Local Authority Single Status Agreement
The second item is to consider correspondence that we have received in response to our report of March 2006 on the cost of the local authority single status agreement. As members will recall, we received a response to that report from the Scottish Executive in June 2006, and we wrote to the unions and to the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities before the summer recess inviting them to send responses to the report. We have received a response from Unison, which is attached for members' information. In addition, the Equal Opportunities Commission has sent us correspondence relating to our report. We have also received various bits of correspondence from COSLA, which are among today's papers.
I will invite comments from members on the correspondence that we have received, but I begin with a couple of points of my own. First, Unison says that funding is a significant concern for local authorities, but the committee understands that perfectly well. Our concern in the context of the report and the work that we did for it was about the fact that, since 1999, there had been a protracted period of delay in addressing the various issues related to the single status agreement and in implementing the agreement. The message that we sent to the trade unions, to COSLA and to the Scottish Executive was that we felt that the clock was ticking. It is now six months since the report was published, and as far as we can see from the Unison response, there remains only one authority that has concluded an agreement.
The second issue that arises from the Unison response is to do with the best-value duty on local authorities and the assessment of best value by the Accounts Commission. Members might recall that we challenged the way in which the Accounts Commission assessed the annual budget position of councils. That has to be done separately from the best-value report, which is a more periodic exercise, to see whether, given the risk to an authority associated with potential costs arising from compensation payments or from failure to agree, best value should, in fact, be factored in as a risk issue by the Accounts Commission. The Accounts Commission was not particularly forthcoming on that matter, but that is perhaps a better way of dealing with it than what Unison is suggesting.
Having looked at local government accounts, I still feel concerned that there is a significant risk that could have a significant financial exposure impact on councils, which is not being factored into the way in which they currently present their annual budgets and which is not being considered by the Accounts Commission in its examination of the annual budgets of those authorities. That does not seem to me to be particularly good budgetary practice, so perhaps we should write to the Accounts Commission again about that.
I take the same view, convener, in relation to the risk to local authorities of having a liability that is not clearly and expressly stated. I suppose that it is a chicken-and-egg situation, because it is difficult to specify exactly the sum involved until a negotiation has been completed, but the issue has been going on for such a long time that it is a factor of real significance.
The second point that I want to raise relates to the affordability of the single status agreement for local authorities. I understand that the Executive is putting a fair amount of pressure on local authorities, particularly in relation to the utilisation and rationalisation of assets, to ensure that they find as much as possible within their resources to tackle the issue. I think that we need to hear a bit more from local authorities—from individual local authorities, because I suspect that COSLA would not be terribly informative about where individual authorities are heading—as to whether, by rationalising assets, authorities will be able more easily to afford some of the one-off costs associated with single status. I know that authorities that cover the area that I represent are looking into that.
Finally, I would like to ask about the timescale. Councillor Watters's reply of 28 September states:
"I want to make you aware that COSLA remains in discussions with our 32 member Councils and our signatory trade unions with a view to the implementation of single status within a clearly defined short to medium term timescale."
The use of the words "clearly defined" are perhaps a bit of an exaggeration of what
"short to medium term timescale"
must mean for an agreement that has been doing the rounds for a number of years. One of the key points in the Finance Committee's report was that we must get to a point at which the issue is resolved, and a definitive, hard timescale must be set to resolve it, or it will just lurch along and we will be continually reflecting on the same issues in the period to come. If the committee is able to reiterate one point, I would like us to reiterate the importance of resolving the matter in the short term. We cannot say that there has not been enough time for consultation and dialogue. The agreement has been consulted on almost to the point of absurdity. We should apply more pressure on that point to try to elicit a speedier response.
Two points do not arise in the correspondence that we have received. First, I know that one reason why it is taking so long to deal with the single status agreement—and local authorities admit that they were slow to start—is that a major human resources exercise is needed to implement the agreement, and there are just not enough people on the ground to do it. I am not making excuses; I am simply pointing out the reason.
My second point relates to what John Swinney said about assets. The Executive urged local authorities to consider releasing some of their capital assets in order to help with one-off expenditure, but most local authorities with which I am familiar do not even have an asset register, and they have never taken a proactive view of managing their property assets. Local authorities do not seem able to move into a positive state with regard to their assets. I know that, whenever they start to do that, there is a great emotional pull attached to selling the family silver. There may be some good examples, but, in general, local authorities do not have a good record of managing their asset base.
I would like to comment briefly on the Equal Opportunities Commission's representations, which are quite important. On the surface, there is an expectation that single status will solve the problems of gender inequality in local government, but it is important to monitor whether that actually happens. I echo the concerns of the Equal Opportunities Commission about that. If authorities do not do gender impact assessments after the single status agreement has been implemented, we will not actually know whether single status has addressed the inequalities in pay between men and women.
Presumably, we can take evidence on that later this morning when we hear from the Scottish women's budget group.
Further to Andrew Arbuckle's point, we all recognise the problems that local authorities have in dealing with this complex issue. However, I agree with what John Swinney and others have said about the COSLA response. The letter from Pat Watters states:
"we do not believe that further deadlines, as proposed in your letter are necessarily helpful or within the Committee's remit".
However, there is a need for deadlines because the issue has dragged on for far too long. I understand completely that there will be human resource and staff allocation problems, but the matter needs to be dealt with. If that means drafting in a lot more personnel officers, authorities need to pull the finger out and do it. That is why we need to keep up the pressure.
When I read the response from Unison, I wondered whether anything had happened since our report was published. It was not immediately clear that any movement had taken place. Nobody seems to be taking responsibility for ensuring that the process comes to a conclusion. I was quite concerned by Unison's statement that
"funding is a significant concern … and this is a factor in delays or will result in unacceptable proposals that will further extend negotiations. This still needs to be addressed by the Scottish Executive."
From my reading of that, the unions—and perhaps to some extent the councils—seem to be thinking that, if the problem can be strung out long enough, the Executive will eventually bail them out. That is not a helpful way of addressing the process. It would be helpful if the Executive made it clear that the problem should be dealt with first and foremost by local authorities and that they should have dealt with it long ago.
I do not think that Tom McCabe will have a problem saying that.
I found Rowena Arshad's submission, especially the final paragraph, quite interesting because it calls on the Executive to play a leadership role. The Executive is clearly not keen to do that, but it could manage the process more actively by setting deadlines. As Derek Brownlee said, the Executive should avoid being the bail-out of last resort by proactively managing the situation. It is embarrassing that that has not happened.
Another issue that has not yet been mentioned is that, if authorities fail to put a single status agreement in place, those authorities that have made compensatory payments might be expected to make further payments in due course. We do not have a grip on what that situation is, but it is obviously a matter of some concern.
Another concern is the issue that is mentioned in the final bullet point of Carol Judge's letter, which states:
"There remains a significant group of authorities who appear to have made very little progress in developing their proposals."
If some authorities are doing nothing, that is also a source of major concern.
Drawing together all the points that have been made, I think that we need to pursue four different courses of action. First, we can write to the Accounts Commission about how the annual accounts of local authorities account for the unmanaged risk arising from the failure to implement single status. We can ask whether, bearing in mind the continuing delay, the way in which that risk is factored into the annual accounts needs to be reconsidered.
Secondly, as John Swinney suggested, we can write to individual local authorities to ask whether the rationalisation of assets has freed up moneys and the extent to which such moneys are directed towards single status issues. Is that a reasonable summary of what was suggested?
Yes. In addition, when we write to local authorities, we can also ask them where they are with their individual negotiations. I think that we might see quite a difference among authorities. Some authorities are obviously trying to resolve the issue locally, and some are in a more advanced state than others. It would be helpful to get an account of where each authority is.
It might be useful to refer to the three categories that are mentioned in Carol Judge's letter—the letter has four bullet points, but the first refers only to South Lanarkshire Council—and ask authorities to state which of those categories they are in. Whether each authority puts itself in the right category is an issue that we will need to judge in due course, but it might be useful to get a sense about which category authorities feel that they are in.
The third suggestion was that we write to COSLA to urge that we need to focus on a deadline.
The fourth suggestion, which Jim Mather made, was that we should write to the Executive to underline our concern about the fact that, six months after our report, the situation does not seem to have moved on. We can suggest that the Executive needs to engage in an active management of the process so that it moves towards a satisfactory resolution.
If we are writing to local authorities anyway, we can also ask them how they intend to respond to the Equal Opportunities Commission's request that a gender impact assessment be carried out after the implementation of single status.
Do members agree that we should write as I have indicated?
Members indicated agreement.