Audit Committee, 05 Dec 2006

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Official Report 262KB pdf

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Community Planning Partnerships

I welcome Dr Andrew Goudie and his team. We will be taking evidence on "Community Planning: an initial review", a report that has been prepared for the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission. At a previous meeting in November, we heard evidence from a number of senior community planning practitioners about some of the issues that are raised in the report. Members of the committee also visited East Ayrshire community planning partnership in October, which gave us an opportunity to see community planning in practice. In today's session, we shall focus on issues relating to funding streams, and integration and prioritisation of national policy objectives. Those issues were highlighted in the Auditor General's report and by our previous witnesses as areas of particular concern in respect of community planning.

I invite Dr Goudie to introduce his team to us and to make his opening statement.

We have been trying to think about the areas that we might most usefully cover today, so I thought it important to illustrate some of the broader comments that we have made with some specific examples.

Paul Gray is a director in the Scottish Executive Heath Department, Mike Neilson is a director in the Scottish Executive Development Department, and David Henderson is the head of local government finance. I hope that, between us, we can cover the areas that it will be useful to touch on.

I will not say too much by way of introduction, but I have a few introductory comments to make. As members know, Scottish Executive ministers have long believed that community planning has a central role to play in meeting the challenges in improving public services. It is making a difference to the lives of the people who use those services by joining national policy outcomes with the needs of each area. We know that that is happening around Scotland and we are committed to supporting partnerships as they progress that work by marrying the efficiency gains of joint working with the benefits of local engagement, and by developing services that are truly sustainable.

Audit Scotland's initial review of community planning reflected many of the conclusions that had been set out in the Executive's consultation document, "Transforming Public Services: The Next Phase of Reform". At the time of its publication, the Minister for Finance and Public Service Reform welcomed the review's acknowledgement of the progress that has been made to date by community planning partnerships, and the view that a great deal more remained to be done to improve public services for the benefit of individuals and their communities. The recommendations of the review are consistent with the public service reform agenda that was set by ministers, whose basic intention is to rationalise and simplify initiatives and funding streams wherever possible, and to create greater local freedoms and flexibilities for community planning partners to respond to local needs.

Feedback from the public sector reform dialogue over the summer suggests that respondents from throughout Scotland also see significant potential in community planning and recognise that it is a platform on which we can all build. We are therefore already exploring how community planning might best move forward. The Executive is committed to helping local partnerships to find the appropriate mechanisms to maximise the potential of planning in each area.

We are supporting partnerships in a wide variety of ways. In particular, the Executive is facilitating the community planning network, Communities Scotland is providing direct support and individual members of the management group of the Executive are systematically maintaining links with each community planning partnership. The development of community planning is, above all, a key element of the wider work of public sector reform. As ministers take forward their thinking in that broader context, the role of community planning will necessarily be to the fore.

That is all I need to say by way of introduction.

Thank you. The first area that we will inquire about is the fragmented nature of funding streams. I invite Margaret Jamieson to start the questioning.

You said that the Executive is seeking ways in which to respond to the needs of local communities via community planning partnerships. When local authorities join their health colleagues and together make a policy decision, they must still approach different Executive departments for funding. How can you ensure that local impacts are taken into account when one department says yes but the other says no?

One of the key things that we have been trying to achieve is greater clarity about outcomes in specific work. In clarifying outcomes, we can have the sort of conversations that you are talking about and we can see how the different partners may come into play. There are already several examples—which my colleagues may pick up on—of work for which partnerships have been formed and about which those conversations are taking place.

Work on children's services is a good example of partners coming together. We have brought together—among others—local authorities, the health service, youth justice and social work so that they can form a common view about how to make progress. Although that may not have been done explicitly within the community planning framework, it is a good example of how joint working has allowed greater understanding of the purpose of the work.

Other work is perhaps more tightly defined in one sense, in respect of outcome agreements. The regeneration outcome agreements are a good example of different interests coming together to form a common vision. Mike Neilson has been involved in that work and might want to say more about it. It is a good example of different views of a common picture focusing work around that picture.

It is worth considering regeneration outcome agreements, as they are one of the most concrete examples of trying to put the outcome agreement approach into practice in quite an ambitious way. The outcome agreement involves all local partners, not just the local authority, and it is in the cross-cutting area of regeneration. Quite a lot of important lessons have come out of that around the relationship between allowing flexibility for local players and setting national priorities, which is one of the big issues.

It is interesting that we have found that, in some respects, we should be more specific about priorities in the future because the current arrangements have made it more difficult to align them. The lessons that we have learned are that the priorities that we establish nationally need to give sufficient guidance and that we need to build evidence around the baseline for improvements.

I think that Margaret Jamieson asked how agreement is reached across the Executive when partnerships want to do something. The regeneration outcome agreement approach, whereby integrated outcomes are sought, has been effective in making the system work. In areas in which the approach has been based on integrated outcomes rather than just bidding for funding, it has been possible to align outcomes for regeneration with other frameworks. However, there is no doubt that we must continue to work on how the regeneration outcome framework links to targets for health and education.

What you described is very much a top-down and not a bottom-up approach, which is why I asked the question. My question was particularly about local government and health, which in some areas in Scotland have agreed that the best way of delivering outcomes for communities is to have co-location and a one-door approach. However, when they want to access moneys, health boards must go to the Health Department but local authorities must take a different route. Even if funding from one funding source is approved in principle, there might be a six-month delay before the other funding source gives its approval. How will the Executive rationalise how it works? Community planning partners appear to have got their act together on co-location and shared services, but you guys at the Executive have not quite come out of the silo—that is demonstrated by the fact that four of you are here.

There were two parts to your question. First there are issues about how we join up and work with local government. As you know, in the Audit Scotland report comments were made about the fragmentation of funding streams and the fact that the Executive has a variety of initiatives, each of which has its own planning and performance processes. As I am sure you know, ministers have acknowledged that that is an issue and have asked us to consider how we might consolidate and remove some of the current bureaucracy. That is an important part of the work.

I will briefly describe some of the work that we are doing to tackle the issue. For some time we have been undertaking an internal review of issues to do with streamlining bureaucracy, to consider in particular how we might measurably reduce the number of funding streams with local authorities and the number of plans and performance reporting lines that we request. We asked each portfolio closely to consider its relationship with local government, to ascertain how such cuts might be made, and we are currently considering the progress that portfolios have made in that regard during the past six months. I am jumping the gun a little when I say that the indications are promising. We concede that more can be done, but the initial progress is encouraging. If there is a real need to create a new stream or programme, we try hard to ensure that that need is met in the context of a general reduction in the number of funding streams.

Another piece of work is to do with smaller funding streams and is important because such funding streams can generate a disproportionate amount of bureaucracy. We have particularly considered funding streams of less than £10 million, to ascertain whether they can be consolidated or integrated with other programmes. We are trying to tackle the issues that were raised in the report and in the document that ministers published during the summer.

Another important piece of work is consideration of how statistical reporting is done in local authorities, whether it involves formal sample surveys or the collection of administrative data from local government. We did not have an overall picture, but we have now collated a baseline of the demands that are made on local government by departments throughout the Executive. Now that the work has reached that point, we are asking those involved to look methodically through the information and identify the precise need that underlies each request. For each item, we are asking what it informs us about, whether it is about performance tracking or about target tracking, and what precisely is the purpose of the data collection. There is a presumption that, where there are undefined or ill-defined reasons for data collection, we will look much more closely at whether it should continue.

Another dimension is that, even if data are required for various reasons, we can reduce the duplication that occurs when different portfolios ask for broadly similar data. Such duplication is obviously unnecessary and, in principle, the collection of those data can be made much clearer. We are also considering ways in which collection can be made simpler, perhaps through electronic data capture rather than manual means. A variety of work is being done and it is going well. That perhaps answers the part of your question about local government.

The other part of your question related more to the coming together of different sectors. I want to tell the committee about the exploratory work that ministers asked us to do on outcome agreements. Mike Neilson described the good progress that has been made on the regeneration side in recent years, but we are open about saying that that is a lesson-learning process. It was, in one sense, the piloting of an idea. Most people think that it went well in principle, but we also agree with you that a lot can be learned. It is clear that community planning partners have some concerns and interests and we need to capture those.

There are three strands to the work on outcome agreements. First, as I am sure you are aware, we are working with West Lothian Council and East Renfrewshire Council on the scope for designing a single outcome agreement that would capture all the resources that go into local government. That depends on defining outcomes up front in a clear and methodical way. It also depends on defining ways of tracking performance and knowing how to analyse the agreement at the end of the period. That raises some important questions.

The second strand is the work that we are doing with two community planning partnerships from North and South Lanarkshire, which have submitted proposals to us. They are looking to take forward what I regard as the thematic example of deprivation by building on the work that has been done on regeneration outcome agreements. We hope that that will be another forum for bringing together the various groupings.

Thirdly, work is being done on some other thematic areas. Mike Neilson might want to comment on those because two of them are in his area. One is to explore the possibility of having an outcome agreement around the children's service work. That work has gone ahead rapidly and it is a good example of joint working, but it is not necessarily within the framework of an outcome agreement. The second area is around older people and potentially around other areas as well. Mike Neilson might want to comment on where we have got to with that.

Before I do that, I would like to return to the important point about getting different people to say yes at the right time. There is a set of issues around national priorities and local priorities and there is a set of issues around different policy areas, but there is no perfect way of cutting that cake that will always give us the right answers.

There is a set of short-term issues and a set of longer-term issues. As far as the short-term issues are concerned, I will cite the urban regeneration companies—which, strictly speaking, do not fall into the category of community planning—as an illustration of what we are trying to do, whereby all the local players come together to consider the regeneration of a particular area. The role that the Executive has played in that has been to say that if issues emerge in relation to the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council and its plans to build, for example, we will ensure that our approach is joined up so that answers are provided coherently. That is quite a good model for practical, specific examples.

To pick up on what Andrew Goudie said about the longer term, it would be easier to fit things together if we had a more coherent, outcome-based approach. In the case of older people, we are considering running a pathfinder, which would cover, at the very least, health care and housing and which would also take account of active aging. We want to identify what would be the right scope of that, which local players would need to be involved to make it work most effectively and what funding streams could be brought together. That poses quite a big challenge for us, because it means that we have to go back to health, housing and care policies to assess how they fit together. We think that having a particular agreement for a particular service group is probably a good way of achieving greater integration between policies.

I am interested in what you have said about an urban regeneration company looking at a particular area and getting different players involved. I see no difference between that and a community partnership identifying what it needs for an area. If such a system can work quickly for regeneration and other individuals can be pulled in, why can that approach not be rolled out across the Executive?

Our approach has been that if a well-defined local objective has required a set of decisions, we have told the local authority to work out what it wants to do and to come and tell us if it finds a barrier. I am quite familiar with some of the issues in Glasgow, where the experience has been that a great deal can be achieved before insuperable barriers are encountered. When that happens, people come and talk to us or to the Health Department.

I want to pick up on those answers by referring to paragraph 49 of "Community planning: an initial review", which mentions community planning partnerships being required to develop regeneration outcome agreements. It says that some CPPs

"found the process of developing ROAs resource intensive and the specific guidance on where resources should be spent not always relevant to their local communities. In some areas, work on the ROA significantly delayed progress on other local priorities."

To what extent can that be avoided?

We have examined the experience of regeneration outcome agreements and a number of interesting points have emerged. First, it is important to emphasise that regeneration outcome agreements were envisaged not just as a way to describe how the community regeneration fund would be used, but as a way to set out a regeneration strategy for the area and all the players in it. It is partly because what we have sought to achieve is quite difficult that meeting such a high aspiration has proved hard.

The second point to bear in mind relates to ROAs not necessarily fitting in with local priorities. To a large extent, there has been a geographic focus on ensuring that 80 per cent of the money is spent in the 15 per cent of areas in which deprivation is greatest. That we should focus on the most disadvantaged areas is an important policy objective but, in practice, we have tried to show some flexibility, with the result that in some areas the spread has been rather wider. However, the basic principle of ensuring that the most disadvantaged areas get most of the funding is extremely important.

The third issue is intensity of funding. One of the issues that came out of the evaluation is that the approach probably needs to be more in proportion to the level of funding. At one end, we have Glasgow, which receives £32 million, whereas one or two local authorities receive hundreds of thousands of pounds. It is reasonable to expect a more attenuated approach.

Those are some of the lessons that we are learning for the next round. I stress that the agreements were the first effort to have a genuinely outcome-based approach in community planning partnerships. The process is a challenge and, the first time round, it was difficult.

Dr Goudie, in response to an earlier question, you mentioned work with partnerships in North and South Lanarkshire. Can you give us a timescale for that? To what extent are other community planning partnerships being encouraged to take the same approach?

I cannot give you an absolute comment on the timescale, for the important reason that ministers have asked us to explore the proposals that have been produced. At present, we are considering the technical nature of the outcome agreements and exploring the ideas, particularly on single-outcome agreements, as that approach has not been taken before. Ultimately, the proposals will need to go back to ministers for comment and a decision, which I cannot pre-empt. The intention at present is that if ministers want to move, they would look to try to introduce the proposed measures in the next year or two. However, we have a long way to go before we are at the point of making a decision.

To an extent, I have picked up a certain amount of reassurance from comments that have been made. My question comes from experience at the grass-roots level. Part of my constituency is an area that was previously in the social inclusion partnership in north Edinburgh. Half of the North Edinburgh Area Renewal area is in my constituency and the other half is in the Edinburgh North and Leith constituency. During the past decade, people have moved from considering purely housing and regeneration issues to working with health partners and local businesses. On the ground, in north-west Edinburgh—I am sure that the area is not alone in this—people have been doing community planning for nearly a decade and have structures, funding streams and ways of working in place.

For the most part, community planning can be thought of as being about bringing people up and increasing community partnership working—that is certainly the case in parts of my constituency—but, in areas where such working has been a way of life for several years, there is a concern that people will almost have to move backwards to accommodate the new arrangements. I seek assurances on that. How will such areas get the flexibility that they need from the Executive and councils to continue the work that they have been doing, bearing in mind, of course, the need for full accountability? What will the funding stream picture be for them and how will it compare with their previous situation?

One important point about the progress with community planning, which is explicit in the legislation, is that the process must allow for local initiative and innovation. The process is deliberately not intended to be prescriptive about the way in which local communities should develop their planning partnerships. That is important, because it means that some partnerships will inevitably move at different speeds and some will have different approaches to the way in which they define their models. I am not familiar with the particular example that Margaret Smith raises, but with individual areas where such work has been going on for a long period and which have a genuine sense of joint working and a joint vision toward which they have been working for some time, I do not see why they should feel that they are being pushed back.

The Executive's approach is to work with existing partnerships rather than to redefine them according to some kind of blueprint. Indeed, across the public sector reform agenda, ministers have made it clear that, as a matter of principle, they are looking for a bottom-up approach to the reform process rather than an approach that imposes a particular model. For issues such as the streamlining of bureaucracy or funding streams, I see no reason why we should constrain the way in which a community planning partnership decides to take its thinking forward.

On Mr Neilson's point about targeting resources into deprived areas, I think that different situations on the ground might require slightly different approaches, such as different boundaries, so there will be some changes. In general, will the approach that has been outlined still be the direction of travel that the Executive will set for local councils in such areas?

That is right. In effect, local community planning will cover all areas, whereas SIPs or other structures previously covered only the most disadvantaged areas. We want a more strategic and comprehensive approach so that local community planning happens everywhere. However, we also recognise explicitly that we need to build on what is already happening in areas where community planning is in effect functioning and we need to continue to target resources on the most disadvantaged areas. That implies that we must build on the strengths that exist.

However, we must also recognise that some change will be part of the process. Change might be involved as a result of the community planning agenda or, in Edinburgh, the neighbourhood management agenda, which is important in getting big decisions down into neighbourhood level in a more integrated way.

Let me turn our line of questioning round slightly. How does the Executive intend to give community planning partnerships greater flexibility to respond to local needs in using specific areas of funding, as opposed to pooling everything?

Implicit in the direction of travel that I talked about earlier is the exploratory work that we are doing on outcome agreements, of which the community services work that I described is perhaps one of the earlier examples. That work is important because, in essence, outcome agreements will focus on the impact on the client group or beneficiary while putting much less emphasis on the means by which the outcome objectives are achieved. We are currently exploring the extent to which, in such agreements or contracts, greater flexibility might be given to the combination of different agencies so that they can work on an outcome in the way that they feel is most appropriate to the local setting. In many ways, that is the essence of an outcome agreement. Outcome agreements could address several of the perceived barriers or challenges to taking forward community planning. A key challenge is to bring in the local dimension and local knowledge in a way that allows people to address the problem in their own particular way. That is an important strand of our thinking that has a very direct impact on the issue that you asked about in your question.

We have no more questions on funding streams, so we will move on to the next area of questioning, which is integration and prioritisation of national policies.

My question is on the balance between the centre and the locality in the setting of goals and priorities. What consideration is being given to setting a smaller number of strategic priorities when community planning could add value and is supported by agreed outcomes?

In "Transforming Public Services: The Next Phase of Reform", which ministers published in the summer, one of the key thrusts was, as I think the question suggests, that we should look much more towards an outcome-based approach of some sort—although the document did not specify precisely what that approach might turn out to be. Ministers also asked us to consider ways in which different partners might participate in that process.

The report states:

"The Highland Council has estimated that 29 separate plans and strategies are required for different Scottish Executive departments".

Does that not conflict with what you have just said?

We must see what has been proposed as part of the wider public sector reform agenda. We are looking towards a fundamental transformational change in that sector. The document that was published in the summer does not answer all the questions; rather, it flags up the immensity of the challenges that ministers have seen, which include the kind of challenges that have been mentioned. The examples that I gave earlier point towards the activities that we have now put in place to address the overall picture. As I have suggested, our initial look at what has recently been done in individual portfolios suggests that there has been a considerable move towards addressing the overall picture; indeed, on-the-ground changes have already been made that address the issues that have been mentioned.

I know that the situation is complex centrally and locally, but the report also states:

"There is … no clear direction … from the Scottish Executive on which national priorities should have precedence for implementation at local level."

Is greater clarity needed?

Ministers have said that they want more sharpness about what the outcomes are and on prioritising actions to achieve those outcomes. The context that I have described is such that we will be able to focus more on having greater clarity.

What changes have been made in how central Government operates and organises to deal with sometimes complex local problems in different organisations and to get action?

Perhaps it would be best to answer that question by way of a couple of examples. Mike Neilson and Paul Gray can give specific examples.

An example that is worth drawing attention to is children's services. I do not deal directly with children's services, but I have an interest in them. A single, integrated children's services plan that pulls in several previous requirements and makes a real effort to focus on the child is now required.

On strategic priorities, a number of plans relate to particular areas or particular groups, such as looked-after children and kids not in employment or training. Whatever framework exists, we will want to be reassured that certain issues are being targeted as priorities and that tackling one of the issues is not a higher priority than tackling another; we will want to be reassured that action on all the issues is being driven forward. Young people who are not in education, employment or training are a good example in that context. It is good for the Executive to say that action must be taken to address their problems and that there must be a new approach in areas in which the problem is most significant.

We are trying to pull together several housing plans. Local housing strategies will integrate supporting people planning and fuel poverty planning among other types of planning. However, there is an issue to do with homelessness strategies. At the least, there are housing supply and social care support elements to tackling homelessness, which do not fit neatly into the housing side of things or the community care side of things. There is a challenge in finding a way of continuing to focus on homelessness as a priority while recognising that a wide range of interventions is involved.

I am interested in what you are saying because you are talking about a big change from how things used to be run. Ensuring that maximum efficiency is achieved is a complicated matter because clarity is required both centrally and locally for such complex processes to work.

I will give you another local view that we have received:

"Different national priorities are set for the different partner organisations; finding priorities which are relevant across all partners is difficult".

There was a plea for national guidance, which would help.

It is worth picking up the example from the health side, which goes some way to addressing that. I will hand over to Paul Gray on that.

I will touch briefly on three examples. One is our work on the hub initiative, which is about building joint premises and touches on issues that Ms Jamieson raised earlier. I chair the steering group on that initiative, and Mike Neilson is a member of it. The group attempts to ensure that departments are joining up on the initiative and allowing local authorities, health boards and other sectors that might be interested, such as the voluntary sector, to have a say in joint premises and to manage the rather disparate funding streams in a way that produces a good outcome.

The second example is the work that we are doing on outcomes—Dr Goudie has referred to some of it already. A couple of weeks ago, we brought together the range of people who are involved in what has, up to now, been called the joint future work—the national health service, the local authorities, the Scottish Executive and the voluntary sector—so that, instead of each department producing a set of outcomes and then thinking about how we could weld them together, we could start from the other end. We asked what outcomes would make sense to the delivery agents against what they know about Executive policy.

In that context, it is worth pointing out that the outcomes that are sought from the implementation of "Changing Lives: Report of the 21st Century Social Work Review", which is the broad, overarching policy in our approach to social work, and "Delivering for Health", which is our broad, overarching policy on health services for the next 15 to 20 years, are closely aligned. That is by design rather than accident.

The third point is that one of the key roles that the Executive can play is to know when not to try to intervene. The Glasgow addiction service partnership is a prime example of that. The NHS board, the local council and voluntary providers got together to support a redesigned service and our job was not to interfere with that. They did it within the established lines of governance and within proper accountability. It is an excellent service and our job is simply to support the partners in achieving their aim.

What you have said makes reassuring sense in the search for focus and effectiveness. How will the Executive ensure that, if a smaller number of priorities are agreed, all departments will adopt a consistent approach to prioritising them within their own departmental policies and to holding their local delivery organisations accountable for delivering them?

Ultimately, the view that the Executive takes on the key outcome priorities will necessarily be determined by ministers. That is an important point, because the way in which we take the matter forward is driven by ministers' priorities. Let us take the next Administration by way of example. Once it has clarified what directions it wishes to move in, it will be for the departmental structure, under the permanent secretary, to make the links of which you speak.

We can give you a degree of reassurance that we are now working in a more joined-up way throughout the Executive—although I would not wish to exaggerate that, because one can always do a great deal more. For example, Paul Gray has described some of the links that he has with Mike Neilson. Our recent work on young people who are not in education, employment or training is another good example of much more real joined-up working across the Executive to try to address some of the issues of which you speak.

Once we are given a strong lead on what the key objectives and priorities are, I agree that it will be for us to forge the structures that allow joint working and joint activities and the single communication process with community planning partnerships, local government or whatever the relevant agency is, so that we have a clear process of communicating with those groups.

In complexity, the common interest is in having a focus and consistency.

Yes.

I welcome Susan Deacon to the meeting. We already gave apologies for her, so she need not worry.

Children's services have been mentioned several times—Mike Neilson mentioned them. Of course, one of the bases for such work is children's records of needs, which are provided to share knowledge about children's needs, so that the needs of all children who have records of needs are—we hope—addressed. A requirement to review records of needs applies, so all the services that are involved can know how a child is progressing—a constant survey takes place. Will a quantitative overall evaluation of how that is progressing be made? In other words, are children's needs being addressed more effectively? Would you be able to measure that? More generally, how will you monitor and report effectively the delivery of the outcomes on all the strategic priorities that you have identified?

I think that you are referring to the work that is being done on the getting it right for every child agenda. That is a good example of how the key partners have come together collectively to define a single assessment process, a single reporting process and a single record for children. The impact on the system and the effectiveness of that work are important. They will be important parts of the joint inspection process, which is in train. Some progress has been made on joint inspections of child protection services, which are closely related. I understand that, in the not-too-distant future, the aim is to have joint inspections for the full range of children's services, but that is a little further down the track. The inspections will be a tangible way of addressing the question that you ask, which is what joint working is achieving.

I fundamentally agree that one key test for all the public sector reform agenda is what the ultimate impact is on the client group—the beneficiaries. The inspection process provides a strong, robust and independent way of digging out precisely how effective we are. The other part of the inspection process, which is extremely important, is its use for analysing what can be done better. That provides feedback into a process of continual improvement. I agree that we must ask about the importance of the process.

I will pursue that. We have heard evidence that hubs can make significant improvements in the quantity of services and the efficiency with which services are delivered. Obviously, one also needs to know about the quality of services and what is being achieved, rather than just the number of people who go through the processes. For that, baselines are needed. I presume that quite a lot of baselines could be identified already for the performance of the separate social services, health services and the gamut of other services. Does the Executive intend to gather such figures or to require baselines to be set as hubs are established? I hope that more hubs will be established, as I think that they will be extremely successful. Are you thinking of setting qualitative and quantitative baselines according to the previous performance of the separate services, against which you can measure how much better they do when they work together?

I have three points to make. First, I do not want to mislead the committee into thinking that hub services will be the answer to every problem that we have ever had. We are trying to provide a more streamlined way of procuring joint premises, involve people who would have done that anyway had it been possible and remove the barriers that might make it impossible at present.

Secondly, we would expect anyone who wanted to establish a hub to have a business case for it. The business case should not be merely a financial one; part of it would have to revolve around the better delivery of joint services.

The third part of my answer relates to what Dr Goudie said about the delivery of outcomes. We expect the partners who engage in the provision of hub services to do so against the background that co-location will make it easier for them to deliver their outcomes. We expect that to be tested in the normal way in which we take evidence and statistics from those organisations. The hub is a means to an end and you are asking whether we will test the end as well as the means. The answer to that has to be yes.

I have a gut feeling that where hubs are set up, there will be a higher quality of services as well as more efficient services. It is very important for the individual who takes advantage of the services offered through a hub that there is some way of assessing that the quality of the services is better than it was when there were separate services that did not operate together in that way.

One of the challenges that we face is to find appropriate means of measuring outcomes for people. Much of a person's experience contributes to their feeling about the outcome. From a health perspective, it is as important that they get polite as well as appropriate clinical treatment.

A live example of improvement is the Strathbrock partnership centre in West Lothian, where primary care, general practice, pharmacy, social work, mental health services, local authority services such as housing and residential care services for the elderly are all located in one place. The benefit to the individual is substantial because, on a simple level, they do not have to go to the GP and then find a pharmacy elsewhere to get their prescription. On a broader level, if someone has a range of issues, they can access all the services in one place. That reduces the need to use transport and also means that they are more likely to take up the treatment that is offered to them because it is easier for them to get at it.

To be frank, finding an absolute measure to show that that is better is quite difficult. Nonetheless, if the hub model gives an advantage to the client—in this case, the patient—it is worth pursuing. That is quite apart from the financial advantages to the various organisations that take part in such a partnership in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of the delivery of their services; we are looking at the hub from the client's perspective.

Mary Mulligan will begin questions on supporting community planning, including co-location of premises and sharing information.

Just while we are talking about Strathbrock, I will add that the partnership is also much more efficient for MSPs, who can get all their questions answered in one afternoon, as I found yesterday, as everybody whom I needed to see was in the same place. Do you think that co-location is necessary to develop community planning?

I will offer some general comments and my colleagues may want to comment on their areas of expertise. I hesitate to say that co-location is necessary for community planning to work. As with most things, the key issue is the relationship between different organisations and people, not merely their physical location. However, there are undoubtedly some good examples of co-location facilitating and encouraging joint working. A couple of weeks ago, I had experience of an excellent example of co-location—an integrated community service and hospital, where several key professional groupings, including the hospital, GPs, dentists and social workers have been brought together in the same building. During my visit, they demonstrated admirably how powerful linkages were being made. Although co-location may not be necessary to develop community planning, I agree with the thrust of your question—that it often provides significant advantages.

Over the past year or two, we have done quite a lot of work on getting people to think much more about the possible benefits of co-location. As members will know, some of that has been rooted in other pieces of work, including efficient government work on the potential for savings, which ministers see as very legitimate. On the benefits side of the equation are the issues that I have just spoken about, such as services working together more closely to improve provision of services and to increase benefit to users, which is the key purpose of everything that we are doing. Co-location has the potential to bring a variety of benefits.

I will cite a couple of examples. Members may be familiar with the on-the-ground work that is being done in the Environment and Rural Affairs Department family. The department is examining how 10 public bodies throughout Scotland can be brought together in the same facilities, with the same set of multiple objectives. The aim of the work is partly to secure efficiency savings, but it also has a great deal to do with the visibility and accessibility of the different bodies. The ultimate purpose is to deliver a much better service to people on the ground.

Members are probably familiar with the work that has been done recently in individual sectors. Local government, in combination with the Improvement Service, is carrying out an assessment of its assets. Paul Gray has already described what has been happening in health. We can point to different activities that are under way and that we have tried to encourage and promote, with the multiple objectives that I have mentioned in mind.

You have said that you do not think that co-location is necessary, although there are desired outcomes that we would like to progress. I will come on to the issue of what happens where we do not have co-location. It has been suggested to us that, where we do, managing the different accounting responsibilities of the different agencies—health, local government and so on—may prove difficult. How can you address that issue, to make it easier for bodies to co-locate?

Are you talking about accounting in a financial sense?

Yes.

I will mention one other thread of the work that we are doing at the moment. Ministers have asked us to look particularly at some of the potential barriers to joined-up working, of which barriers to co-location are one specific example. One piece of work that is already in train is focused on the potential legal or accountability obstacles to joint working. We are also on the point of setting up a piece of work that will respond more directly to your question. We plan to look at the possible obstacles to joined-up working on the financial and audit side. Different bodies come with different financial and audit customs and traditions, which may inhibit joined-up working. We are aware that that is a potential difficulty. In the early months of next year, we will look more closely at that. We recognise that the issue must be addressed so that co-location can go ahead in those places where local partners deem it to be valuable for the various reasons that I mentioned.

Where we do not have co-location—as you said, it is not always necessary—surely it is important that different bodies work together. Mike Neilson referred to children's services, which are a good example of an area where we need to ensure that information is shared. How do you propose to encourage that? For example, in the round-table session, it was suggested that the Executive should be more directive in setting out the ways in which information could and should be shared. How do you intend to take that forward?

Again, I will make a general comment on the work that is going forward at the moment and others may wish to chip in from their angle. One of the important threads of that work is the national data-sharing forum. As you may be aware, the forum was established to bring together the many different partners across the public sector. I think that representation is based on the health board geographies. The forum is looking at the fundamental question of how to create a secure environment in which data can be brought together and shared in the way in which you suggest. A great deal is being done on that front at the moment. The work is partly technical in nature and partly to do with the requirement to meet certain standards and protocols in terms of confidentiality and to have other safeguards in place. The work is being driven by a clear recognition that bringing together the data in a way that can be shared has the potential to create tremendous efficiency and much better services for clients. Mike Neilson may wish to comment from his particular angle.

In order to allow joint inspections to happen, we had to legislate on the exchange of information among inspectors. The conclusion that was reached at the time was that there were no insuperable barriers to information exchange among service providers. It was also agreed that a priority of joint inspections is not only the sharing of information but having in place the practices that ensure that information gets picked up on. The Executive has reinforced to local authority and health board chief executives in particular that that is a priority for Scottish ministers.

It might be helpful if Paul Gray were to say something about e-care.

I will not give a lot of technical detail on the e-care framework. Basically, the Executive has developed a system that allows information to be shared securely among different agencies. Information sharing can be difficult when it takes place within agencies and it becomes increasingly difficult when it is put into practice across agency boundaries, whether health or social care. The e-care system deals with the issues around who is allowed to see what. In any information-sharing exercise, one of the critical issues is to ensure the proper protection of the individual about whom information is being shared, as well as of the practitioners who are sharing the information. The Executive has put in place some work and some funding. The Lanarkshire child protection messaging system, which went live in November 2005, has now been evaluated. We are putting systems and processes in place and then looking at whether and in what way they work.

To return to the question whether people should be co-located, the crucial component of any information-sharing protocol is not the system or process but the trust and confidence between the people who share the information. I believe that people adhere to high professional standards and work within the existing legal framework. Ultimately, the only answer is to get together groups of people who trust one another and who are therefore willing to discuss cases, particularly those that are difficult, sensitive and complex.

If we depend entirely on technology and systems—I am not in any way suggesting that that is what Mary Mulligan was proposing—we will fail. Dr Goudie mentioned the national data-sharing forum, which is such an important development in getting people together. All the local data-sharing partnership chairs are now in place and have been since June. We recognise that it is about getting people to work together and trust one another. The Executive's job is to provide the underpinnings that allow that to happen successfully.

In the evidence that we have received, we have been told that people are looking for guidance and encouragement. You are absolutely right that, when people work in the same office, they are more likely to be able to share information. However, we recognise that that is not always possible and that we need to ensure that there are other ways of passing on information while protecting the individuals who are involved.

You say that there are partnership chairs and so on in place. What is your end point? When will you be in a position to say that you have got all the supports and encouragements that you propose in place?

At the risk of giving a glib answer, I have to say that I do not see an end point. I think that information sharing is something to which we will have to give continued attention and support. The Executive's role is to provide the leadership, the framework and the support to allow people to behave in that way. If, in five years' time, information sharing is confident, secure and trusted, our job will be simply to step back and maintain the underlying systems that we have provided. However, at this stage, we want to continue to encourage and nurture that atmosphere of confidence and trust. It is too early to predict when we should step back from that.

I have one other question, convener.

We are pressed for time. I suggest that we put your question together with a question from Susan Deacon.

We have talked about co-location and sharing information. The other aspect of joint working is the sharing of responsibilities. There is an issue that arises with the joint approach because people coming from different backgrounds—for example, care workers, local authority officials and health service workers—might have different terms and conditions and pay rates. How can we bring about uniformity of terms and conditions in community planning, to ensure that we get the right person to do the job, no matter what their title is?

I apologise for missing the beginning of the session and part of the previous discussion on community planning. I am happy to be cut off at any point if I stray into the wrong area or repeat a question that was asked earlier.

I was late in getting here because, among other things, I was taking part in a local planning inquiry. In the course of that, I commented on community planning and the aims and expectations that people have regarding the community planning process. I was reminded of the challenges that are involved in making a reality of the public's expectations of the process. Different leadership skills and approaches are required by people who work for the various public services and agencies that are involved in community planning partnerships. In the case of local authorities, that includes the elected members who are involved.

I know that you have touched on this, but I am interested to know more about the role that the Executive might play in trying to build and develop the kind of leadership skills and capacity that are required in the partnerships to translate rhetoric into reality so that what the public sees, feels and touches lives up to the aspirations that the policy document sets out both nationally and locally.

I ask Paul Gray to comment on the first question. Mike Neilson might want to say something about engagement. I will then pick up Ms Deacon's question at the end.

We are going to wrestle for a while yet with Mrs Mulligan's question about where the service delivery person comes from. That fact that people are employed by different employers creates different pay rates and terms and conditions. In the community health partnership context, we try to ensure that the skills and abilities of the individuals who contribute to delivering a service are properly recognised. Through the structures, we try to ensure that everyone feels that their contribution is properly valued.

We cannot escape from the fact that, up to a point, people define the value that is placed on them by the amount that they get paid. It is not the only factor, but it is certainly an important one, and we cannot ignore that. Through agenda for change in the health service, we have tried to ensure that jobs of equal weight are paid at an equal rate. The concern that, depending on where they come from, people might be recognised in different ways has come out through the feedback on the transforming public services work that ministers have been leading. I will not attempt to offer a panacea answer, except to say that we recognise the concern and that, in our work on joint outcomes, we are trying to ensure that everyone is appropriately recognised. To be honest, we must also ensure that we do not take advantage of people by asking them to do work that is outwith their skills or for which no training is available.

That begins to shade into Ms Deacon's question about leadership skills. For me, the issue is about the skills that are needed throughout the delivery chain and ensuring that appropriate attention is given to providing people with the necessary training and skills so that they can deliver effectively.

That is not a complete answer to the question and I would not pretend that it was.

I will stick to engagement. It is one stream of skills that needs to be developed—collaborative working is the other big one. The standards for community engagement that were developed by Communities Scotland have been used usefully across Scotland by community planning partnerships. Financial and other support has been given to almost all community planning partnerships to help them to apply those standards. There are good examples of where that has happened among a range of organisations to secure effective joined-up community engagement.

In community planning, there is an opportunity to engage people in their interests in a joined-up way, rather than having discrete streams of community engagement around particular silos. That is part of what the standards for community engagement and our work with community planning partnerships are intended to help. A range of activity is helping on the community engagement skills.

I refer in passing to the pretty intense debates about community engagement in planning. A consultation is currently taking place and planning is at the core. The debate will be followed up through best practice and guidance to secure early engagement in planning. That is different from community planning.

I want briefly to comment on the question of leadership, for no other reason than to say that ministers would argue strongly that leadership in public sector reform and the development of community planning are a crucial part of making progress and achieving our key objectives. It is a central issue.

I can mention two particular examples to illustrate the importance that we attach to leadership. First, the committee knows that we have established the Scottish Leadership Foundation. The committee has examined it in the past and agreed that it is an important development in building the skills and knowledge of our senior leaders. In response to some of the work that was done by Audit Scotland, we will put more resources into the foundation over the next three years because we regard it as fundamental. The signals that are sent from the top of organisations and senior leaders across the public sector are also fundamental.

The second example is also a very powerful instrument and demonstration of the importance of leadership. It is the bringing together of the Scottish government forum. The committee is probably aware that the permanent secretary was very concerned that he should demonstrate the ability of senior leaders to come together and talk about problems, and to develop a sense of common purpose and vision. The first meeting took place about a year ago and there will be a second meeting this week, with the intention of going beyond the sharing of the common purpose and vision and talking much more about the detailed way in which senior leaders can implement joint working. Again, that reinforces the point that the signals that are sent down from the leadership at the top of organisations are crucial, and getting the leaders together in the same room to explore that not only creates networks that allow others to step in behind and implement joint working, but sends important signals through their organisations and the whole system.

I thank Dr Goudie and his team. That session has been very useful for the committee. There will probably be several points on which we will want to follow up and we will do that in writing once we have seen the Official Report of the meeting. I thank you for your time and look forward to your response when we issue our report.

Meeting suspended until 12:29 and thereafter continued in private until 12:34.