions, any piece of software that has been considered to be introduced that could utilise the data better? Susan Webb? I can maybe kick off. Again, it is to someone that is relatively new to this. I guess that there are a number of actions that we have undertaken. We have got a memorandum of understanding that allows us to share data in the first place. We are trying to set out what we call a tiered intelligence approach, where we make sure that our front-line staff have the information that they need to manage their services on a day-to-day basis. We are also reducing the amount of data that we look at to ensure that we focus on the absolute indicators that will give us a sense of whether we are moving towards our strategic outcomes. In terms of what we can do to facilitate data sharing, we are working with some national bodies to enable us to do that. We are currently in discussion about what we need to put in place so that we can link data where it is appropriate to link data. We are also working with our local university colleagues utilising safe havens to enable us to do surveillance and link a number of big data sets across a number of partners. We have some examples at a local level, particularly in the community safety agenda, where pulling data together has enabled us to shape up some of our domestic violence projects so that it is a much more partnership approach because it is pulling the intelligence that has given us a better insight into what we need to tackle. Data sharing is, of course, so important. We all hold data as NHS, as local authorities, and there is a lot of sharing of data across the community planning partners. The public health function, by the way, we have a joint director of public health, joint between health and local authority, but public health has been working very closely with the community planning partners to develop a local reducing inequality strategy. The partnership has been able to use data from a whole range of sources across the partners, plus national surveys, local surveys, trying to understand the characteristics of inequalities in the borders as they relate to health and wellbeing, and also the other key strategic aims of the partnership around economic education, community safety and so on. There is a lot of data sharing that has gone into the production or the development of the reducing inequalities strategy. The partnership now needs to consider, or the joint delivery team now needs to consider, how all this shared data on inequalities can be best used to inform the delivery of services and working closely with local communities, but that is a very good example of using data to produce a strategy particularly around health inequalities. Now we need to move to the next step, having got the data to how we move forward to deliver our objectives. Just a brief contribution from Mr Watson, then I have one final question from Strachan. We'll be brief again. If we're to be informed, we need the data and I have to say I'm no technocrat, but I have a chief executive in Aberdeen City Council that has far more knowledge. She's really keen to extract all the data from all the organisations and she has all that software, hardware, names that I can only dream of, I suppose, but she has an idea of where we need to get to. The challenge of main frustration over the years has been that we as an organisation, Police Scotland and before that, Grampian Police, we're pretty keen to share data. Some of that is very sensitive and other partners have come around and rallied to the cause, but there are still one or two notably that still find it a challenge and there are cultural and leadership issues there that we still need to work through in certain areas. If I'm to be honest about that, but we have data sets now that we didn't have a few years ago and, of course, that helps us in former strategic assessment, which gives us an objective view on what our priorities are for the city, but there's more that could be done round the edges to give that richer picture. Okay, thank you. I was touched upon earlier regarding the issue of sharing of best practice between the CPPs. In recent times, COSLA produced the benchmarking tool, which I warmly welcome, and I know that that certainly will help going forward. Do you think that a similar tool would be useful for CPPs or do you think that the utilisation of the benchmarking tool itself will assist the CPPs going forward? I think that the benchmarking data is very helpful and the benchmarking work that has been done is useful, but I would always say that the sharing of best practice and whatever fuel you're in is very welcome. Any advice that Audit Scotland has or anyone has to give us in relation to best practice in CPPs across the country is very useful. It's something that we all learn from and we all look to replicate, so that would be very welcome. Mary Scanlon referred to the report card that we've had over time, and this latest report card continues to show that we're not making the progress in community planning that we would like to be making. I suppose that the first question I would ask would be for some insight from the panel on what are the examples of that lack of progress? Quite understandably, and I know the reasons why, but people have given examples of what is not as bad as all that. Here is a good example, chief superintendent Watson referred to the community hub. Mr McKinnon gave an interesting example of some of the innovative things that he did. What are the actual, in your views, from your own experience of being involved in community planning? What are the practical consequences? I think that we probably understand the practical consequences, but what are the factors that lead to us not being able to achieve things? What kind of specific examples are those? Otherwise, I can't square that we keep getting these reports from the auditor general saying that those boards are not performing as well as they should. They don't have a clean enough sense of what they should be doing. The overall report card, as Mary Scanlon says, certainly isn't improving anywhere near fast enough, but the people in the leadership positions and the boards are just on the community plan partnerships that are pointing to the good examples, which undoubtedly exist, but they should exist. Is anyone willing to share where it does go wrong? Can I just give a general overview from my perspective over the years? It has to be day business, but this is not a bolt-on. I still believe that I want a strategic level feel. This has to reflect on our respective organisations, business plans, all our priorities, day in, day out. That has got to be felt by staff in a very positive sense, because that's what the organisations across the public sector, third sector and business sector Scotland are about, encouraging and empowering. I'm not necessarily sure that's felt to that level yet, and it is seen as that additional work. I think it's getting better. I think we're maturing in many aspects, but until you reach that, what it's reflected in, for instance, in my organisation through the Aberdeen city policing plan, which it is, and it's tangible and it's there and people are striving day in and day out and, dare I say, being appraised on it, here's the city vision, here's the single outcome agreement and here's where you fit, Bobby, on the streets in Aberdeen city. Until they actually feel that, I don't think we'll make the ground that you're looking for, when in fact we're all looking for. I would agree with that. I think one of the big issues is genuinely having capacity within all the different organisations to deliver everything they have to do. There's the core functions that we all have to deliver, and then there's new government priorities and our own priorities and all the different strands of work that we're working on at any one time, and capacity is an issue. So I think sometimes progress is slower than we would like, because we just don't have the capacity to do everything that is being asked of us across all the different things that we're delivering. I thank Douglas Sinclair to the committee that we need to get out of the mindset that community planning is the Saturday job. I don't see it as that obviously, and I don't think that's the way it operates in borders. But as David Parker says, there are so many day-to-day pressures that we have to deliver on our key mainstream targets for mainstream services. But we're not going to change that overnight. I think up to now there's been an overreliance on the local authority, and I think in health we have certainly in my area tended to rely on the council to provide the administrative structure, the organisation, keep the machinery going, perhaps to an unfair extent. I would look hopefully to the community empowerment bill to perhaps shift that axis somewhat, because it will give statutory authorities who, all the partners, to contribute to community planning. Whilst the council will always have that pivotal role, we've got to be very careful that the other partners don't see it as solely the council's job to do. Mr MacKinnon? It's just an observation. I mentioned earlier that Scottish Enterprise is involved in 27 community planning partnerships. When I talk to my colleagues about their experience in community planning partnerships, a common theme pops out. That theme is about the common thread that runs through each of those partnerships where things are working well, and it's not about the structures, it's not about the governance of the partnership, it's not about the SOA, it's not about the bureaucracy of community planning, and there is quite a bit of that. The common thread that pops out is where the partners in that area have reached a common understanding of a particular issue, and you've got to bear in mind that many of them come from completely different perspectives. When they have reached a common understanding of that particular issue, they then coalesce around a series of actions that relate to that issue. That doesn't necessarily mean, as I mentioned earlier, joint budgets or joint activities. It's aligned resources, so partner A does this bit, partner B does that bit, but it's all part of a greater whole in relation to the particular thing that's being done. There are many successes across Scotland, some of them big, some of them small, but that's what my colleagues tell me. Quite interesting. I wonder if I could get the other members of the panel to reflect on it, because, I mean, I have to be honest with you. People on the panel here are all in leadership positions in the library of our public services, and the people in your own communities and among community will look to people like yourselves as being the key decision makers, and the people who are ultimately responsible to greater and lesser extents accountable for these decisions, and it doesn't, you know, if people come to me and say, oh well, you know, my elderly relative is, you know, is delayed getting out of hospital, or I'm having difficulty dealing with an issue of anti-social behaviour, because the council keeps telling me to speak to the police, and the police keep telling me to speak to the housing provider, and you know, those are all the examples of community planning failing, and if I respond to them and say, well, you see, the problem is there's, you know, there's not buying at appropriate levels of leadership in the public services, or there's not significant enthusiasm for collective working at the strategic level. They're not going to be very satisfied with those answers, and it goes back to Mary Scanlon's point about, you know, this is not a new process. I can understand, you know, that these things take time, and we would seek to get better over time, but after 10 years, to be responding and just saying it's about culture, it's about whether or not the individuals in the room pattern to get on, or whether or not they have a similar and shared understanding of the challenges that they face in local communities, is that really good enough? Yep, it's from Dennett. You asked the challenges, you know, and I gave you that example, and that's still my experience to an extent, but I think we have, you know, we've moved considerably from where we've been over that 10, 12 years. And, you know, you speak about the example, and if I may throw it back, the antisocial behaviour of councils being to police, police speaking to council, that was my experience in Aberdein. I daresay it was replicated across the 32 local authorities that we were working in silos, but you give me the opportunity to go back and speak about a living, breathing example of where community planning has worked in Aberdein, and that is the community safety hub, where on that day-to-day basis, that council and that police employee, the third sector, the fire health, will sit round a table and have a daily meeting, effectively playing through all the community safety issues that the folk are phoning in about or complaining about over the past 24 hours and looking forward somewhat, you know, into the future. And we're seeing that now as a tangible, successful story of community planning, where all the trusts and the commitment given by the partners through resource, not any financial outlay as such, the only financial outlay aside from the resource is the computers and the place itself, and that's been kindly given by Aberdein City Council. So it's modest, you know, but we've had to come round the table, and that's been nurtured through community planning, down through community safety, the governance has been given. In day-to-day, we've seen significant reductions, you know, just not in terms of figures, but certainly quality feedback in terms of safety across the city that should make us all rather enthused and proud with what we have. And I suppose the sly frustration from you is to see how that plays out nationally and can we share that experience? And look elsewhere to take other living, breathing, positive experiences back up to Aberdein. And I still see the landscape, you know, there's a duff, you know, in terms of the success stories, and I still think many of them are happening, but we're not perhaps sharing them. And naturally, we're quite reticent in North East to share all the positive experiences that we'll have, but there is much happening that we're very proud of locally in Aberdein. So it's not that a black picture is such. I give a generalisation, I still think at times there is a feeling that it is an add-on to the day job. And I was trying to give a signpost, I suppose, from my perspective, that we all need to come round the table and see this as day business. And if we're serious about it, and we all are, and we're very passionate, certainly I can speak for the city, that it needs to find its way into our individual organisations business plans, that we are as one. What are the priorities? The SOA is the priority for Police Scotland in Aberdein City. And how does that 2022 vision place through, right down to the bobbiness street? And do they understand what they're doing in terms of that collective effort to making the place a bit safer? Thank you very much, convener, and good morning, colleagues. I was a bit concerned when we started that this was going to be a very defensive session. I'm grateful that it in many ways hasn't been, because I think as I take stock of the notes that I've made here, I could write up a pretty good resume of what you need to do to get the planning partnership to work well, and that's now on the record. But I'd like to carry on just where Drew Smith was, because it wasn't quite said, and I don't want to put words into people's mouths, but it was very nearly said that there's a duty to be part of it, but there's no duty to do anything. And the counter to that has come from discussions about passionate leadership and recognising that it mustn't be part of the day job, which I think is absolutely fair. But I'm just wondering whether you could reflect, please, on the structural position that you are in. Reflect that people move on. Changes do happen, you know. Not so good leadership is hopefully moved out, but anyway, good leaders move on. So it can't be based around the people you're currently working with, because in a couple of years' time some of them will have gone. It can't be based on things on the back of a fact packet. You know, you and I agree we're going to do this and that. The structure has to be there, and I'd like to go right back to the absolute basic, which is, as I understand it, you have a facility to work, you have a desire to work, you are asked to work together. But actually, at the end of the day, if council leader or NHS leader or one or two other local police chief wants to get in the way, there's nothing really to force them to cooperate. Now, could I ask, first of all, is my analysis correct? And if I am right there, is there anything we should be doing here to ensure that these things do just simply get better and get embedded? And I'm stopped by individual people not playing ball. I think from what we've heard on the table today that your analysis is correct, that that has been a stumbling block, I would say, in the past. I think it's what Adrian mentioned earlier. I think it's about ownership within the different partner organisations as well, and I think it's about embedding that within our own strategic plans. And that's where we'll see the continuity, no matter who is in the leadership role. If it is embedded within that plan as you move forward, then obviously I would expect that to then be fulfilled by whoever comes into that role. I think that the other problem that we have, and it's around the data and whether we gather the information, but we live in a very immediate world now. We want to see results right away. People want to see that the actions that we're taking are having an effect, and we're always under pressure in order to satisfy people about how we are spending money and whether it's making a difference to people's lives. I think that we need that buy-in from people that, in this situation, a lot of the especially around the preventative spend that we're looking at, it will take some years in order to filter through before we see the full benefits of that. That's why I think that we need to have faith and it needs to be embedded within people's long-term strategic plans in order for us to continue on that journey and not just say, well, we haven't got the results in a year's time, so we're going to stop that. I think that we've seen it with some of the pilot funding and things because it's perhaps been on a yearly basis or something, that the results at the end of that don't substantiate, perhaps continuing, and it's difficult for the partners to then say, let's mainstream the finance in order to do that. I think that it's about us having faith but also people out there having a bit of patience around that so that we can actually bring forward and demonstrate that the changes that we have made have had a positive impact on communities. So, councillor, can we come back in that point and just elaborate on it slightly, though, because I think it was a very focused question on personalities, obviously the process is working because of the people who are involved in that. I think—I mean, can you focus on the question that Nigel Don asked, which was, if personality move on, does the process continue? Well, I think if it's embedded properly within your strategic plans and it feeds in from community planning and then into the plans of the individual partnership organisations, then I think it should continue because people should continue with those long-term plans. I think we've seen it within the council itself. I mentioned earlier about our priority-based budgeting and we've seen a change in the political complexion of the council, but that budgeting process continues because there was buy-in at an early stage around that. I mean, obviously, in our community planning partnership, we have all political persuasion sitting around the table, which I think helps us as we go forward because we are the ones that change most because we're elected obviously going from year to year. But I think if it is within the strategic plans of organisations, there is a better chance of that continuing while the personalities may change. Can I just come back on that? Yes, there is a better chance. I take it up to thank you for the answer. I don't want to see a better chance. Our job as MSPs is to set up a structure that is going to work. I accept that, but what I'm saying to you is that we'll carry out programmes, we'll have preventative spending of things, we then have to look at the outcomes of that, whether they've achieved what we wanted them to achieve. Now, it may be that when we look at it that perhaps different decisions would have given us better outcomes and people will always have to have that flexibility to change that. Forgive me for interrupting you. I entirely recognise that you will do your level best and sometimes it won't work. That's not one worries me. What does concern me is that there's a parliamentary level within national legislation that we should set up structures which are not going to rise or fall or the effectiveness is not going to be significantly determined by the individual who's actually in a place, be it a council leader or a NHS chief executive or whatever. I come back to my basic thesis that at the moment and I'll repeat it, there's a duty to be involved but there's not a duty actually to do anything. Should we change legislation in such a way, and I don't know quite what, don't quote me on the words, I don't know quite what we should do, but should we set up a structure in legislation that requires organisations actually to achieve something through this? I think that our experience in the Scottish Borders is that we have never had any difficulty bringing the partners around the table and we've never had any deliberate obstruction or anybody saying I don't want to play or do this. We've never had that. We've had organisations who maybe take longer to do a piece of work than we would like because of capacity issues, but we've never had any difficulty bringing the partnership together and having a good relationship. We've always had quite a lot of self-evaluation built-in, so we're keen to be a pathfinder authority and go and be audited for the 2013 report. We evaluate ourselves on a regular basis. We're currently doing an evaluation at the moment and asking ourselves is the current structure working, is the current leadership right, is there anything we should change and that will come back to our partnership later on this year and we will probably make changes, but certainly we have always had very good engagement around the table and I've never come across obstruction at all from any of the partners that have been there. We've also had a very stable environment in the Scottish Borders. We've fortunately, for whatever reason, we haven't had the political changes that some authorities go through. I've been with the council for 12 years, so we've had a stable environment in that period of time and a stable environment in our partners. Actually, that kind of collaboration in working together and coming together has worked very well and I've never found a partner who said, you know, I don't want to be here. Savrine, and then one final question from Nigel Doe. I think the point that's made is a very good one. It's about future proofing, the performance of community planning partnerships. Whilst David and I will tell you how good things are in the borders, and that relies upon leadership and others across the partnership board who sit around the table, we won't be there forever and a day. Maybe we've got to look at better scrutiny arrangements. In health, we are held to account through our local delivery plan annually. There is a section now that requires us to report our performance and our contribution to community planning, but you may not see that as sufficient scrutiny or accountability. Maybe because of the nature of community planning partnerships, they are local and they should be allowed to determine their own local priorities and maybe that scrutiny is best coming from the locality. If we have other people sitting around the table from the community whose role is very much to hold to account and scrutinise, that might be one way of doing it. Another way of doing it might be through scrutiny committees in local government, but I do think that there is perhaps scope to think of some imaginative ways in which community planning delivery can and those delivering can be held to account for achieving what they set out to achieve. I think that the question stops there as far as I'm concerned. I've simply observed that we have two areas who clearly are able to defend what they're doing for better or worse, but I suspect and suggest that the Auditor General's report implies that there are other areas where this is not so good, but I can hardly expect those who are here at the moment to defend others who aren't. I think that some of my answers have been answered, but there are a few things that still sit with me a little bit in my looking at the recommendations on page 6 of what CPPs should do and the first couple of about strengthening the effectiveness of leadership challenge, scrutiny, etc. Some of it's been answered and streamlining the local working arrangements that comes in kind of reminds me of a problem in my days as a councillor in Edinburgh, which was that we set up underneath the CPP the neighbourhood partnership system, which sat around the various areas and with the partners. I remember initially any rate, and I have to say that my knowledge of this is now about five-year-old. The difficulty that we actually had in some ways of getting partners clwed up to how to take part in the management of this partnership, and it seemed to be, although there was an awful lot of people sitting around talking about what they were doing, there was a limited amount of integrated partnership that was actually happening on the ground. There are difficulties that we've seen on a number of occasions. I'm not just talking about the community partnerships problems, but the problems overall of integrated working, as against working within silos. The one question that's in the back of my mind is that we all know that there's a board of community planning partnerships, but do the people who work underneath the board level at council and local partner, not on the board, but medium-area interests officers, do they understand what the CPP is? I can identify with some of that. Certainly in the early days, when we had an independent share and our initial structures were quite cumbersome, we did create a structural bureaucracy that some people found difficult with. Certainly, as I said in a previous answer, we're quite keen to review what we do and to self-evaluate the work that we've done. In recent times, we have changed our structure to streamline it and to make it more effective and to try to reduce the number of meetings that people have to attend and to make sure that we're pulling people in who have the capacity to do the work that we're asking them to do. Our current structure is very different from the one that we set out with. It's certainly much more streamlined. In terms of officer colleagues in the council and across the partner agencies who are involved in it, they are absolutely aware of what the board does now and they know what the different groups are delivering the day-to-day work. Our current structure is a very good one, but certainly in the past I would accept that possibly we hadn't gotten that right at the beginning. Members of the panel want to respond to that. In my other perspective, that basically reflects our position for our leaner and, did I say, a bit more agile now, our structure that we're building on. The question that I asked is, do all our staff, across the respective organisations, agencies, etc, need to know the finer detail of all that's been achieved, of all that's been worked on by CPP, but I go back to my experiences within my organisation and I know that that's been played through now in the council and fire. It is having the understanding of that collective responsibility around about the 2022 division for Aberdeen City, how that plays through the single outcome agreement. Making it real for staff, I think, is the important thing and how that fits with their day-to-day priorities, their expectations and delivering a service to the Republic, whatever organisation that happened to be in. I'm really looking for the NHS here because the NHS were actually one of the more problematical areas initially in getting involved in local partnerships and understanding. As I say, it was all this is NHS work and this is what we're doing. It was a very little grey area over to the other... Is there a web point to come in on the NHS point? Yeah, I can do that. I said earlier in the evidence that I gave that, I think, sometimes staff on the ground very much work in partnership because I believe that will deliver better services for their patients or their clients. However, they perhaps don't associate that with community planning and the structures. Certainly from an NHS perspective, health and social care integration and integrated joint boards, as we move forward on that, we need to make sure that we're very clear of the role of the integrated joint board in community planning so that staff become aware of the contribution to both the board and the community wider partnership. That will take us, I think, a bit of time to raise awareness of staff because that is a change. Can we drill down to levels of awareness, then, if we were to speak to a nurse in your organisation? Would they be aware of who the chair of the community planning partnership was? Would they receive minutes of the community planning partnership? Would they receive the objective of strategic aims? What kind of information would they receive? Again, I think that a nurse... I suppose it depends where you are in the organisation. If it was a nurse based within Aberdeen City, they wouldn't necessarily be aware of the whole community planning structure, but they might be aware of some of the programmes that they are involved with. I think that this is an area that we were discussing earlier about the need to make sure that we link our activities and badge them through community planning partnership, how to engage what the structures are, and we've got further work to do on that. However, I don't think that that translates into people aren't participating in activities. It's just that they may not recognise them as community planning activities. I'd probably accept the fact that somebody who is a nurse is probably not going to know what the CPP is. However, I would expect that anyone who is producing a strategic direction within any partner organisation to have at least an idea of where that came about, why it's being done and why it's not an addition to the present bureaucracy but should be a part of the bureaucracy that's there. It's not an addition, it should be real partnership working. My concern, and it seems to come through in the background of much of what the auditor general has come in and said, is the fact that we have the CPP which virtually nobody, if you go out in the street and nobody will know what a CPP is. I'm absolutely certain of that because I've actually asked, do you know what this is? They don't know, they either see it as being, this is a council, this is NHS, this is police, whatever it is, they don't realise. One of the most successful things we've had in Edinburgh actually is the police, and partnership has been great. I think it has been since we changed it. To me, the difficulty actually happens when you get down into below director level, below that sort of strata of management, down to the people who are supposed to implement it but don't actually know why they're implementing it and where it comes through into the system. I think this is the difficulty. I think Nigel Don was trying to pick up on that, that the actual structure of the development of service provision within the area needs to be clearer throughout every partnership organisation to say, we're not on our own, we're doing this because. This is, I think, where we end up with people who will sit there and say, we can't do that because we've always done it this way and et cetera, et cetera, we've all heard it. What I'd like to know from people here is how do you take that through to your individual organisations to explain to them, this is why we're doing this, this is why it's not in addition to the bureaucracy but it's a merging of partnership working within our responsibilities but working together, how do you do this and explain it so that people who are middle management actually know what they're managing for? I think there's a challenge there for all of us and I think if I was to ask staff, middle management level, tell me what the community planning partnership is about, I'd probably be met with a blank stare. Many of our staff know about joint working and working in partnership because it's what they do but they're probably not so aware of the strategic approach that the community planning partnership is trying to grapple with. I think also there's a question of how we might better link the work of the partnership to our own in health, our own governance and management structures because and it's a weakness at my end that we do little more than provide minutes of community planning partnership meetings when in fact we should be providing much more explanatory information to encourage ideas to come forward from staff and so on. So I think there's quite a job to be done about selling the role of community planning partnerships and also the achievements because we read the transcript of the debate in December and the impression is that next and nothing is happening when we know in the borders that it is and we're probably deficient in the way that we promote the concept of community planning, the benefits that if we can get it right, the benefits that will accrue to Scottish borders people, so we need to do more internally and externally to talk up and to talk about the work of community planning. I promise I'll be brief again, just again from my perspective, Police Scotland within Aberdeen City. I've mentioned it before, it is that single outcome agreement, it's how it filters down into our day job, dare I say inverted commas, how that plays through with staff appraisals. You know, we are seeing perhaps relative terms, fairly hierarchical, I try and be as organic as I possibly can with my resource in the city, there's a good fit there, we're encouraging through staff meetings with the inspectors, the chief inspectors, that's at middle management level, what does this actually mean for you? They don't need to know every word from every minute of community planning but they need to know that community planning services, the city, the single outcome agreement, the priorities, the things that matter and where can we play our part not only in terms of community safety but into the other five thematic groups. My staff at a middle management level have a reasonable enough understanding of that because that will play through into their staff appraisals because they have to feel it in a very positive sense as well, although their contribution will be through the partnerships and the partnerships objectives within their staff appraisals will reflect community safety partnership which in turn, going back up, will reflect community planning and that will play through to the teams as well and we knowledge check, allow the phrase but we do do that right down to the constable level, where do you fit in all this. So I'm reasonably comfortable that we triangulate as much as we can but it's still working progress but we're certainly going the right direction. I really just wanted to put this into context, you know the role of this committee is actually to scrutinise value for money and effective spend and I think the whole morning we haven't really mentioned the word money but I heard on the radio this morning there's another committee looking at Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise who allegedly don't work together to the detriment of our film industry. We've also had the Christie commission which we all signed up to which was about working together. We've been forced to bring in legislation for health and social care integration in order to make them work together and can I just say that in my time on this committee almost every report, maybe not everyone from the auditor general but high percentage, it's about people not working together or not sharing data. So why is it in a country of five and a quarter million after 16 years of a Scottish Parliament having been reconvened, why are we sitting here for three hours this morning asking why our public services can't talk to each other? I just don't understand that. Can someone explain that to me? I know you've got very good plans going forward but to be fair we heard very good plans going forward after the 10-year report card and you know I just don't understand it. I mean I've been 16 years here and almost every committee I've ever been on including the health committee that put through the health and social care act. Why do people in Scotland public services not talk to each other? Why are we wasting spending three hours today asking you why you can't work together? Can I ask one member of the panel to answer that because we've got another two questions and then we need to conclude if you want to answer it. Mr Rean. Can I say, convener, that if that is the impression that we conveyed that the parties can't work together then we've failed this morning because I did hope that we were getting across the message that we are. We're the living proof of joint working, working together and we are good at data sharing and that data sharing is producing some good outcomes. So I'm somewhat disappointed to hear that that's the impression we might have conveyed. Again I can't speak for any wider part of Scotland than the borders but I did hope to give you the message that we do speak to one another. David Parker and I travel up together even. There's a strong measure of co-operation across all of the partners on our board. Scottish Borders submit to the committee written evidence beforehand but having been here this morning and if you'll allow me I will most definitely submit written evidence after this session and half of the partnership particularly in the area of joint working because I think there is a story to tell that we're obviously not conveying but there is a significant amount of joint working and work going on with other partner organisations. I was touched upon earlier by Councillor Parker regarding the previous formation of the CPP with an independent chair so going forward the panels think that having an independent chair of the CPPs as well as placing the CPPs on a statutory footing as per the community empowerment bill will actually make the CPPs more effective. We did go for an independent chair in the Scottish Borders in the early days and that was really because there was quite a lot of turmoil and change going on within some of the partner organisations and the council. I wouldn't say we're at odds but we were campaigning to keep certain services and it was quite difficult where I was going around at the time trying to fight to save the university and then having then to go to community planning partnership with the university and trying to be nice to them as well was always quite a complex argument so in the early days there were political motivations why we felt an independent chair was a good idea and that worked okay but I think we came to a conclusion that actually it didn't add a significant value and the independent chair found it quite frustrating as well so we moved to a new arrangement and that arrangement is that the CPP has been a formal committee of the council and I have chaired it. We're currently going through an evaluation process of that arrangement just now and we'll see where we get to with that. I personally am quite relaxed about it. I mean I think things are working now better than they have been but I would imagine what will come as a result of our reviews that there will be some kind of rotation of the chairmen's say or some of our arrangement put in place at the council during all the time and I'm certainly very relaxed about that and we'd welcome that. I've actually got three very quick questions. The first one is I've heard some quite positive statements being made on sharing resources, sharing services and so on in individual cases. Would that have happened anyway or did the existence of the CPP act as a facilitator for that? I would say a bit of both. I think some of it may have happened anyway but because of the CPP I think the pace of it certainly in the borders has increased and I think because we're doing it so frequently now when people are looking at designing new services they're actually thinking about where the partners can add value and Mr Reign is at the moment looking at a new children's service at the Borders General Hospital and I know in various discussions about the council and other partners will be very heavily involved in that. It will be a co-located facility and there'll be joint funding going into it from the partners. If I turn to page 15 of the orator general's report, paragraph at the top of the page there states that the current pace and scale of activity is unlikely to deliver the radical change in design and delivery of public services called for by the Christie commission. Do the panel have a view on that? Well it's difficult isn't it? I mean I would hope from what we've said today in the positive moves that we're making going forward that we will be able to pick up the pace, we will be able to deliver but as I mentioned earlier we have to wait and see what the outcomes are as we go forward and we'll obviously have to be judged on that. I echo the sentiment of Jenny there. I'm pretty bullish in the current structure and I'll be slightly subjective with the people around the table that will make significant progress in Aberdeen but there is back to that element I think it was picked up on by Mr Dawn. It's the moving parts, people move on and it's that sustainability and it needs to be driven through all the business plans and respective organisations. Everybody needs to understand that this is the legitimate way about going about our business in the city of the Borders and there are 30 local authorities in the country that it's right up there as that day business. Okay can I thank the panel for the time this morning? I think we'll get one follow-up piece of correspondence which we councillor Parkersley and agreed to send to us in terms of examples of good practice so thank you very much for the time and can I suspend the committee for five minutes to allow for the witness change over. Thank you. Welcome our second panel of witnesses. I would like to welcome Sarah Davidson, director general of the communities of the Scottish Government, councillor David O'Neill, president of COSLA and finally Pat Waters, the chair of the national community planning group. I understand that two members of the panel, Sarah Davidson and Pat Waters, would like to make a brief opening statement so can I start first of all with Pat Waters? Okay just open up chair and say can I say that as far as the national group is concerned we are actually very welcome of the report. Unlike what I've heard at the committee today we don't think it's an entirely negative report we think it's actually a very good report with a lot of positive aspects in it and can I say that the reason we have got scrutiny of the community planning is that community planning itself tried to insist and worked with Audit Scotland to get to a position where we could actually evaluate what we're doing as organisations on the ground. It's not anything that community planning either under the 32 groups or at the national stage wanted to hide what they were doing. We welcome the opportunity of scrutiny and remember what scrutiny is about. It's about trying to help and assist to improve. It's not just a bit criticism. I also wanted to start by welcoming the report and as Pat Waters was just saying the auditing of partnership activity this way is something of an innovation and I'm really grateful to the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission for working together in a way that is designed to support improvement in community planning. I also wanted to be clear at the outset that the Scottish Government welcomes and accepts all the findings and recommendations in the report. I personally was involved in the area of work a few years ago and coming back to it again after that period of time I do recognise that renewed sense of energy and a more active participation that the report describes and it's really good to see what the Auditor General described as the beacons of good practice being recognised but we also recognise that there's a long way to go before community planning fulfills all the potential which those who signed up to the statement of ambition believes that it has. I really welcome the fact that the recommendations have been pitched in a constructive aids to improvement and the Scottish Government, Kozla Solis, working with the national group have already started to act on all the recommendations in the report and I'm very happy to talk more about that this morning. First of all just to open with the first question and really it's responding to and I think you've heard some of the frustrations about the timescales that were involved in making improvements. Obviously the legislation has been in place for some years now since 2003 and obviously we're still referring to how we can make improvements and how we can take this forward. Is there any timescales attached to how we can implement some of the changes that have been recommended in the report? I accept, Paul, that the legislation has been in place since 2003. I think there was hints earlier on to about how that was approached by the public service at that particular point. Although the legislation was there, I don't know when the legal responsibility was local government. People could dip in if and when they wanted. I think the government recognised that and hence there's new legislation coming through. I think the renewal of the statement of ambition has made it an absolute sea change to how we look at community planning and how we take it forward. Having the whole of the public sector signed up to that statement of ambition and that is not an end in itself but I think that has renewed how we take forward community planning and how we inject some energy into community planning at local level to ensure that what's happened has added value and actually changed in the outcomes for the local people. Although, haven't we? We've been here before. I mean probably there's been many committee meetings similar to this that have taken place where people have said, yeah, we can do this, we can take it forward. I mean, is it beyond repair? I mean, can we do something with coming forward? I mean, can I say to you? What's different now from what's been proposed before? I think that the commitment and buy-in from the whole of the public sector now to deliver is what's the changes. I mean, the statement of ambition, which I think in the last meeting of the national group, I've asked officers to look about how we reshape that and to drive it forward even further to go back out to community planning and say, how do we want to take this forward? But there is many, many, many good practices on the ground now at local communities because of community planning and partnership working that's going on at the present time that wouldn't have happened if community planning hadn't been there. Yes, it took a long time to get off the ground, Paul. Is there still work to be done? Yes, there's still work to be done. Can we improve? Yes, we can improve. But don't tell me it would have happened that it hadn't been there because it wouldn't. So, can I just fast finally before bringing my colleagues in? Can you give me three examples of that kind of good work that's happening now as a result of community planning? No. Can I say to you, if I even just go to someone that's very close to your heart in Glasgow and look at how Glasgow is tackling that, Glasgow is tackling it in a very basic way but in a very practical way in actually making improvements in delivery. If I could look at what's happened in one partnership in area in Glasgow alone, for instance, the work that's done by the housing association with police, with fire, with the city council and with voluntary organisations. In the past three and a half years in the city housing stock, there has been one fire death in all that time. The housing association themselves believed that in the first two years of the project, a partnership working, they saved £22 million as a result of not having to decant tenants and not having to refurbish property because of fires within the thingy. That's about prevention and early intervention. That's very practical ways of whether we can work together within the public sector to ensure that not only we're delivering a change, but we're delivering an improvement to people's lives. During the first two years, we reckon as a fire and rescue service, for instance, that we've seen seven deaths a year in Glasgow. In the first two years, 14 deaths prevented the route of partnership working, taking aside the financial benefits to the housing association and the health service and the public authorities. That's practical examples of how we do that. If I go to other areas, for instance, in East Renfrewshire, where I was just last week for a meeting with the council, when I walked through the door of their partnership office, I couldn't tell you and neither could the public tell you whether a member of staff dealing with me is either a council member of staff or a member of staff from the NHS. That would not have happened if it had not been that partnership working and how we take things that forward. There are many examples. If I go to West Lothian and how their partnership has developed over the years, I'll shine an example of how we can learn from each other and take areas forward. There are many examples that we can say that ensures that what we're doing is delivering and making a difference to people's lives within local communities. Just if it's helpful, I'll add a couple of examples to that. I thought it was very interesting what Councillor Parker said in evidence earlier about the CPP setting the context locally for good partnership working. In other words, the working doesn't all actually only have to take place at the community partnership level but it can set that context. I used to sit as a non-executive member on both Dumfries and Galloway and Edinburgh community planning partnerships and there I saw very practical examples of the type of joining up that we heard earlier with issues that should previously not have been well understood by all the partners were discussed at the table and that then enabled the partner organisations to bring their own resources to bear in addressing them. I heard that that happened both in relation to demographics and into preparing young people in the area for skills to meet the challenges of the area and then in Edinburgh there was good working happening at local level where I think some of the people who were in localities weren't necessarily confident that they had the support from their collective leadership for what they were doing and the community planning partnership was a place where that could be made very explicit and where the senior leaders could think about ways in which they could make sure that people who are delivering in the neighbourhood partnerships had all the backup and support they needed. The previous panel highlighted a number of areas where they showed good practice in sharing of resources, sharing of services and so on and when I asked them the question would this have happened in any case regardless of whether it was a cpp the answer was bit of both. What would your comment on that be? Possibly that could have happened yes. I think that in areas where there is a real willingness to work together that would have happened anyway. I think that in areas where it would not have happened I think that the push for better partnership working has been there for a long long time. The buying to get all the parties involved in that has not been there. I think that the community planning partnership and particularly in the past two years they have seen a vast improvement in how we take that forward. I would accept that some of it might have happened, the majority wouldn't have, because people were still in very much in silos prior to this. I think that what is significant about the community planning partnership is that it is the one place that brings together formally all of the strategic leaders in an area responsible for services and that it does so along with the third sector that we have heard earlier and in many places also with local business. Whatever partnership working is happening between two or three other organisations there is one place where decisions are taken about the strategic priorities for the whole area and decisions made about alignment of resources. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a correlation between places where there is good partnership working happening anyway and really good effective leadership around that shared table. I think that it probably always has to be a bit of both, as we heard earlier. Just taking that step further, I mean one of the key areas that the CPP can make an impact is on alignment of budgets, shifting of resources into more preventative activity and the indications are that that's not really happening. Now obviously the CPP doesn't actually have a budget and doesn't have direct control of anybody's budget but I would have thought that the CPP role in influencing the quite simply the alignment of budgets towards the outcomes that everybody wants, it's not happening. I'm not sure that's the case, I mean public agencies are now obliged to share the budget information with each other so the local authority will share with the health board, the health board will share with others so that we are all aware and that gives us a better opportunity to align what we're actually doing. I think just going back a wee bit it would be fair to say anyone who was involved with community planning at the beginning all those years ago and coming into it today will find it's a vastly different beast, it's changed dramatically in that time. I think it would be fair to say when community planning was initially established there wasn't really an understanding what it was. Some folk thought it was a geographic community, some folk thought it was a community of service delivery organisations, in actual fact it's about both and about much more and I think that recognition is now there and it's about delivering for our communities. So I think in the last two or three years we have seen community planning take up a new role, get a bit of pace and I'm fairly confident, I'm conscious that I might get invited back here next year and get pulled up for saying this but I'm confident that we will start to see the pace of change increase. I welcome the optimism but I'm looking at the Oratory General's report of November 2014 and the Oratory General's report of March 2013 and they both tell a fairly negative story and there seems to be a lot of concerns and one of the key areas is that this shifting of resources is not taking place and let's face it everything follows money these days. Didn't they ask the auditor general to go and write a report that we would like? We asked them to go and look at what they saw and tell us what they saw. That informs us, it helps the decision making process and it allows us to take the right decisions to move it forward. The report is a fair report, it's got good bits in it as well. Quite a few people sitting around about the table today have been picking parts of the report. I don't particularly want to do an awful lot of that. Key messages, since the publication of the statement of ambition, there's a strong sense of renewed energy nationally and locally to improving community planning. Community planning continues to become more of a shared enterprise with more active participation by partners and evidence of more shared ownership of the priorities in single outcome agreements. As you get through the report there's many other positive aspects, fully accepted there's negative aspects as well. We asked for a report that was worse than all. That's what we got. If we again look at the auditor general's report, it states there that the patient's scale of current activity is unlikely to deliver the radical change called for by the Christie commission. That's a strong message from the auditor that we need to help the pace of change. Accepted. We've had 10 years, how many more years before a CPP is fully effective? CPPs will continue to evolve continuously. It's not something that's ever going to be fixed, it will never be job done. I could maybe pose a question if it's not going to be community planning. What is it going to be? Is it going to be a whole-scale reorganisation of public services in the near future? Don't really think so. Let's make community planning work. Coming back to a very simple function that the CPP should be carrying out is encouraging and hopefully guiding and agreeing the shifting of resources towards preventive activity, aligning budgets, and that's not happening. I think that when we first envisaged community planning what we were looking about was if we would put their budget on the table and we would discuss what the priorities were and how we would allocate that budget to those priorities. No practical. Can't be done. Health has still got to deliver health in Scotland and their budget is probably dictated to that. Local authorities still have to deliver education and the budget is dedicated to that. What the community planning has done, and I used a very early example of in Glasgow, was to say what are the priorities? Can we get jointly agreed priorities where they kept it extremely simple in how they took that forward? They set the priorities in Glasgow and then the community planning partners around the table agreed that that was the priorities and would then look about how their input to delivering the priorities would outcome. Whether it was working together jointly or whether it was something that we're doing as an individual organisation with support of others. It's not just about aligning budgets, it's about setting agreed priorities and looking about how you would deliver that. The point that we have raised about early intervention and prevention, we have asked the international group for local community planning partners to identify where they are actually doing that work and show us evidence that that is happening. That is happening at the present time where they're beginning to show evidence about how they're putting it. Some of the changes we're talking about, as you heard earlier on, are generational changes. It's not going to be changes that you're going to see next week. You may not even see it next year. If you're talking about influence and the life of people into the future, you're talking about a generational change to tackle the inequalities that are there for instance in health. You may not see a change next week or next year or maybe even 10 years. You will see a generational change of how that will impact in communities and the lives of people who are living in those communities. So we can't see an overnight change in what's happened. What we need to do is take those first steps to ensure that we start that work and see that in the future we will see a change to the impact in people's lives and how they live within that community. Tavish Scott. Order of Scotland observed that community planning partnerships are not clear about what their specific role in public service reform is. Why is that? I mean, as a chair of the national community planning group, I don't think it was nine months ago that I wrote out to every chair of the community planning partners. I think that community planning partners should be very clear about what their objectives are, what their aim is and how they should be able to go about delivering that. I don't accept that at the community planning partners. At that level, I don't know what their goal is. Order of Scotland found that, Mr Waters, because we know about your letter of July of last year and we've also got Audit Scotland's advice on that, that they're not clear as to what difference that letter has made. So I repeat the question. Why don't look, why don't CPPs, or is it Scotland saying it's not me? Why don't CPPs not know what their role in public service reform is? I'm sorry, Tavish, but I can't answer why they don't know, because it's very clear to me what their aims and objectives are. I've tried to put that across the community planning partners, many of whom I know personally and I know that they know what their aims and ambitions are. Let me try it the other way round. Is integrating health and social care the number one priority for community planning partnerships? No, it's the number one aim for certainly government. It's the biggest reform going on across all four sectors. Can I say, it does not diminish the role of community planning partners. As a matter of fact, it sits very much alongside community planning partners and how they could change and deliver for their community. It's not a hindrance. I wasn't suggesting it was a hindrance. I'm just suggesting, as David Parker said in evidence earlier on, that when that comes into the front page of his inbox, then everything else gets pushed down. Do you accept that? No, I think it's something that works alongside what's happening in community planning partners. I don't think it overrides what's happening in community planning partners, but it is a need to deliver and change in that community. I thought that David Parker was being very fair, because what he was pointing out is that when another national initiative happens, apart from police reform, this is the biggest one imaginable, huge role and requirements placed on both local government and on the NHS, then, by definition, local priorities, you can't do everything. David Parker said it very clearly. We asked the public sector to do too much at the moment, and we've put in place a very big reform. Other things have to go, don't they? They have to slide down the inbox. They can't be done at the same time. I think we have to appreciate that health and social care integration is not something that just happened overnight either. There were five pilots in place that got set up seven or eight years ago, so they were running for about five years before we started to get through the process of rolling it out throughout Scotland. David Parker is absolutely right. As a leader of a council, there will always be things that will land in your inbox, things that will land in your desk that you have to deal with straight away. His point was perhaps that we could do a bit of a breathing space to allow us to get some of those things developed. I think that that was a very well-made point. Let's get those things right and then let's start new initiatives after that. You looked to what, from national government in terms of allowing community planning partnerships to develop and make sure that they can meet the criticisms that were found in the audit Scotland report, what do you need to make sure that we're not here in another year's time and you're giving the same evidence again? It was really a specific point about health and social care integration, which I would expect to be very high up at the top of the agenda for both the health board and the local authority participant in community planning in an area, and different community planning partnerships will have engaged with that differently. However, what I would expect community planning partnerships to be most focused on as the entity is how will they, from the coming spring, involve that new statutory partner around the table of community planning and how will they make sure that they take all the opportunities that they get to learn from what's going to be an embedded example of effective partnership working within a partnership context. I think that there's a distinction to be made between things that are priorities for the constituent partners within community planning and things that are a priority for the actual partnership itself, and those are not necessarily always one and the same. The final question that I was going to have, if I may convene it, is that, again, although Scotland have observed that there is no coherent national framework for assessing the performance and pace of improvements of community planning partnerships, I wonder if you'd care to comment on that. We recognise that as well. At the last meeting of the national community planning group, when the group was discussing the Auditor General's report, the group asked for advice from the senior officers group about how we could make further progress towards that, and that would be supported by the work that's been going on for some time on benchmarking across CPPs, which is going to be shared with CPPs this coming spring and will be developed over the coming year. That's a criticism that we absolutely recognise and which the national group is keen that we address. In other words, we can all do assertion in life, but we don't actually know how to monitor the effectiveness of CPPs. There is monitoring of effectiveness of individual activities, but there is a gap about how that adds up collectively and how individual CPPs can compare against each other. On an audit committee's point of view, we can't measure, can we? We can't measure at the moment. Not as much as we would want to know. If I may ask Sarah, when are we going to build to measure? Well, as I say, the benchmarking framework will be shared with CPPs this spring and that will be populated by data over the coming year, so by the time that the committee is looking at this again, there should be data to share about benchmarking. Forgive me, when will that be? Will that be by December of this year, next year, when? The expectation is to be starting benchmarking from this spring, so a full year's data would be ready in spring 2016. 2016 at the earliest before. That's fine. OK. OK. Go on, Keir. I'm sorry, I haven't thought of thinking my feet a little bit since something's been said. I had marked down, but in terms of the central position that you guys are coming from, do you feel that the information that's going out to community partnerships and the various partners individually allows them to understand the clear way forward that you envisage it as a national set of people implementing, so to speak? Do you feel that it's clear, because it was trying to sort of get the information in my question earlier, that the knowledge of CPPs from—actually, he goes to some councillors that are not clear what CPPs naturally are. I know that because there used to be one. Is the information that's coming from central, heading out to these people, is it clear enough that it gives them enough leeway to deal with their local problems while dealing with national initiatives? Are we getting into this situation where it's now become rather grey and everybody's starting to do their own things and people, the expectations are perhaps raised to a point that they haven't been met, obviously, in those situations, as various members have mentioned, about how do you actually audit the success of this particular set-up? Is there anything else that you, as a group, can do—government, as well as COSLA and part of your group in your position—actually can do to make it a little bit simpler that people understand what the CPP is and what it's meant to do? There is, obviously, a thing about—as was pointed out by one councillor to me, who will remain nameless today—but there is a fear among some that this may start digging into the democratic rights of councillors, for instance, to make decisions at council level. If I could start off, I'll try and be as brief as possible. I don't think that the national group is there to tell or dictate to CPPs that they have got democracy elected and accountable to their own area, for their elected members on it, and others that are accountable elsewhere. Can the central group be more clear on how they deal with advice and out? Yes, they can. Again, at the last meeting, I indicated that what we were going to look at was to reshape the national group. The national group is something like 22, and it has the leaders of the whole of the public sector on it. If you remember what we're doing is having discussions there, that is then taken back by those people that are delegated to be there to their own organisations to then filter down the discussions that we've had within the national community planning group. However, I'm conscious that a group of 22 is extremely difficult to get to conclusions at that particular point, so we've decided that we're going to have a smaller group that is going to look at how we drive forward the community planning in the future, and that will then report back to that larger group. That smaller group will include ministers, local government representatives and representatives of the hell war, and from the voluntary sector. We're trying to reshape and maybe get better at how we get the information now, but remember that the people around that table are there delegated from their organisations to feed back the information that they discuss at that national table. I think that you make a very fair point. One of the things that I have been reflecting on in preparing today and going back and looking at the guidance and various exhortations that have been developed over the years is that we're often very good at describing things and writing them, and there's an exhibit in the report that very beautifully draws what it's meant to be like. I think that it's always really important that we, who are at the centre, understand how that lands in local places. One of the great benefits that government has had through the system of location directors, where we've had a senior member of staff attached to each community planning partnership, is that we get that feedback about what actually happens when this guidance sits on the table and when partners look at it, does it make the same sense there that it makes when it has left government and COSLA? Part of the evolution that has been described has been of us recognising that it is very, very important to be very clear. I hope that one of the benefits that will come from the community empowerment bill will be giving added point to what it is that community planning partnerships are supposed to do. The guidance that has come out and the letters that have come out from the national group in the last year or so have sought to do that as well. You also posed the question, is this damaging democratic accountability? Do people see some of the power disappearing? Inevitably, if you're going to have shared priorities, that criticism could be there, but it's better having a shared priority than having a local authority priority, a health service priority, an enterprise network priority. Let's get the priorities agreed and worked together. It does have an impact on democratic accountability, but it's still a better outcome for the communities. You did say that you thought that this was a fair report, and I think that Ms Davidson also said that you accepted all the recommendations. In actual fact, it is critical, but it's actually very critical of the tasks of the three of you in front of us today, rather than at the local level. If I can just give an example, the Scottish Government needs to demonstrate a more systematic approach to implementing outcomes. CPPs are still not clear about what they're expected to achieve. That has to come from you. CPPs don't yet know what a strategic approach to prevention looks like. That has to come from you. An established Scott mentioned, and if it's good, it's worth repeating. There's no coherent national framework for assessing the performance and pace of improvements of CPPs. That has to come from you. Finally, Scottish Government guidance is not clear enough about the specific role that CPPs should play in the implementation of public service reforms. While we've had a very good evidence session from Borders and Aberdein, it does seem that they've made some progress and their plans are positive going forward. I'm only reading from page 4 and 5 the summary messages—I'm not picking out paragraph 57—a little phrase there. Those are the key messages. The key messages are that you have not stepped up to the mark to provide leadership, advice, support, co-ordination and teamwork that is required to make community planning a success. That was the case 10 years after the legislation. In the follow-up report, this is only two months ago and you all accept that it's true and it's fair.  You have not stepped up to the mark to give local CPPs the support that they need. Can you explain that they don't know what a strategic approach to prevention is? The Government guidance isn't clear. CPPs don't know what they're expected to achieve. You have been very selective in what you're picking for the report. Let me be equally selective. To be fair, to Mary Scanlon, she's asking questions that are in the report. Can you respond to that? I'll give you an opportunity to elaborate on other points on it, but on no specific points. I would ask all members of the panel to respond to them. I'll start with Sarah Davidson. One of the things that has been a hallmark of the way in which those national bodies that you described have worked together since the statement of ambition and through the implementation of the new SOAs in the last 18 months to two years has been by adopting a very supportive approach to CPPs. We worked very closely with CPPs as they developed their SOAs. There was a scrutiny improvement panel that did quality assurance working very closely with each community planning partnership up to the point when their SOAs were signed off, and each community planning partnership now has in place an improvement plan. That is something that they're also giving feedback about progress against two national groups through its senior officers group. That is not to say that more couldn't be done, but I wouldn't want the committee inadvertently to get the impression that we hadn't been working together very closely and with a shared ambition in relation to this. Government, as I said at the outset, recognises the work that is still required to be done and the criticisms that are made in relation to the specifics that you identified. I already spoke about the benchmarking work. In terms of the more systematic approach to outcomes, we recognise that there are places where some of the local performance management arrangements and shared partnership performance management arrangements are not as need to fit as they ought to be, and we would like them to be in order to drive outcomes. There is some work that has been going on for a while and hopefully will come to fruition soon between the improvement service and the local authority of executives organisation of the Scottish Government to look at the overall performance management of both the individual entities and CPPs and the way that they fit together. Finally, the point about the role of community planning partnerships in public service reform programmes. We accept the feedback from CPPs that they have not always been as clear as they ought to have been or as they would have liked to have been about the way they fit, and we will certainly think about that and make sure that when the Scottish Government is speaking about public service reform, whether that affects one organisation or the way in which they come together, that we are scrupulously careful to enunciate the role of community planning partnerships. However, I think that the evidence also shows that even if community planning partnerships are not always identifying something as part of public service reform, they have been very involved in thinking about, for example, the role of Police Scotland in their new shape in playing into community planning partnerships. We have already spoken a