Agenda item 2 is the continuation of evidence taking on the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Bill at stage 1. I welcome to the committee Martin Docherty, policy and research officer at West Dunbartonshire Council for Voluntary Services; Anne Houston, chief executive of Children 1st; and Carolyn Roberts, research and influence manager at the Scottish Association for Mental Health.
The bill has the potential to reform public services. Our submission outlined a number of concerns with the bill, which have been reflected by some of the other organisations from which you have taken evidence. We welcome much of what the bill proposes in respect of reducing the burden of scrutiny, and we hope that it will do what it aims to do in respect of ensuring that organisations are subject to fewer inspections without there being a reduction in the quality of services that are provided. We have concerns about the order-making powers and particularly about the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland, which I hope we will have the chance to consider later, and about the context in which voluntary organisations operate, which is different from the context in which statutory services are provided.
Can you expand further on the context?
Yes. In our submission, we mentioned the context in which SAMH and many other voluntary organisations operate in respect of commissioning services, retendering services, the lack of funding and, indeed, the cuts in funding that we are experiencing. SAMH, along with all voluntary organisations, strives to provide quality services—and we succeed in doing so—but when we lose funding it makes it more difficult for us to meet quality standards that are set by scrutiny organisations.
Broadly, Children 1st also welcomes the overall aims and principles of the bill. Like SAMH, we expressed a number of concerns in our consultation response. Our two major concerns are first, the fact that the Commissioner for Children and Young People in Scotland appears in schedule 3 of the bill, and secondly, the issue that Carolyn Roberts mentioned around commissioning and procurement and how that fits within the new body social care and social work improvement Scotland. Our concern is that the same level of scrutiny and enforcement should apply from the commissioning stage to the inspection and scrutiny of the services that are delivered, because the process has a significant impact on service users from the commissioning stage onwards.
I think we will come back to that subject in questioning. Mr Docherty, do you wish to comment?
I agree with Carolyn Roberts and Anne Houston that the theory of the bill is good and welcome, but the issue is how it is implemented through local authorities and community planning partnerships and whether other voluntary organisations will have equal access to the procurement and contracting process. It is about the voluntary sector being equal to public authorities; it is not about saying that the voluntary sector is any better or worse than public authorities. We need to have a level playing field when it comes to accessing contracts. That has not been the experience of many of our user groups.
My question leads on from that. Martin Docherty's submission refers to volunteering, commissioning and procurement and so on, and states that real public sector reform would be reliant on the
The picture is patchy in different parts of the country. As a third sector interface, we have had support from the present and previous local administrations in promoting the voluntary sector and the work that it does in our area. Nevertheless, I assume from what I hear from other areas that the approach there is not as robust or proactive as it is now becoming in West Dunbartonshire. It has taken a long time to get to that point; there has been a lot of cross-party support to try to move the process forward. That has just been our luck. I do not want to speak out of turn, but things could not have got any worse. We had robust support at different levels from across the political spectrum and things are now slowly improving. Given what I hear, I can only assume that things are not improving at the same rate in the rest of the country.
Who do you think the robust political leadership has to come from in the first instance?
In community planning, political leadership definitely needs to come from community planning boards themselves. It is not party-political leadership but managerial political leadership that provides the focus that is needed to deliver the outcomes that people require.
Do those who provide that robust political leadership recognise that there is parity of service among the volunteer organisations and the directly employed council services?
You have hit the nail on the head. It is about recognising the employees in voluntary organisations, not necessarily the work that is undertaken by volunteers who are on management committees and who have fundamental responsibility for financial decisions. I do not think that there is parity in that at the moment—sometimes I do not think that those volunteers have parity with their own members of staff either.
I want to develop Linda Fabiani's point. I seek your view on what implementation is reliant on. In quoting your submission, Linda Fabiani stopped tantalisingly short of the "Reviewing local government" bullet point. Can I entice you to expand on that?
Was that about reorganisation of local government? Everyone cowers under the table.
You did not say "reorganisation."
We were trying to say that local government has to recognise the cross-boundary work that it can do not only with other public bodies but with voluntary organisations throughout the country. If moneys are not infinite, work has to be outcome and focus led. The volunteers on the ground whom we work with on a daily basis want moneys to be used in the best way possible. They are not really interested in who delivers that. I say that from a voluntary sector perspective. We do not want to say that we are the best thing. We acknowledge that we are not but, like everyone else, we can provide good and bad things in relation to public service.
I will turn to the more general subject of order-making powers, which was touched on earlier. We have taken a lot of evidence on section 2 and schedule 3. Are the proposed order-making powers proportionate to the job at hand?
Children 1st is concerned with Scotland's Commissioner for Children and Young People, because that is the body that most relates to the people with whom we work. A huge amount of work went into the consultations on setting up the commissioner's office. Not only was that a long and involved process, most important, it involved direct consultation with children and young people.
I agree. SAMH is particularly concerned about the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland. As you know, earlier this year, it was announced that the commission would be merged with other bodies. That came out of nowhere, as far as we could see—there had been no consultation or discussion—and that context makes us anxious about the commission appearing in schedule 3. As far as we can see, its role could be substantially amended or it could be abolished without consultation, discussion or the opportunity for people who trust it as an independent body that is genuinely interested in securing their rights to influence the outcome.
The proposals on the Mental Welfare Commission were withdrawn and we anticipate that they will reappear at stage 2. Can you enlighten us on the direction of travel?
I am not sure about that. We expect some amendments to be proposed at stage 2 and we await them with interest. We responded to the consultation on the commission, expressing the concerns that I have just set out.
I will ask about the scrutiny proposals, specifically those on user focus. We heard from Professor Crerar that an important aspect of the bill is that it will place a duty of user focus on bodies. However, other witnesses, including the Law Society of Scotland, have said that that is not appropriate for certain public bodies. I am interested in the witnesses' views on that. In particular, I am interested in what Carolyn Roberts has to say on the Law Society's position that the Mental Welfare Commission should not be included in the user focus proposals.
We welcome the proposal for a user focus duty. Service users should clearly be at the heart of service scrutiny. Services are provided for their users, who should have the opportunity to influence and be part of scrutiny and to influence the services themselves.
The aim of the bill and of the merger of scrutiny bodies is to improve outcomes for service users, whoever they are. I would go as far as to say that, without consulting, it would be difficult to establish what those outcomes are and whether the organisations meet service users' needs, so we welcome the inclusion of the user focus duty in the bill. At times, perhaps, we all need a bit of help to remember to take users as seriously as all the other people who are consulted in the scrutiny process.
The user focus duty is welcome. It concerns me that any public body would not want such a duty. Many users of mental health services are also volunteers in local organisations, and I would be concerned if they were unable to influence those organisations' design and scrutiny processes.
I want to return to the order-making powers and find out what the concerns are. If it was clear that the powers could be used only to improve the exercise of public functions and that such changes could be made only with full statutory consultation and a proper parliamentary process, would that alleviate the concerns? Is the problem the lack of clarity, given that, perhaps rightly, people always assume the worst?
In a way, that goes back to the previous question about consultation with important stakeholders. My understanding is that there would be consultation with stakeholder representatives—that is, with representative organisations—rather than with stakeholders themselves, and that there would be limited debate and discussion in the Parliament. The Parliament might not have a full debate on something that could involve a major change to an important body that was set up through a detailed consultation process.
If it was clear that stakeholders would be consulted, would that go some way to alleviating concerns?
To be honest, it would depend on what else surrounded that.
I agree. Our concern is that there is not always agreement about what improvement is. A measure might be intended to improve something, but not everyone will see it as an improvement. As Anne Houston said, without having a specific proposal in front of us, it is difficult to give a definitive view. The order-making powers cause a lot of people quite legitimate concerns.
I assume that no member of the panel had an opportunity to give the Government their views before the bill was published. Were any of you consulted?
No.
No.
If you had been consulted, would you have said that the order-making powers should not be included in the bill?
We would probably have said something similar to what we say in our submission. We would have expressed the view that the order-making powers seem to provide ministers with a lot of power to effect a great deal of change—possibly quite significant change—without being subject to the kind of scrutiny that might be expected.
I find that quite difficult to answer. The question feels hypothetical, so it is hard to know how it might have been presented in a way that could have produced a clear yes or no. Our perspective at Children 1st is inevitably quite specific to the effect of the bill on Scotland's Commissioner for Children and Young People, which deals with our area of work. I have made quite clear what our view is. To be honest, I find it hard to answer that question.
It is worth noting that the commissioners did not find it difficult to answer that question. They told the committee that they would have said that such order-making powers should not appear in the bill.
Just for clarity, what was that consultation on?
The consultation was on the possibility of amendments at stage 2 to bring the Mental Welfare Commission within the scope of the bill.
The consultation closed about two weeks ago, so I expect that we will see the results of it reasonably soon.
I want to ask Ms Roberts about a couple of points in her submission that intrigue me. The SAMH submission states:
Our thinking is that the bill presents an opportunity to try to reduce some of that duplication. We are asked for the same information from the Scottish Commission for the Regulation of Care and from local authorities, which require information for the purposes of contract compliance and because we are required to be on an approved provider list for every area in which we provide services. Other funders, such as national health service bodies and Jobcentre Plus, also ask for similar information. By and large, those organisations ask for the same information in a slightly different format. That is a fairly small practical point, but we would be saved quite a lot of hours putting information together if the information was held in a central repository.
I guess from the nodding heads of other panel members that their experience is similar.
Community planning could assist with that process if each community planning partnership across the country agreed on a process that was easier for voluntary organisations to access. There would then be one identified place from which organisations could access information locally. If the issue cannot be dealt with at national level, local partnerships could at least provide one way of dealing with it.
Does Ms Houston have any views on that?
I agree with what has been said. Monitoring information is required in many different formats. Given the amount of time that is spent on dealing with such requests rather than on delivering services, it would be helpful if such duplication were reduced significantly.
Ms Roberts's submission also states:
That relates more to my initial point about the current funding situation in which many voluntary organisations such as ours find themselves. Voluntary organisations generally struggle to secure full cost recovery in the services that we provide. They regularly find themselves with the choice of either subsidising a service or closing it because the funder is unable or unwilling to provide the full funding.
Would anyone else like to comment?
From our perspective, the issue is interesting, because we in Children 1st have a clear policy, whereby it is our intention, wherever possible, to use voluntary funds to bring added value to services that are funded. However, the purpose of that is to be able to offer innovative new services and provide added value. I agree with what has been said about the importance of it being possible, at least, for voluntary sector staff to have similar salary expectations to those of local authority sector staff who occupy similar posts. The position is slightly different in that we see ourselves not necessarily subsidising services but offering something additional and different. We wish to still be able to do that. That gives us an independence that enables us to speak out on behalf of the service users with whom we work. However, where there is a clear contractual arrangement, we look for the same kind of costs.
There needs to be clear parity in accessing contracting and procurement, although I would not necessarily agree with what has been said about salary scales, especially when one is working with volunteers, who often provide public services, or manage large and robust organisations, free of charge. Money is a governance issue and it is for organisations to discuss it internally. I do not think that we should consider the issue in relation to the bill.
I have a further point, which relates to Mr Docherty's submission. Under the heading "Organisational Consolidation", you say:
We were trying to say that there is a range of skill levels across the sectors that deliver public services. We are glad that the bill is about public service reform as opposed to public sector reform. In that sense, it gives us a great opportunity to tackle the differing skill levels across the spectrum of public service delivery agents. We might need to invest more in improving management skills, because we sometimes find a great deal of duplication as a result of people doing something not necessarily because it is needed, but because they think that it just needs to be done. I might be going out on a limb in saying so, but that wastes a lot of finances and time, and results in money being taken away from front-line services and put into back-room services instead. Skill levels need to be improved across the sectors.
I have a final point. In the following paragraph, you say:
Elements of chapter 2 of part 4 give the idea that social services are delivered by paid employees, and do not recognise those organisations that are neither incorporated nor formal, but which deliver a range of public services off their own bat and are not seen as active organisations because they do not shout about it. While people outside the local area might not know about them, they still deliver social services.
In his review, Professor Crerar identified five guiding principles of scrutiny: public focus, independence, proportionality, transparency and accountability. Do areas of the bill appear deficient when they are measured against those principles, leaving aside the issues that you have already identified?
I am not sure how clear it is from the bill that bringing together the scrutiny bodies will lead to genuine integration of services, rather than just a merger of back-office functions. If we are to satisfy the principles of accountability and transparency—indeed most of the five principles—it is important that there is true integration, which reduces the potential for confusion among service users about what they can expect from an organisation and brings a shared ethos and culture to organisations.
I agree. Much in the bill is to be welcomed, but we will know whether it brings about real change only when it is implemented. Our only hope is that any moneys that are saved will be returned to public service, to deliver services on the ground. However, that is completely out of our control.
I agree with the other witnesses. We will be able to judge whether the bill satisfies the Crerar principles when it is implemented. Regulations might shed more light on that. Will service users and stakeholders be involved in developing the outcomes against which bodies will be assessed? We will be looking for answers to such questions.
What are your views on the case for a single scrutiny body along the lines that Crerar recommended?
We have not taken a position on that; we have focused on the proposals in the bill. We would not necessarily be against the idea of a single scrutiny body, but we would want to consider detailed proposals before reaching a position.
I do not want to speak for my board of directors, but I think that we would welcome a process that was more robust and that provided a level playing field for everyone who delivers public services. More duplication would certainly not be welcome.
It would very much depend on what the body looked like and whether there was true integration or just a great many different approaches under one heading. A single body could support the integration of service delivery—I guess that that is where we are all headed—but that would depend on whether the approach was really aimed at integration.
If the witnesses have no final comments, I draw this part of the meeting to a close. I thank you all for coming and for your expert evidence, which will help the committee.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—