Local Government and Communities Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Official Report 598KB pdf

---

Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 (Parts 3 and 5) (Post-legislative Scrutiny)

Agenda item 3 is post-legislative scrutiny of parts 3 and 5 of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. Today, we will take evidence from three community organisations that participated in the committee’s survey on the act. We are keen to explore some of the issues that they have raised. I welcome Peter Scott, planning representative with Cramond and Barnton community council; Iain Hamlin, secretary of FRIENDS, or Stevenston Conservation; and Mary Peart, secretary of Community Out West Trust.

Thank you all for being here. We have just over an hour for this session. Before we start, I have some brief technical information. There is a pre-arranged questioning order. I will call each member in turn to ask their questions for up to nine minutes. It would help broadcasting if members indicated who in the panel their questions are addressed to. We might have a short amount of time for supplementary questions at the end.

As there are three panellists, please indicate clearly whether you wish to answer the question—for instance, by raising your hand—and do not feel the need to answer every question if your views are generally in line with points that have already been made or if the question is not aimed at you.

I ask everyone to please give broadcasting staff a second to operate your microphones before you speak.

We will now move on to questions. First, can each of you tell me about your community and what your organisation is trying to achieve? What are the big challenges facing your communities or organisations?

I am happy to take anyone who wishes to start.

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to give evidence.

The challenges to our community include large numbers of housing developments on the periphery of our community, which are putting huge pressures on local transport networks and causing us issues in trying to get decent traffic management solutions. That is part of the reason why we have been trying to get good engagement with the City of Edinburgh Council.

Another issue is that there are quite a lot of elderly people who need services. It is often thought that an affluent community such as ours does not have any needs, but we certainly have a need for medical, social and care services.

We also have people coming into the area whom we need to service. We have a lot of visitors coming to use the waterfront at Cramond, the Cammo estate and so on, and that gives us problems of traffic congestion and more traffic issues.

I will leave it at that.

What is your organisation trying to achieve?

I suppose that we are trying to reduce some of the issues, such as parking issues and traffic congestion on the main traffic networks through our area. We are trying to provide community services. At the moment, we have limited facilities for community meetings and so on. A lot of voluntary work is undertaken to help to maintain the environment in our area. We need to upgrade public toilets, for example, in some of the resort parts of the area. We just want to engage with the community and help it to liaise with the city council, and to make the city council’s services work on our behalf.

The challenges in our community are really about the closure of facilities, or the lack of facilities, for the local community and the many visitors who come to the area. We set ourselves up nearly two years ago in order to take over a set of local public toilets that were closed by Highland Council. Since then, we have been trying to get funding to develop that and to provide camper-van hook-ups and other facilities such as camper-van waste disposal units. That is for the many tourists, but we hope that it will provide sustainable funding for the community toilets. In a small way, that is what we are trying to do in our area.

Our group has a reasonably specific remit, in that we deal with community green spaces. We try to improve them along various dimensions and we try to protect them, too. It is the issue of protecting community green spaces that is a big issue in the community. We have lost playing fields, and we are in the process of losing public parks and other wild green spaces in the town. There is a huge rate of loss of community green spaces, which obviously has a terrible impact on the town in various ways, and we devote a lot of time to trying to stop that.

How would you describe an empowered community? Do you feel that your communities are sufficiently empowered to make the changes that you have all spoken about and that your areas need?

I guess that an empowered community is one that has influence and that genuinely has decision-making power over the big things that happen in the community. Our community has influence over small things. For example, a year or two ago, the council carried out a consultation about which flower beds should be maintained and which should be abandoned.

In that sense, there is a certain amount of power over the small things, but that is not really of great interest to the community. People are interested in the big issues and the big money that is spent in their community, but we have almost zero power over that. I have no hesitation in saying that we have almost zero power over the big decisions.

There is a certain façade. There are public consultations, council community working groups and all kinds of community empowerment processes that take place when there are big plans on the table, but those tend to be just for show because, any time that the community is at odds with the council, the council never budges. Therefore, I would say that the community lacks empowerment in the extreme.

That is interesting. I am sure that my colleagues will come on to question you further on that subject.

Empowerment is really the ability of the community to be heard and, as my colleague said, to influence decision making in the council and other public agencies. It is also about the ability to get support for any initiatives that we put forward.

We are now part of two community participation requests. One is on traffic management issues at a local and strategic level and the other is a joint community participation request by five community councils in our area. That is basically a result of the council, over the past six years or so, keeping on changing the structures through which it engages with the community. First there were neighbourhood partnerships, and then there were locality committees. Now there are neighbourhood networks, but we remain unclear as to how the latest of those structures is supposed to work. They keep being changed, and the staff—

Mr Scott, I think that some of my colleagues are going to ask you about those areas, so I will move on and give them a chance to ask you about them in more detail later.

Mary, will you give your views on what an empowered community looks like?

For us, an empowered community is one that takes responsibility. It does not just sit back and complain about things; it does something about them.

We are quite a small group and we have not been around for too long, so it would be going a bit far to say that we are a fully empowered community. However, it has been an encouraging experience, because people have been excited by what has been achieved and there is a coming together of the community. I talk to other groups, and they are now looking at the approach as a way forward for some other problems, and perhaps some of the other toilets in the area. I think that we have shown the way in our community.

You see growing empowerment in your group and you think that the model may be one that others can follow.

Yes. I think that we have shown what is possible.

I welcome the witnesses. It was really good to hear your opening remarks, and I am keen to follow them up.

Mr Scott, the convener asked you to wait until another member asked you about this, and I would like to ask you about the relationship with local authorities. One thing that came up in the workshops that we held with community groups was how they could access the right person in the local authority or public body. Do you know who to contact? Is it clear? You said that you had neighbourhood partnerships and then locality committees, and that you now have neighbourhood networks. Is the issue to do with the people you need to contact, the structures or the culture?

I ask Peter Scott to respond first, and then the other two witnesses.

It is about the structures, for one thing. Recently, we had to ask the transport service for an organigram so that we could understand who does what, and we are still waiting for that. The responsibilities keep being changed and we keep being told that we are going through another change. We do not know who we are dealing with. That is one issue, and the culture is another one. There is sometimes a culture of people being listened to but not heard, and a culture of intransigence and procrastination. We keep thinking that we are getting somewhere, but then another study comes along on road issues or whatever, and we do not make any progress.

We have some good relations with individual officers. A lot is happening with voluntary work on environmental issues—for example, at one of our local nature reserves on the River Almond. We get on well with them at a local level. The problem arises when we try to get through to headquarters and influence the real decision making at the higher level, on the committees. With decisions on planning and traffic issues, we just seem to get nowhere.

Mary, what is your experience at the Community Out West Trust? Is the problem to do with access to the council and knowing who to contact, or is it the culture?

I think that we have been lucky, because we were solving a bit of a problem for Highland Council. We found the whole process remarkably easy. We were lucky, in that there is a special community asset transfer team. I phoned up one day with a vague idea that we could maybe take the toilets over, and it was brilliant from that moment on. The team was helpful and supportive, which was a contrast to everything that I had heard. We also had to work with the amenities department, and the team chivvied that department along and got it on board with us.

It has been easy but, as I say, that is because we were solving a particular problem for Highland Council, which is that it has a bad reputation for closing toilets. The situation was a win-win, really. We met with nothing but encouragement.

10:30  

Thank you. That was a good culture and a straightforward process—we could learn from that.

The team was also fantastic to work with. We really enjoyed it.

Thank you for that. Mr Hamlin, do you have any insights on access, knowledge of who to contact and the culture? Has your contact been primarily with the local authority, or have you had contact with other public sector bodies?

Our organisation does not have much trouble with identifying or accessing people. We have been around for an awful long time, so we are well acquainted with who does what in the council. Our problem is really with influencing the council on big decisions. When the council has a big plan up its sleeve, it does not want to be influenced, and that is a problem for us.

When it comes to other public bodies, we have liaised with Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency on a few things. I do not think that we have necessarily had trouble with accessing the right people, but we have not really had much success with influencing them. Access is not the issue; the issue is with influencing people. That is the killer.

It is not about the difficulty of getting into organisations, such as the two that you mentioned; it is about getting a result. Community Out West’s experience was, however, a good relationship, with good results.

For those of you who have done participation requests, do you have any recommendations for how things should change? Is the issue not so much the participation requests themselves as the outcomes from them? Mr Hamlin, would you like to answer first?

In a sense, there is nothing wrong with the participation request process; it would be entirely reasonable if public bodies were willing to be influenced. What strikes me as perhaps something that is wrong with participation requests is that there does not seem to be anything in the legislation that gives a community power. All it does is allow the community to speak to public bodies; it does not give it any power at all. The system will not work unless public bodies have more of an aspiration to give away power to communities, and I do not think they have that aspiration.

Could Peter Scott follow up on that? You have had major strategic issues with the impact of transport coming into your area, but also you mentioned that you have had quite a few issues with support for older people and access to social care. Did you get the outcomes that you wanted from your participation requests? Does the shift need to come through the process, or is it more to do with the question that Mr Hamlin asked about the power relationship?

We had problems with the process—I could go into those, but I am limited in what I can say at the moment about whether the process was successful or not. We have had two substantive meetings on the traffic management issues. The joint community participation request by the five community councils has only just started—the first meeting has not even been held yet.

We have found the process to be problematic. We have never had a formal decision notice. We asked over and over again for an outcome improvement process, which is what the 2015 act suggests. We then got three generic objectives for such a process, which were just short paragraphs. We ended up writing back to the council to say what we thought an outcome and improvement process should look like, which included timetables, people whom we wanted to be involved, key stages and so on. That was not what we received from the council to start with and not what we thought the guidance to the 2015 act required of it.

We had problems at the start. Our request got lost on a couple of occasions because of an information technology glitch. At that stage, we wondered, “If the council is ignoring our request, to whom do we appeal?” Appeals are quite important, so the committee might want to follow up on that issue.

The process has not been ideal. I am not sure whether there have been the same problems for other organisations in the community participation request process, but we have certainly not found it ideal. There are also issues with the reporting process. We have never been able to find any reports of previous participation requests to the council, apart from when they were hidden away in a committee report.

Do I have time for a quick supplementary question, convener?

You will have to be very brief and put it to just one witness.

To follow up, I have a yes-or-no question for Mr Scott. Has the relationship between the community and the local authority changed as a result of your participation requests?

It is far too early to ask that question. We now have good relationships with some of the officers, but it remains to be seen whether we will get the outcomes that we are looking for.

Good morning. I will follow on from Sarah Boyack’s questions and pick up on something that Mr Scott said regarding an appeals process. Which body or bodies should be responsible for assessing appeals?

[Inaudible.]—that the community participation request has been made to. We wondered whether the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman was the right person, but we do not really know. Basically, it has to be an independent body with a mediation role. That is about all that I can say.

I will frame the question slightly differently for Mr Hamlin. Should there be an appeals process for participation requests?

Definitely. There could be two appeals processes. One could be used when people are not happy with the process itself, if the participation request has been rejected or if they feel that it is not being handled appropriately. It is a good idea to have an appeals process for that.

However, there is a different type of appeal that would be even more useful. If you do not agree with the outcome of the improvement process, you should have the opportunity to appeal to an independent body. That could go beyond participation requests. If at any time a community was at loggerheads with a local authority over an issue, it would be good to have an external appeals process, so that an external body could make a determination.

At the moment, the only people in the equation who have any power are the people in the council. They have absolute power. That is not a very healthy environment for good decision making, so it would be highly desirable to have an external body that could intervene on contentious issues.

I will ask you the same question that Sarah Boyack asked Mr Scott. Has the relationship between the community and the local authority changed as a result of a participation request, at any point?

The only two participation requests that have been submitted to our local authority are on the same issue. My group and the community council submitted them in parallel. That has had a negative effect. In other words, the requests have not led to any improvement; they have not led to anything at all. That is one more example in a long series of examples of having no effect on anything. In that sense, it is just one more nail in the coffin. It is a negative thing, rather than a positive one.

Thanks for that.

My final question is for Mary Peart. Although your organisation has not yet had to submit a participation request, how confident do you feel about influencing decisions that are made on behalf of your community? I note that you said that you have a good relationship with the local authority.

That is not something that we have thought of, at this stage. The nature of our body means that that would not be an obvious way forward. We feel that we are listened to; the people whom I have worked with so far certainly listen and we have had good conversations. I would be more than ready to give appeals a try, but I am not sure that that is likely to be necessary in the field that we work in at the moment.

Thank you.

Good morning, panel, and thank you for joining us. I want to start with Mary Peart, who will probably not be surprised by that. I am delighted to hear that your experience with the council has been good. We chatted about that at some length during the workshops. Has there been anything that you have found to be negative with any other groups? I believe that the council is not the only organisation that you have had contact with.

[Inaudible.]—the minor negatives were sorted out very quickly with that. Since then, we have been trying to develop the site. We have a rural tourism infrastructure fund grant application in at the moment, on which we have a bit of a problem emerging with SEPA, which is making a broad-brush decision about the site without looking at it specifically. That is not strictly on asset transfer, but about planning and moving forward. Even there, we have had support from various bodies.

There is a lesson in that, however. We were talking before with other bodies and organisations about what we saw as the lack of interest in community bodies coming forward, and about what could be learned from the ones that have been successful and, perhaps, those that have not been so successful. The lesson is probably that asset transfer is a big undertaking. It is not just the initial asset transfer that has to be gone through; a lot goes on behind that, and a lot happens afterwards, as well. It is interesting to hear that; I hope that it can be sorted out.

We hope so.

I will open the question up to our other two panelists. At the workshop, one of the big bits of feedback was that the legislation is good but there is possibly a lack of awareness of it and a deeper lack of understanding of how it works in practice. That applies to members of the public and community groups, and to members and officers of local authorities. How did your groups first think about using the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015?

[Inaudible.]—had been trying to get Highland Council to keep the toilets open and they were told, “Absolutely no—if you want them open you’ll have to do an asset transfer.” That was how we heard about it. We then sat and talked about it and thought, “Let’s go for it.”

10:45  

Iain Hamlin, how did your group first start thinking that it could use the act?

Every couple of weeks I read the Scottish Community Alliance website, which had an article about participation requests. When I read that, I thought that I would give it a shot. I told the community council about it and suggested that it do the same thing. We just advertised on the Scottish community web presence, as it were.

How did you find the initial process in terms of knowledge of the act within the local authority?

That is a good question. We submitted requests and heard back from the local authority, so it must either have known or taught itself what it was, and followed the appropriate steps. Obviously, the process was a bit shaky and there were delays, but that is to be expected when working with local authorities.

Although the local authority followed the process well, I do not think that it wanted to buy in to the most important aspect of the process, which involves it being influenced. Perhaps the people involved do not understand that they are supposed to be influenced. Perhaps they think that it is just another thing that requires them simply to nod and to placate communities when they come along. They might not appreciate that they are supposed to be more influenced by participation requests than they usually are.

Did you have to deal with one specific officer in the council? Another thing that was brought up in the workshops was that people have had to deal with different departments and different officers, and have ended up having to explain the objectives several times. It was suggested that having in each public authority a specific officer, who at least has knowledge and experience of the process, would be helpful. Would that have been helpful in your case? Did it happen?

I think that it must have happened. We submitted a form—I cannot remember where we submitted it to, but it obviously went to the right people—and we must have got an interim email that thanked us for our request and outlined what would happen next. Following that, we were pointed to the council manager who would liaise with us. That was not a community empowerment individual but a man who was actually working on the project that we were interested in. The process seemed to go smoothly.

At what point did you realise that it was starting to go not so smoothly? Was there a specific point, or did things just fall by the wayside in bits and bobs?

Things did not really fall by the wayside; there was a conclusion. Both organisations—the community council and FRIENDS—went through the process in parallel and discussed matters with the relevant people in the council. Based on those meetings and the information that we gathered, we reached our respective positions and put them to the council.

To say that those positions were ignored would not be right, because our emails would have been read, but they were not used to influence the council. It was the same as what happens when the council runs a community consultation, or there is a community petition or a community council working group: whatever the process is, it results in an output—in this case, a community representation—that has no influence. We went through the process, produced an output and it had no influence.

That is interesting.

Peter Scott, is the legislation understood and is there enough awareness in the community and the public authority?

I do not think that the legislation is understood or well known in the community. I happen to know about it because, in the past, I had been interested in asset transfers and was interested in the opportunity that the act might provide in that regard. That led me to find out about the community participation element. After a lot of frustration, we eventually put in our request.

The City of Edinburgh Council has a set of guidelines about how requests should be dealt with, but we have found that they have not been followed. The council seems to follow an informal process: you put in an application and, eventually, you get a letter or an email saying that there will be a meeting and that certain people will attend. We have never had what I would have understood to be a decision notice—which should be published on the website, according to the guidance. I believe that there is not even a page on the website that deals with that.

As I said, the process is informal. The lead officer in the governance team who started the process handed it over to a transport officer. The community participation request was on transport issues, so it was not exactly an impartial person who was going to lead the process in the council. Luckily, we have somebody who is dealing with it on a very impartial basis and who knows the locality, which helps. Basically, it has been handed over from governance to the service that we had the problems with, which does not give an impartial view. The process is carrying on in that informal way. We have to write the notes of the meetings and get them agreed. We had to develop the process, say what stages we wanted to go through, what the timetable was and so on. My understanding from the guidance was that that should be done by the public authority. It has not been a very happy process, so far.

I see that the second CPR—the one that is being done jointly—is going through the same initial stages of meetings with senior officers, but there is no process set out. We wait to see whether that will come.

That is very helpful.

Andy Wightman is next.

Thank you, convener. This is for Iain Hamlin and Peter Scott. Have you considered using the asset transfer provisions and, if so, how far have you got?

We have thought about it. There is, next to the biggest and most deprived part of the town, a really nice public green space, which is obviously of great social and environmental value. Despite our best efforts, the council has for the past 15 years repeatedly zoned it for housing. We thought that an asset transfer might be the best thing to do, and it has been spoken about in the community.

We have got as far as making inquiries, but not so much about how to acquire the asset, although we had a chat with the leader of the council and a local councillor about how to get our hands on it. I have made inquiries with various organisations about how we would pay the ongoing costs, which is the worrying part. The process of acquiring or getting the money to buy the asset is not particularly challenging, but how on earth to pay the ongoing costs of owning land is. Therefore, in a very casual way, I am continuing to make inquiries to try to find the simplest way possible for our community to raise enough money to pay the ongoing costs of land ownership.

[Inaudible.]—car park, but at the moment the community council is struggling to get volunteers to do such things. In fact, we struggle even to find members for the community council who will be active and take proactive roles. That might be surprising in a community council such as ours, but many people are already volunteering with various initiatives—in the kirk, giving care to elderly people or working on environmental projects. To take on more at the moment would perhaps be too onerous for us. We would like to do it, but we are unsure, given our experience of working with the council, how positively the council would respond to such a request, and how much hassle it would give us.

Thank you. Iain Hamlin, you are from Stevenston, which is a place that had argued for more power since 1831 and eventually became a town council in 1952, giving it power over licensing, planning and all the rest of it. Stevenston managed all that itself for almost 25 years. Is there an issue about where power lies? You have expressed a degree of frustration with the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, which you have said allows you to speak but does not really allow you to make decisions. Do you think that we need to return some of the powers that you used to have in the past?

Yes, I agree 100 per cent. When one is doing community projects, one’s peers tend to be older retired people, and people of that age remember Stevenston back in the days when there was a town council. The community produces a narrative about why the town has gone down the tubes over the past few decades and they attribute it almost entirely to the town council vanishing. Local people think that the fact that decisions are made at local authority level, where there are 130,000 people—the most local level of decision making—is the reason why the town is so bad, because local decision making was removed and replaced by decision making by people who have no connection to the town and no real interest in its wellbeing.

On asset transfer, I am intrigued by the green space you mentioned. What is the history of the parcel of land that you have been interested in?

That is the thing. The land was owned by a wealthy landowner until the 1960s, when it was sold to Glasgow City Council for Kerelaw residential school for young folk. Technically, Glasgow City Council owns the land—I have been making inquiries about it to the council for 15 years. However, one of the problems is that an arm’s-length quango, City Property (Glasgow) LLP, owns it on behalf of the city council. It tells me that its only remit is profit. I have contacted the quango about improving the site for the community, protecting it and taking legal ownership and the company tells me that its only remit as a quango is to make money and that anything community-related does not make money. That has been a problem and that is the current situation.

The land is owned, on behalf of Glasgow City Council, by an arm’s-length quango that is determined to make money and is marketing it as a development opportunity and our council—North Ayrshire—is complicit in that because, despite objections, it keeps zoning the land for housing, even though we have three times as much housing space as we need. That is what is forcing us to try to acquire the land because we know that, otherwise, it will be lost.

Thank you. The committee has heard concerns that a lot of land that is held by ALEOs is not eligible for transfer because they are not listed as eligible public bodies.

Stevenston has a common good fund, which has about £100,000 or £200,000 in it. Do you have any role in managing the fund or the land that is owned by the fund or is that all done by the council?

That is all done by the council. The community does not have a role in that. The community has tried to exert influence over common good land. We have a couple of small parcels of common good land, one of which was acquired by community subscription about 100 years ago, to serve the benefit of alleviating suffering and promoting good things in the community. That piece of land was particularly important to us—it was a building with nice gardens—and we tried to exert influence over it, but the council decided to sell it to a property developer for £15,000. The community launched a campaign, but it failed and part of the common good land was sold off. That was a few years ago. We have tried to exert an influence over common good assets but we have had no luck.

My next question is for Mary Peart. Has your experience in taking over public toilets encouraged you to think more ambitiously about other assets in your community over which you could take ownership and management?

11:00  

Yes, in the long term. At the minute, we are very busy—it is the typical thing of a small number of people being involved in something. We keep thinking of other things that we might like to get around to in the future. However, it is a lot of work. We have to be cautious, and not overambitious, because it all the paperwork and management takes time. However, the experience has made us think about other things in the area that could be improved, that is for sure.

Thank you; that is useful.

My final question is for Peter Scott. You mentioned a participation request for which you have just begun the process, in which, I think you said, five community councils are involved. Will you say a little about how that process came about, and how you got together as community councils?

Some major planning and transport issues were affecting the whole of north-west Edinburgh, so the chair of our community council suggested getting together with the chairs of all the other community councils. We have had several meetings with the convener of the council’s transport and environment committee, and with senior officials in planning and transport services, but were basically getting nowhere, so the Queensferry and district community council has headed up a joint community participation request. As I have said, that has only just started, so I cannot really comment on how successful it might be.

Okay. It is interesting that you have got together to do that, and I am very keen to follow your progress.

I think that I said that my last question was final, but this question is—it is for Peter Scott and anyone else who wishes to answer. Community councils were created in 1973, mainly as a concession because 196 town councils that were being abolished resented the loss of real power on things such as planning and licensing. Peter Scott mentioned that there is an issue about capacity and volunteer time. Is there an argument for giving community councils more statutory powers, so that they could have a proper income through taxes, could employ professional people and could thereby increase the capacity of the community to do useful things?

That might be possible at community council level, or it might be better at the locality level, bringing together several community councils. I am not sure that our community council alone would have the resources and the strength to be able to do that.

As well as what you are talking about, one of the important points about community asset transfers is that money would need to come with some of the assets that the community might take over. For example, there is not really a lot of reason why a community would want to take over a large car park without getting funding to do so from the council that was responsible for it. Things such as open space or allotments would be more attractive to take over and perhaps raise funds for, but toilets or car parks, important as they may be, perhaps do not have the same appeal for a community to start fundraising to look after them. I am not sure that that totally answers your question.

Thank you; that was very helpful. Unless Iain Hamlin or Mary Peart wants to come in on that, that concludes my questions.

A lot of ground has been covered. I will not take as long with my questions; I have one for each witness.

My first is to Peter Scott. I last lived in Cramond about 45 years ago, and traffic management was the issue at that time. That was when they changed the flight path to Edinburgh airport; it went right above our house.

I can understand why community councils would be very focused on the local council, as it is central to what they do and produces the scheme for their establishment. However, the act allows for participation requests with other public bodies. I do not know how relevant it would be to the particular issues that you have raised or whether, for example, Lothian Buses would be classified as a public body, but have you ever considered looking at participation requests with other public bodies?

We are early in the process. We are only beginning to realise the scope that the act provides for community participation requests, so we will not decide whether to take on more until we see whether the process works. We see it as a process of last resort and one would hope that we would manage to get the levels of engagement and the outcomes that we are looking for before we went down that route of last resort.

I said I had just one question for each witness, but I will follow that up. Many of your answers have been about frustrations with the local authority. Previously, we have had a number of recommendations that might help, such as the perennial one of saying that there should be a culture change—in this case, that would be a culture change in the approach to community empowerment. I worked in local government for 20 years; culture change can be aspirational but difficult to achieve. In your experience, would it be more beneficial if one person had central responsibility for making sure that the authority responded in the correct way—[Inaudible.]—the minutes of meetings and that kind of thing?

Yes, it would.

Thank you.

I have a question for Iain Hamlin. In response to a previous question, you said how powerless you felt, that all the power was with the local authority and that it would be good to go back to how it was before. Am I right to assume that, in looking for that authority and power to be devolved further down—through reorganisation of local government—you mean to an elected body, not to a conservation body such as yours?

Our body is a small community group that does environmental projects, so it would be odd if we were given genuine carte blanche power. A lower level of elected representation would make a lot of sense but you can give community organisations such as ours power via other means, albeit on a case-by-case basis. There could be a powerful body that sits separately from county councils and liaises with community bodies to give them power when needed. In a previous answer, I mentioned that, if a community organisation or movement is at odds with the council on an issue, it would be good to have an independent body that had power, so that, on that particular issue, it could give power to the community. Whether it is small or big, the body could take power away from the council and give it to the community on an issue-by-issue basis.

I apologise; I said that it would be one question but, again, I will follow that up. Your particular issue was with what you called a quango but which the council might call an ALEO, although the language does not matter. Do you think that one of the improvements might be to bring those bodies more directly into the remit of the 2015 act or to strengthen the arm of organisations such as yours in relation to arm’s-length external organisations such as that?

Yes. We have had only one scenario in which we have encountered arm’s-length bodies, which was the one that I mentioned. Yes, it is frustrating. On that occasion, and in the context of that issue, it would have been 1,000 times more helpful if the quango had not been there and Glasgow City Council had owned and managed its assets.

I have a final question for Mary Peart. It seems that you have the most clear cut and positive experience. Without putting too much on it, having taken control of the public convenience, is it the feeling of empowerment from taking that decision—and action being taken, so that a local facility was protected—that led to that intangible sense of empowerment in the community? The community can see that it has taken action and that it worked in the way that it wanted. Do you feel that that helps to empower local communities?

Yes. The toilets were in the middle of the village and abandoned, and people were misusing them when they were closed. We took them over, and one of the best things about that was that we started to see a rekindling of the community spirit in the village within a matter of weeks. We were not expecting that, but it was there; for example, people who had never done so before were turning up to fundraising activities. It is a tiny village, but the action has—in a small way—brought a bit of life back into it and the neighbouring village. It is a very rural and spread-out community, hence why we need the public toilets, and other villages are now doing the same. We have been invited to talk to two other community groups about their toilets. It is spreading and, although it is a slow process, it is a very good one.

Good morning. It is obvious that each and every person on today’s panel is very much a community champion. We have also seen that in the engagement that the committee has had with other organisations when taking on board their views. You will want the act and you will want empowerment to take place, because it enables you—as communities—to feel ownership and responsibility. There is no question but that you have echoed today much of what we have already heard about frustration, the lack of communications, and even, at times, the lack of respect that there seems to have been between yourselves and officials at the community level.

What more could the Scottish Government and public bodies do to ensure that there is real empowerment? As I see it, and from what I have heard today, there seems to be an element of empowerment, but not what you, as community champions, want or need to ensure successful asset transfer or participation.

The problems in relation to empowerment and engagement start at the top. We find that we do not get heard properly, even when we go to conveners of committees. If the leadership at both the elected member and the officer level does not give the lead to junior officers, we will not get the change in culture that we—[Temporary loss of sound.]

I think that I am the only person left who people can see and hear. I apologise—we appear to have some connection problems. We will suspend the meeting for a couple of minutes to see whether we can figure out what is happening.

11:15 Meeting suspended.  

11:24 On resuming—  

I apologise for the technical glitch. Does Alexander Stewart want to pick up where he left off?

Yes, thank you. I think that Peter Scott was trying to answer. My question was about what the Scottish Government and other public bodies should be doing to support engagement.

I am sorry—do you want me to speak without seeing me?

Yes, that would be fine.

I am told that the committee cannot see me.

As long as we can hear you—that is the main thing.

It is probably better that way. I am not sure how much of what I was saying you heard.

Not very much.

I was saying that the change in culture needs to come from the top of the organisation. We have found that, even when we engage with the conveners of committees or senior officers, we do not really get the level of engagement that we want or the time that is needed for them to take on board what we are saying to them. They seem to hear but not to listen.

I am not sure how many of you have read the Accounts Commission’s report on best value. Basically, it says that the Edinburgh partnership and the council do not have a community engagement strategy in place. That is an accurate assessment; it is certainly the impression that we get.

Will Iain Hamlin give his impressions? Are they similar?

Yes, I think so. The broad problem with things such as participation requests is that they do not give any power; all that they do is encourage engagement. There is a difference between engagement and empowerment. Communities are engaged to death by councils—there is engagement all the time—but there is no power for them. A distinction needs to be made between increasing engagement and increasing power. As far as I can see, participation requests increase engagement, but do not increase power.

[Inaudible.]—respected and listened to. We had a very contrasting experience. As I said, we found Highland Council to be very receptive.

A lot of work is needed. We started off as interested individuals, and we had to set up a company and register it at Companies House. There was a massively steep learning curve, which we enjoyed; it was a very fulfilling journey. However, we need more organisations or strengthened organisations, such as the Community Ownership Support Service—[Inaudible.]—service. They were fantastic, but there is so much to learn and to do.

My worry is that we could end up with a proliferation of small organisations such as ours. Is that the best way forward? We have enjoyed what has happened—it has been fantastic—and we are ambitious for the future. We are lucky in the Highlands. We have the dedicated community asset transfer team, which is brilliant, but we need support, help and advice at the next stage. We were lucky that we got that and that we had the skill set to deal with it, but there must be a lot of opportunities for which that skill set does not exist.

You have all identified that you have enthusiasm and energy, that you want to be involved, and that you get so far. Then, however, there is frustration and lack of support and you are dismissed, or you believe that your abilities do not seem to match what the community, the council and the officials want.

My question is for Mary Peart in particular, because she seems to have had a reasonably good experience. What made the difference for you? Was it simply personal contact, or was there a strategy? Was there an overarching ability in your organisation and the people whom you met to ensure what happened? It appears from what you have said that that is the case, but others do not seem to have had the same good experience.

11:30  

It was all those elements. I must preface that by saying that Highland Council was getting enormous stick in the press for closing toilets and we were opening a set of toilets, so we were on the same side, basically. That colours a lot of what has happened to us.

Our experience was down to the CAT team listening and to its human touch. We are lucky that the small group that we formed had the time, skill set and determination. Things fell into place for us, but that was due to a combination of factors, and I do not know how often that would be repeated.

In fairness, I point out that Highland Council has asked us whether it can give our details to others who approach it about asset transfers, so that we can provide advice. Our experience was down to a unique combination of elements that we were lucky to have.

Thank you very much. I will end there, convener, as I know that time is pressing.

That completes the evidence session. I thank the witnesses for taking time out to speak with us today and for raising interesting issues for our inquiry.