Official Report 191KB pdf
I bring today's meeting of the Local Government and Transport Committee to order. Our sole item on the agenda is an annual report from the Accounts Commission. I welcome Alastair MacNish, the chair of the Accounts Commission. Supporting Alastair are Caroline Gardner, the deputy auditor general and controller of audit; David Pia, the director of performance audit for local government; and Gordon Smail, a senior manager for performance audit from Audit Scotland. I welcome all four of you and give you the opportunity to make some introductory remarks.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to share the 2005 overview report of local government in Scotland.
Thank you very much, Alastair. I will open up the questioning, after which other members may come in. How well prepared do you believe local authorities are to deal with the range of cost pressures on them, which you highlighted in your introductory remarks—pensions provision and equal pay, for example—as well as the likelihood that increases in central Government funding to local authorities will be at a more modest level than they have been in recent years?
Local authorities' financial planning is sound and has been for many years. There are indeed major financial pressures on them. The unallocated reserves are down to 2 to 2.3 per cent. That is partly because, if offers are made under the single status agreement or equal pay conditions, the funding can go into a specific reserve but, if they are not, the money will stay in the general reserve. There is a difference between those sorts of allocation.
In my experience, the big issue with local authorities and funding is that of so-called underfunding. Whether it is the McCrone settlement money or the money for free personal care for the elderly, whereas the Scottish Executive might say that it is fully funding the programmes, councils say, "Hang on a minute; you are not fully funding it."
It will probably not surprise you to hear that it is a mixture of things. When the McCrone committee was first set up, figures for the total cost were bandied about by local government. To date, councils have funded the McCrone settlement. It is perfectly valid to ask what pressure that puts on other resources. Ever since the distribution formula was established back in the 1970s, there has been an issue about its fairness to different areas of Scotland with respect to rurality, urban deprivation and so on. There have also been specific, ring-fenced moneys under individual settlements.
The only thing I can add to what Alastair MacNish has said is that there are some areas where we have been able to examine in more detail the match between what has been spent and what the requirements have been. The most recent example is in the report, which we published a couple of months ago, on implementation of the teachers' agreement following the McCrone settlement. We were able to track through the Executive's estimates of what it would cost, the funding that was made available to cover the settlement and the amounts that were spent by individual councils. Overall, there was a pretty close match—the gap was very small.
You have a specific role in that regard. Neither local government nor the Executive is served well if there is argy-bargy between the two sides. I mentioned the recent case of Argyll and Bute Council saying that it does not have enough money for something, and the Executive claiming that it received the money that was required.
The difficulty there is that McCrone was a six-year programme. At the end of it, we were able to say, "These are the facts." As you will understand, that was very difficult at the start. The figures that were being bandied around were very different.
I used to be on the Health Committee, which is about to produce a report on free personal care. The Executive tells the committee that free personal care is fully funded. COSLA, in evidence to the committee, said that it accepts that it is fully funded. You have a role in saying that it is fully funded and that, overall, councils are doing well, but your role might be to say, "Well, actually, while the 32 councils taken together might be fully funding free personal care, there is an issue in this council and in that council." Councils such as Argyll and Bute are crying foul, which must mean that other councils are getting a greater share of the money. I would have thought that your organisations have a role to highlight what the facts are in the round and what the facts are in the 32 councils.
You are right: we are uniquely placed to look across the Scottish public sector from the Executive to councils, and to all the other public bodies that spend public money, but the sort of transparency that we are talking about is not easy to achieve with all the other things that are shifting at the same time, which is why it took us a while to get under the skin of the McCrone agreement. Probably the best thing I can say at this stage is that we are just about to start consulting on our work programme for the next couple of years, and free personal care is one of the issues on which we will be consulting. The committee's views on whether that would be a fruitful area for us to consider would be welcome.
On page 23 of your report, you conclude:
Yes. This probably comes as no surprise to those round the table, but there is a tendency for councils to promote what they are doing well, in council magazines, newsletters and so on. We are conscious of the need for balance.
I will give an example from Highland Council—you know what I am going to say. There has been much controversy about the council's proposal to put out to tender the care of elderly people who are currently looked after in a number of publicly owned care homes in the Highlands, including homes in Grantown-on-Spey, Fort William, Kingussie, Inverness and Nairn, in my constituency. The proposal was narrowly passed recently. Although the approach reflects a major change in policy, the council elected not to hold public meetings to present and explain the policy to the public and give people the opportunity to ask questions and receive correct information about the purpose and detail of the policy. That led to anger and confusion on specific points, which could have been avoided.
In my experience over many years, public meetings are often—although not always—held to discuss major issues, because such meetings provide an opportunity to test the temperature in the community and receive feedback. You raised the matter informally with me about 10 days ago and I took it up with the auditor, who will have another look at Highland Council's position vis-à-vis the new set-up for those care homes. It is unusual not to hold public meetings, but it depends on how expansive the consultation was and whether all aspects were covered. The auditor will consider such matters.
I appreciate that helpful answer.
In my experience at South Lanarkshire Council, if we were undertaking an exercise for the first time we would trawl councils throughout not just Scotland but the United Kingdom to find examples of best practice and discover what we could learn from other authorities.
Does that mean that it has slipped up in the past?
Over the past few years, COSLA's advice to local authorities has certainly not been as effective as it was. I think COSLA would acknowledge that. That is why it has made changes over the past three or four years.
Can you give any examples?
I am delighted to say that I cannot off the top of my head.
In your introductory remarks, you referred to the section of the report that deals with council tax collection rates, in respect of which there are obviously good signs. Notwithstanding that, council tax collection rates in Scotland remain low compared with those in England. What is your perspective on why that is the case? What solutions can you suggest to improve the situation?
The figures that are quoted in the report are for council tax collected within the 12 months. I do not mean to be complacent, but we are now up to just under 93 per cent of all council tax collected in the 12-month period. That is a vast improvement. If you go back 10 years, there was a huge gap between the collection rates in England and in Scotland. Our percentage was down in the mid 80s and England was up at around 93 or 94 per cent, but the gap has narrowed dramatically. I know for a fact that councils across Scotland are trying their hardest and are being more and more direct about collecting as much as they can within the 12 months.
There is also a technical difference in what councils here are collecting. Council tax in Scotland, as you all know, includes water rates, whereas water rates in England are collected separately. In fact, I heard on the news this morning that one of the English water companies is being criticised for its level of outstanding debt. We have not been able to do an analysis that lets us compare like with like, but there is a technical difference in the basis of the figures that we are talking about.
Do you think it is steady as you go?
I would not take the pressure off at all. All I know is that an awful lot of effort is going into the collection of council tax, and it has been successful year on year. Last year, there was a full 1 percentage point improvement, but the day we take the pressure off is the day it might just start to level out. We need to get as close as we can to collecting 100 per cent within the year.
We regularly hear reports about the significant number of people who qualify for council tax benefit but do not claim it. Could councils do more to make people aware of their right to claim such benefits? Is the efficiency with which such benefits are processed an issue that you have considered in any detail?
Caroline Gardner can give you a detailed answer, but I could not agree more with what you say. Some of the councils that have the highest returns are extremely good at ensuring that benefits are paid. Council tax collection statistics are based on those who are due to pay and exclude those who receive benefits, so a lot of councils work hard, as my old council did, to ensure that benefits are paid to those who require them. Where that is done well it helps dramatically, and the system allows for the payment of proper benefits.
Alastair MacNish is absolutely right: all the guidance that is available to councils about council tax collection and council housing rent collection suggests that they should not be seen as collection exercises in their own right. Rather, it is a question of getting to people early, ensuring that they are aware of their entitlements and processing both the initial claim and any changes as efficiently as possible. When we looked in some detail a couple of years ago at housing rent collection, there was a clear correlation between doing benefits advice and benefits processing well and overall collection rates.
I would like to ask about the reference to the police in paragraph 202 on page 33, which states:
We report the figures that each police force records. We do not analyse the reasons for variations in clear-up rates.
Many organisations such as the police and local councils would say that there are different ways of collecting the data. Is that the case?
That may be part of the reason for the variations, but the purpose of the performance indicators is to highlight what the reported figures show us. The figures will certainly prompt questions and they should enable the bodies that must account for the performance of the police to explore the reasons for the variations.
In the past few years, we have done a lot of work with Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland to ensure that consistent definitions are used. That work should be starting to feed through, so that there is more consistent reporting of crimes. However, as David Pia said, following up the reasons behind variations is more the responsibility of the police inspectorate.
Okay, but if there are inconsistent performance indicators and different ways of collecting data, work will obviously take a long time to feed through the systems. In other words, we ought to take the whole lot with a pinch of salt.
There is guidance that tells police forces what they should represent and what data should be collected. We can start from the assumption that the data are consistent, but people will often challenge performance indicators by saying that the explanation for the different figures has as much to do with the figures that are used as the performance of the police forces.
I accept that the answer to the member's question is not particularly good. I return to what I said in my introductory remarks. One of our major concerns is inconsistent performance management information across local authorities, including information on police forces and fire services. We are concerned that statutory performance indicators—SPIs—are not as good as they should be and that they are unacceptable in some areas.
All the bodies concerned are aware of the importance of having information that is as consistent as possible. A project that is being led by the Justice Department and which involves Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary, ACPOS, COSLA and Audit Scotland is considering the whole framework of police performance information. The objective of the project is to improve the framework so that it gives us much more accurate information that can be examined in the comparative way the member suggests.
May I ask about another matter, convener?
You may ask one more question before I bring in other members.
I want to ask about common good funds, of which local councils are often custodians, and in which there can be huge amounts of money and assets, such as land and buildings. Have you explored common good funds in any way? Are there guidelines for administering them? Have you come across councils that do not have a clue about what assets and buildings belong to a common good fund?
Common good funds form part of councils' accounts, so they are audited as part of the wider accounts. No separate opinion is given on common good fund accounts, but they are dealt with as part of audits. Auditors examine them as they would any part of an authority's accounts and determine where the risks may lie. As you rightly say, some common good funds are of substantial value, particularly in the cities. We deal with issues that the public raise in correspondence, and common good funds come up quite often; there is a lot of interest in them.
On page 5, the report states:
The main problem is not necessarily small councils. National priorities are put to local authorities to develop, and authorities have to marry their resources to them. We are concerned about them marrying their resources to local priorities that are important to their communities and council members.
Do smaller councils have greater difficulties than larger councils with any particular areas? Did you analyse the effect of size?
Council size is always a problem for education. Let us take rurality and the number of pupils in a school as an example. The cost of a small rural school is far greater than that of a large school in an urban area, because the council is able to maximise the economies of scale for the latter. Care for the elderly is another area of responsibility in which size is a problem. It is difficult for a council to get the necessary quality of and expertise for home care if its population is sparse. Sparsity is a big issue.
Along the same lines, what have you ascertained about how the size of councils affects the implementation of the cabinet model of decision making?
As you probably know, I was the chair of the leadership advisory panel that considered in 1999 the political structures in local government. It was suggested that we would say that everyone should have a cabinet, but we chose not to go down that road; instead, we recommended what fits each community. At present, almost 50 per cent of councils have a sort of cabinet set-up and the rest still work with committees. Smaller councils and rural councils tend to work on a committee basis.
Where the cabinet style is appropriate, does it help the process?
Where scrutiny of the cabinet is vigilant and correct, it can help the process. However, scrutiny must be independent and genuine; it cannot just involve going through the motions. Where scrutiny is genuine—no matter what the system—it benefits the community that the council serves.
I will return to one aspect of the discussion about council tax collection before moving on. In response to a question from Michael McMahon, you said that collection rates have improved, that the gap between Scotland and England is narrowing and that performance is improving generally. You said that we should keep the pressure on to improve performance and finally to close the gap.
It is wonderful to have colleagues from Audit Scotland with me to answer such questions.
To be frank, we do not have a view on the impact of the bill. We see arrestment as the back-end of a series of processes that starts with issuing bills on time, ensuring that people are aware of the range of ways to pay, encouraging direct debits and taking follow-up action quickly when somebody falls into arrears. We hope, therefore, that arrestment orders become an issue of last resort rather than a central plank of councils' policies to increase council tax collection rates. However, we will consider what the bill proposes and where it might have an effect.
It would be a tragedy if any proposals limited councils' ability to collect council tax. The Accounts Commission is clear that someone who is due to pay council tax should pay it promptly when it is due. If anything were introduced in legislation that would affect that, it would not benefit the community that local authorities serve or the Scottish people in general.
I am heartened to hear that you will consider the bill's proposals. I accept that arrestment orders are the back-end of the process of trying to improve performance rates, but well over 200,000 applications are involved. Clearly, arrestment orders must have an impact on getting the extra few percentage points that improve performance rates.
A big bang would not work. The efficiency savings must be incremental, and they have already started. The figure for the savings to date is £120 million. However, I personally—not the Accounts Commission—have issues with what is deemed to be an efficiency saving and what is deemed to be a saving for other reasons. This is not the appropriate time to go into that, but there is a balance to be struck. There are efficiency savings and there are other savings that it would be good practice to achieve but which are not necessarily efficiency savings, for example savings relating to the workings of backroom staff. Councils are starting to develop savings and are trying hard to marry them to the targets that are to be achieved, so there are on-going savings that should add incrementally to the 2008 target.
I appreciate the complexities of defining what is, for example, a time-efficiency saving, a time-releasing saving or a cash-releasing saving, and whether something is a saving and whether it is an efficiency, and so on. Are you satisfied that in terms of your ability to measure all that and to report to us on performance, you are working from the same base as that of the Executive? If the minister tells Parliament that the Executive seeks to achieve cash-releasing savings of £220 million from local government by 2007-08, and you assess the savings, are you assessing the same thing that the minister talked about?
I get the impression that my colleagues are getting nervous in case their chairman says something that they might regret later. My position is clear: the Accounts Commission must satisfy itself that the efficiencies that we identify are genuine efficiencies that are along exactly the lines that the Executive has indicated and they are not made up of various elements. The Accounts Commission, through Audit Scotland's best value audit and the annual audit, will ensure as best we can that that is transparent. If it is not transparent, we have a right and a duty to declare that we are not comfortable with it.
I want to follow that through. You said that you will check what you find against the Executive's baselines or definitions to identify whether the target is being achieved. Earlier, you said that the process had to be incremental and that the target could not be achieved in a big bang in 2007-08. Can we take it from that that when you come back to us next year, you will be able to say in your report on 2005-06—which you are now reviewing and which is one of the first full years in which the Executive has put in place all its efficiency plans—how far along the road to achieving the target councils are, and that you will be able to do the same for 2007-08?
Yes, on two counts. First, we will have that information or, if we do not, we will state that we do not have it and why that is the case. Secondly, it will be my final report, so—
It will look good.
No. I will be more dangerous in my final report.
There is one other subject that I want to raise—your comments on public-private partnerships and school projects. In paragraph 101 of your report, you say:
One of the Accounts Commission's concerns has been about the growth in capital expenditure across the authorities. As the overview reports, such expenditure is rising significantly, for a variety of reasons. That is partly to do with the use of PPPs.
Your report raises concerns about some local councils' policies on reserves and balances. You say that only half of them have provided information with which you are satisfied. Is the Accounts Commission keen to do further work on that?
The figures on reserves are the best news that the Accounts Commission has had about the impact among local authorities of our actions last year. Virtually all authorities now have a reasonably transparent policy on the issue. The overall unallocated reserve is down to 2.3 per cent, which would be deemed reasonable even for Audit Scotland's reserve. Some authorities have an unallocated reserve of 5 or 6 per cent. For example, Moray Council has a large unallocated reserve, but that is because it requires a contingency for flood alleviation. The same goes for single status and equal pay. Councils that have not made an offer to trade unions or staff cannot put the money for it into an earmarked reserve, so they have to leave it in the unallocated reserve.
The chart on page 16 of the report shows that Glasgow's unallocated reserve is 2 per cent, whereas the figure creeps up for the more rural authorities. It seems that the more rural the authority, the greater the reserve. Orkney Islands Council is not mentioned. Is there a reporting reason for that?
Neither Orkney Islands Council nor Shetland Islands Council are included in that chart. Their reserves are substantially higher than those of other councils, for reasons to do with the oil industry. Rather than include councils that were way off the scale, we tried to take account of local circumstances. We showed the spread in the other authorities, without saying what we think is an appropriate level of reserve, because that must be determined locally.
The chart shows that East Dunbartonshire has a reserve of 5 per cent. Are you satisfied with that?
We are not concerned about any of the reserves in the 2004-05 audit. The councils have to make the decisions on that issue. However, we deem that the reserves of the 32 councils are reasonably appropriate. We could argue that, because my old council, South Lanarkshire, has such a low reserve, it should hope that no major disasters occur, because very little is left in the pot. However, although the percentage is low, the reserve is still millions of pounds. The auditors considered the figures seriously because of the issue that arose last year. We are comfortable with the situation, but we will revisit the issue during the 2005-06 audit. The councils had drifted, but they are coming back on board. Every council will have a strategy for 2005-06.
I want to return to David McLetchie's point about PPP. The Accounts Commission has raised concerns about the way in which we have managed and used what Alastair MacNish said is the only show in town. If the show was the original show that was in town some years ago—public capital investment—would we not still face the same management pressures?
The amount of money that would have been required could not have been found instantly. The big advantage of PPP is that the money is spent over a longer period. Our main complaint about PPP was that we were not getting the best rate, because the Treasury rate might have been cheaper. Significant sums of money are involved. Councils could not have come up with sufficient money to carry out the projects simply by going out to the market.
So the investment packages in the early days of Strathclyde Regional Council were not used as an analogy.
Strathclyde Regional Council was huge and covered a third of Scotland. In effect, it was a small country and it could therefore live with that system of capital expenditure. When we moved to a system of 32 councils, the vast majority of them could not cope with that system, which is why PFI was introduced. That helped significantly, but there is now a move to variations of the method. Councils no longer use simply PPP; there is a balance between PPP and traditional methods. As one of the best-value reports states, we have gone down part of the road with the traditional method and taken some of the PPP method on board. A balance makes sense for the future. We cannot continue to roll out projects under PPP.
The fact that they are public-private partnerships takes some pressure off the councils involved in the management of capital projects. Instead of the council, the contractor has the responsibility for the management arrangements.
There still need to be very astute officers in the council to make sure that the private contractors are up to speed and that they tie in with the contract that they have signed.
It is probably worth adding to that that the study to which Alastair MacNish referred is a follow-up to the schools PFI report that we did three or four years ago. It is deliberately broadening the scope to examine the management of the schools estate. The study is considering not just PPP deals but the range of ways in which councils are now investing in the school estate. We hope that we will be able to draw out some lessons about where the benefit and advantages lie.
A number of members want to ask supplementary questions. Because we have a bit of time, I am prepared to take them, provided that members keep their questions quite tight.
I want to ask about roads. In paragraph 195 of your report, you refer to the Audit Scotland report of November 2004 "Maintaining Scotland's roads". At that time, councils estimated the backlog of maintenance to be £1,500 million. I believe that the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland—the local authority engineers who deal with roads—produced a programme that would cost £4 billion over 10 years to carry out the necessary work to clear the backlog and bring the roads up to standard. Obviously, it is a serious problem, not least in my constituency of Inverness East, Nairn and Lochaber, which is 5.2 times the size of greater London and has a huge network of roads, many of which are single track, and each of which has its own portfolio of potholes.
The report was very clear that almost 50 per cent of the Scottish roads for which local authorities have responsibilities have serious problems. The local authorities have started to tackle that and there has been significant additional expenditure on roads maintenance. That is why we are starting to see a drop in the number of roads requiring to be improved, although the figure still stands at 41 per cent.
Thank you for that answer. There is certainly no railway alternative in most of my constituency; nor is there likely to be in this millennium.
I have a small supplementary question. You alluded to the choices that local authorities face. Do you recognise that not all local authorities took the opportunity afforded by the mild winters to take money away from roads and divert it to other services? Some local authorities used that capacity to invest in roads and, as a result, some of them have improved the standard of their roads.
The argument has always been that authorities whose roads are well maintained—I do not intend to say which authorities those are, but that is clear from the studies—kept their roads budgets fully funded and were able to improve the roads as they went along. It is now so long ago that it would be difficult to go back and check whether that was totally accurate.
That is why I raised the matter.
I refer you to page 17 of part 2 of the overview report, on managing resources. I refer specifically to paragraphs 96 to 98, on accounting for assets. This is to help me, as I am not an accountant. You talk about the problem of repairs being considered capital rather than revenue costs. If a council spends £1,000 on a repair but puts it down as capital expenditure, what is the benefit to the council of transferring that to a revenue account as long as it is accounted for?
I will make a poor attempt at answering that question and my colleagues will then give you the right answer.
Before I do, can I just check something? Is paragraph 97 an example of a widespread problem or is it a specific problem?
It is a specific one. South Ayrshire Council was the only council in Scotland that we had a problem with.
It is a specific case of something that we come across frequently, although not usually involving sums of that magnitude. There is an issue with councils following proper accounting practice. The accounting is quite important. If the money is required for a repair or something that has value over time, it is right to capitalise it. However, it is important that a quick repair job—something that has no lasting value—is recognised in the year in which the expenditure is incurred. The council should not take the benefit of something over a number of years—for example, by capitalising some sort of expenditure and writing it back to the accounts over 30 years—if the repair, for example, to a council house, will really last only for maybe five years. It is about matching the benefit with the expenditure. It is attractive to councils to put spending into their capital account, as that avoids the pain of that expenditure being put through the revenue account in the particular year.
Some of us would argue that that is creative accounting, but that is what accountants get paid for. In this case, the auditors were right to say that the expenditure could not be capitalised.
In the interests of transparency, the more information that we have, the better. The document is very good. As you say, it is an overview of the local authority audits. It would be extremely helpful to have a comparative table for each of the comments that you make. You have that information, otherwise you could not draw comparisons. You give a comparative table on page 16, but it concerns only one issue. It would be extremely useful to have such tables in an annex or appendix to the report.
Every year, we issue the statutory performance indicators, of which there are about 70, and there is comparative information on every one of them. Until this year, we issued small pamphlets in three or four tranches, but they were misused. The media would get hold of them and highlight one particular issue that was out of kilter with the overall mix. We now publish statutory indicators on our website, and copies are available. If we started to include them in the document, it would become very bulky. However, we can give comparative information in all those areas. The type of chart that is on page 16 is very useful because at a glance it lets you see the situation, although it does not give you all the facts.
Given that you have produced a comparative table for one issue, why have you not done so for the others?
We could do so, but the issue is the size and bulk of the document.
Could you look at the matter for next year?
We can certainly look at it. I am not dead against the suggestion, but I wonder how big the document might become. If it made sense, neither I nor the commission would have a problem with it.
We spent quite a lot of time considering the issue this year. We went through versions of the report that ranged from half the size of the current document to 10 times its size. The answer probably lies in the smarter use of technology to create a version on the web that has hyperlinks if someone wants to explore the information behind the report. We always try to strike a balance between accessibility and showing all the evidence that we have to support the report. The information is all in the public domain, but it is not all in the report.
The commissioners constantly raise the same issue and ask whether more information could be included in the overview. It is a question of striking the right balance, but I am happy to consider the matter again.
You talked about the different ways of running councils, such as a cabinet system or a committee system. Some councils—even in my own area—seem to go through constant change in respect of amalgamating senior management responsibilities. Other councils have not done as much of that. Are you in a position to say whether councils that have changed their senior management structures are better at delivering best value and efficiencies than those that have not done so? Some councils seem to have spent a fortune getting rid of senior executives but have ended up having to take on consultants at vast expense.
That is a very difficult issue. The strength of a smaller corporate management team is that it acts corporately. To take my own example, South Lanarkshire Council had 17 directors in 1995 or 1996. It is very difficult for 17 directors and a chief executive to act corporately. The number was reduced to seven and the team acted more corporately. Does that make for better services? It certainly makes for easier strategic management of the authority. However, it costs money.
With all due respect, I do not think that you have answered the question. Have you seen councils that have changed their senior management structures perform better? Do councils score higher on performance indicators when there have been changes in senior management? Has too much effort been concentrated on senior management when staff morale may be low and management of departments in other parts of the organisation may not be good? For example, perhaps things could be organised better at other levels to deliver better customer care.
If the senior management and corporate management set-up is not good, I am afraid that it does not matter what the quality is below. If the top is not organised properly, there is a serious problem. I do not know of an authority in Scotland that has not revisited its management structure since 1995. They have all downsized in respect of the chiefs. That does not mean to say that they do not still work on 12 or 13 areas corporately, but I think that every authority in Scotland has examined its management structure.
I have a quick question on roads further to the question that Fergus Ewing asked. You mentioned the good work that had come from the Audit Scotland report that was mentioned. However, roads maintenance is still a major issue, given the percentage of the road network that the overview report says needs further maintenance. How does the commission plan to aid councils not only to keep tabs on the problem but to inject a bit more action on the issue?
We have tried to encourage the use of a traffic lights system of red, amber and green for the roads maintenance programme. I think that quite a lot of authorities now use that. We are constantly looking at the issue, as David Pia will explain.
We are in touch with the road engineers association SCOTS, which carries out the annual road conditions survey. That survey is the key measurement of the state of the roads. At some stage, we will carry out some kind of follow-up work to check what progress has been made since the publication of our original report. It is plain that a lot of action is being taken on roads maintenance at the moment, but we cannot tell to what extent that is due to the favourable trend in local government expenditure and to what extent it is due to a shift in priorities. We will look at those sorts of issues in our follow-up work.
That brings us to the end of our questions, so I thank Alastair MacNish, David Pia, Caroline Gardner and Gordon Smail for attending today. The overview report was the only item on our agenda today, so at this point—
Convener, I want to raise a matter when our guests have left the table.
There are no other items on the agenda.
I know, but I indicated previously that I would like to raise a point at this stage in the meeting.
You may do so very briefly, but we will not discuss an issue that is not on the agenda. If you want to raise an issue briefly, I will listen to it, but I will not have a widespread discussion on an issue that is not on the agenda.
That is fair enough, but it is entirely up to other members whether they are willing to accept that.
David, I ask you to come to a conclusion.
Since your meetings normally last until half past 5, I do not think that five minutes is too much of an imposition on people's time.
However, I am indulging you on an item that is not on the agenda.
The letter explains that the Executive's study will include
Convener, can I ask a question?
Very briefly.
This item is not on the agenda. If we are allowed to do this, can we raise any matter that is not on the agenda? It would be more appropriate to have this discussion privately outside the formal meeting.
You are correct that the matter is not on the agenda, but I do not want to set a precedent for taking items that are not on the agenda. The only reason why I permitted Mr McLetchie to raise the issue at this point is that, as he had raised the matter with me in private correspondence, I wanted other committee members to be aware of that. I intend to respond to Mr McLetchie, but I do not intend to open up the discussion further beyond this point.
I want to ask a point of technical clarification. Do the standing orders provide that the content of the agenda is purely for the convener to determine?
Yes. The content of the agenda is agreed between the convener and the clerks.
So no other member at any time can invite, ask or request the convener to put an item on the agenda.
Members can do so informally. That is why I suggest that this meeting should be closed and we should have an informal discussion on whether it should be put on the agenda.
I would be very happy to have such a discussion. I would like to request that we informally discuss the issue next week.
I will decline that request on the basis that I have given my ruling. At this point, I will close this meeting of the committee.
Meeting closed at 15:19.