Official Report 504KB pdf
Item 2, which is our first substantive item, is evidence on the local government benchmarking framework. I welcome Malcolm Burr, chair of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers Scotland; and Colin Mair, chief executive, and Emily Lynch, programme manager for performance management, from the Improvement Service. Would you like to make any opening statements?
On behalf of SOLACE, I say that we are very pleased to note the continuing collective commitment to the framework. It is not very old in terms of benchmarking methodologies, but all 32 councils continue to be committed to it financially and organisationally. I would say that, at all levels of organisations, there is strong interest from elected members. There are very good examples of that through not only audit and scrutiny committees but service committees the length and breadth of Scotland.
We are very pleased to note the affirmation of the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland through the statutory direction for the forthcoming year that councils report through the framework. That is a measure of its acceptability and its place in the public performance structure. Certainly, the responses from a lot of councils indicate that we want to develop the framework further—not just adapt it. We have to adapt it for changing circumstances, and I am sure that we will talk about that a little more this morning. I think that the aim is to adapt and continually improve the indicators themselves, particularly in planning and economic development and similar areas.
The framework is classic intelligent intelligence and it has established its place in the public performance firmament.
Linking with what Malcolm Burr said, and looking forward a bit, we are now working quite closely with colleagues who are involved in the national improvement framework for education and the framing and measurement of national health and care outcomes. The local government framework will therefore need to adjust over time, to take account of the fact that much more of a council’s work is now done through partnership vehicles of one sort or another. We need to have a clear look at how the framework fits in with the developments that are taking place in such areas. We are also interested in looking much more deeply at the economic impact of local public services, in terms of employment, procurement, asset distribution and so on. Again, that is work that benefits from a partnership focus as well as a focus on councils.
The second strand that we are aware of is that changes within councils themselves are calling into question some of the service classifications that the framework is built around. Increasingly, the distinctions between services are being overtaken by the merger or integration of those services locally. We need to be careful that what we are reporting to Parliament and to the public is up to speed with what people are doing in the organisation and delivery of services.
The final matter for us is a very important piece of legislation that was passed by Parliament last year: the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. We will need to look at a range of things in order to see how councils and their local partners are progressing with that, and that will be part of the work strand going forward. I think that we have established a solid enough base but that that will need to change with the pattern of reform that is going on.
Miss Lynch, do you have anything to add?
I have nothing to add at this stage.
Thank you.
Let us start by looking at some of the intelligent intelligence, as Mr Burr called it, and how certain things are measured. We will take an example from some of the evidence that the committee has had of late about burial costs. We found that burial costs in the Western Isles were the lowest in the country, and that those in East Dunbartonshire were, in my opinion, unbelievably high. It was difficult for us to get a real grasp in the course of our scrutiny of costs about what those costs actually cover.
Of course, we tried to drill down and we asked questions about what the costs actually are in the Western Isles for what is delivered there, compared with what is delivered in East Dunbartonshire. In terms of that intelligent intelligence, are we ensuring that the measures are comparable? Backroom costs, or other costs, may be being added on in one place for the delivery of a service, but not in others. Have we got to grips with that?
There are a couple of different elements. There are some factors that make the measures different that are important in driving the improvement.
There are some factors that councils have control over or are able to influence. Councils need to understand which factors are creating differences in the measures. For example, one of the factors that drives variation in our sport, culture and museum costs may be related to the different service delivery models that are used in authorities. It is important within the family groups and scrutiny committees to understand the extent to which that is a factor that is shaping and driving the cost.
That leads me to the other element, which is the fact that it is not just a question of the cost measure—we have to look at the measures in the round. Other factors, such as customer satisfaction, productivity or other measures of outcome, are important in understanding the difference between the services. That is crucial to understanding the issue.
We have a very robust validation process now that is focused on ensuring that the information that we receive from councils follows a very clear, strict methodology to ensure that the information is measuring the same thing as far as is practicable.
We know that all authorities have different structures in place, so benchmarking will never be perfect. As we have said previously, we are 95 per cent confident that the data allows the discussions that I mentioned previously to really get at what is making the difference. We have a validation process in place, and the family groups carry out further work to address any anomalies that exist.
We understand all that, but let us say that I am a member of the public, looking at the benchmarking figures for a number of areas; I have picked upon burial and cremation. What I want to know is: why is a burial in the Western Isles so much cheaper than a burial in East Dunbartonshire? This is quite a simple thing to do. If I were a councillor, I would also want to find out what the difference is in the delivery of that service in the Western Isles compared with East Dunbartonshire.
That is what I want to know, so that I can, as a member of the public, say, “Hang on a second, what is going on here? Why is this so different? What is going wrong in my authority?” If I am a councillor, likewise, I want to be able to ask, “How can we deal with that?” No matter what we talk about in quality of service and different delivery methods and all the rest—and that may be in the background—at the end of the day, where there are huge cost differentials in the delivery of a service, there has to be an understanding about the reasons, particularly during the times that we find ourselves in.
I suspect that part of that will be policy choice—whether or not elected members are wholly aware of it. Some people will be running services, such as burial or parking, with the clear aim of maximising income and will be putting no public money whatsoever into subsiding such services. Others will be taking the choice that, because of the nature of the service, or economic objectives they have, they want to charge for it in a different way. Therefore, I feel that this is probably less a question of cost attribution and more one of policy choice within those councils.
Some of that choice may be based on assumptions about what the market will bear, even though that is quite a coarse way of talking about something such as burials. It is certainly true across Scotland in relation to charging for street parking or council car parks. Of course, they are massively variable because markets vary across Scotland and so do policies.
In that sense, there may be issues about the precise calculation of costs in the figures that you have looked at, convener. I do not think that we include burial figures as it stands just now, but I suspect that policy choice is probably a clearer factor in that particular example—that people are choosing either to underwrite the service or not—and the choice may depend on the council’s overall financial circumstances.
Mr Burr, do you have anything to add?
Very briefly, convener. Such a difference may also give rise—I think that this shows the benefits of the framework—to questions about how a service is organised. I know that some of the reason for our own lower costs is that we organise that service flexibly. Perhaps the higher-charging councils have a workforce that is entirely dedicated to that service and therefore the costs need to support a specific workforce. It is a very good example of how the framework works: it should give rise to questions such as whether the reason for a difference is policy choice or organisational structure.
That is exactly what I am trying to get at, because it is not currently spelled out whether the reason for a difference is policy choice or the cost delivery of the service. Some folk told us that the reason was the cost of the service. However, what we were unable to gather from the evidence that we took—and, as I say, we were drilling down—is what backroom costs were added to the cost of that particular service or whether it had been a policy choice for the council to set that fee so high. What is interesting in the answer that you have just given, Mr Burr, is that, in Comhairle nan Eilean Siar, there are staff who do not just deal with that service but work cross service. We would maybe want to ask why are other councils are not doing likewise. We now have all the data, but there are still hidden things in the background that we are unable to scrutinise. Would that be fair to say?
There are two things to reassure you on. The way in which the data is compiled within the benchmarking framework is strictly in line with the criteria for the local government financial return, which is a statutory return from local government to Government.
I understand all that, Mr Mair. I am trying to keep this as simple as possible. I can now go and compare a number of things, look at the family groupings, get an understanding of why an authority is in that family grouping, and all the rest of it. However, with some of the differences in service delivery—or in some of the service costs—it is still difficult for me, or for a member of the public, to drill down and find out exactly why a service may cost X amount in one authority and Y amount in another. It is difficult for people to judge why that service costs four or five times as much in one place as it does in another.
10:15
The second point that I was going to make was that—as you will know, because we have abused your hospitality by boring you to death on this point over a number of years—from our point of view, the purpose of the framework is to allow people to pose questions. We do not think that the data in that framework will answer those questions.
If you are a councillor who is leading a particular service in the west Highlands, Fife or wherever, you can ask why you are spending three or four times as much as somewhere else, and you can find out whether that is because you are choosing to offer a richer service, because you are less efficient than others or whatever. The drill-down part of the process, which follows on from having comparative data, is undertaken by councils through the family groups and so on. That is an actively on-going process, and many councils have introduced changes because they think that they can learn from efficiency measures that others have undertaken and can apply them in their own context. I do not think that the framework ever set itself to answer the question that you mention; it set itself to answer precise questions about the difference between approaches. The duty is then on the participants in the framework to take that information and run with it.
You have said that a number of councils have used the framework to examine what has happened elsewhere and have made changes. Can you give us some examples of that?
I can give you a couple of examples from my council: one at a strategic level and one at an operational level. The operational example concerns the rate of council tax collection. In the Western Isles, that has always been extremely high—around 95 per cent or more. However, I noticed that, in recent years, we had not been improving and that we were actually going backwards by around 0.2 per cent. Before the framework came along, I would have put that down to the effects of austerity on our area, which is one in which people do not have high incomes and might struggle to pay council tax. However, we used the framework and noticed that others in our family—other comparable councils—were increasing their council tax collection rates. Because of that, we applied appropriate measures with the result that the rate has gone up to beyond the previous level. Again, I stress that we are talking about levels within a band from 94 to 96 per cent. However, without the framework, we would probably not have known who to speak to about the measures that we needed to employ.
The other example concerns education. We felt that we could have done better on population retention in what is loosely called vocational education. We have done quite a lot in that regard, based on benchmarking.
As you will have seen from the responses that you have received from a number of authorities, the framework is being used in a number of different ways across councils. We are starting to see improvements in terms of targeted efficiencies and on-going investment as result of that. We have been working with local authorities to try to promote some examples of that. Some authorities are using the framework to identify where they can prioritise savings in the budget. Obviously, given the current financial climate, that is a particular focus. One of the ways in which that has been done is through an examination of the council’s family group in order to gain an understanding of the family group average in terms of the spend on or the cost of measures such as street cleaning or waste collection. That information can be used to have a discussion with elected members about how that family group average can be reached, and what saving would be generated as a result. That is happening in a number of authorities across a number of service areas.
We have also seen how a local authority’s performance as identified in the benchmarking framework has been used to identify priority areas for service improvement. Elected members can identify areas in which their council is continuously not where they would like it to be in comparison to similar councils. That information is being used, particularly by elected members, to raise the profile of those areas and to explore how to improve the situation.
An example of that is rent arrears. An authority with a particularly low level of rent and a low level of employment had a particularly high level of rent arrears, which was comparably higher than other similar authorities. The benchmarking information helped to ensure that the rent arrears situation maintained a significant profile. Over time, the authority has worked with other authorities to look at how to improve the level of rent arrears. Certainly in the last year, the authority has reduced the income lost through rent arrears by 11 per cent—which is against the national trend—as a result of some of the improvement actions that it has taken.
In addition, we are seeing the learning coming through the family groups. It is not just about targeting and prioritising where to make improvements; it is about learning from colleagues how to make improvements, what might work and—just as important—what might not work. We heard from one authority that it was looking at implementing the second home discount in relation to council tax but, through discussions with other similar councils in its family group, it was able to identify the potential cost against the benefits and so it altered its decision on that.
A number of improvements have also been developed to do with ways of implementing agile working—there has been a reduction in absence across councils due to that—and around waste structures.
You are painting an extremely positive picture of how the framework is being used. However, if we look at the evidence from councils alone, in response to the question,
“How often do you use the Local Government Benchmarking Framework?”,
Dundee City Council stated:
“Generally Dundee uses the LGBF data once a year around this time.”
Some other councils also responded that they use the framework annually. It does not strike me as a tool that is being used for continuous improvement if it is being looked at once a year.
I guess that the answer depends on who responds to such consultations. If I was the performance officer of Dundee City Council, I would probably look at the framework data in some depth once a year, because I would report to the chief exec and the members on what that year’s round of data was saying and how it differed from previous years. Emily Lynch’s point is that people who work in particular service areas or family groups are getting together. Operational managers are getting together and asking, “Why do these differences exist? What can we learn from each other?” and so on.
The question arises of who responded to the questionnaire on behalf of a particular council and what their interest is in the framework. If they were a corporate policy and performance manager, their interest would be different from that of a service manager. We have made arrangements to engage with both categories of officer on the framework so that we get the maximum impact not only in performance management but in service management.
The question about who filled in the questionnaires is interesting. Our correspondence goes to chief executives and to council leaders. To be frank, I sometimes wonder whether chief executives and council leaders look at the responses that are given. That might be what gets them into difficulties in the first place.
We had feedback from the councils on the benchmarking family groups, and East Ayrshire Council and North Ayrshire Council made similar comments about considering how best to exchange the lessons that can be learned. Is enough work being done to ensure that that exchange of views, ideas and learning is taking place throughout the year and not just at the end of the year when the report is done? The family groups need to be brought together to ask, “What are we doing and how are we doing it?”
There are good examples of improvements—you mentioned that a local authority has increased its collection rates, so rent arrears are down. However, in relation to council tax arrears, 19 of the 32 local authorities managed to increase their collection rates, which means that the rest failed to do so. Western Isles Council might be good at learning the lessons, as Mr Burr indicated, but it looks as if other local authorities are not.
The family groups will always need to be adapted and reviewed. As councils deliver services in different ways and as partnership working increases, not just on strategic direction but on delivery, we will continually have to look at the family groups.
I will not go on about my old friend the Scottish index of multiple deprivation, which is a blunt instrument for rural areas. As an aside, we are working with the Improvement Service on delivering a more measurable fragile areas index. However, if the SIMD is used, we sometimes find that we are in the same family group as very large councils such as Glasgow City Council. That is questionable, to say the least, because certain measures are overemphasised, to the detriment of others. We must always review the family groups and keep them under constant scrutiny, because structures change.
Ms Lynch talked about making the process meaningful as services merge and are delivered jointly. I think that the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 will very soon assist with the process of communities delivering services themselves. We will need to look carefully at how the family groups reflect not just the services and the background but the structures in order to ensure that the family groups are a meaningful measurement.
I am not sure that I answered the question.
Neither am I. Try again, Mr Wilson.
I am trying to find out what is happening in relation to the family groups. To be honest, I was surprised when Mr Burr talked about fragile area groups and moving away from the SIMD, rather than about working within the frameworks that we already have, which is what I thought the benchmarking framework was established to enable. Benchmarking is about ensuring that we all understand the measures that are applied when local authorities deliver services and ensuring that local authorities can improve delivery by learning from others in the sector.
Forgive me if this sounds a bit brutal, Mr Burr, but you seem to be looking to find other ways of measuring things because you just happen to be in the same family group as Glasgow City Council when it comes to the SIMD. Why is Western Isles Council talking about setting up a different structure to measure things in its area? Surely that would take you out of the concept of the family group measure for how the SIMD is applied in your local authority.
My apologies—I have clearly emphasised the exception rather than the rule. The family groups are vital and, as I indicated with our council tax example, we use them well. I was just making the point that they need to be reviewed from time to time in the light of changing structures and changing methods of delivery. However, they are there for a reason and SOLACE is fully committed to the process, as are the Improvement Service and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. Those are our structures but, like any structures, they need to be looked at from time to time.
Why would a local authority need to review the family groups? We are talking about a local authority, not the benchmarking family, reviewing how it interacts with the family groups, what information is gathered, how it is gathered and how it translates that into the delivery of services.
Simply to reflect any demographic and other changes to our—
That is fair enough, but the point is that it does not matter what joint procurement or joint service delivery you are doing because, at the end of the day, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar is responsible for the service. Even if it were to join up with Argyll and Bute Council to deliver a service, you would still be responsible and the performance indicator would be based on your area, so why would you need to change the family grouping?
10:30
Simply to reflect changes in localities and in, for example—
Localities do not really change, do they?
No, but populations change, as do service delivery models. If we want to have the best comparator we can have, the groupings must be reviewed, like every other aspect of the framework.
That would happen very irregularly.
A review would not happen frequently.
Perhaps once a decade.
Yes—exactly.
You are talking about a new scenario; we are concentrating on implementation, but you are talking about change that is a decade away rather than looking at what is happening at the moment.
I am just keeping an open mind about the criteria that the framework comprises.
Does Mr Mair want to come in?
To pick up on the example that has been given, one thing that the family groups do—and it is done across service communities, because a distinct community of people is responsible for revenue collection across councils—is look at why some councils are improving collection over time while some are not, although the broad trend over the past five years has involved improvement.
The technical balance should also be looked at. Are some people adopting mechanisms that others should copy? Are there policy choices? Some councils have households that are under a variety of pressures. Adding the pressure of debt enforcement by the council is not seen to be advantageous or even cost effective, because the downstream cost of services would be higher. Such issues are genuinely explored in some depth.
I do not want to undersell the framework, but I do not want to oversell it, either. In each service area—education, social care and so on—there are professional associations that benchmark together. Therefore, as far as councils are concerned, our framework is not all there is, but it provides a high-level overview for elected members and the public of comparisons between councils. In the education arena, there are detailed comparisons that look at improvement and development and so on. People can and do go right down to school level.
The local government benchmarking framework is not all that happens on benchmarking in Scotland’s councils or community planning partnerships, but it links to and supports a wide range of other much more detailed activities. The aim of the framework was to make, as the Accounts Commission used to do through its statutory performance indicators, high-level comparisons between councils that will pose questions—and allow the public to pose questions—about why a council is different from others and why its performance looks less good and so on.
I reassure the committee again that we work quite hard with councils across the year to look at what the data means and how they can improve. In addition, other improvement devices are being used all the time for much more service-specific benchmarking.
I found your comment on other associations doing their own benchmarking on service delivery interesting. I was on this committee in the previous parliamentary session and this session when the early discussions on what benchmarking was setting out to do took place. You can correct me if I am wrong, but I understood that, given all the other organisations that are carrying out their own benchmarking, with their own reporting structures, the exercise was intended to declutter the landscape, so that we could have an overview of what was happening in local government. The benchmarking would be brought together and we would be able to pick up one document and say, “This one document tells us what’s happening in the various areas.” I do not know how many areas there are now, but I think that the original number was 42.
You are saying that other benchmarking is taking place, but how does that fit into the work that is being done by the Improvement Service and SOLACE? It would be logical to cut out some of the backroom work that other officers are doing to collate information, and to collate it centrally and record it in one framework that everyone can see and which says, “This has been the situation in Scotland for the past year, as we see it.”
There are two things to say about that. That was an aim, which I think that we have achieved. There is a single publication that provides, with high-level indicators, an overview of the range of local public services. However, the head of schools in a particular council will want to look at the balance of the administrative costs and the non-administrative and teaching costs in each school for which they are responsible. We do not publish all that information for the whole of Scotland. That is about people looking at operational detail with each other and asking, “Why do you do it this way? Why do we do it that way?” We report the high-level indicator, so we say, for example, “Your overall costs per pupil are higher than another council’s.”
If you are saying that the overview report is an overarching high-level document—
I am.
If I am picking you up correctly, the document does not engage in the learning exchange that is taking place in local authorities. That learning is not being done through the benchmarking framework; it is being done by teaching associations and other organisations that do related work.
Where is the learning for the local authorities in the family groupings that have been established through the benchmarking framework? Much was made of bringing local authorities together and putting them into benchmarking families so that they would learn from each other. You are telling us that, at another level, things may be taking place and people may be learning from each other outwith the benchmarking families. I thought that people were supposed to be learning lessons through the benchmarking families, so that we all understood what was going on in the delivery of services in local authorities.
I hope that that is what I am saying. The language that we have used consistently in the development of the framework is “high level” and “drill down”. I am talking about the drill-down bit. When we pool families of authorities, we bring together directors of education and heads of schools to say, “You’ve all got fairly similar populations. Why are these variations occurring in this family? Why are there variations in your performance and cost structures? Let’s explore that.” We use the framework to learn in that way, which is the drill-down bit.
The Educational Institute of Scotland and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland exist. They get together to discuss a wide range of issues that are to do with educational performance, and they contribute to the national improvement framework and so on, as we do. We use the devices that are already there as part of the drill-down process in the benchmarking framework. We have not created an entirely different process, because an infrastructure was already there that we could use for improvement purposes.
I am sure that we will come back to this.
I suspect that I am about to ask a similar question. I have looked through the report and it is full of numbers: numbers are going up, numbers are going down and numbers are staying the same. If you are a councillor, a head of service or a member of the public, you are looking for information about performance, quality and whether things are improving. I find it hard to see the real evidence in the framework, although I realise that that might be difficult, given the volume of data. Most of the qualitative, public-perception information is gleaned from elsewhere, such as the Scottish household survey. Is there not a case for this kind of report having another section or another level that describes where good performance is happening in Scotland within these groups, and where the best opportunities for improvement remain? I cannot see that.
We can certainly consider that as we develop the approach and as further evidence and information become available. However, I highlight that that richer detail that you describe will be provided in the individual authorities’ public performance reporting. They have to provide information that shows why a certain level of performance is occurring. They can provide other information that we can use to understand what is going on, what is driving the performance and what the local authority will do about it. The local public performance reporting will give that much richer information that you describe. However, we can certainly consider that matter for the overview report going forward.
Mr Coffey is absolutely right that we are thin on issues such as the public experience of services and satisfaction. We have spent a significant period exploring the opportunity on that. Councils have a variety of ways of assessing community satisfaction with their services: some use resident surveys, some have standing citizens panels and some employ outside agencies to manage those things on their behalf so that there is a degree of independence. At the outset of the framework, the agreement was that, if councils had put in place devices that worked and gave them the community and customer feedback that they needed, we were not going to standardise those out of existence.
Clearly, there is one major national data source: the household survey. That gives a measure of satisfaction with public services across Scotland but, in all honesty, it is not very reliable when we take it down to the level of individual councils. We considered asking the household survey to greatly extend its sampling, but that would cost about £1 million to £3 million, which, frankly, we simply do not have. We are exploring the alternative of taking the three major surveys of households, which have different sample bases, and asking them all to build in a set of questions about local services for us, so that we extend the sample base and get a more reliable measure of variation between councils.
As Emily Lynch said, the public performance reports that councils make annually use some of the benchmarking data, but they also do residents surveys, service users surveys and so on. That data is published through the public performance reports. There is a richer source of data there.
Forgive me if it is not your role to do that, but I kind of expected that sort of information to be uppermost in such a report. Are you saying that it is not your role to gather information on performance and public satisfaction because others are doing that?
Our role is to ensure that an agreed set of data is collected, analysed and returned annually. We also engage with councils, if they seem off the mark somehow, on why that is and how we can support them to take that forward. On the satisfaction issue, the board that oversees the process, which is chaired by SOLACE, has thought hard about how we can improve the measurement of satisfaction and public perception of services in different parts of Scotland, but it is very expensive to do that well.
Councils already invest locally for their purposes in surveying their local communities, but they do that using different methodologies and sampling devices, so the data is not strictly comparable. However, we are looking at whether we could aggregate that to show the broad spread of satisfaction between councils. We are working on the issue, which is important, but some of the routes that we have explored to improve the approach have had such heavy price tags that they are not practical. We are looking for discussions with colleagues who run the major national surveys in Scotland to find out whether they can accommodate us by building in additional questions to the national surveys that go into households across Scotland.
John Wilson mentioned East Ayrshire Council, which has raised the difficulty of comparability between the data sets and the family groups. I hope that an attempt is being made to try to standardise that so that we are comparing like with like.
Indeed.
Your report claims, at the tail end of it, that councils in Scotland improved the quality and performance of the services covered by the framework last year. How can you claim that if you do not have the data yourself and if there is a lack of comparability among the data sets?
10:45
That statement was intended to be a remark about the generality. We have a very good measure of spread across the whole of Scotland from the household survey. There is data there that says that customers across Scotland are rating the services provided by Scottish councils very highly indeed. We have other measures of financial input and output or outcome for those services. I stand by that remark.
If you break it down to individual council level, the sample from East Ayrshire, for example, in the general household survey will be very small scale—Emily Lynch will correct me if I am wrong—because it is meant to be proportionate at a Scottish level, not proportionate at the level of each council. We can make statements about the whole of Scotland; the difficulty is in making the variations between councils clearer on that basis.
On page 8 of your report, in the concluding paragraph, you say:
“With further challenging budgets ... it should not be assumed that the improvements will simply continue.”
Why not?
I think I wrote that slightly ill-worded-sounding sentence, so I will take full responsibility for it. The point was that incremental improvement cannot simply carry on, and we will need to do more transformational things now. The point was not to say that we will not have to carry on improving; the point was that the pace, scale and depth of that improvement will have to speed up to keep up with the demographic and budgetary pressures that are faced.
The way I read that, it tells me that you cannot make any improvements unless you get more money.
No, I do not think it is meant that way.
What does it mean, then?
We are making the point that, as council budgets reduce continually, it is inevitable that improvement cannot be assumed. We have to consider the overall context of service delivery. I am thinking of health and social care integration and of other partnership approaches. That links to what I was trying to say—quite badly, I think—about different sorts of measurement. Councils’ budgets are reducing. The framework—
Mr Burr, we are very well aware of the reduction of budgets. It is happening right across the public sector, because of the austerity measures of the United Kingdom Government. Mr Coffey has made a specific point about a specific statement. Could someone please answer Mr Coffey’s direct point?
I will answer it. Mr Coffey has rightly drawn attention to an ill-worded thing. The point that I wanted to make was that there has been a pattern of incremental improvement to date, and that will now need to become much more transformational if we are going to address the demographic and income pressures that we face. What is being said here is not that improvement will not continue; it is that the nature and depth of it will have to shift categorically if we are to keep up with the patterns of demand.
Can performance improvement take place with a static budget, or can it not?
Yes, and it will.
It can take place.
It can, and it will.
I think the past few years show that.
I am interested in some of the points that came out there. The household survey is not enough, you say, to gather up certain data, but the survey itself allows you to make the statement that Willie Coffey read out. Which is it?
It is both. The household survey allows me to make an accurate statement about local government across Scotland in general; it does not allow me to make an accurate statement about East Ayrshire. The sample is not big enough, and it is not designed to be accurate for East Ayrshire; it is designed to be a balanced, representative sample for Scotland.
The next question is this. Different measures are used in the 32 local authorities, but we have measures. Mr Coffey asked why we could not have something—based on those measures—that shows where dramatic improvement has taken place, allowing others to pick up on that improvement quickly and to do something similar.
That would be a very natural development of the framework.
Why is it not being done?
Well, the survey provokes analysis and questions. It leads to continued improvement, but I think that it is important—
Can I stop you there? We know all that. We know what the measures are for, we know that the survey provokes questions, and we know that it should provoke scrutiny and service change.
For me, and for the general public across the country, it is not the easiest thing to look at 32 local authorities’ performance reports from over the year. I am an anorak, but even I do not manage to look at 32 reports. I cannot imagine that there are many others who would do so. Why can we not have headlines? Why is the best delivery of a service or the biggest change in service delivery not highlighted at the top level of the report?
It is simple. If we are truly striving for improvement, then we should surely point out to folk where that improvement has taken place and how it was achieved. Surely that should be at the top level of the report, or am I just being far too naive?
Can I ask a question, so that I can understand that a bit better? Do you mean that we should identify individual councils?
Let us go back to burial and cremation as an example. Let us look at the Western Isles. Why is it that they are achieving a service for £680? What are they doing that allows them to deliver that service for £680, when it costs East Dunbartonshire £2,716 to deliver it?
I will talk about how we can develop that. I think that there is a natural progression as we develop an understanding of, for example, the reasons for the differences in burial costs across authorities. How does one authority manage to achieve something? What are the consequences for performance, or the quality of the service? As we develop further, that information—
How much more development does there need to be before we get the answers to these very simple questions?
I suggest that it is a progression. It would be good if future reports referred to each of the councils.
I am sorry, Mr Burr. You say that it is a progression, but it has taken years to come up with a set of indicators for this framework—years.
Indeed.
How many more years do we have to wait to get to the simple situation in which we can look at why it is that a service is being delivered at four or five times greater cost in one authority than it is in another authority?
I realise that policy choices may well mean that the service delivery is somewhat different in different authorities. We were told that all of that would become apparent in the draw-down. However, we need to get to the simple situation of me—or any man or woman on the street—being able to say “Why does it cost more to deliver that here, and with lesser service, than it does elsewhere?”
I think that that information is absolutely of interest to members of the public. All that I would say is that, a few years ago, that comparative information would probably not have been available to anyone without them putting in a great deal of individual effort. That provokes that very question, and I am sure that the higher-charging councils will be called upon to answer it.
I think that that information should come through the report as well, but it is primarily a high-level benchmarking report. In each local authority area, the questions would be so different that I wonder whether the information would become unmanageable. However, I think that it is something that we should absolutely look at.
I am not necessarily asking for all that information to be published in a document, but I am looking for a simple scenario so that the public can work out for themselves why there is such huge differentiation in costs and can scrutinise their local authorities on the cost and the delivery of the service. We have concentrated a lot on cost, but it is not just about cost. A gold standard service might be being delivered in a particular place and people might want to continue in that vein, which is absolutely grand, but, particularly in the current times, we need to have reasons for the differentials.
Will the panel comment on Unison’s view that the report focuses too heavily on cost measures and on too few council services for it to be an accurate reflection of council performance?
Our view and the view of SOLACE is that we should prioritise the development of outcome measures or performance measures in a number of key areas. That would rebalance the framework. The cost and resource information is critical and important, but we also need to understand the performance. For example, in relation to culture and leisure, at the moment we have measures on costs but the framework does not include measures on performance. We are working with VOCAL and the family groups to identify meaningful measures of the impact of culture and leisure services in order to strengthen the framework. We are certainly working on some areas to address that.
The sports, leisure and culture area is a good example of the performance issue. The framework suggests that the costs per person attending things such as council museums, libraries and sports facilities have come down sharply, but that is mainly because the attendance has gone up sharply. One of the things that we are trying to do is to get people engaged in sporting and cultural activities and using libraries and so on, and the figures on that have gone up significantly. Although it ends up being expressed as a unit cost—the cost per attendance—in reality, there is an element of a performance measure as well. We can see that there is improvement precisely because more people are using the services and participating, and we have the detail on that in the report. So the issue is not as simple as we might think.
We cover about 90 per cent of all council spending, so the idea that we are missing out on huge blocks of spending that we ought to cover is not correct.
On the outcome side, which is probably the point that colleagues in Unison are rightly raising and which goes back to Mr Coffey’s points about quality, the issue is whether we have a framework that is properly balanced in that it gives an understanding of the quality and impact of public services and not just the units delivered. We are working closely with colleagues on that. We are engaged with the national improvement framework for education, which should give us further data on outcomes for kids across their young lives. We are engaged with those leading health and care reform and saying that, if there is to be an outcome framework for health and care reform, we need to build those outcomes into our framework so that we get the appropriate high-level measures. That work is on-going and it will strengthen the framework in time.
Mr Burr, do you want to comment?
I have nothing to add to that.
I have another question that is not related to that point. On the role of service users, Colin Mair said that the framework allows the public to pose questions to the council. What efforts have been made to publicise the framework so that it is accessible to people other than council officers? My guess is that the vast majority of people have no idea that the framework exists—never mind how to find information that might help them to compare the value that their council is offering.
We—
Miss Lynch is desperate to answer.
I beg your pardon.
I was showing my enthusiasm there.
We have developed an online tool that all authorities have embedded and used in their websites and local reporting mechanisms. That tool was designed to make it easier for members of the public to interact with the information—to look for the information in which they are interested and find most useful. That is accompanied by a narrative from the individual local authority that helps people to understand what is driving the matter, whether it is a policy priority and what is being done about it in the future. That is one area of the development in which we have supported councils.
11:00
It has been interesting to note in our recent series of budget consultation meetings how much community groups and others have used the framework to say where we are not doing so well, that we cannot cut a service, that we are doing quite well in an area, or that we should consider an area for savings. It has been quite remarkable. I would like to think that that is because of good public performance reporting, although it is just an anecdotal example from us. The success of the matter is in how councils report the framework publicly through their own PPR frameworks. Without that, it would not go beyond a council or community planning partnership, but I do not believe that that is the case.
The chair of the Accounts Commission has written to the committee. There is a directive that requires councils to report fully on the data in the benchmarking framework and the relevant comparisons to their local communities. The online system about which Emily Lynch talked—which lets people look at any particular service, council area or combination of both—exists to support the kind of participation that Cara Hilton talked about.
My question follows on from Cara Hilton’s—which I was going to ask. [Laughter.]
I am sorry.
To go back to what Colin Mair said about developing a more outcome-based approach to performance reporting, how do you envisage the public and service users being involved in developing those outcomes? Sometimes, a good outcome for the public does not depend on low cost; the public do not mind paying if they are going to get a suitable service. How could the public be involved in those discussions? Would it be through the Improvement Service and SOLACE, through councils or a combination?
There is a significant amount of public engagement on, for example, the national improvement framework in education, in which we participate. The Government has held a number of significant events and has invited contributions from a range of community and voluntary organisations, as well as directly from parents. There is participation in the outcomes that we want for our children in education.
I do not regard cost data as outcome data. Yes—we have to balance the books, but that is not a statement of an outcome for the public, so I absolutely agree with you. We would work through the broader frameworks because we are keen not to say that we will do work on educational outcomes, that our colleagues in Government and local government will do it as well and then we will then pile all that up. Rather, let us work together to get to a set of outcomes on which we are all agreed and which the public have had a significant chance to influence and shape.
The health and social care reform agenda is the other big area in which we are light—we are absolutely not capturing outcomes, as things stand. Therefore, we are working with colleagues on defining what we want for older people and the outcomes that older people want in their lives, beyond good moral propositions. We want them to have decent lives, independence, dignity and so on, so what are services delivering in that space and how do we define and measure that? That really matters. We will spend large sums of money and provide a lot of services. If we are not giving people what they need and the lives that they want, we are seriously missing a trick. I absolutely take your point, and it is a focus of work just now.
I have a quick follow-up question for Malcolm Burr. Who is using the framework at political and officer level and how do you measure that? You touched on that, but I want you to elaborate on it.
Every council uses the framework at both officer and political level. I observe that in specific areas it goes down to lower levels in council services. It is not just a document for the corporate management team and elected members, but one that is widely used—it is on service committee and audit and scrutiny committee agendas. If external validation of that is sought, I suggest that that be through the support by Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission and its appearance in the statutory direction, which has been referred.
Are you convinced that the framework is being used a lot by the general public?
I have given my anecdotal example. It is one thing to believe such examples and to be assured by them, but it is good to hear it face to face when figures are being quoted back to you. Because the information appears so much in a council’s own performance statement, Audit Scotland’s statements, the local scrutiny plan and all other such documents, it has high public prominence. The material in the framework is easily used by the media and members of the public to make comparisons. It is very readable.
Obviously, we have councils out there that are performing very well in certain areas. What methods does the Improvement Service or SOLACE use to ensure that best practice is exported right across the country?
We do that in a variety of ways. The moment that we identify variations, we go to the councils that are off the pace to say that we need to look at why that is and that we will work with them on that. We often build so-called communities of practice around improvement areas, so that people who are doing well can share not just what they are doing, but how they are doing it, because that is often the issue with people who are struggling.
The family groups have contributed—their role is largely to say, when we look at variations, what good practice is and how it can be ensured that that practice is easy to adopt. We give straight practical support, because implementing good practice requires change: if people need support in that, we give it.
Where can I find the information about what you are up to in those regards?
That information is reported online in our business plan, which is kept up to date. All our board reports are out there, too—they report progress against each dimension. The documents are online for people who want them. Whether they are a good read as far as most of the public are concerned, I do not know. We will happily copy the committee into them.
I am sure that we will all have a look at that. What organisations does the Improvement Service benchmark itself against?
We work closely with a variety of organisations and national Governments, including NHS Health Scotland, NHS National Services Scotland and so on. We look at our own offerings and evaluate ourselves in every single project and programme that we deliver with the people that we have delivered it with and for, so we have a fair amount of information.
Self-evaluation is not benchmarking. Who do you benchmark yourself against?
I suppose that is an interesting and relevant question.
It is obviously a question that cannot be answered.
From the SOLACE perspective, I say that if the Improvement Service was not doing what chief executives and councils wished it to do we would find other means, so there is a negative affirmation.
I will be honest with you, Mr Burr. In some regards, I am not interested in what council chief executives might think; rather, I am interested in what the public think. I want to know how SOLACE and the Improvement Service benchmark what they do doing and against whom.
We evaluate what we are doing. It is fair to say that I know against whom I would benchmark in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom. In some cases it would probably be private consultancies, if they were willing to benchmark against us.
Our successor committee might want to look at that issue at a later date. I thank you for your evidence today.
I suspend the meeting to allow a change of witnesses.
11:09 Meeting suspended.