Evidence
Thank you, Trish. Why do I have the feeling that we are not the centre of parliamentary action this morning? [Laughter.]
I will take a few moments to recap where the Executive is on the local government agenda. Frank McAveety wrote to you on 4 October, setting out the Executive's planned programme of action following the McIntosh commission's report. It might be helpful if I highlighted the main areas of on-going activity.
First, the leadership advisory panel, chaired by Alastair MacNish, has started its work. I set out its remit in a letter that I sent to council leaders, and I know that all committee members have seen it. The panel has had its first meeting. Perhaps more significantly, it has embarked on visits, so councils are beginning to develop a clear understanding of what the panel is setting out to achieve. There is plenty of positive feedback from that process. As you know, the panel's work is intended to continue until the end of 2000.
The second area of on-going activity is that of the renewing local democracy group. That name is something of a mouthful—the group is known colloquially as the Kerley group. It has started work; it has a particularly demanding remit and has been asked to work fast. We have asked it to aim for the end of February, but as I indicated in my letter to the convener yesterday, there is clear evidence that it might need slightly longer to produce a finished product.
In passing, I mention the leadership forum that took place in September. I was happy that the convener was there. We felt that it was an opportunity to meet leaders in a way that was different from the stage-managed and confrontational meetings of the past. Subsequently, at the end of September, we issued a consultation paper on the various aspects of McIntosh to which we did not respond immediately. We are looking for responses from the public by the end of November.
The convener has written to me about the time scale, asking whether the committee could be given more time. I sympathise with that, so I have written to her proposing that at the close of the consultation period, we should send the committee all the responses that we receive—with the exception of those where the author has requested confidentiality—so that it can take account of them in formulating its response. It is up to the committee to decide whether it wants to respond collectively, but we would welcome that if it were possible. The Executive is expected to produce a statement of its conclusions following the consultation period. That statement is likely to be in late January or early February. We would expect to receive the committee's deliberations by the Christmas recess, and would then need time to reflect on all the responses. I hope that that information will help the committee to schedule its activity over the coming weeks.
The other major event on the horizon is the ethics bill. We plan to publish a draft bill fairly shortly, with a view to formal introduction in the new year. We are anxious that the committee should play a part in pre-legislative scrutiny at that draft stage. We look forward to working with it on that.
I have tried to set out what we are doing as extensively as possible. I am particularly interested to know how the committee sees its own work programme shaping up and how it sees that relating to the Executive's work. Frank McAveety has embarked on a trip visiting all the councils in Scotland—he is about halfway through. The response from councils is that they would like a pause to reflect on their submissions to the McIntosh consultation and to think through the implications of the leadership advisory panel. They have also said that they would like the opportunity to consider their submissions to Kerley, given the width of his remit, which takes in remuneration and numbers of councillors, as well as electoral systems.
I am trying to accommodate that pause, and I would like today not to go further than the consultation documents. I want to convey the genuine impression that this is a consultation period and that the time for drawing things to a conclusion is in the new year. I should be happy to hear the committee's views on how we work together to examine the responses to the consultation. I know that the committee is examining many of the same issues on the same time scale and that there is a danger of duplication.
I am anxious to explore the scrutiny role of the committee, with which I am completely comfortable. We need to be alert to the way in which we scrutinise legislation and reconcile that with a desire to work in parallel with the Executive. We are in new territory. I am happy to come back to the committee in the new year, once we have the responses to the consultation.
In your letter, you said that the committee had both a scrutiny function to perform and a partnership role. We recognise that. We appreciate that our role will not always be straightforward, and I ask this question for the sake of clarification—if I do not ask it, other members will.
Does the Executive have a procedure for issues going to Parliament? The Cubie committee is an example, although I am sorry to have to bring it up. We are all engaged in a learning process—you are learning to do your job as we are learning to do ours. No one in the committee is clear whether the Executive will enable discussions, not about the membership of the independent committees, but about the remit of the committees. Does the Executive have criteria for that? It is a general question and is not specific to the committee.
There are three circumstances of appointments that we are in danger of confusing.
The first circumstance is Executive appointments to quangos. Such appointments are dealt with by a commissioner. I know that this area is of interest to members; there have been discussions about the possibility of different forms of scrutiny of the process. The procedure for appointments will remain until the Parliament decides to change it. I think that that will happen in the period ahead.
There is a group of ad hoc advisory committees, which includes the local government advisory panel and the Kerley committee. There is no hard-and-fast rule about how the Executive makes appointments to advisory committees.
I do not want to make this a matter of principle. I checked the dates and I see that Trish was appointed convener of the committee on 30 June. That was subsequent to my taking a paper to the Cabinet to examine the composition of the Kerley committee, having consulted all the political parties, before an announcement was made on 2 July.
On coalition issues, we are driven by the partnership statement, which said that there would be immediate progress on electoral reform and the recommendations of McIntosh. That led to the announcement of the Kerley group.
On 2 July, we announced that we would move ahead with the establishment of a leadership forum at the beginning of September. In August, while the Parliament was in recess, we announced the composition of that forum, to enable Alastair MacNish to lead the session at the leadership forum on the work of the leadership advisory panel. We did that because McIntosh had included in his document an obligation that councils should commit themselves to working out a new structure by 1 January 2000. We had to make the appointment in the recess to allow Alastair MacNish time to talk to all the council leaders and to give them 16 weeks—only two or three committee cycles—to discuss the situation with their groups.
On the second circumstance—Executive appointments to informal advice groups—there is no generic guidance for the Executive; the formal position is that the Executive makes such appointments. Informal discussions took place with the committee, and had those events not taken place during the recess, perhaps they would have been handled differently.
The Cubie committee is an example of the third circumstance of appointments. As everyone knows, considerable space and time are devoted to student funding in the partnership document. However, the document gives a specific commitment that the committee's terms of reference, time scales and membership should be submitted for approval by the Parliament as a whole, so that the Parliament would feel some ownership of the Cubie committee's deliberations. When I got home at 11.05 pm last night and watched "Newsnight", I heard Andrew Cubie fulfilling exactly that role when he said that his job was to come up with, and consider, a range of options. The Cubie committee was a special case. Is that helpful?
Thank you for answering the questions, Wendy. As far as I am concerned, the matter has been clarified. Wendy is here for some time this morning, and I would not want the committee to spend that time pursuing the issue further. If members want to pursue the issue by another method, they are free to do so.
The meeting is now open for questions. Donald, you have your hand up.
Not unexpectedly. As everyone else in the world—except the Executive—who is at all interested in Scottish local government is in favour of an independent review of local government finance, would not it be reasonable for the Executive to give way on the issue? If it did so, the Executive would not lose any of its short or middle-term activities, most of which we support. Any long-range review would take a couple of years to reach a conclusion, and any major change—for example, to a local income tax or energy or land tax—would take several years, so we are looking years and years ahead. I cannot understand your—I mean that collectively, not personally—thrawn attitude.
May I take the opportunity to clarify another important point? The McIntosh commission recommended an independent commission on finance. Therefore, it would have been inappropriate for me not to state the Executive's position on that in the opening debate. I had taken the issue and my statement to the Cabinet, and it was agreed that I should clarify our position. That clarification would include the variety of independent ways in which we thought that elements of the review could be progressed other than in the form conceived of by McIntosh. That has indeed happened. It is true that when I make speeches on local government, or when Frank McAveety visits councils, if we are invited to state the Executive's position and explain the various reviews that are under way, we do so.
I regard the committee as being slightly different, because members scrutinise the Executive. It would therefore be inappropriate for me to answer on part of another Executive minister's portfolio; I conveyed that to the clerk in advance of the meeting. My position acknowledges that the committee's role is not simply to hear me make a speech on the Executive's position, but to scrutinise the Executive. Jack McConnell has testified to the committee on matters regarding local government finance, and we would get into a dangerous position if I tried to answer on a point that is the portfolio responsibility of a colleague whom I know to be very willing to testify in his own right. The Executive, collectively, is anxious to avoid Executive ministers testifying on the portfolio of other ministers.
Do you have a supplementary question, Donald?
It might fall under the same umbrella. Would you personally—or, to the best of your knowledge, would the Executive collectively—take a dim view if the committee, either on its own or together with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, set up some form of review? Would the Executive co-operate with such a review?
That is a question for Jack McConnell to answer. Nevertheless, I shall give a collective answer. It comes back to respective roles and the fact that we are all still feeling our way. It is not the place for the Executive to dictate the work programme, in any shape or form. Should the committee decide that it wants to run a PR review independently of, or in parallel with, Kerley—and I imagine that there are aspects of finance that we are reviewing, both the traditional and the modernising elements, that you want to scrutinise—that is a matter for the committee, not the Executive.
I do not want to trespass on areas that are the concern of other committees, and I hope that you do not mind if I take housing as an example for the point that I want to make. What strategic role do you envisage that local government can play in the partnerships that it is developing with the private sector? In housing partnerships, for example, local government can govern a whole area within which housing associations can be many and varied. Will local government be given the strategic role in the planning and development of housing, and in other areas?
That is a fair question. It would be wrong to suggest that there is not a fuzzy boundary between committee responsibilities. Also, as a minister, I have responsibility for housing.
As members will know, we have published a summary of the responses to the green paper on housing. There was widespread support in those responses for a full recognition of the strategic role that local government can play in housing. The specific issue on which the consultation responses crystallised is whether, when a council divests its landlord role, it should be able to take a much wider-ranging strategic role, which would cover the financing of other housing partners in that area. The responses to the consultation also express a difference in view on how strategic that role can be when local government continues to be a provider in its own right, and a landlord, and therefore in competition for resources in that area.
To resolve that, a series of meetings is taking place with housing interests. One of the overwhelmingly positive responses to the green paper was the suggestion that there should be a Scottish housing advisory interest group. We have an embryonic group that meets approximately once a month, which aims to take a statement to Parliament before the Christmas recess, which will set out the Executive's general view on a range of housing issues, including the future strategic role for local government in housing. The aim is to roll out further, more detailed, policy procedures in January or February, and to publish a housing bill next May.
The feedback that I have received from Stirling Council, about the leadership forum, has been extremely positive and constructive. Frank has also had feedback on that. The fact that you gave up so much time, and that listening was involved as well as presentations, was appreciated.
My question follows Michael's and concerns the strategic role of local authorities. I want to ask about the work that is being done in Stirling on community planning. Will you say something about the reports from the pathfinder groups, and will you tell us what you think are some of the issues, as the initiative is spreading out to some of the other local authority areas? The initiative is obviously critical to strategic policy at local authority level.
That is a fair question. We are trying to create a permissive climate for community planning, because we do not want such planning to take the same form in every area. What emerged from the five pathfinder councils' presentation at a seminar in March before the Scottish Parliament elections was that what was right for one area was not necessarily right for another. As a result, we are working with COSLA to develop guidance and support for all councils that is not overly prescriptive.
One of the complex issues is the interrelationship between the genuine commitment to community planning—the process by which councils promote the well-being of their communities and we promote joined-up government—and the need to resolve the on-going debate over general competence. We have talked to COSLA about creating a community planning framework. However, at the moment, we are encouraging every authority to establish its own community planning framework that allows the authority to talk effectively to other partners in the area and at the same time allows the authority to play its leadership role as the other democratically elected tier of governance in Scotland.
Has the work that has been undertaken so far raised any good points concerning a more holistic approach that brings together the public, private and voluntary sectors?
You are right to point to the potential for structural barriers. Earlier this week, I said that we would invite all the local government leaders to identify structural barriers that stop them getting their job done. I cited examples such as the provision of breakfast clubs and other aspects of the social inclusion agenda where they felt that they could contribute. We have now sent out that invitation.
I want to raise an issue with which we have wrestled, about the relationship involving the Scottish Parliament, this committee, the Executive and local government. One of the difficulties with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament is that power might be sucked up from a local to national level. It is ironic that, as we scrutinise local government and take into account the views of the Scottish Executive and the McIntosh commission, the people who are delivering at local level work in local councils, and much of the work that comes to us as constituency MSPs is about local services. How can we allay some local authorities' fears about our scrutiny role—with the introduction of the advisory panel and with visits from this committee and various other groups—and tell them that it does not mean that we are necessarily sitting in judgment of them, but that we are working with them to deliver the most effective services?
Furthermore, on the advisory panel and the issue of evaluation, how will you deal with a local council that receives advice, but which does not necessarily want to take that advice on board?
I will take those two questions together, as I think the point raised in the latter illustrates the problem of not having in place the relationship raised in the former.
I reviewed the McIntosh recommendations yesterday. It seems to me that the first two—on the joint agreement, or covenant, between the Parliament and the councils and on the joint standing conference—are among the most genuinely thorny, and I look to the committee to take a lead on those two areas. We would have a headless wonder if we responded to the detailed specifics of McIntosh that we have put into the consultation paper without trying to resolve the big issues of constitutional structures. The recommendations were made in the spirit of the convention—they are an invitation to create a relationship between the Parliament and local government in which the Executive does not feature.
Frank McAveety and I will have a view on whether, should we go ahead and set up a joint conference, it might be better to have the Executive at the table, as that would allow for a tripartite dialogue. However, such action is further down the road. The committee should form a view first as to how to structure that relationship. I realise that that is not easy. We are still driven by the Westminster system—we have select committees that have scrutiny elements to them. Members scrutinise in forums such as this, which does not allow for a round-table discussion. People from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities are still questioning the essential character of the covenant and the joint conference. I would be anxious to be part of those deliberations at a much later stage, when they begin to take shape.
I have been circumspect about discussing the backstop position in circumstances where the leadership advisory panel might feel that one of the 32 councils has not engaged with the challenge of developing structures that are right for the 21st century. I am anxious to stress that not living up to that challenge means that the council would not have met the essential criteria of transparency and effectiveness in decision making. We are trying to avoid being overly dogmatic. It would be very sad if we decided on an ultimate backstop position in the absence of knowing how either the covenant or the joint conference will look—although I do not see that situation arising.
That raises a wider issue—where are we going with this debate? We are considering the introduction of some form of generic local government bill at some stage in this Parliament. From my point of view, whether we push hard for such a bill in the next session is an open question. I believe that a backlog of legislation will build up and, with the establishment of the convenant and the joint conference, members might want a much longer pre-legislative scrutiny period and, therefore, might prefer the introduction of legislation at a later stage. The obvious way in which to impose a backstop on the leadership advisory panel would be to enshrine a power of intervention in that legislation, but that raises the question of the stage at which that legislation will materialise. That is a terribly winding answer, but there we are.
How will local councils take ownership of the leadership advisory panel? How will we get away from the perception that it will be like a travelling fair, with someone sitting in judgment saying that one council deserves 9 out of 10 and that another will get 10? How can we get across the strong message that we want to implement the panel by working with councils?
I welcome what you said about the forum—that is a good way to take things forward. Is there an opportunity, through that body, to acknowledge the difficulties that have been imposed on local government, for example by reorganisation? Perhaps you cannot comment specifically on finance, but there are more than financial implications to the reorganisation of councils. Councils were reorganised for political reasons, and not necessarily in ways that made most sense for delivering services. Should we explore how to support councils in dealing with that? I am thinking about Glasgow, but there are difficulties elsewhere.
It is undoubtedly true that there is concern about the number of initiatives.
We are asking all councils to do three ambitious things—they are the same things with which people here are wrestling. What should the electoral system be? How should people be elected? How should they be remunerated? We are asking councils to think about structures that are right for the 21st century for their circumstances and—while they are at it—to respond on the various outstanding aspects of McIntosh and to conduct best value service reviews.
With the best will in the world, that is an incredibly ambitious agenda. We have a responsibility to minimise bureaucracy and help people to be truly strategic. There were concerns that, although best value reviews were not meant to be bureaucratic exercises, they tended to become so on occasion. We have acted to reduce some of the burdens. For example, we have introduced a unified set of performance indicators for next year and we have set up a joint scrutiny forum to ensure that the various inspectorates in local government do not duplicate each other's work. We must keep the best value regime simple and make it an exercise that allows people to stand back from the daily grind and does not drag them into it.
The candid answer is that there is a legitimate concern, to which we are alert. We can act and have begun to act to ensure that the best value process is about improving the delivery of services and does not impose additional bureaucracy, either for the Executive or in the way chief executive departments carry out the exercise.
I hope that that deals with the question about ownership. The process is elevated above an exercise with the unfortunate connotations of the contract specification culture that was so familiar under compulsory competitive tendering and did not have a sense of local ownership.
I want to return to diversity in local government. Different local authorities have a wide range of problems and ways to tackle them. How comfortable is the Executive with local authorities finding their own solutions to problems? An example is the diversity of views on housing, which you recognised.
The question about recognising diversity brings us back to what the character of the commission and the joint standing committee will be. One reason the leadership forum worked so well was that it had one person from each council, so the fact that council obligations in Orkney and Shetland differ wildly from those in Glasgow and Edinburgh could not be ignored. COSLA perhaps does not capture that diversity as fully. The issue of diversity raises interesting questions about the structure of the Parliament's relationship with local government.
On the question of individual solutions, I think that we are trying to create a much more permissive regime, although that is not easy. Scotland now has two directly elected tiers of government besides Westminster and the European Parliament. For the first time in hundreds of years, that creates a dialogue between two sets of politicians. Too often in the past 20 years, local government's elected politicians had to talk to Scottish Office civil servants because ministers were spending three days a week in London, one day in their constituencies and only one day in Scotland.
The dialogue can become more political—not in a party political sense but in a real and meaningful sense—and less administrative. That will create the opportunity for leadership. Some will succeed and some will fail, but we are not seeking the sort of universal administrative solutions that were forced upon us in the past by political circumstances.
I want to ask about decentralisation. The reorganisation of local government was painful in many different ways. In remote areas, it was felt that aggregating authorities led to a loss of local control. By way of a sop, the previous Government said, "There shall be a scheme of decentralisation." What proposals do you have to review the decentralisation scheme that had to be submitted to the then Secretary of State for Scotland? Has the Executive given any thought, without prejudging the issue, to whether adopting a new voting method might impinge on decentralisation?
That was two questions.
I am sorry. Strike out one of them.
Let me answer both of them. As you know, decentralisation, active citizenship, engaging people directly and bolstering the representative role of councillors were central to the McIntosh recommendations. I hope that, when people respond to the consultation paper, they will take the opportunity to mention those things. In my statement on 2 July, I observed that community councils are not the only way of listening to what is going on in communities. A plethora of organisations is offering a huge range of opportunities and we are looking for creative submissions on how people can engage with the political process at local level.
I am committed to the potential of information technology to allow both greater participation at local level and decentralisation of service delivery in the creation of one-stop shops. There is a whole agenda concerned with access to participation. Much is happening and more can still be done.
In answer to the second question, the Executive has no thoughts on the implications of a new voting system, in so far as we have left that for Kerley to consider as part of his remit.
According to reports in the press two or three weeks ago, the Executive has decided to extend the life of councils, possibly to a four-year cycle. If that is the case, do you intend to hold the elections on the same day as parliamentary elections? If we go down the route of proportional representation, which, according to the press, is now a less favoured option, would you expect the new system to be introduced in time for the next local elections?
The Executive has made no decisions of any kind on that matter. We set up the Kerley committee in good faith and we await its deliberations. What was your other question?
If we go down the route of PR—
Oh, yes. There is a variety of views on the timing of elections and the matter is explored widely in the consultation document. As members can see from the table on page 17 of the Executive's response to McIntosh, the matter that gives us concern is that, with a certain phasing of general elections, there could be annual elections in Scotland for 11 consecutive years from 2001. That raises the question of voter fatigue, never mind politician fatigue. There is, therefore, a need for a genuine debate. I look forward to receiving the committee's view, although it may be one of the issues on which it will be more difficult to reach consensus. No decisions have been made.
Could some of the reforms be brought in in time for the next elections, which may be only two and a half years away?
One of the reasons for the tight time scale for Kerley was to allow us to meet the commitment to respond rapidly. In principle, we want progress, but I cannot offer guarantees in advance of Kerley's recommendations. However, the commitment to speed is there and was reflected in the original setting of the date for the report in February. As I indicated in my letter to Trish Godman, it now seems impossible for every council to make considerations and submit by then, so there will be a slight slippage.
Twice on page 4 of its response to the McIntosh report the Executive says that part of the Kerley committee's remit will be to advise on the appropriate number of members for each council. The second time that is mentioned, it says the group will be
"taking into account . . . the impact of changes to the political management structures of councils".
Why would the internal management structures impact on the number of council members in a local authority?
A certain number of members is required if we want to move to a model where councils have an executive and a scrutiny role. There is a relationship between the two. The Kerley committee will consider such matters. We did not want to pursue them in a party political forum; we want to try to reach consensus on them. We have attempted to acknowledge the genuine link between the work of the leadership advisory panel and the parallel work that Kerley is doing. It seemed inappropriate to send Kerley off to do a programme of work without acknowledging that there would be a simultaneous debate about political structures and the fact that some councils may move to a model where there is an executive and back benchers. I am aware of a number of councils in Scotland that are doing that.
There is obvious concern among councillors that the entire exercise could lead to a significant reduction in the number of elected members. According to the Executive document, any improvement in the remuneration of councillors can be met only from existing resources, which may mean fewer councillors. While that may make management structures more effective, it could have an impact on the relationship between councillors and their electorate. Fewer councillors would have to serve larger electorates, which may make it more difficult for them to serve effectively. Might there be an increase in the number of elected members in some local authorities or is that, frankly, not on the agenda?
Concerns are misplaced. We have asked Kerley to consider the matter. The fact that we did not try to have a narrow review simply of electoral systems—in isolation from who would serve, how they would be remunerated and what role they would perform—was widely welcomed by COSLA. Any attempt to second guess what Kerley will come up with is unhelpful. Given the tight time scales, the real challenge is to persuade everybody who has an interest in the debate to contribute to the Kerley review and to recognise in the submissions the quite complex interaction between any new electoral system and political management structures, the number of councillors and their remuneration.
There is no hidden agenda, however. Kerley was set up on an all-party basis, with a remit that we felt was broad enough to capture the complexity of the issues surrounding why people stand, why they serve, what circumstances they should be elected under and how they should be rewarded for their service.
I want to ask you a brief question about Kerley. Obviously, minister, you cannot comment on the findings until they emerge. The rest of the McIntosh report talks about the importance of engaging, the political process, renewing democracy and so on. What weight will be given to the ability of each electoral system to engage the electorate? What will be the impact of having different systems for European, Westminster, Scottish, local government and community council elections? Delivering proportionality is perhaps the best option, but we must recognise, particularly if local government and, say, Scottish parliamentary elections coincide, that differences between the systems might affect people's ability to participate.
I have tried to resist all attempts to shape or influence in any way what Kerley is doing. One of the strengths of the McIntosh report was that it was independent, developed in two phases over 18 months, I think. I believe that there were very few occasions during that process on which Neil McIntosh traipsed in to see the then Secretary of State for Scotland, subsequently the First Minister—because he wanted to maintain some distance.
The concern is wholly legitimate, but I felt that, having set the remit, the obligation of ministers was to stand back and not to try to steer the exercise. We identified proportionality and the ward-member link as key criteria and asked the committee to examine recommendations on an all-party basis and in that spirit.
You also raised the complexity of a proliferation of electoral systems, Johann. At the leadership forum, Mr Kerley made a presentation to me and everyone else, and one of the slides that he showed highlighted that very issue. In so far as I have seen him present that to all council leaders, I know that that issue is on the agenda. It is something that he is raising as he goes round the country.
My perception—which may be entirely wrong—is that at UK and Scottish levels, the national Administration is, in a non-political sense, essentially anti local government. The national Administration is about the national Administration doing things that it thinks it does well; it has grave suspicions about local government, which it thinks is far less competent. There are sniffs of that in, for example, the Scottish Executive's response to McIntosh.
In four years' time, minister, do you think local government will have more or less power than it has now? Would you like to comment on your attitude to local government?
I think that it is wholly misplaced to suggest that there is a hostile attitude towards local government in Scotland. McIntosh was widely regarded as an agenda for local government for which many people had campaigned for more than 20 years. It was widely welcomed, and we overwhelmingly accepted its recommendations or put them into consultation. It is an enormous step forward on the democratic agenda, which local government has been advancing for 20 years.
The evidence refutes Donald Gorrie's essential premise that the Administration is hostile to local government. The very first debate the Parliament had was on the nature of its relationship with local government. At that time, we were asked to accept 30 recommendations. We accepted the overwhelming majority, or asked for further consultation with local government or with the Local Government Committee before seeking resolutions. I therefore do not accept the central premise of Donald's point.
The answer to whether local government will have more or fewer powers is probably more in some areas and fewer in others. I do not know that those will be drawn by statute. I will explain what I mean. We do not live in a static world. I would be failing in my duty as a minister if I changed nothing about how we attack poverty in some of the most deprived estates in Scotland. Therefore, the balance of responsibilities changes in what I do.
I can cite two areas in which local government will have a massively expanded role. Too often, we refer to new burdens, but new burdens can also be described as an expanded role. At the moment, there is a consultation paper about transferring to local government resources that are currently held by the Department of Social Security to help care leavers establish themselves in supported accommodation and jobs. That, by any criteria, is central Government moving resources to local government. I hope that it will allow local government to become the personal adviser to everyone leaving care, to ensure that they do not fall through the cracks, as happens at the moment.
We are now under an obligation to provide child care across Scotland. Local government has a hugely expanded responsibility in that area—not as the sole provider, but as the lead provider of care. There is nothing inevitable about that—further and higher education, by contrast, are provided by others.
There are many areas in which local government will play an expanded role in the new Scotland. The boundaries will not necessarily be enshrined in statute. One of my firm convictions—my attitude to local government proves this—is that the new Scotland is not just about making laws; it is more about how we do things. This afternoon, we will debate domestic violence and discuss how we support work against violence against women. That requires not a change in the law, but a fundamental change in the way in which we do things.
The fears are misplaced on two counts. First, because we were asked to accept the McIntosh report, which represents a huge democratic advance. We have done that. The benchmark has been set. Secondly, the fears are misplaced because of the way in which, day to day, ministers make decisions—on care leavers and rough sleepers, for example. I think local government can be very optimistic about its future strategic role in housing.
We will hold you to that.
Surprisingly, there do not seem to be any more questions. In summing up, I want to make a couple of points. I would like to reiterate what Sylvia Jackson said. As yet, we have not gone out to councils, either as small groups or as a full committee, but those of us who meet councillors during our other business have received positive feedback about the leadership forum day. They did not all agree with what you were saying, minister, but they appreciated the fact that you and Frank McAveety spent so much time with them.
I am grateful to you for your comments, in answer to Johann Lamont's question, about the covenant and the joint conference. That is where things should start to gel.
I want to pick up on what Donald Gorrie said. Most of us around the table have been councillors, and it would be dishonest of us to say that we should not investigate local government, as changes are needed there. However, the committee must say that it is for local government, rather than against it; I think that we all agree on that. The Scottish Parliament must remember that local authorities, not us, deliver services, but we have the right to monitor what they are doing.
That, for me, is the essence of the McIntosh report. The committee has examined its recommendations. There has been some disagreement, but I am sure that we will be able to sort that out. I must return to what I said at the start; we know that our role is to scrutinise, but we want a role as partners, too, even though that is not straightforward.
On behalf of the committee, I thank the three of you for coming along. The two civil servants got off easily, I must say. Perhaps one day they will come by themselves so that we can put questions to them specifically. I also thank Frank—I hope that you were not taking copious notes.
I am cultivating a gentler and softer image.
We will take a five-minute comfort break.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—