Chamber and committees

Again, that is a question that you need to put to Ms Somerville. It is not an area that I am able to talk to effectively.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

When it comes to community empowerment and asset transfer, there will always be discussion about whether any specific example of that will work. I have been involved in a few local cases in where a wee nudge has been required to get them over the line. I think that the legislation is good, but that does not mean that assets will always be moved over to communities. Often, that will not be the right solution. However, as a piece of legislation, the 2015 act has, for the most part, been very effective and helpful in what it has delivered.

As far as future structures are concerned, community planning partnerships have an important role to play, because they bring partners round the table. It is important that we work through where we might end up with regard to local government structures. As part of that process, we can look at what the most effective mechanism is for enabling things to be joined up more effectively through CPPs. On aspects such as economic development, some of the CPP partners are more effectively engaged at a regional level, whereas, with other aspects, we might want to take a more local, community-level approach than is possible the way things are currently configured. That would change the shape of the process with regard to who we would want to have around the table and what would be discussed. I am thinking, for example, of how we deliver front-line interventions such as whole family support, which are important for people.

As part of the reform process, there is scope for us to look at what CPPs could and should look like and how best they should be shaped for the future.

You are absolutely right—you have hit the nail on the head. As I said at the start, the community empowerment piece of this is absolutely central. If anyone has any doubt about that, they need only look at those statistics or even just talk to people in their community. I talk to the people I represent and to community groups and individuals, and, every week, I see that they feel that they are not able to make the change that they need to make locally.

That is absolutely at the core of our thinking. It is important that we have in place the mechanisms to enable more local engagement to happen. That applies to community planning partners around the CPP table as well as to third sector organisations and community groups, which are also a really important part of the jigsaw.

In business, as in the work that we are taking forward, there are many known unknowns and many unknown unknowns. Over the past five years or so, we have been through Brexit, Covid and the tail end of austerity, so a lot of things happened that we could not predict. Anybody who sat here and said that they could tell you exactly what will happen in every public body in each of the next five years would be kidding themselves.

The important point is to understand, in broad terms, where we are trying to get to. We have laid that out clearly. We have published data on an annual basis on corporate costs across the public sector. That £5 billion-plus figure is the area in which we are driving the 20 per cent reductions. We have been clear that that equates to an average year-on-year reduction of 4 per cent. We have now published much more granular data on head count within each of those public bodies, which was not previously available. That has been helpful in shining a light on where the opportunities are.

We have been clear about the toolkit that exists, such as the automation work within Government—the relevant unit has delivered more than 140 automation projects across the public sector, including some very effective ones in Social Security Scotland—or non-workforce reductions, such as those in procurement or estates. On estates, we have saved £52 million already. On procurement, we have saved more than £300 million over the past number of years.

There is a series of programmes. However, to say that we know exactly what contracts we will be able to work on in procurement and exactly how much that will deliver in years 4 and 5 across every agency would not be realistic. We have set the targets at a top level. We work hard to understand where the opportunities are and where the support is in place to enable us to deliver on what we need to do.

Are you asking about invest to save?

You are absolutely correct. Last year, we published a document that listed all the preventative interventions that the Government had made over the past 25 years. There were quite a lot, so to say that we have done nothing is not true. However, we recognise that there is absolutely more to be done.

Understanding happens not by just talking but by understanding, at a deep level, what the structural barriers are and how to address them. When it comes to understanding data, what happens and what drivers there are, we have the Government’s prevention unit. To be honest, it is great—quite geeky. It gets about the numbers, the logic, the structures and the way things join up. It has produced some great analysis on that and has gone through the process of tagging the budget lines at a detailed level, so that we understand which budget lines are preventative, but not only that—clearly, there are different stages of prevention, depending on how deep they are and how long it takes for the impact to come back. A lot of that technical work has happened.

However, alongside that, we need to be in a place, as I said, in which we address the cultural aspects and the accountability piece. That is in workstream 2 of the strategy, in which we work with Audit Scotland to make sure that, when we audit people on what they are delivering for their money—precisely as you said—the process is flexible enough to enable a shift to prevention, or at least to stop it from not happening.

Yes.

We are engaging with COSLA and others in discussions about what the future of local government looks like. It is our responsibility to address the challenges that we have talked about today, such as how we empower citizens and communities, ensure that we deliver strategic services at the right level and do so as cost-effectively as possible, given the need for fiscal sustainability. We will continue to engage with partners as we work our way through this process over the remaining 70 or so days.