“Dealing with offending by young people”
Agenda item 5 is the Executive's response to "Dealing with offending by young people". Members have that response, together with the clerk's note on it, and I am interested to hear their comments. Margaret Jamieson and Rhona Brankin were members of the committee in the previous session and therefore have some experience of the issue. I would appreciate hearing their views before those of other members. Once we have discussed the issue, we can consider what action, if any, we wish to take on the Executive's response.
This was a complex area for the committee and some work has already been done on it. It will be an interesting area for new members to cut their teeth on.
We can use a lot of the work that has been done in Westminster to frame questions that we would wish to put to the Scottish Executive. Everybody, not only the Scottish Executive, can learn a lot of lessons. The concern has been expressed that, in Scotland, we were not in charge of what we should have been in charge of, because Westminster was leading on these issues. I am grateful for the briefing paper. It lets us see exactly what has happened in Westminster, which will influence me in the questions that I want to ask.
We are actually considering the Executive's response.
I know, but the paper answers some of the points in that response.
I am slightly confused: are we talking about the Executive's response to "Dealing with offending by young people"?
Yes.
Margaret is too subtle for me.
I want to ask about several areas. Paragraph 5 on page 2 of the clerk's paper talks about the Executive response. I welcome what is said about the inspection and review of adult services, which are issues that we felt very strongly about.
Turning to paragraph 9, I agree that our recommendation talked about promoting new services, as opposed to the new services themselves. Information on that was lacking and it would be useful to get more information.
Turning now to paragraph 12 on page 3, I agree that, when the Executive talks about the national work force planning group and about the increase in the number of workers in local authority children and families teams, we have to be clear about where that increase is coming from. Is it an increase in qualified staff or other staff?
May I come back in, convener? I had jumped somewhat in the agenda.
That is a relief.
I apologise for that.
Apologies accepted.
It may all have been too much for us in our first meeting after the recess.
I share some of Rhona Brankin's concerns about the way in which we talk about qualified social workers. It is against the law for someone to call themselves a social worker unless they have undertaken the appropriate training. However, there are a number of other qualified staff in social work departments. Those people are qualified to different levels and we should find out more details on that. Work has been done on attracting social workers into certain areas.
The way in which Scottish Executive departments join up, or fail to do so, was an important aspect of the committee's inquiry. That is another area on which we need clarification. In certain areas, the Scottish Executive Education Department takes the lead, but in other areas the Scottish Executive Justice Department takes the lead. We need to explore that a wee bit further.
As a newcomer to the committee, I want clarification on where we go from here with a report of this nature. The Auditor General produced a report; the committee then investigated the issue and published a final report; and now we have an Executive response. Where might we go from here? We need to avoid simply going back over the same ground. We need to move forward in our analysis and ensure that change happens.
My intention is to invite the Auditor General to make any further observations, and to add any further information, that he might have. Then, subject to the committee's agreement, it might be advisable to follow up on one or two points of clarification. I propose that, once we have had our discussion, I should write on the committee's behalf to the department responsible to seek clarification and raise the matters that members have highlighted.
We will hear from the Auditor General after Kenny MacAskill.
I was struck by point 11 on page 3 of the clerk's paper. Having had previous employment in the criminal justice sphere, I recall that Edinburgh's only residential place for a child was in the likes of Birmingham or Barnet.
We all recognise that the size of our local authorities has caused the difficulty that they are unable to deal with many aspects of social work and care matters, but we need a bit more of a lead from the Executive. We all accept that cognisance must be taken of local authority autonomy and that the Parliament should not tread all over local authorities. However, that will not happen of its own volition; there will not be spontaneous combustion. Somebody needs to get a grip and ensure either that local authorities pool their resources to direct funds or that provision is made at a national level. The fact is that that has not happened since the Parliament commenced and it did not happen beforehand. One could argue that a lacuna has resulted from the demise of regional authorities—although even then, few special places were available.
If the Executive will not get a grip of the situation, nobody will. I do not mean this to be an overt criticism of the Executive, as I understand that it may have acted with the best of intentions with regard to local government democracy. However, the system is not working. There needs to be a clearer remit on how we are to deliver secure units and residential places in particular. In the main, the local authorities will not have the take-up. The structures for getting together are just not in place.
That is a big issue for smaller local authorities, such as the local authority in my constituency. I agree that there are grave problems for local authorities of that size in finding the resource that is needed, albeit for a very small number of youngsters.
Are there any other comments?
I do not want to reopen the discussion, which is partly why I sought clarification on the process, but there is a fundamental point on which I would like to comment. Paragraph 5 of the clerk's paper states the committee's support for the
"recommendation on the establishment of independent inspection",
and the comment is:
"This is a significant new commitment."
I stress that I say this in the absence of detailed prior knowledge of or involvement in the subject, but my instinct is to be concerned and to urge caution about directing yet more resources into yet more inspection. I am conscious of the fact that in this area, as in many other service areas, the Executive and this Parliament—sometimes with the best of intentions—have added to the pressures of dealing with day-to-day demands and delivering improvements in other areas by introducing further inspection. Would anyone care to comment on my anxiety on that front?
There do not appear to be any volunteers at the moment, but we may want to hear more on that point. Does the Auditor General have any further information that he wishes to give us?
One of the lines that I occasionally have to use is that it is not appropriate for me to comment on policy matters. I have to say that that can be a great let-out from time to time. More seriously, the commitment to strengthening inspection is something that follows naturally from some of the recommendations in our report. Whether or not to take that step is a policy matter, and finding the resources for it is something that the Executive would have to determine with the Parliament.
More generally, with regard to the fundamental point about how such issues are followed through, I have two comments. We see youth justice as such a significant area of social policy in Scotland, involving huge sums of money and areas of major public concern, that we are committed to sustaining some kind of continuing programme of work in that area. We look forward to further discussion with the committee on that matter in due course.
In the meantime, we have one significant piece of work in the pipeline, looking specifically at the implementation of some of the issues and focusing mainly on the role of local government. On that point, I would like to bring in David Pia, to give an indication of the next stage in our work in that area. I think that that will help to assure the committee that we are not letting go of the issues.
That would be helpful.
David Pia (Audit Scotland):
We have two stages of follow-up work. The first is under way now and will report in October. It will focus mainly on the supervision of children who offend, which was an issue that we picked up in our main report as an area of risk. The evidence that we received, from a limited sample, was that there were gaps in services for the supervision of children who offend, so we have carried out a study looking at those services across the whole country and will report on that in October.
We will do a further follow-up in two to three years' time, which will consider the impact of the various initiatives that are under way in the whole field that is usually described as youth justice. As members will be aware, the Executive is carrying out an extensive action programme just now, and it has added a lot of resources to budgets in that area.
It is plain from the initial follow-up work that most of the issues that were identified in the report that we published at the end of last year are being addressed through the action programme. The follow-up work will assess the impact of those initiatives in addressing the policy objectives.
I would like to comment on a couple of the points to which members drew attention. With regard to the point about inspection, I would like to add to what the Auditor General said. Our report tried to draw attention to the fact that there is a clear gap in the inspection of services for young people in the community. There are inspection arrangements in relation to residential schools, prison care and the education system, but there is no means of checking the quality of services for young people in the community. We were particularly interested in that because those services were the ones in which the gaps in provision were apparent, so that was an area of risk.
Our follow-up studies look further at that area and, without prejudging our final conclusion, I think that it is safe to say that there are still questions about whether children who are placed in supervision by hearings are getting the service that the hearings say they need. Further questions arise about the extent to which councils and the Executive have arrangements in place to monitor the quality of those services. That explains the conclusion about inspection.
A question arose about the Executive's response to the point about the cost-effectiveness of residential and secure care. It is true that the Executive is committed to increasing the provision of secure care quite substantially, and a substantial increase is promised. Our report raised the issue of the knowledge that is available about the cost-effectiveness of that provision, because it is very expensive indeed. We also had questions about the cost-effectiveness of residential schools, which are also very expensive, providing non-secure care. The unit costs of those forms of provision are very high. It costs five or six times as much to look after children in those facilities as it does to support them on programmes in the community. That is not to say that the two types of provision are directly comparable, as they are addressing different needs, but the costs of those services are very high. There is still an absence of information about what we are getting for that money.
Thank you. I found that information useful. It puts the inspection in a specific context and suggests that, in relation to some of the concerns that were raised by the committee, information will become available that might begin to orientate local authorities to work together at a policy level to fill in some of those gaps.
In summary, I would like to suggest to the committee that a number of points—specifically points 9, 11 and 12—are worth taking up, both for clarification to the Executive and for our own benefit. I would like to ask the clerk to draft a letter, which can be circulated for members' comments, and once we have some agreement on that we can submit it.
It is also important to be clear about who is taking the lead in the various initiatives. As Margaret Jamieson said, it is notoriously difficult to work in a cross-cutting way. A lot of such work is happening, but it is important for us to have a clear view about where the lead is being taken by the Executive.
It is noticeable that the response is signed by three people. That is indicative of the fact that, although people are working together, there is no clear and obvious focal point. It may be that different parts have a different focal point. Nevertheless, we should ask.
In respect of recommendation 11, the questions seem to be why, where and how. Why are we doing this? Is it simply because there is public concern? Is this the best way to do it? Where would the places be? There is no point in putting residential accommodation in some areas if the need is in other areas. How would people get access to their kids? I know from my previous job as a practising agent that significant difficulties can be caused if families of the unemployed or low waged are required to visit their kids in Rossie School or other such places that are difficult to access. The final question is how places would be commissioned. Would it be left to individual authorities or would there be a national drive? Or would there be a conglomerate of local authorities?
We will find a form of wording to express that. Do members have any other observations to make before we move into private session?
The Executive has agreed with the establishment of independent inspection. Are we to assume that it agrees that the inspection should be multidisciplinary?
I cannot answer that, but we can try to clarify that point in our letter. We will tease that out.
I thank the members of the public, the press and others who have attended the public part of the meeting. We will take a break and then move into private session. Members have five minutes or so to take any calls and wash their hands.
Meeting suspended until 11:51 and thereafter continued in private until 12:50.