Cross-cutting Inquiry into Deprivation
Before we deal with agenda item 2, I apologise to colleagues. The journey through from Glasgow was unfortunately disrupted by a fatality on the railway line.
The second item is a report back to the committee on the case study visit that a number of us carried out in Glasgow as part of our deprivation inquiry. This item has been deferred from last week's meeting. With me on the visit were Jim Mather, Frank McAveety, Derek Brownlee and Andrew Arbuckle. We visited projects in Drumchapel and Pollok. I record our thanks to the Glasgow Alliance for organising our visit. Jim Mather has agreed to give a verbal report.
I will explain the structure of the day. As the convener said, we visited the Glasgow Alliance and met officials from Glasgow City Council and Greater Glasgow NHS Board. We then went on a trip around Glasgow. We talked to representatives of caring over people's emotions—COPE—in Drumchapel; the supportive training and rehabilitation partnership—the STAR partnership—also in Drumchapel; the Pollok civic realm initiative; and the Kool Kids children's health club in greater Pollok. It was an illuminating day. To be honest, I did not expect to get so much out of the day when it was first scheduled, but there was quite a lot in it.
I have done some follow-up work on the visit, which I hope will be useful. In essence, the strategy that has been employed involves leaning heavily on the regeneration outcome agreements as a mechanism to move things forward. There are some very solid people doing good work at grass-roots level, who genuinely respect their client base and are trying to work to people's strengths. I want to say more about people's strengths later, as they are significant.
We repeatedly saw implicit acceptance of the Heckman route—which Wendy Alexander brought to our attention through the Allander series of lectures—in which education serves as a mechanism through which we can achieve a long-term solution. The objective was not just to fix problems; it was economic deliverance. I am not sure that we saw too much evidence of that, but I will talk more about that in a minute.
What was particularly illuminating—[Interruption.] I am sorry: that might be my phone. One snippet that we got when we were talking to one of the ladies who ran COPE was particularly illuminating. She said that tangible improvement for men involves activity training or a job, whereas tangible improvement for women is different—the Mars/Venus split—in that for them improving a family relationship is the key criterion. I suspect that there is an economic driver behind all that.
We saw that there is focus on addressing people's needs, rather than on tackling the core problem. There is, however, awareness of the importance of economic resurgence. There is little evidence that attempts are being made directly to foster economic resurgence, and there was pretty strong criticism of the enterprise agencies because of that.
In Pollok, I got the impression that much of the economic resurgence there seems to be a function of the M77 development and of some previous failures. The fact that housing had come down and schools had been closed had created an opportuntity to develop, with the M77 now in place.
People told us eloquently that there are too many small projects and that funding is complex. They also said that personality clashes had damaged focus and cohesion and that there is a constant challenge in trying to close the gap while offering universal stigma-free provision. It is felt that the enterprise agencies are not doing enough, as I said a moment ago.
Another point that struck me was that although we have heard from Glasgow about the worklessness and addiction targets, there is a lack of specific targets and quantification for management and monitoring over time. I came away feeling that we need to map the organisations to examine more closely who is delivering services and which downstream service providers the money ends up with.
I did a bit of research after the visit. On the web, I picked up on an interesting case study from the United States called "Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets". The study says much about the current model that resonates strongly with me. It says in essence that if the solution is tackled by producing a map of need, the outcomes will be perverse in comparison with the outcomes from dealing with a community's potential by mapping its assets door by door and street by street; for example, by identifying a retired joiner who could take on apprentices and so on.
The US experience was of fragmentation of efforts, of funding being directed towards service providers and of the negative effect on communities because problems are highlighted, which creates an atmosphere of negativity. Another negative effect was that people were no longer as resilient as they might have been; they looked to the expert—the social worker, the health provider or the funder—for their salvation. The cycle of dependence deepened and services became focused on individual clients rather than on a development plan that included the energies of the entire community. The conclusion was that a needs-based strategy guarantees only survival and maintenance survival. If that is the best we can provide, it is unlikely that we will achieve long-term investment and resurgence in an area.
My conclusion is that this could be a defining moment for the Finance Committee: we can consider the issue and say, "Everything's fine; we're spending money," or we can drill down, find a better way and aim for a different level of outcome from that which has prevailed.
I invite Derek Brownlee and Andrew Arbuckle to speak first, before we come round to the old lags—Frank McAveety and me—from Glasgow.
Several issues from the visit struck me. I think that I am right in saying that every group that we visited said that the problem is not that there is a lack of funding per se, but that access to funding, the timescale, short-termism and the bidding process are problems. I think that everybody acknowledged that money was being provided to tackle deprivation; the questions were about effectiveness rather than the quantum, which was interesting.
The more fundamental point, which Jim Mather discussed in more detail, was that what we saw deals more with symptoms than with underlying causes. If that is the policy intent, it is perhaps not surprising when the policy outcome is not particularly effective. The visits were interesting and provided food for thought, but I am not convinced that what we saw shows that there is real hope of tackling deprivation, in the sense of effecting lasting change, rather than making things feel slightly less bad for people.
Like Jim Mather, because I come from a rural background I approached the visit with perhaps not trepidation, but with the feeling that it would be interesting to go into an urban situation and see deprivation. I was very encouraged by what is happening. I pay tribute to all the people who work at the grass roots. If I learned one thing it was that we should feed the grass roots rather than try to dictate policy from on high. The other lesson is that short-term support is almost as bad as no support at all because it creates expectations; if those cannot be fulfilled that does people a disservice.
I came away thinking that we must insist not necessarily on long-term funding but at least on continuation of funding so that people who work on the ground and those who try to help can see a way forward.
Frank McAveety can put the issue in the broader context of Glasgow.
What members have said is probably a fair reflection of the visit.
We met the senior representatives of the city council and the health board. There was an immediate disconnection between what we heard when we spoke to the health board and the reality when we visited a project that supports folk through the community care or mental health agendas. There is concern about provision for them among almost all the community groups that we met, whether they are voluntary charity bodies such as the ones in Drumchapel or—like most of the people whom we met during the time that I was able to stay on the Pollok estate—a hybrid of professionals, enterprise and development company people.
As has been said, a consistent theme was the bureaucracy of trying to secure funding. I think that it is out of civility that people said that they do not think that funding is the real problem but that it is more about process. Ultimately, because of the complexity of the process, many communities will not know how to break it down effectively to get the outcomes, achieve value for money and make a real difference. That is a persistent problem in any regeneration strategy, particularly in very disadvantaged communities.
I agree with Jim Mather's point about the leg up that Pollok received from the M77. The issue is contentious, but in my opinion there is no doubt about the benefits to Easterhouse and Pollok that have resulted from the connections with the M8 and the M77. I know that among the committee's members there are other views on that; I respect but disagree with those views. Ultimately, private sector investment, which had not happened for a generation, is kicking in in Pollok because finally two or three things are, so to speak, plugged into the electricity grid for the first time. That had not happened for 10, 15 or 20 years.
One of the lessons is that we should trust communities more in as broad a sense as possible. There is no simple solution because each community is diverse and different and has as many psychologically challenging individuals as any Parliament. The second issue is that the agencies should get out a bit more and on to doorsteps to confront the reality of the experience. Thirdly, we should create the space for new capital to come in, which includes private sector regeneration. The idea that the taxpayer can constantly pump-prime such regeneration is in the long run not advantageous for any of us.
I will build on those comments and add three or four points.
One of the interesting points about Pollok is that it is a disproof of the worst-first approach to tackling deprivation. Pollok did not get funding in the early 1990s because it did not meet the indicators, but was clearly in need of support. As Frank McAveety suggests, through a fortuitous set of circumstances—the M77 and a shopping centre development—there is a good prospect that there will be significant improvement in the area. Qualification for support plus private sector investment is delivering palpable change in Pollok. If we were to concentrate resources on the worst 5 per cent of areas, Pollok would not qualify, but if we concentrate on the worst 15 per cent, it will. However, Pollok needs targeted public and private sector investment to deliver meaningful change. That has worked there, but not everywhere.
My second point is about the human potential and organisational capital that exist in many deprived areas. People think of deprived areas as places where people are victims of social and economic dislocation, but such areas have a lot of social organisation and many able and capable people. In particular, there are many able and capable young people whose potential needs to be developed. We should see deprivation as something that can be tackled effectively by the kinds of intervention that we saw on the visit.
My third point relates to Andrew Arbuckle's comments on the timeframe for interventions, the weighting of the bidding process for organisations and how we capture and sustain resources and interventions. I add to Andrew's comments that we sometimes pursue innovation for its own sake. It is easier for new organisations to get funding than it is for existing organisations to achieve recognition for what they do, and to achieve acceptance that they need support to build and maintain their capacity. Organisations that have existed for a while often have almost unrealistic expectations placed on them. COPE told us that it has had to generate resources through becoming almost a private business to meet the new criteria that have been imposed on it.
My final point again relates to Pollok. In the late 1990s, many mediating organisations such as the Wise Group, Barnardo's and One Plus were involved in Pollok. However, when the area qualified for resources, there was an understandable reflex response of creating home-grown organisations that were controlled locally. A shift took place from a contracting relationship to a control relationship. I wonder whether the pressure for that was created by uncertainty about continued funding and a perception that there was lack of control. We need to consider whether we want to promote a shift away from contracting organisations to indigenous organisations in such areas, or whether we want to shift the balance in the structure so that contracting organisations have more likelihood of continued involvement and are not driven out by the psychology of the funding structure. That structure may have perverse unintended consequences rather than the consequences that are planned for or thought desirable.
The purpose of the visit was not examination, but observation, to echo Jim Mather. Ultimately, under the Heckman theory or any other theory, a core issue is the quality of state education and the support for primary and secondary developments. On the visit, we did not find out about the interesting work that is being done in a high school in Pollok that is willing to challenge the assumptions of low achievement and to try something different. That has created a bit of a stooshie with the educational establishment—or elite, if we want to call it that. Education was missing from the visit, as we could not fit it in, but the role of schools is a core issue. Schools perform well in some estates, but not in others. The Education Committee is considering that matter, but it strikes me as an issue that we, too, must address.
I was interested in the convener's comments. From what he said, the issues sounded complex and convoluted. We are coming back on ourselves and repeating—the eddies and currents are unspeakably complicated. It is like a business that begins to lose its way a bit and it just needs direction. We should look to getting that direction from outside. The key questions for us as the Finance Committee are: what money is going in, what outcome will there be and is that good enough? If it is not good enough, we should suggest alternative strategies and find them outside Scotland. I am keen to submit the case study paper from the US because it cuts through the issue, brings out the experience that the Americans had of doing exactly the same thing and the different way that they tackled it.
We need more research, but we will take on board that paper and other evidence that we have received.
I have slightly contradictory feelings about the situation. We are getting better at tackling deprivation, although that might be because of links with broader economic growth in some of the examples that we have seen. Glasgow has been doing well and the other places that we have looked at are near connectors.
There is a sense that the efforts that we are making to tackle deprivation are better co-ordinated and more focused than they were. However, I am not convinced that we are not reinventing measures that did not in the past work as well as they might have done. I wonder whether the process that we have gone through involves enough pausing, taking stock and learning from what has and has not worked. If, as we heard from a couple of people from the first research group, Castlemilk was not a good model of urban regeneration, to what extent have we learned from that? Are we beginning to take such issues on board?
If we look at Glasgow in a broader sense, it is clear that the biggest investment in Glasgow happens through the Glasgow Housing Association, which is about physical regeneration, but how does that relate to the people?
In the recent interview with Michael Lennon of the GHA, we learned that only 6 per cent of GHA residents are in full-time employment. The relativity of deprivation is the main point. Any author whom one reads on the subject, whether it is Friedman in "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth", Steven Pinker in "The Blank Slate" or—I forget the author—"The Welfare State We're In", it is all about relativity. If the gap gets too big, people turn in on themselves and those forces are very destructive. We do not have to go far—to Pollok or Drumchapel, or, up in my neck of the woods, to the Ferry in Inverness or Soroba in Oban—to see that.
We will return to the subject when we take stock of where we are going in the deprivation inquiry.
The remaining agenda items will be in private.
Meeting continued in private until 12:57.