Section 23 Reports
“Improving civil contingencies planning”
I ask the Auditor General to give us a briefing on the report.
The report "Improving civil contingencies planning" is a joint report by the Accounts Commission and me because civil contingencies planning is complex and involves many different agencies in Scotland. I will say a few words about the report and highlight some of the key issues from it.
I do not need to tell members of the committee that there have been a number of high-profile emergencies in Scotland, such as the current flu pandemic, the Glasgow airport attack and, most recently, floods that were extremely serious for local communities. They all highlight the importance of having in place resilient and flexible arrangements that allow effective responses to any type of emergency. It is also important to ensure that key services continue to be delivered to the public throughout any disruption, and that communities are assisted in recovering after the event.
The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 was introduced as United Kingdom legislation, so it applies in Scotland as well as the rest of the UK. It was designed to ensure that key organisations, such as the police, local authorities and health authorities, as well as private and voluntary organisations, have in place effective arrangements to prepare for and respond to emergencies that threaten serious damage to human welfare, the environment or our security.
The report examines progress in Scotland since the 2004 act was implemented, particularly in relation to the requirement on organisations to work together. We do not consider particular events; we examine how the overall arrangements are bedding in.
Some of the key findings are as follows. The main finding is that, overall, organisations are working well together to prepare for and respond to emergencies, particularly through the eight strategic co-ordinating groups that exist throughout Scotland. However, the greatest progress to date has been made in relation to what might be called the more traditional aspects of emergency planning, by which I mean the aspects that concentrate on the immediate response to an event rather than the important issues of business continuity and the arrangements for recovery in communities and economies.
Key organisations generally keep one another well informed, but there are some barriers to effective information sharing. For example, organisations use different security labelling systems on documentation, they operate different levels of e-mail security and they work to different definitions of what constitutes an emergency. At the moment, organisations do not tend to share very well or very widely good practice information, the findings from the exercises that they run or the reviews of real-life incidents after the event, in order to learn lessons locally. There is also only limited evidence that the lessons that are learned are systematically put into good practice.
Civil contingencies planning is complex. There are some areas relating to the strategic co-ordinating groups in the Scottish Government in which we think the governance and accountability arrangements are not absolutely clear and could be tidied up.
The Scottish Government has been active in implementing the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and in supporting the co-ordinating groups. One consequence of the increased priority that has been given to civil contingencies planning and the growing activity at Scottish Government level is that much greater demands have been placed on what are called local responders—the key people in the local areas.
More use could be made of shared services and formal mutual aid agreements. Such arrangements could increase the capacity of the system to respond to emergencies and make more effective use of resources, some of which are quite specialised for some types of emergency.
Finally, we suggest that organisations should develop a consistent framework for managing and reporting expenditure on civil contingencies planning to make it possible to demonstrate value for money. We say in the report that we recognise that it is quite difficult to do that, because for many of the services, particularly the emergency services, their day and daily job is to respond to emergencies of some kind or another and it can be difficult for them, and indeed for other bodies, to isolate the resources that are specifically committed to an emergency response. Nevertheless, we think that there is scope for improvement there.
Our report sets out a series of recommendations for the Scottish Government and the main bodies that are involved in handling emergency responses. We have followed our recent practice, which we now undertake with all significant reports, of including at the back a self-assessment checklist, which we are encouraging and expecting bodies to use when they are implementing our recommendations in order to achieve improvement.
I am pleased to say that the Scottish Government has given a positive response to the report and thinks that it is a useful contribution. My colleagues and I are happy to answer questions. The team who are with me understand the detail of the report better than I do, as members can imagine.
Thank you for that. Is civil contingencies planning focused solely on how to deal with an emergency once it has happened, or does it also include identifying potential problems and seeking to avoid their happening in the first place?
The starting point is that the UK Government has a national register of risks, which is part of the whole framework of civil contingencies planning. There is not yet a document like that in Scotland, but the Scottish Government has indicated its intention to prepare a supporting document—an addendum, if you like, to the national risk register—which reflects the risks as perceived in Scotland, including flooding, terrorist attacks and health events.
When we talk about improving civil contingencies planning, is any attention paid to the risk that comes from flooding, such as the recent flooding in north-east Scotland? Over the years, we have seen flooding elsewhere, including in my constituency.
Flooding is a risk that is identified in the risk assessment. Perhaps the team can provide further detail.
Ronnie Nicol (Audit Scotland):
There is obviously a continuum between prevention activity and response activity. Civil contingencies planning generally recognises that events will happen from time to time. For example, global warming is a contributor to greater flooding. The scope of our study was to look at what preparations can be made to respond to events, on the assumption that events will happen. Common sense would say that organisations that are coming together to consider risk and responding to events would also take away from that process something about prevention. However, it is not something that we looked at in this work.
So no consideration has been given to the growing concerns that the money that was previously allocated specifically for flood prevention work is no longer so allocated, or to the fact that that could leave gaps at the local level across the country.
That is correct. That issue is outwith the scope of the study, which is on response arrangements. As I am sure committee members are aware, as part of the new arrangement for funding local government, defined budgets no longer exist; they are rolled up into the single budget that a local authority receives.
Paragraph 27 of the report draws attention to the complexity of the environment around civil contingencies planning. Exhibit 2 makes immediately apparent the complexity of the responsibilities of the various bodies that are involved at the UK and Scottish Government levels. I am concerned that that complexity will lead to confusion.
Is there any evidence that the complexity of the arrangements is causing difficulties? Is there a case for streamlining them?
I remind you of my opening comment, which was that we think that, overall, the arrangements are working. Although we did not look at individual recent emergencies and how they were handled, general knowledge indicates that Scotland has responded pretty well to recent events.
The report shows that governance and accountability arrangements are not always as clear as they might be. It would be helpful if a little bit more could be done in that area. We capture that point in some detail around page 20 of the report. I invite my team to supplement my answer.
There has been an increase in activity of late and, in all areas of the public sector, when such activity occurs, layers, organisations and lines of communication are created. There has also been a deliberate attempt to plan on a generic basis. Rather than having separate processes and plans for different kinds of event, which would create a more disparate and harder-to-organise system, generic planning means bringing together all sorts of organisations that might be involved, depending on the nature of the event. It is probably inevitable that the arrangements will be quite complex.
Certainly, the things we saw that were difficult or challenging for multi-agency working on civil contingencies planning were similar to what we find with any multi-agency working, whatever the subject. We found a few parallels with our community planning study, for example, so we were not concerned that there was any specific difficulty with civil contingencies planning in that regard. However, as the Auditor General said, we believe that, given that the legislation was enacted five years ago, now is the time to check some of the lines of governance, accountability and answerability. The civil contingencies environment is very busy and there is probably scope for some streamlining, although we have not identified what that might be.
I have two questions. The first is on the co-ordinating groups. Are you aware of any mechanism that is in place so that work can be done with specific groups that might face specific issues or threats? I am thinking of what happened just after the Glasgow airport attack in relation to the Muslim community. How effective are such mechanisms, if any are in place?
That leads on to my second question. Does contingency planning take account of community cohesion? To use the same example, after the Glasgow airport attack, there were a number of incidents in which people in the Muslim community were targeted, and there was the threat that local communities would splinter and become fragmented. I do not know whether that had anything to do with contingency planning. Are you aware of any mechanisms that would cover such situations?
Those are relevant questions, but unfortunately we can give you only a limited answer. Our study examined overall arrangements for handling emergencies, rather than responses to individual emergencies. I will offer a few comments that might be helpful, and my team might have something to say on the subject.
A general message in the report is that, in developing the new planning frameworks, the greatest progress has been made on the immediate response when an event happens. That response tends to be led by the emergency services, and by the police in particular. We expected that, because it is a continuing responsibility that lies with those protective services.
One of the challenges that the report highlights is the need for planning at a local level to give great consideration in general to recovery and to community cohesion and resilience after an event. The report suggests that the role of elected members in that area is perhaps not fully recognised, and that more needs to be done with regard to working with them.
I am not sure whether we use the awful word "training" in the report, but we need to make elected members aware of the issues, help them to engage with the local communities, keep them informed during the emergency, use them as a channel of communication, and recognise their local community leadership role after an event. I hope that that theme, which runs through the report, will be picked up, given that the Government has responded positively to the report.
There are some interesting issues in the report that relate to Strathclyde. One exhibit examines how the various contributors to emergency planning view the quality of information sharing and so on in the local area. It is clear that the co-ordinating group in Strathclyde faces particular challenges in civil contingencies planning, simply given the size of the geographical area that it covers, the wide range of different communities it includes and the very large number of organisations with which it needs to interact.
We recognise that it is difficult to involve all local organisations in civil contingencies planning. However, we know that the Strathclyde group is working hard to identify and address those issues by examining its structures and the way in which it responds. That is not to say for a second that the emergency services and the local authorities do not do well in relation to the immediate response, but it is generally recognised, as our report picks up, that work needs to be done on interacting with local communities and bringing elected members on board.
Perhaps Mr Nicol would like to add to that.
That was a fairly comprehensive answer. I will just add that the idea behind local strategic co-ordinating groups is that they can think through the particular issues that relate to their local level and—either through membership of the group or other forms of engagement and communication—involve the organisations or representatives that are most relevant to their area. Work with vulnerable groups, such as elderly people or those who may have mobility difficulties in an evacuation, is particularly encouraged.
There is a shift in balance from the immediate response that the Auditor General mentioned to community cohesion and recovery—we would expect more of the type of thing that Anne McLaughlin talked about to take place.
I do not know the extent to which you considered the crossover between civil and military authorities. Of course, certain areas of work in which the armed forces are involved are necessarily kept secret. However, there are concerns about, for example, the ship lift at Faslane, where nuclear weapons are still on board vessels that are lifted out for work in the dry dock, and the potential for an incident to take place there. How much crossover work has been identified and what contingency preparations for an incident such as a leak, an explosion or a fire at a military base have been made through co-operation between local authorities, the Scottish Government and the Ministry of Defence?
We did not look at that in this study. However, we comment in the report on the scope for further improvement in the way in which the UK Government, the Scottish Government, local authorities, health authorities and so on work together. Those comments are made against a background of the very good work that takes place—they are about further improvements to what is quite a strong framework.
We mention the dead swan in Cellardyke, which was a serious issue at the time because it might have been an indication of an avian flu pandemic, which would have been much more serious than the current swine flu pandemic. That experience highlighted the need for clearer definitions of the roles and responsibilities of various parts of Government in cases in which the lead responder—such as the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, British Transport Police or the Health and Safety Executive—delivers services in Scotland but the matters involved fall within a reserved competence. There is a need to ensure that the relationships work well. Unfortunately, we do not have any information about Faslane and the concern that you mentioned.
Could that matter be looked at in the Scottish Government's addendum to the UK's national contingency—
The question of how it manages those relationships is probably one that would be better addressed to the Scottish Government.
Paragraph 124 in the report states that a survey conducted only last year indicates that
"the public think they are unlikely to be affected by major incidents."
The example that was given was influenza A (H1N1). Why do people think that? Is there a lack of understanding of the risk or the threat? Are the public not being given enough information? I noted in a subsequent paragraph that quite a few of the category 1 responders, such as local authorities, the police, the fire service and the ambulance service, do not have plans in place to inform the public as quickly as possible and keep them up to date if and when an incident occurs. Can you comment on that?
The emergency services need to take a balanced approach. They must have robust and effective plans in place to respond to an emergency, but at the same time they must not needlessly raise public anxieties about events that may not happen. At one level, it might be suggested that the response that
"the public think they are unlikely to be affected by major incidents"
reflects a good deal of common sense and maturity among the public, because most of us are not affected by incidents terribly often. The greatest risk of recurrence tends to come with flooding, in relation to which there is an effect on local communities. A targeted survey in parts of Elgin and Moray would attract different responses from a survey that was conducted across the whole of Scotland. I suggest that the public's response is not inappropriate, because the risks are not that high.
We comment about the need to improve the material that is available to the public to ensure that it is appropriate and presented consistently. However, I suspect that we are all in the same boat. Such information is the sort of thing that we look for when we need to acquire it, rather than absorbing it as a matter of course.
Among the category 1 responders, is there no lead agency for informing the public? Do they expect one another to be the lead partner in informing the public? Is that possibly what is happening?
Justine Menzies (Audit Scotland):
When an incident occurs, there is a lead agency—it depends on the specific type of incident. When there is not an incident, the strategic co-ordinating groups have a responsibility to inform the public, and they publish community risk registers.
As there are no further comments, I thank the Auditor General for his briefing. We will return to the issue later in the agenda.
I suggest a change to the order of the agenda. We have agreed to take in public our discussion on the committee's report "The First ScotRail passenger rail franchise". Rather than separating out our consideration of the accountable officer's formal response from our further deliberations on the subject, I wish to take those two items together. With the committee's permission, therefore, I propose to take items 5, 6 and 7 first, and then go on to item 4 on First ScotRail.
Why do we not just do ScotRail now?
We can dispose of the other business on the agenda and then give attention to the two ScotRail items together. That way, we will not have to squeeze the other items if we overrun on ScotRail. Is that okay?
Members indicated agreement.
“Central government's use of consultancy services—How government works”
We come now to item 5. The committee has correspondence from the accountable officer. It is a fairly full response.
I have a comment on the response to the last question, about contractors entering new framework contracts and so on. The whole thrust is to promote continuous improvement and to encourage the emergence of approved contractor lists, not to encourage the emergence of rejected contractor lists. There was to be a purely positive focus. I took from the response more of a negative intent to exclude people on the basis of bad performance and somehow to highlight that. That was never the intention; it was meant to be the other way round—to promote approved contractors, which I would say is a fairly common practice in business in Scotland. We can rely on the approved contractors that have emerged, given their previous performance.
Do you wish to draw that point to Stella Manzie's attention, or should we simply note the response?
The matter needs to be clarified. Stella Manzie perhaps missed the intended emphasis. We are not seeking to discriminate against anyone; the aim was purely to highlight good performance in the public sector and to make such information widely available. That does not imply that we were saying that performance by other contractors is bad.
Do we agree to draw that point to Stella Manzie's attention and to note the reply?
Members indicated agreement.
“Drug and alcohol services in Scotland”
We have further correspondence from the accountable officer. Perhaps in response to some of our previous criticism, we now have a fairly detailed response from which further issues may flow. Do members have any comments on the issues around access to treatment services? Are members content with what has been said in the correspondence? It seems that there are no further comments, so we agree to note the response.
Members indicated agreement.