The next item on the agenda is a discussion on dealing with offending by young people—a topic that has exercised people from time to time and caused some controversy over the years. Audit Scotland has examined performance on the matter in some detail and produced a report entitled "Dealing with offending by young people: Performance update". We have decided to take evidence on its report and to hear from some officials from the education department.
I will invite my two colleagues to contribute as questions are asked because I am relatively new to the domain and Colin Maclean and Donna Bell have deep expertise in the subject area.
Thank you. Before I invite members to ask questions, I want to pursue a couple of points that you made in your opening statement. You said that ministers are committed to addressing the issues identified in the Audit Scotland report. You also mentioned the concordat with local government and the use of resources. Can you guarantee that, over the next three-year spending period, there will be no reduction in the resources available to tackle offending by young people?
In a sense, it is not for me to guarantee anything around the financial packages. I am sure that you can talk to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth directly about that sort of issue. The concordat sets out the overall resource envelope for local government—and increase in resource envelope—from which it will be able to take the resource to meet its responsibilities around youth justice and supporting children and young people.
Yes, but has the minister indicated to local government that she expects there to be no reduction in the resources available for tackling offending by young people?
All ministers have indicated—and agreed with local government—that local government will work with the Government to achieve the national outcomes. It will be committed to allowing its performance to be measured against the indicators that support those national outcomes. That is the focus of the concordat—and rightly so. Decisions on how to achieve that in a local area and a local context are for local government to make.
So there is no guidance, no expectation and no indication to local government about how much should be spent on tackling reoffending. General outcomes are specified, but it will be left to local government to decide whether it wants to spend money on this issue.
It will be for local government to decide how it works towards achieving the national outcomes. I should add that it is only a week since the concordat was signed. A lot of detailed work has to be done nationally with COSLA and with individual local authorities. In that context, the richness of their experience and the experience of other agencies can be brought to bear to help them achieve—
I understand that, but, as things stand, no requirement will be put on local government to spend money at the current level on dealing with offending by young people. It will be left to local government to decide how best to allocate its resources. Ministers hope that the outcomes will be delivered, but decisions on expenditure are purely a matter for local government and ministers will not be given any indication of what should be spent.
Decisions across the range of local government expenditure are for local government. That is absolutely explicit in the concordat that has been signed.
That is perfectly clear.
Annex B of the concordat states that there is no longer ring fencing for antisocial behaviour funding, funding for community safety partnerships, the police capital grant, the national priorities action fund, funding for social work training, the early years and child care work force development fund and youth work for local delivery funding. Were you consulted before all that was rolled up into the settlement?
I anticipated that this session might turn into more of a forward-looking one than a backward-looking one. Of course we were consulted on that. We were absolutely involved, as was the whole ministerial team, in the detail of the negotiations with local government.
Do you think it is a good thing that funding for those things is no longer ring fenced?
If ministers did not think it was a good thing that it was not ring fenced, it would still be ring fenced.
What is your view?
I do not think that it is for Mr Rycroft to answer that question—it is a matter for the minister. Our concerns are about whether the resources will be available to carry out the recommendations and address the issues that have been identified. We have already identified some questions that will need to be pursued.
With respect, convener, is it not a material issue in respect of whether the resources will be available?
It is a material issue, but it is one for the minister rather than for Mr Rycroft.
I see. We will have to question the minister.
That may well be the case.
It is worth pointing out that the overall resource envelope for local government will increase during the spending review period, in the context of a clear agreement about what it will be expected to do in addition to on-going activity. One would expect that, within that allocation, sufficient resources would be available to carry on the work around youth justice.
But it would be possible not to spend money on the areas that are not ring fenced and to move it into a completely different area.
That is, in theory, entirely true—just as it would be possible for a local authority not to spend any money on schools and instead to spend it all on parks or something. In that case, it would be difficult for the local authority to demonstrate at the end of the year in question that it had achieved what it was required to achieve in respect of the national outcomes. In other words, local authorities should spend their money in the way that they think is best in order to achieve what they are required to achieve at a local level to support the national outcomes.
I understand that, but it involves a huge leap of faith.
Yes.
Do you have any evidence that they have not been used appropriately?
You will be aware that we have very little evidence about their use for under-16s, because as I understand it only six have been issued, which does not give us a particularly strong evidence base.
But you have no evidence that they have been used inappropriately.
By the same token, we do not. However, we have a lot of evidence that, to address offending behaviour, it is not sufficient only to go for the offending bit; it is necessary to examine the needs of the child or young person in the round and address them all.
That is correct. Has that not been done up until now?
Of course it has.
So there is no change to what has been happening.
How do you mean there has been no change?
You said that ASBOs would be used only when appropriate. You accept that there is no evidence that they were being used inappropriately. You also said that when they were used, wider issues would be considered, and you accept that up until now those wider issues have probably been considered.
There is a certain amount of playing with words in the use of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" in those comments. Ministers have signalled clearly that they do not expect local agencies to pursue ASBOs for their own sake, if you like. They may be an appropriate tool in the toolkit, but ministers want to ensure that the underlying behaviour that leads to offending behaviour is addressed effectively.
That sounds to me like a continuation of current policy. I am not aware that any authorities were using ASBOs for their own sake. Are you aware that they were?
Of course, there will be lots of continuity between past and present policies—
Yes, but the question I am asking is whether you are aware of any authorities that have been using ASBOs for their own sake.
Not for under-16s.
I thought for a minute that I was in the Justice Committee rather than the Audit Committee.
Those are good questions that to some extent describe the job descriptions of people in the team here. If you work through the various levels of this and understand the commitment to and the nature of the national outcomes, you will understand that we would not be satisfied or say that we had achieved those outcomes unless we had made progress on youth offending and supporting young children effectively.
There is not much to add, except that we know that local authorities and the Improvement Service are working closely with Government officials to think through how authorities, individually and collectively, can identify a set of performance indicators that they want to use. We expect that to be a combination of some performance indicators that authorities will tend to use collectively, across authorities, and others that may be developed to be used in specific areas. However, as Philip Rycroft said, many of the data in this area come from the SCRA and the police forces, so they would be common throughout the country.
Is it too early to say when we might be able to see the performance indicators on paper? When might we expect to see something tangible that we know everyone is aiming towards?
It is, obviously, too early to say. With only a week gone by, that would be a little ambitious. The bit that is missing from the quotation that I read out to you, which I should have included, states that authorities will report on the local outcome agreements "starting in 2008-09". That sets the timeframe for developing the agreements with each authority.
So, could it be that, notwithstanding the fact that you are looking at outcome-based agreements, and national outcomes at that, you could have 32 different sets of outcomes on offending by young people?
We will have 32 different sets of outcomes, because there are 32 local authorities.
Yes, but there will be no national expectation of what an outcome agreement should look like. You say that there will no longer be persistent young offender targets, but we will come to that later. What outcomes will be acceptable to ministers in each of the different areas that are covered by offending by young people?
Again, as you are aware, the national context has been agreed and set. We have the national outcomes and the national indicators. The local outcome agreements will have to be framed in that context.
So the local outcome agreements will have to be consistent with the national outcomes, which are already there.
Exactly.
So those can be provided to Willie Coffey and the committee.
The national outcomes and indicators?
Yes.
Sorry. If you are looking for those, they are in the spending review document and indeed in the concordat, both of which were published last week.
So the spending review document specifies the national outcomes. How many of those national outcomes relate to offending by young people?
There are 15 national outcomes in total, a number of which are relevant to offending by young people. An obvious one is:
That is an interesting one. Can you explain to us how that will measure, at a national level, as an outcome, offending by young people?
The outcome, clearly, is not the measure. The measures are held in the indicators.
So there is no national outcome.
No, no. That is the national outcome that we are seeking to achieve.
But you cannot measure it.
The measure of whether we are making progress towards that is in the national indicators and targets.
Okay. Can you explain them?
I would recommend the document to you, because all this is set out very clearly.
I understand that, and I have looked at the document, but I am asking you which of the national indicators and outcomes are specific to offending by young people.
Well, the ones that I quoted to you are specific to offending by young people.
No, they are general ones that will apply to young people across a range of activities. You say that there will be local outcome agreements that vary between authorities, so there will be 32 outcomes. At a national level, you do not have any specified outcomes or indicators in relation to dealing with offending by young people. Is that correct?
We have both outcomes and indicators, which, to be achieved, will require government generally, across the piece, to take action to support young people, including young people who exhibit offending behaviour.
I understand that, but at some point we will want to measure whether investment and action have been effective. How will we be able to measure nationally whether there has been a reduction in offending or an improvement in behaviour? What outcomes and performance indicators do you expect to use at a national level, rather than the ones that will be implemented at a local level?
If the Audit Committee calls me or others back to the committee in years to come and is interested in how the work on youth offending that has been done has helped to secure progress on the national outcomes and indicators, I expect it to look at several outcomes and indicators to find out how the indicators have supported and measured progress against the outcomes, and I expect whoever is called back to tell the story of how the local work that has been done not only to address youth offending but in a range of areas has supported progress.
So the information that Willie Coffey is looking for will be available for 2008-09.
With respect—you should correct me if I am wrong—Willie Coffey was looking for two things, one of which was national data. I assured him that national data will still be provided. For example, there will be the SCRA data, and data from police forces and local authorities. However, you are right that commitments from local authorities will kick in then.
Okay.
I anticipated Mr Rycroft's recommendation and have a copy of the concordat. There are 15 national outcomes and 45 indicators. Will you confirm that none of those explicitly refers to offending by young people? The convener has tried to get an answer to that question.
I see the corner that you are trying to push me into, but—
My question was very simple. I am trying to get an answer to it.
There is no indicator for reducing youth offending by whatever, but there is an essential point to understand in respect of how the Government operates. In order to succeed against the outcomes and achieve progress against the indicators, local authorities, police forces and all the other agencies that are involved will have to think about the range of outcomes for young people, including youth offending. One thing that worries me is trying to parcel up in a separate box youth offending and the treatment of kids who are demonstrating offending behaviour. Our whole approach towards young people involves providing a range of services throughout their lives, and youth offending services are built into that. Therefore, it seems to me to be entirely appropriate to consider the general outcomes that we want to achieve for young people in order to get effective outcomes for them. If we want to succeed with those, we will have to make progress with youth offending too.
But you agreed that no one indicator explicitly refers to offending by young people.
In the indicator sets.
Why not?
I must appeal to the convener for his forbearance on the matter. It would not be appropriate for me to go through the whole process of how everything was put together. I am also at risk of repeating myself. In respect of my responsibilities, I am perfectly satisfied that the national outcomes and the indicators that support those outcomes will act as a lever to effective performance by local authorities and other agencies and will create the expectation that there will be good performance management and good performance generally in addressing the issues that the committee is concerned about.
I think that Murdo Fraser wants to ask questions on the same theme.
I want to ask about the target for reducing the number of persistent young offenders. My questions tie in with questions that have already been asked.
You ask about the rationale for moving away from the target. As everybody is aware, once a target is set in isolation, two results can occur. It can be discovered that the target drives behaviour in an unexpected direction, which calls into question the value of or thinking behind the target. Such a target also places a big focus on the data that sit beneath the target, and people can begin to discover issues with the data set that qualify the weight that can rest on the target.
In the persistent young offending target, we measured referrals to the children's reporter, but well over half those referrals do not lead to a hearing, because the reporter decides that local action is sufficient. However, that pattern varies considerably throughout the country. Children might be classed as persistent young offenders in one area because they were reported for behaviour that a different part of the country would deal with differently. The measure is a crude indicator of overall performance—as referral patterns change, the number of persistent young offenders changes.
I am not sure whether I understand entirely your argument that setting the target drove behaviour in a particular way. If the target had all those difficulties and complexities, I wonder why it was set in the first place, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.
The SCRA will still publish a range of information every quarter on the pattern of referrals, so we will still be able to identify the numbers who have been referred five times in six months, to whom the target on persistent young offending related. However, we want a wider range of indicators, so that we can have a better sense of the overall picture, rather than focusing on just one measure, which we know is at least partly influenced by the behaviour of agencies and not just that of young people.
So we will still be able to see how many young people persistently offend.
Yes.
Philip Rycroft's letter to the convener says that the new strategy will have a stronger emphasis on prevention, positive opportunities and early intervention. How will resources be shifted to achieve that?
Again, we are into forward-looking territory. As I said in my introductory remarks, ministers asked us to review the youth justice strategy. We are in the process of doing that and working with ministers to achieve it, and we hope that it will come into the public domain early in the new year. In response to the detail of your question, I must defer to ministers and the decisions that they will take and the direction of travel that they will want to put into the public domain then.
But are you going to shift resources, as far as you understand? If you are going to do preventive work and more on early intervention, that will surely need resources.
Of course that will need resources, and of course one would expect that, as those who expend the resources come to understand what leads to better outcomes, they will focus the resources where they are most effective. That seems to me fundamental to the approach that we are taking through the concordat and the work that we will do, particularly with local government. I am not sure whether you are looking for something with a bit more detail.
Well, I would like that—if you want to have a go.
I am, in a sense, asking the question back of you. How the work might happen will clearly flow from the agreement. It will be a matter for local government, when the work concerns local government, to put together its strategy and behaviours, based on what it knows works in the context of the strategy that ministers set out.
I have a specific question. Are you working with the WAVE Trust on early intervention?
I do not know the answer to that—I do not know whether my colleagues do.
We have done some work with the WAVE Trust in the past. Our colleagues in violence reduction are also working with it.
Are you planning to do any more work with it? It has a fairly radical idea about intervention at an early age. The Home Office—if you do not mind my mentioning part of the United Kingdom Government—is working closely with the WAVE Trust on early intervention.
I think that we will be looking to it for examples of good practice if it has them and to disseminate them to local partners where we can.
I am grateful for that specific answer. Assuming that you are going to move resources in that direction, do you anticipate that that will have any adverse effect on the current work on dealing with persistent young offenders?
Again, I do not quite get the drift of the question. We are trying to describe a context in which local agencies work towards national outcomes with national indicators; we have agreements with local authorities at a local level; and all that comes together to improve the outcomes for children and young people. In that context, there is a range of possible interventions that local agencies can take, and there is a range of services that they can draw on to achieve that. If they find that working with the WAVE Trust, for example, is effective in delivering the outcomes that they want to achieve, one would expect them to shift resources in that direction. If they find that something else is more helpful in their context, the resources should go in that direction. It is difficult to sit here and anticipate the multitude of decisions that will be taken across Scotland in the next three years.
I can offer a specific example of where we have begun to see changes in practice. I mentioned earlier the high proportion of referrals to the reporter that did not go to a hearing. In a number of parts of the country, the proportion has reduced considerably, releasing reporter time to focus on the most severe cases, because local agencies are taking decisions in some of the less severe cases without going to the reporter. We are seeing a reduction in what is in effect the wasted time of going through the process of assessing cases where local decision making is sufficient. That releases more time to focus on the severe cases and early intervention.
Have you read paragraph 30 of the Audit Scotland report? I was really referring to that. This is a classic dilemma. If you spend more money on prevention—I think that it is right to do that, and the report deals with that—you might take money away from existing areas. Do you anticipate that, or will extra money be available?
When you are talking about the financial envelope and talking about "you" to mean us in central Government, as was clear from the exchange with the convener earlier on, you should be aware that the majority of resources that support work in this area rest with local authorities, and always have done. Indeed, the majority of those resources have not been ring fenced. The shifting of resources between the different approaches will be driven by local government.
There is an interesting position there. Notwithstanding the fact that money has always been determined by local authorities in their areas, there has also been significant investment by the Government, the Administration, the Executive or whatever we want to call it. Some of it has been ring fenced in the past, and some of it has come under broad headings. Generally, those are disappearing. Now, you are putting all the responsibility to determine how money is spent on to the local authorities, are you not?
I think that I am probably within my rights, as it were, to decline to answer that question in any detail. I am not clear what part of the budget you are talking about—or whether you are talking about the whole swathe of the budget.
No. Let us take education. Has the education budget been bent to achieve what you have stated to be the intentions—that is, early intervention in the areas where there is clearly the greatest problem? Are you shifting resources accordingly and are you giving more to those local authorities whose areas have the highest levels of persistent offending, the greatest levels of deprivation and the lowest levels of achievement in order for the aspiration to be met?
That question will be appropriate for when the Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee meets the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning to discuss the budget with her and to go through it materially and in detail.
That committee can do its job, but I am asking you about this now. Something has been identified in the Audit Scotland report involving a potential impact. I am asking you whether you have taken a decision to skew resources.
I have two comments to make in answer to that. First, if you look at the amount of money that is held in central Government lines for education and children's services, you will see that it is very small compared with the amount of money for those services in local government. The sums of money that you are discussing are not sufficient to switch whole systems. That has to be—
I will clarify my question for you, before you move on to your second point. You talked about early intervention and prevention. Examples of early intervention and prevention are sure start, early years services and the provision of more money for primary schools in areas where achievement is lowest and children are more likely to end up drifting. That is not a small part but the core part of your budget. In order to achieve early intervention and prevention—which is absolutely the right thing to do—have the budgets been skewed? As has been asked already, will that have an impact on other budgets?
I will come back to the two points. Given the balance of budgets, it seems to be more important to work with local authorities to achieve effective spend from the billions that they disburse than to put all our weight on the relatively small budgets that are now held by central Government. On a technical point, I cannot go into great detail about how those central Government budgets will be disbursed as that material is not yet in the public domain. There are probably more appropriate occasions on which to examine all that.
It does, to some extent, but I am asking whether you are skewing the resources that are allocated to each authority to reflect the aspiration on prevention and early intervention and to concentrate on the areas in which there is most offending by young people.
I am obliged to give you what might be called a holding reply on that, given the on-going discussions with COSLA concerning distribution and the fact that ministers have still to reveal the detail of their budget decisions. You will have to question ministers about those decisions on other occasions.
Okay—thank you.
We can see the stated objectives, and we have heard a flurry of words, but I am unsure about what has been achieved in practice. You have to know where you are going before you can achieve anything. The Audit Scotland report clearly shows that the previous objectives were not being delivered according to their definition. Now we hear that you are developing a range of indicators—whatever that means—that will support national targets and aspirations, and that you are looking for strong local performance management to be developed.
You might be surprised to learn that I have quite a lot of sympathy with what you say. In an area as difficult and complex as youth offending, it is difficult to demonstrate—this has been proved over the years—how specific policy interventions work through the system to produce specific outcomes. If we needed confirmation of that, we have had it from a number of comments in the Audit Scotland report. I am marginally less pessimistic about what the report says than you appear to be. It indicates that pretty solid progress has been made in a number of areas, some of which have a hard edge to them, for example the provision of national data and the time taken by police and reporters to clear cases. The task now is to learn from all of that and to use those lessons to inform practice in the years ahead, so that we get better at addressing the issues.
I think that Andrew Welsh was concerned about not what ministers will come back with but what lessons you have learned, which surely will shape what ministers do. Like Andrew Welsh, I am still unclear about the position.
I am not asking about policy—you are an official, and that should not be your responsibility; ministers should be answerable for policy.
With respect, that might be putting a slightly pessimistic cast on what has been done. The report makes clear that, in 2002, there were big concerns about the quality of national data and so on. As I said in my opening remarks, a lot of work has been done on that and we now have some pretty good data sets, which have been referred to throughout this morning's discussion.
I can understand negotiating a mutually agreed solution, but we do not seem to be anywhere close to the practical effect of that. I hope that I am wrong in holding that view.
That is too pessimistic a reading of the report. One of the other examples that I draw out of it relates to the good work that has been done over the past while in relation to a number of the previous Administration's initiatives. The improvement in partnership working at a local level is recorded in the report. That is the sort of hard-edged evidence that is hugely important in this domain. Particularly at the severe end of the issue, we are dealing with young people with enormously complex lives, many of whom come from damaged backgrounds. It is difficult for one agency to deal with all those problems.
How different will the new performance indicators be from the old ones?
Again, I defer to Colin Maclean for the detail.
At one level, we will not know until we have discussed the issue. You are quite right—we need to have those discussions and bring something firmer back to the committee. Instead of the current indicators, which focus only on the system's operation, we need indicators that look at young people's behaviour, its impact on communities and a range of other matters. Of course the process needs to be tight, timely and so on, but we also need a better understanding of impacts.
I realise that you have to get performance indicators right, but the frustrating thing is that you might simply talk about them without actually getting them. The fact is that dealing with young people's offending has been on the go for a long time and there is previous form. The sooner something is achieved the better—if, of course, it is achievable—otherwise it is just words. Despite a previous report that pointed people in the right direction, practical action is still required. I wonder whether we will simply be saying the same things when we meet in a year's time. It is up to the people who are negotiating these matters, but unless they have a clear idea of what they want—there is certainly existing work on which to base their discussions—those negotiations will be just words, and nothing will actually happen.
I do not have a huge amount to add to what has already been said, but in the broader context of the outcomes that we want to achieve we are absolutely clear about what we, working with local government and other partners, are endeavouring to achieve over the next while.
So do you intend to use performance indicators to measure value for money?
On that matter I defer to Audit Scotland colleagues, who are, after all, concerned with seeking value for money in local government expenditure.
No, I am asking you this question. In its report, Audit Scotland says that with regard to
There are a number of different processes in that respect. Ministers have said that they wish to be held to account on the basis of the indicators that are set out in the budget documentation. Those indicators will not necessarily tell us anything about value for money, but they will say whether we have achieved the outcomes. To give us more of an indication about individual processes, we might, through our work with COSLA and other authorities, need to develop other information from national sources. Clearly, value for money is as important in that respect as local performance and whether outcomes are achieved locally.
Yes, but value for money has specifically been identified in the Audit Scotland report. To echo Andrew Welsh's point, I fear that we could be sitting here in three years' time asking you whether we are achieving value for money. How will you respond to the issues that have been identified about not being able to assess value for money? Perhaps a more important question—which follows on from Andrew Welsh's point—is how quickly will that happen? Will we need to wait until the end of the three-year programme or can it be done annually?
Convener, your question can be answered on a variety of levels. At the high national level, which Colin Maclean has mentioned, you will be familiar with the assurance systems and best value processes that are in place to monitor the performance of Government, local government and other players in the round. Several layers down from that, the value for money of specific interventions perhaps raises a more general question about the quality of evaluation. The evaluation provides evidence on how effective interventions have been and whether they might be worth taking from one area and spreading more widely.
In a year's time, will you be able to demonstrate to the committee the progress that has been made with respect to the Audit Scotland report and the progress that has been made on achieving value for money? Will we need to wait until the end of the three-year period for that information?
If you invite us back in a year's time, I hope that we will be able to demonstrate progress on both those matters.
That might be useful. We should, perhaps, start thinking about not just getting immediate responses from organisations after an Audit Scotland report is published but following up our discussions on the responses after a period of time. It might be useful to come back to the issue.
I have a follow-up question. What discussions have you had with the new commission that the Cabinet Secretary for Justice has set up to review penal policy?
We have had no discussions with the commission at an official level as yet, but we have had some internal discussions on the impact that the strategy can have and on what impact the lessons that are learned from the Audit Scotland report might have on custody for young people.
I understand that the commission has been set up to review penal policy. Presumably, the Audit Scotland report will be drawn to its attention.
Yes, indeed. That has been done by officials in the justice department.
Before I ask my main question, I want to raise a wee point. The Audit Scotland report highlights many legitimate points, but for me the one that sticks out and that I really want to be taken into full consideration in the operation of any future strategy is the point about
If you are asking when it will be announced, that will happen as soon as ministers make decisions. As with all strategies, a number of different timescales will be involved. Some things will be done quickly; others will be done over a period of time. As soon as we get the strategy, we will see the various timescales that are laid out in it.
I am a new member, so please forgive me if this is the wrong question to ask. We are about to go through the budget process. If there was a delay in the budget going through the Parliament, I assume that that would affect the implementation of any new strategy. Is that assumption correct?
The strategy will be a mixture—it will set a direction of travel, which may or may not be affected by budgetary decisions, and it will make specific proposals, which clearly would be affected if budgets changed.
I have a brief question that relates back to best value. I recognise that a lot of the work on offending by young people is expensive and concentrates on quite a small group of young people. I am talking about the costs that are associated with secure accommodation, for example. Has there been any consideration of whether such work is too great a burden for local authorities? You have spoken a great deal about the shift towards local authorities making funding decisions, but are particular policy areas such a burden on local authorities that consideration has been given to whether it is appropriate for them, rather than the Scottish Government, to carry them?
A vast range of budget considerations are taken into account by local authorities as they make their decisions about what they expect from the Government in the budget settlement. We can probably rest assured that Pat Watters and his team took advice across the whole range of budget issues, including those to do with offending by young people. The recommendation on the concordat was made in the full knowledge that with the budget settlement, local government would be expected to deliver across the range of its responsibilities. In that context, there is a richness of learning within and between authorities on which interventions are most successful. It is widely recognised that some interventions are extremely expensive, but there comes a point when the only way in which one can deal with the needs of a child is through expensive interventions. It is difficult to avoid that.
I suppose that I am concerned about variations in the provision of expensive services by local authorities and about postcode-related differences of approach to policies such as secure accommodation. Will the Government take responsibility for such matters, to avoid that situation?
Those issues crop up from time to time and have been discussed by central Government and local government over the years. For example, relatively modest changes in a small authority can have quite a big impact on particular budgets. Local authorities have quite complex arrangements on who carries the cost of different interventions, depending on who is involved and where they have come from. There are many interactions on such matters every day. However, the fact remains that local authorities have responsibility for supporting young people. As I have said, some of the interventions are expensive and that will continue to be the case. Local authorities have responsibility for dealing with that in the context of their overall budgets.
We are meeting the secure providers, COSLA, the police, the Crown Office and various other agencies to consider how we ensure that the secure estate is used to best effect. I suppose that there is a value-for-money element to that discussion.
I do not have the concordat in front of me, so I do not have the answer to this particular question. Local authorities will be getting more responsibility for their actions under the new settlement. Let us say that, during the next few years, a local authority's outcomes are not that successful. Apart from Audit Scotland producing another report, what process will the Scottish Government use to step in, not so much to take over as to improve that local authority's outcomes? What would or could the Scottish Government do?
That is a fair question. One point to emphasise about this concept is the greater visibility about what each council is expected to achieve. At the risk of boring the committee, I quote the relevant sentence again:
My question was based on paragraphs 13, 14 and 16 of Audit Scotland's report, which highlight that although there were some successes in the past, there were also some failures. Some of the recommendations made in 2002-03 did not seem to be fully sorted out before the report was published in October 2006. My question was therefore based on the point that what happened in the past could happen in the future. I want to ensure that lessons can be learned, whether from central Government stepping in or other people getting involved.
Your key point about learning lessons explains why we get Audit Scotland reports, and it informs the Government's broader approach. It is a fair point: we need to learn lessons from what has worked in the past and how we support local authorities and other agencies to deliver an effective performance.
To follow through on that, I think that that is not only a valid line of inquiry, but a critical issue. Huge responsibility is now being placed on local authorities. The resources have been given to them along with the flexibility to determine how the money is best spent. There are national outcome agreements, but local delivery is clearly the responsibility of local government. If, as Stuart McMillan described, there is a failure to make improvements in dealing with offending by young people, will that failure be solely the responsibility of local authorities?
On the face of it, that is impossible to answer, because in many cases outcomes are achieved as a result of interactions between agencies, including local authorities. If the question is whether local government has a clear responsibility, on an authority-by-authority basis, for the achievement of the outcomes that are specified in the local outcome agreements, the answer is absolutely and clearly yes.
If there is a failure to make any improvements in dealing with offending by young people, will that be the responsibility of the Scottish ministers or the local authorities?
It is a shared responsibility.
So the Scottish ministers will still have responsibility for any failures in reaching local targets or fulfilling local outcome agreements.
I risk repeating myself, but I will come back to the point again: ministers are bound to the national outcomes, which encompass a range of policy areas and activities that support the achievement and delivery of the outcomes. In that context, it is clear that ministers have responsibility for making progress on the outcomes. Ministers continue to be responsible for setting the broad policy direction nationally and for supporting local authorities and others in the delivery of that policy.
I am not talking about setting national policy; I am talking about achievement and local service delivery. Ministers have, in your words, "a shared responsibility" if there is a failure to make improvements, but Stuart McMillan asked what ministers can do in a situation in which you have left everything up to local authorities. You expect a minister to take responsibility, but from what I understand from your earlier words, that minister will have no power to effect any change. How can there be shared responsibility if there is no ability to influence what is happening?
I chose my words fairly carefully: I said that there was shared responsibility for the national outcomes. In that context, it is clear that there are different domains of responsibility. Ministers are responsible for policy and the policy context, whereas local authorities in their domain will sign up to local outcome agreements and will be responsible for delivering their part of that. However, as I also said, that will often be in combination with other local players. The concordat and agreement with local authorities will give us real clarity about the expectations and the outcomes that we are driving to achieve nationally and locally.
I will give an example. There will no longer be targets for youth offending but, as Colin Maclean said to Murdo Fraser, the information will be collected and reported in the same way. If the rate of persistent offending goes through the roof and continues to rise exponentially, leading to rising numbers going to the children's hearings system and so to problems with delays in the system, will ministers have any responsibility, or will that be the responsibility of local government? Who will be accountable?
Again, you ask what sound like specific questions, but they are in a sense rather general. Obviously, the answer will depend on the circumstances. Given the relationship between a national outcome and the issue that the committee is interested in today—youth offending—it seems to me very unlikely that we will have what you describe as an exponential increase in the rate of youth offending while recording steady progress on the indicators that support the national outcomes on young people generally. That would suggest a serious dysfunction in the system more generally.
I have one more point before I bring in Andrew Welsh. I understand what you are saying, Mr Rycroft, but you say that if there is an exponential rise in persistent young offending, the general outcomes may not be met. Clearly, ministers would have an interest in that. Even though you are not setting a target for levels of persistent young offending, if there is a rise—for whatever reason—will ministers take action? If there is such an evident trend throughout Scotland, will ministers have the ability to do something? Will they be able to intervene, rather than wait until the end of a reporting period?
I find it slightly difficult to envisage the situation that you are describing. You are implying that there is a dramatic mid-year increase in youth offending, whether locally or throughout Scotland. It slightly depends on one's definition of exponential, but while the numbers do go up and down, I am not aware of such sudden variance in the statistics. If a situation occurred such as that which you describe, it would be of national concern. Ministers would be keen to find out what was going on, to try to understand its causes and to ensure that appropriate responses were given to turn that round. On the whole, however, I suspect that we will be considering performance within a more data-rich environment. Building on what we have achieved, as reported in the Audit Scotland report, we will hopefully have a wider range of data to help us to consider trends in the system and anticipate future difficulties, so that we do not suddenly find ourselves in the unknown situation described by the convener.
So although ministers would be keen to find out what is happening, they will no longer have any budgetary influence and, at a local level, will probably have no policy influence either.
The committee can read the concordat to find out how the budget decisions would be worked through with local government. However, on the policy influence, I come back to the point that if such a significant shift were taking place—not just in this domain but in any domain—ministers would want to sit down with local government to find out what was going on. There would be mutual interest in doing that. If such a dramatic shift were taking place, the chances of local and national Government being able to demonstrate positive progress on the national outcomes and what flows from them would be much diminished.
I come back to the nub of Stuart McMillan's question. You said that ministers would be keen to sit down in discussions. What can ministers then do? What powers do they have to do something?
Given the concepts that I was invited to the committee to discuss, I have not come prepared to talk about the range of statutory and other relations between central and local government. However, there is a range of options for central Government in terms of its relationship with local government both generally and specifically. There is a range of mechanisms to buttress that relationship, notably and chief among them the work that Audit Scotland does on best value and so on. You will be very familiar with the range of options that ministers have for working with local government to ensure that poor performance is turned round. Ministers have those possibilities if they are required.
That is correct. It would be helpful if you could revert to us in writing so that we can reflect on just what powers there are. However, from what I understand, there is now a complete devolution of budgetary responsibility and a number of budget headings have been amalgamated. We are in a completely new situation.
With respect, convener, "completely new" is probably not quite right. The vast majority of the budgets for education and children and young people have not been ring fenced. There have been ring-fenced lines in the budget formulas—in the grant-aided expenditure formulas—but it has always been clear that those formulas are about arriving at a distribution methodology, not a target for expenditure by local government. What is new in the budget context is that the remaining areas of ring fencing are being reduced.
That is completely new; that has not been done before.
Again, I say with respect that it is not completely new.
It is.
You will be familiar with the fact that there have been elements of central Government funding around—
We are talking about one specific area. I am not talking about the broad remit. As far as the areas that we are discussing are concerned, this is a completely new situation.
The novelty of the situation involves a reduction in ring fencing around a number of specific budget lines.
Let us not argue about semantics and the difference between "novelty" and "completely new"—we will leave that sticking to the wall. However, I would ask you to revert to us in writing on the powers that are potentially available to address the matter.
I wonder if you could explain the constitutional position regarding ministerial powers and the role of officials. Surely politicians, whether at local or national level, have responsibility for creating the concordat and are answerable for it. Am I right in thinking that your work, as officials, is to do detailed work on behalf of your ministers and to report to them on outcomes? Is it not your role to report back and to alert ministers to problems relating to their remit? Constitutionally, however, you surely cannot ever be responsible for the actual concordat; rather, you as officials are responsible for reporting to the minister, who, along with those others who have signed the concordat, has responsibility for it.
There may well have been a loose use of the word "we" in that context. When we are talking about the various responsibilities in a Government context, it is clearly ministers who are ultimately responsible to Parliament. We are there to work for and service ministers, which puts a certain restriction on the sorts of questions that you may ask officials who come before you—which you have respected today, I hope.
I have an easy question for Mr Rycroft, which is well within the responsibility of officials. I am a new member of the committee, and I am not sure how such reports from the Auditor General for Scotland are dealt with within Government. The report before us was published in August 2007. What interdepartmental meetings have you had to consider its recommendations? Have you had meetings with local authorities? How do you plan to follow up the report?
I will ask Colin Maclean to give you a bit more detail, but as far as the general picture is concerned, the reports do not simply fall out of the sky. We know about the work programme, and we are involved in giving evidence to Audit Scotland about what is going on.
Donna Bell was on the advisory committee.
Yes. There is a co-operative process that underpins the whole thing. Ultimately, the judgments on what is put into its reports are for Audit Scotland. I can give you the absolute assurance that the reports are dealt with extremely seriously. We never take them lightly. We are always invited to respond to what is said in the reports. We cannot do that from some isolated pocket within the Executive, particularly on a subject such as that which we are discussing.
How we respond to such reports varies depending on when during the cycle they come in. "Dealing with offending by young people" arrived when we were about to get into discussions with COSLA about the spending review, which would at least explore the relationship between local and central Government and many of the issues in the report are relevant to that.
As Stuart McMillan pointed out in his perceptive question earlier, the recommendations in the 2002 report have not really been implemented.
Many of those recommendations have been implemented and there have been positive responses to what we did. Some work is still to be done. The 2002 recommendations encouraged us in work that we were developing anyway and other specific points on which we need to place more emphasis were picked up. We accept that.
Will you sit round the table with local authority representatives with the report in front of you and go through the recommendations seriatim?
As part of the process of discussing the new strategy with COSLA and other agencies, we will look at the report and a number of other documents. We will discuss with COSLA all the available evidence and agree with it the broad direction of travel.
A lot of work and money have gone into the reports. They must not lie on a shelf and gather dust.
They do not.
I draw the discussion to a close and thank Philip Rycroft, Colin Maclean and Donna Bell for their contributions today.