Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, June 11, 2020

Official Report 648KB pdf

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Section 23 Report

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“Affordable Housing”

Item 4 is the section 23 report entitled “Affordable housing: the Scottish Government’s affordable housing supply target”. With us from Audit Scotland, we have Caroline Gardner, the Auditor General for Scotland; Claire Sweeney, assistant director; and Kate Berry, audit manager, performance audit and best value. I invite the Auditor General to make an opening statement.

The report is a joint one with the Accounts Commission. It reports on progress towards the Scottish Government’s target to deliver 50,000 affordable homes between April 2016 and March 2021. It also considers what more the Scottish Government and councils need to do to continue to increase affordable housing for those who need it. Our work concluded before the Covid-19 health crisis, which will have a significant impact on the delivery of the target. That is not reflected in the report, but our findings and recommendations remain relevant.

The Scottish Government’s target is substantial and challenging, and good progress has been made towards meeting it. However, there are serious risks to delivering the remaining homes, regardless of the current health crisis. Those include a lack of capacity in the construction sector in some areas and the capacity of council planning and building control services. The planned rise of funding towards the end of the programme and the uncertainty about funding post-2021 intensifies those risks.

The target was a response to evidence of the need for more affordable housing in Scotland, but it is not clear how councils’ local assessments of need informed the specific target and the balance of tenures. That means that it is not possible to` assess if the Scottish Government’s investment is targeted most effectively to deliver new homes of the right types in the right places. Councils are generally working well with their partners to plan and deliver affordable homes, but health and social care partners need to be more involved. We saw some good examples of community and tenant involvement, but some councils could involve tenants and communities earlier in project planning to help to ensure that the wider benefits of the investment are maximised. The investment is allowing councils to meet some of the housing needs in their areas and there is also evidence of wider community benefits such as local employment and training opportunities. Overall, though, monitoring of the programme focuses on the number of homes being built, rather than the wider impact.

Affordable housing makes a big contribution to many other Scottish Government policies, such as reducing child poverty, and the Government could have done more to set out how its affordable housing target linked to other policies and to the outcomes it aims to achieve from its investment. The Scottish Government is developing its longer-term plans for housing and I hope that this report will be useful as the Government takes that work forward with its partners. As always, my colleagues and I are happy to answer the committee’s questions.

You mentioned the impact of Covid-19. I know that your report does not look retrospectively at what has happened in the past few months, but what are your thoughts on how the coronavirus lockdown will have impacted on the ability to meet those targets? In the longer term, what impact might the lockdown restrictions have on the construction industry in Scotland, and what does that mean for the Scottish Government’s ability to achieve its affordable homes target?

12:30  

We know that there will be an impact. As you suggest, convener, the construction sector stopped work pretty much across the piece in the middle of March and it is only now preparing to resume as we head towards phase 2 of easing the lockdown restrictions. It is not possible to quantify the impact of that.

The committee heard from Gordon Wales earlier about delays on construction projects more generally in the Scottish Government’s investment programme. All that will have to be looked at as the sector gets back to work. We do not know how far it is simply a matter of resuming what was already planned and how far there may have been a loss of capacity in some parts of the sector. It is important for me to be clear that, even before Covid-19, we thought that there were risks to the achievement of the target, due to a lack of capacity in construction in some parts of the country and in councils’ planning and building control services.

When will you be looking at the affordable housing target again to assess the period in which we have had the Covid-19 crisis?

As I have said to the committee before, Audit Scotland is in the process of looking at how we pivot our work to respond to the crisis. We will be looking directly at the impact of Covid-19 on the public finances and public services. Some parts of the performance audit programme will remain relevant and some will either be delayed or switched out for things that have risen up the priority list. We will talk to the committee about that in more detail at the end of this month, but I can give you an assurance that Audit Scotland will continue to monitor progress on the affordable housing target, even though I cannot at this stage put a date on when we will be reporting on it.

Thank you, Auditor General. I will hand over to Colin Beattie.

The report discusses the risks to delivery and highlights two particular areas of high risk to achieving the March 2021 target. Those are delays to construction because of the lack of skilled labour and delays in planning permission and other building consents, due to obvious pressures at council level. Will you expand on those risks, in the pre-Covid-19 context, and indicate how widespread they are across council areas in terms of councils’ ability to cope?

With your permission, convener, I will ask Kate Berry to pick that up. She is all over the detail on those questions.

We have identified a number of risks to the programme and it may be worth giving a bit of context to them. It was planned that the funding would rise towards the end of the five-year programme, which means that we expect a rise in the number of completions towards the end of the programme. That means that there will be a bunching of completions towards the last two years, which we think will exacerbate some of the existing risks from the lack of construction capacity in some areas.

A report was commissioned by the Government from the short life working group on housing skills to look at the scale of the risks relating to construction capacity. The report has been published and it identifies particular shortages in the south-east of Scotland and the Highlands and Islands, and in certain skills including brick laying and site management. We have not been able to quantify exactly the skills risks throughout the country, but we know that there are risks in particular geographical areas and we heard from our fieldwork that Brexit might exacerbate them. For example, workers in the industry might move to projects down south where the pay might be higher.

In terms of the risks relating to council capacity, again there is a potential risk from the increase in the number of completions towards the end of the programme. Work that we have quoted in our report identifies surveys that highlight some of the pressures on the workforce in building services and planning teams. There is a high number of potential retirees and the short-life working group on skills made recommendations on the recruitment of those professionals. We have yet to see a Government response to that report, but those issues are being considered as part of the Government’s management of risk.

Focusing on the council issue, we all know that in most council areas there has been a serious reduction in the number of staff in planning departments and so forth. That is a worry. I have had complaints from developers that it takes two years and more to get planning permission through, which seems to me to be a long time. Do you have any statistics on how commonplace that is? Is it commonplace or is it patchy, or do you not have that information?

We do not have concrete data. A local government overview report, which is due at the end of June, will have some more information on the risks to planning and the pressures on council planning services. I cannot quantify that at the moment. In our report, we quote some information about a survey of local authority building services that found that 81 per cent of councils building standards teams had reduced full-time equivalent numbers, and that 25 per cent of the existing workforce could retire within the next five years.

Have you found any indication that councils are addressing the problem?

That was not a particular focus of our audit. We have identified that as a risk that needs to be managed by the Scottish Government in longer-term skills identification, and by local councils.

The question of the lack of skilled labour on construction sites has been highlighted in previous audit reports. Again, I ask the same question and you might or might not have the answer to it. Is there any indication that that problem is being addressed in any meaningful way? It is not new.

You are right that it is not new. One of the issues that we identify in our report is about the deliverability of plans in local areas. There was a key concern at the start that there was not the capacity to deliver that substantial increase from the previous target. It takes time to step up plans to get the skilled labour and enough staff to make the plans happen. In future, there might be lessons for the Government to learn in thinking about the deliverability of the targets that it sets. Our report identifies some action that registered social landlords and councils are taking. Funding has allowed them to recruit apprentices and offer work placements that will help to build skills locally.

The report concluded at the point of its publication that the target, particularly the socially rented element, was at serious risk of not being met. What is the current assessment? Is there any update on that?

As I said in my answer to the convener’s question, we know that it would have been difficult in any case. Covid-19 has made it impossible, and the Government has acknowledged that it will not now be possible to meet the target by March 2021.

Alongside all the other things that it requires to do, it is important for the Government to set out its plans for after the current programme, which was due to end in March 2021. The uncertainty about funding and the targets thereafter was one of the factors that was making it harder for councils and registered social landlords to plan, but the hiatus that we have been through and the disruption to the economy make it all the more important to be thinking longer term about how much the Government intends to be able to invest and what it wants that investment to achieve.

Kate Berry, did you want to add anything to that?

I would just add that we know that the Scottish Government has been closely monitoring the targets, and we expect that it will still be doing that. The area teams were working closely with councils in their regional areas and having regular meetings about the progress of their plans so we expect that work to continue, and the Government to consider its impact.

I now hand over to Bill Bowman.

Auditor General, I have a couple of questions about affordability and specialist housing. In paragraph 14, you say that there is no common definition of affordability and that it can be confusing for tenants and the public. During the audit, stakeholders who were not closely involved in delivering the target were not always clear what the Scottish Government meant by “affordable”. Do you know what it means? Is it a case of it not being clearly defined at the outset of the programme, or is this a communication issue?

I honestly think that it is a case of it being complex. If we break down the target, it is for 50,000 new affordable homes between April 2016 and March 2021. Within that, the intention was that homes for social rent would make up 35,000 of the target, to be delivered by councils and registered social landlords; homes for mid-market rent and affordable home ownership would make up the other 15,000.

The complication is that what is affordable in any particular instance depends on the household make-up—people’s income and their other circumstances, such as the size of the family—and the local environment. It is not possible to put a figure on what affordable housing means in any of those categories, but the point that we were trying to convey was that the targets are well understood by the councils, registered social landlords and wider housing associations that were involved but perhaps not well understood by the wider public and people like you and me.

You referred to the local environment; does that mean that “affordable” could have a different definition in different parts of the country? Could some people say that they have met the target but we are comparing apples and oranges because they are not exactly the same targets, money-wise?

They are certainly not the same targets, money-wise. A simple example in the homes for affordable home ownership category is that the limits are very different between, for example, Inverclyde and Edinburgh. That is for reasons that we would intuitively understand, but it does not mean that a figure can be put on it to say that this is the cap that applies across Scotland.

You also note that there is an expectation that the rent that would be charged for social housing that has been funded through the programme would only apply to the first let. What happens thereafter?

I will ask Claire Sweeney to talk you through that—she is our expert on affordability.

Thank you, Auditor General. After the first let, the RSL’s rent policy would apply, so the rent would revert back to the rent policy that is in place for each registered social landlord. We did not look at the appropriateness in any great detail, as it is not for us to conclude on that. That is the local arrangement.

Does that mean that there is an opportunity to get funds from this programme and, in the long term, an affordable rent could go and there would be a less affordable rent?

The situation will vary locally. In the report, we have tried to set out some factors that will be taken into consideration by social landlords when they set their own rent policy—those policies vary. It is worth mentioning that, in our 2013 report on housing in Scotland we said that more clarity was needed on affordability. Since then, the programme guidance on affordable housing has built in some assumptions, so parameters are built into guidance for councils that are carrying out housing needs and demand assessments to try to build in broad assessments. However, trying to pin down a one-size-fits-all definition of what is affordable is not practical, so there are variations across registered social landlords and local authority arrangements.

With regard to specialist housing needs, paragraph 60 covers the provision of new affordable housing that meets special needs for older people and people with disabilities. Between 2016-17 and 2018-19, 1,577 homes were purpose-built for older people and 742 for disabled people. Is that a sufficient number? Where did the figures come from?

12:45  

One of the challenges that we highlight in the report is that, although it is clear that the 50,000 target was a response to the general housing need that had been identified not least by organisations such as the Chartered Institute of Housing in Scotland, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and Shelter Scotland, it is not clear how that target was informed by individual councils’ assessments of demand and need in their areas, particularly with regard to the sorts of dimensions of that need that Mr Bowman describes: housing for older people or those with special needs. That is one of the reasons why we think that the target could be more clearly linked to that assessment of need in future, and that the monitoring of the achievement of that target could be more nuanced and transparent so that it would let us know how well the affordable housing programme is meeting the need and the wider outcomes that the Government is trying to achieve through its investment. Kate Berry may want to expand on that.

I do not have much to add to what Caroline Gardner has said. Mr Bowman asked about where those figures have come from. They are reported in the Scottish Government’s annual affordable housing supply outturn reports. That gives information on where the funds have been spent, the amount that has been spent on each type of programme and the number of completions in each council area. The number of purpose-built houses by council area is not reported.

We have identified that there could be some improvements in the comprehensive nature of the Scottish Government’s reporting. I am referring to units that are purpose-built for particular types of housing need, but we also note that that may not take into account the full number of what has actually been provided, because some houses might be suitable for older people or those with special needs, for example, but they would not be classified as purpose-built.

I would expect that housing for older people would have certain themes—older people will have common needs—but disabled people could have very specialist needs. Do you have any further information on what type of specialisation the properties for those with disabilities have?

Yes. That type of specialisation could be quite wide ranging. The Government expects that all properties that are funded through its grant funding programmes will meet what is called its housing for varying needs standard—a low level standard that might suit those with different mobility problems. Some people will have specialist needs. For example, wheelchair users might require other support and different standards of housing. In some areas, we saw that councils will work to build in features that could support the needs of people who they have identified as being in need of specific types of housing. That cannot always happen, because the need for a wheelchair or housing that accommodates a particular need cannot always be predicted. We have seen some element of joint assessment and a process where houses are designed to meet the tenant’s particular needs where those have been identified.

I have a final question on the needs of disabled people. When houses are built to meet a specific need, are they designed in a way that they can be repurposed if that person moves or someone else moves in?

Again, that would depend on the design of the property. Our report identifies that one of the councils is looking at building properties that are a bit more flexible. For example, there could be the potential for a wet-room shower to be installed, if that is needed. That would account for people’s changing circumstances. Even if a person were to move out of specialised accommodation, work could be done to make it suitable to meet the needs of the next occupant. Again, that would just depend on individual councils and developments.

First, I declare an interest. As Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights with responsibility for housing, I drafted and submitted a paper to the Cabinet about the programme and for the funding to build 50,000 affordable houses. Did the Auditor General have access to that cabinet paper?

I will have to hand that question on to the team. I certainly have not seen it personally, so I will ask Claire Sweeney and Kate Berry to let you know whether either of them has seen it.

I have not seen it. I am not sure whether Kate has seen it during her detailed work.

We have had access to a number of Scottish Government documents, but I do not recall seeing the initial Cabinet paper.

The reason I ask is that, if you dig out that paper, you will see that it addressed a lot of the issues that you said were not being addressed. It looked at why 50,000 was the right figure; it looked at the skills shortages challenge and tried to address that; and it looked at land availability and similar issues. The original policy decision of the Cabinet was on a comprehensive paper—I remember it well. In fact, the Cabinet identified most, if not all, of those issues as needing to be addressed. The issue is why they were not subsequently addressed, and we need to find out why that was.

If we take the issue of skills shortages, for example, the latest figures from the Construction Industry Training Board estimate a shortage of 12,500 people with the relevant skills, mainly in the wet trades, that we need in the construction sector in Scotland, not just for this programme. Did you speak to the CITB about its estimate of the skills shortages?

I will take the part of the question about evidence for the target.

It is a question for Government as to why it did not provide that evidence to us. We have been asking for that throughout the process of the audit. When we cleared the draft report for factual accuracy, the Government will have seen our finding that the evidence was not available to us. That is the point at which we make a final check for whether there is something that we should have seen that we have not. If that is the case, it is a question for the committee to pick up with the Government.

Kate Berry is the person to talk to about who we spoke to on the skills agenda.

As part of our audit, we interviewed a number of stakeholders, mainly those in our case study areas. We also spoke to a number of other external stakeholder bodies. We did not speak directly to any representatives of the construction industry, but we used evidence from a number of reports, including that of the short-life working group on skills, which contains some estimates on the construction sector.

One of the things that you mentioned was that some people said that Brexit was, or contributed to, the problem, and the reason given for that was that some people were attracted down south by better money. They have always got better money down south. That process has accelerated in recent years, but the main reason for it has nothing to do with Brexit and was happening long before Brexit. A lot of the UK house builders decided that, because of planning problems and other issues up here, they would focus their investment in places such as Birmingham rather than Scotland. In the past year or so, about half a dozen national house builders took the decision to withdraw from Scotland because they reckoned that they could make more profit in places such as Birmingham and Manchester. It is bit more nuanced and comprehensive than you are suggesting.

I understand that there is a wide range of reasons for the skills shortages. Our audit did not go into the detail behind the changes in the construction industry. Our main point is that skills shortages are a risk to the delivery of the target, and Brexit might exacerbate that risk.

Yes, but you have to put that in context. You cannot just say “Brexit”. That is the answer to everything: blame Brexit. There is no evidence. Where is your evidence, other than anecdotal, that Brexit was partly to blame?

I do not think that we are blaming Brexit in the report. I think that we have identified that—

You have said this morning that it is a contributing factor to the skills shortage. Where in the report is the evidence of that?

We say in paragraph 96 of the report that it

“could potentially be exacerbated by EU withdrawal.”

Where is the evidence for that?

Can I step in?

I will hand over to the Auditor General, but I think that saying that it will potentially exacerbate the skills shortage does not necessarily mean that it will definitely cause it. I will let the Auditor General come back in.

There is no evidence.

The point that we are making in the report, Mr Neil, is that skills shortages in the construction industry are a risk to the delivery of the target and the continuing ability to meet the needs for affordable housing across Scotland.

Agreed.

You are right that a range of factors underpin that. The wider point that we are therefore making is that it is important that the Government looks at deliverability as well as housing need in thinking about the target that it wants to set, the timescale over which it wants to deliver it and the location and balance of tenures that are involved in that. I understand that Brexit is one of those topics that evoke strong views, and we do not have evidence at this stage of what the impact will be at the end of the transition period. However, the wider point of the report is the importance of deliverability and the continuing risk of shortages in the construction sector.

I accept the wider point, because it is evident that that is the case. However, I think that an audit report should not be saying something is a potential contributor unless you have evidence to that effect, and I do not see the evidence.

The evidence on which we base the assertion—as the convener said, we were careful to caveat it as being a potential factor that was exacerbating—

But there is no evidence of a potential Brexit impact. You are saying that it has a potential impact, but even the use of the word “potential” in an audit report requires the provision of evidence. The whole point of your report is, quite rightly, the demand that the Government produce evidence. However, you have made a statement in the report but have not produced any evidence to back it up, even on a potential basis.

You have made your point on several occasions now, Mr Neil, so you can move on to the next question.

Right, will do. I have a question about land availability. Clearly, land is a major cost. Across Scotland as a whole, it typically represents 25 per cent of the cost of new housing on average, but that varies widely. How important do you think that land availability is for the constraint aspect? Obviously, we all accept that skills shortages are a major constraint and so is planning, as Colin Beattie rightly said. However, land availability, particularly in rural areas, can be a major problem because there is no obligation on private landowners to give up a percentage of land for social housing.

You are right. We highlight the availability of land that is suitable for development and land with the necessary infrastructure as one of the risks looking forward to the next period, and there is increasing uncertainty around that. Kate Berry is probably the person to pick up that question.

Yes. We identify a number of challenges to meeting the affordable housing target in Scotland and one of those is the availability of land. The pressures on land will vary geographically and we have identified some pressures in rural areas. One of the issues that stakeholders told us about was the condition of some of the land that is left. Obviously, we have had quite a big building programme so far and some of the easier sites, if you like, have been built on. What is left in some areas now are brownfield sites that might need a bit more time and money spent on them to prepare them for building on. We identify some of the actions that the Government and councils are taking to address the wider challenges to providing affordable housing. Some of those issues are identified in exhibit 9 in part 3 of the report. For example, at a council level, councils can use their section 75 affordable housing policies to overcome issues of land being in short supply. I do not know whether that answers Mr Neil’s question.

13:00  

That answer is fine, Kate. My final question is about housing policy down the years under successive Governments, from way before the Scottish Parliament was established, which has included Governments taking equity—typically 40 per cent—when providing new housing. A total historic value at purchase price of the equity is hundreds of millions of pounds and the market value of the houses is probably well over a billion pounds. At a crucial time when the Scottish Government needs money, all that equity is tied up but it seems to me that it could potentially be released to make funds available to invest in new housing, for example. Have you had a chance to look in detail at that issue, or will you in future?

We have not looked at it in detail in this report, Mr Neil, but the committee might want to explore it with the Scottish Government. I am sure that the new Auditor General will want to take it into account when he looks at the new performance audit programme, which will look ahead after the current review. There are clearly long-term issues about the value of homes and the way in which the Government chooses to use its financial transactions budget to invest that would be entirely appropriate to explore with Government.

A related issue is the value of the help-to-buy scheme. I am a sceptic about whether help to buy is good value for money. I think that it pushes up prices and the construction companies’ profits. It is a dead weight and does not add a great deal to the total supply of housing. Are you looking at that area?

The help-to-buy scheme is not within the 50,000 target, as I am sure you know. My colleagues in the National Audit Office have looked on it as primarily a UK Government target. They, too, have expressed reservations about its effectiveness. Again, I think that it is one of the things that my successor as Auditor General will want to look at in the work programme.

Thank you very much indeed.

Liam Kerr.

I will look at council funding, which is at page 17 and onwards in your report. One section indicates that the Scottish Government can reallocate funds if a council is unable to spend its funding in a given year, perhaps for slippage or some such. Your report goes on to say that

“it is not always clear about how decisions to reallocate funding are made.”

Does “not always clear” mean that sometimes it is clear, or is it a euphemism—of the sort that I tend to use, to be honest—that it is not clear at all. In any event, what needs to change—and will it change?

I will bring Kate Berry in on the detail. We try not to use euphemisms and to be precise, so I am sure that we mean that it is not always clear. Kate can tell you more about the detail that underlies that.

Councils are allocated their local programme funding and get notice of what it will be over a three-year period, which allows them to work with their partners to plan projects over the three years. As you have acknowledged, projects might sometimes have delays or there might be reasons why all the money could not be spent in a particular year. An example is a council that is master planning an area for regeneration, which might take a lot of time at the start and then slip over.

There is generally a bit of movement in the Government’s programme that is not new but part of the previous programme. I think what we were getting at was that, when decisions to move funding were made, the basis for why one bit of funding was moved to another area was not always clear.

There are obvious reasons for deliverability, but it is important to look at the spend over the five-year programme. We have identified big variations between council areas, so it would be good to get under the skin of that a bit more at the end of the five-year programme and maybe be clearer about why decisions have been made to move funding to a particular council area. To be fair, the Government says that it tries to keep the funding within the broad regional area so that that movement of funding will benefit the wider regional housing market.

Yes. Forgive me for pushing back on that, but my point is that, if decisions to reallocate funding are “not always clear”, that is not always desirable. If I was sitting where the Government was—or certainly where the councils were—I would want clarity, because I would want to know what the criteria were for how the money would be reallocated when there was slippage. Do you get any sense of someone having that conversation and doing something about it?

We know that the area teams work quite closely with the local offices, so they will have a good understanding of programming issues at a local level. However, in the documentation that we could see, it was not always that clear whether there were any guidelines about how those decisions might be made.

I will move on. In the same area of your report, it states:

“Councils and RSLs are investing significant resources”

of their own to meet the target,

“but it is difficult to calculate the total investment.”

It seems important to me that we have an overall figure for the investment. Are steps being taken to address that so that, at the end of the programme, we can tell very clearly how much public money has been spent and benchmark that against what has been achieved?

The Government’s outturn reports have quite a bit of information about expenditure data. We have identified that we have information on the data for projects when they are approved. In some cases, costs may rise after the projects are approved, but we do not have that data. We do not think that it is a great deal, but we have found it hard to get an exact figure for that additional expenditure. However, we note the costs of what the additional funding has been in terms of what has been approved. As for what the Government is doing to improve that information, I think that that is a question for the Government.

Okay. I will put that question to the Government. I know that we cannot get a figure, but the question is about what someone is doing to address that. Your point is a fair one, and I will put that question to the Government.

Finally, you say in paragraph 41 that, if an approved project goes over budget and the council or the RSL pays the extra, that “is not recorded”. Given the challenges that Scotland’s councils are facing in their budgets, that non-recording is surprising to me. Should the Scottish Government be capturing that? If it is not, do you get any indication that it will?

The Government would know whether project costs had risen after a project was approved if the council or the RSL went back to seek further grant funding, but that does not always happen. As I said, we think that the sum of money involved is probably not big, but it is also probably not comprehensive.

Yes, but it is not recorded.

No, it is not recorded.

I find that rather surprising, but perhaps that is another question that I will put to the Scottish Government.

I have a little question for Caroline Gardner on the role of health and social care partnerships in taking forward housing. I appreciate that the report was researched and produced pre-Covid, but do you get a sense that since the start of this health emergency and disaster, we are all beginning to think about how we can do things differently and better in the future? Does that also apply to housing programmes that we can see in front of us and in your report? Can you give us a little flavour of how you see that impacting on how we deliver those kinds of programme in the future and whether that might involve closer working partnerships with our health and social care partnership teams?

That is a great question, Mr Coffey.

From the work that we have published in the past, you will know that the Government has been ambitious in its outcomes approach in the national performance framework, and that one of the ways in which it aims to improve the health and wellbeing of the people of Scotland is through much closer working between health and social care, and also between health and housing, and health and a range of other public services that contribute towards the health of the population. We have reported that the outcomes approach is not always followed through in terms of decision making and allocating money and other resources and, in particular, that health and social care partnerships and the integration authorities have not yet had the impact that they were intended to.

One of my personal hopes is that, alongside all the loss and devastation that we have seen as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, we start to look much more closely at the way in which all those things are interlinked and at how we make use of our resources, which are bound to be constrained in the near future, to have more of an impact on the lives of the people who need help most.

Earlier, the committee heard from the permanent secretary a little bit about the work that is being done on renewal, looking ahead to the new programme for government. In this instance, for example, I would like decisions on how much is invested in housing to be closely linked to the way in which such houses can help to improve child poverty, the health of people with disabilities or older people, and the sustainable economic regeneration of local communities. None of that is easy, but it feels as though there is an opportunity to do it, and we have all recognised how much it matters as a result of the impact of the pandemic.

As far as I can make out, approximately 40,000 citizens in Scotland live in care homes, and we know that there are links between the services that we deliver in that system. Is there a case to be made for thinking more innovatively about how we look after our senior citizens in the future, whether they live in a care home, or whether they live at home with enhanced services provided by the council that support people to live in their own accommodation, closer to or among their families? I know that that is a bit of vision gazing and perhaps you do not want to comment on that, but I would appreciate your thoughts on the possible direction of travel, given what we are going through at the moment.

I am happy to start that off and then I will bring in Claire Sweeney.

In a sense, what I have been saying in my reports on the NHS over the past eight years is that the NHS is increasingly caught up in the short-term problem of trying to deal with the needs of older people who, fundamentally, do not have acute healthcare needs but need social care and support, a lot of which is about housing that enables them to stay safely at home and that adapts and grows around them as they become frailer or their needs change.

Claire Sweeney is focused on those issues as part of our work on this. Perhaps she can add to that.

The response to Covid is an opportunity to start looking at how services are delivered differently and to put the citizen at the heart of discussions. We have seen how that has started in the response to homelessness issues, for example.

However, there are some risks with that. There is pressure around economic factors and we have already talked a little bit about capacity. Those risks feature on everybody’s risk register, including in terms of those partnerships coming together and being at the table to help make more radical decisions with communities.

In the report, we reference our previous work on health and social care integration, in which we saw similar barriers getting in the way of a good visionary approach to working across systems. You have heard from us before about different cultures, resource pressures and leadership and direction not quite being where it should be.

13:15  

However, there is ambition and enthusiasm. In paragraph 46 of the report, we mention that the Scottish Public Health Network said that there was enthusiasm for doing things differently and for closer involvement with health and social care partnerships, which will be at the root of putting different arrangements in place for people in care homes and older people. It is in trying to realise that in a practical sense that we sometimes stumble.

Thank you for that insight.

Your report discusses the importance of tenant and community involvement in plans for new affordable housing, but suggests that approaches are mixed across council areas. You highlighted South Lanarkshire Council as being a good example. What steps are being taken to ensure that good practice in that regard is being shared?

We have looked closely at that in this report, and the Accounts Commission has a great interest in community engagement more generally. We recently published some work on principles for community empowerment.

Claire Sweeney can pick up on what good practice looks like in what we have seen elsewhere.

The principles that we published on community empowerment were drawn together from wide engagement with experts and by looking at community empowerment across a range of different services and areas, particularly focusing on aspects such as the regeneration of communities. We saw some common themes, which made our community engagement a success and we learned a lot through that piece of work.

We highlighted five big areas: communities having a sense of control and driving the agenda; having good public sector leadership so that the conditions are in place for communities to respond well; effective, open and transparent relationships being at the heart of making community empowerment work well; the need for a relentless focus on improving outcomes—a common thread throughout the report is the need for a clearer picture about the positive difference that investment is making—and, finally, the need for accountability so that there is a sense of communities being able to hold public services to account.

We recognised those things as important for community empowerment, and there are good examples of them sprinkled throughout the report. We want a much more consistent approach that is not just about surveying people or focus groups, but communities being involved and hard-wired in right at the start of any decisions that are being made that will affect them. That is a strong message in the report and Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission will continue to take a keen interest in it.

There are no further questions from members. Auditor General, do you want to make any final comments?

There is nothing to add from me—thank you.

I thank you and your colleagues for your evidence. I gather that this is Claire Sweeney’s final meeting with the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee, so I wish her all the best in her next endeavour. I am sure that we will engage with her in her role at Public Health Scotland at some point in the future.

13:18 Meeting continued in private until 13:47.