Audit Committee, 27 Jun 2006

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Official Report 201KB pdf

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“Community planning: an initial review”

Item 2 is a briefing from Caroline Gardner on "Community planning: an initial review".

This joint report by the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission was published on 16 June. Community planning is about public sector organisations working together and with local communities and the business and voluntary sectors to identify and solve local problems, improve services and share resources.

The Local Government in Scotland Act 2003, which provides a statutory basis for community planning, requires local authorities to initiate and facilitate community planning and to secure the participation of health boards, the police and other public sector bodies. The guidance accompanying the act requires Scottish ministers to promote community planning and ensure that the Executive and agencies are joined up in developing policies and performance frameworks.

Radical improvements in services and community well-being will be achieved only if organisations work together effectively. Scotland has led the way in developing legislation for community planning, and this report is the first major review since the 2003 act was enacted. We hope that it will inform the current debate on public service reform. I will briefly outline the report's main findings and then answer questions.

First, community planning clearly can improve services and benefit local communities. Joint working is well established in Scotland and it already covers many of our most important public services. In some areas that we examined, we found that community planning is adding value to existing joint working by building a strategic framework for the area based on a shared understanding of local needs and by building trust and co-operation between partners. However, we also found that the structural differences between partners can limit their flexibility to respond to local needs and can increase the administrative burden on community planning partnerships. Those differences centre on accountability regimes and, in particular, operational boundaries—for example, only five local authorities have coterminous boundaries with most of their partners, and arrangements in most areas of Scotland are more complex than that. We must also bear in mind the different financial regimes and performance reporting arrangements for partners.

In addition to those local differences, the wide range of national policy initiatives and related funding streams make it difficult for community planning partnerships to achieve their full potential. Although the Executive has an ambitious policy portfolio aimed at improving public services in Scotland, the wide range of those policy initiatives creates additional work for partnerships. For example, one council estimates in the report that it submits 29 separate plans to the Executive, many of which require input from one or more partners in the local area.

At the same time, fragmented funding support for those policies also increases administrative burdens. In the report, we estimate that, over the past two years, the Executive has provided through 47 different funding streams about £1.25 billion that was intended to be spent through partnership working rather than by councils and individual partners. Each funding stream usually has its own application process and monitoring and reporting arrangements.

It is now time for local community planning partners to move on from establishing community planning processes and structures to demonstrating the impact of that work on services and on the well-being of local communities. All local authorities have now established community planning partnerships and all statutory partners are engaged at a senior level. There is no single model of effective partnership working—after all, arrangements must reflect local circumstances and priorities—but community planning arrangements overall tend to be complex and there is scope, both nationally and locally, to rationalise partnership structures. There was not much evidence of people taking the opportunity that is afforded by community planning to strip away pre-existing partnership structures, but we think that it is time to do that.

Partnerships are generally putting considerable effort into improving the involvement of communities and service users in decision making. Again, however, we think that there is scope for more co-ordination between partners, so that councils and their partners in health and the police, for example, do that in a more joined-up way rather than each taking their own approach.

Community planning partnerships are improving their performance management arrangements, but progress has been slow. Community planning is always going to be a long-term process and it is probably too soon to be able to point to hard evidence of real changes in outcomes for communities. However, we think that it is now time for partnerships to focus their efforts on demonstrating what is changing for local people and what is better because of the community planning process.

I will stop there, but my colleagues and I will do our best to answer any questions, convener.

Thank you very much. The report is very interesting. I note that it is framed as an initial review, so clearly there is more work to be done.

I will help the committee by asking the first question. You said that community planning can add value to existing joint working. Are you in a position to say at this stage that the benefits that might come from community planning will clearly outweigh the administrative burdens to which you referred?

There is the potential for that to be the case—in some parts of Scotland it is already starting to be the case—not least by getting an overarching vision of what all the partners are working towards, instead of having a series of separate visions for particular types of services. Benefits can also come from building a culture of trust and working together, which we see increasingly in some parts of the country.

Having said that, it is much more likely that the benefits will outweigh the costs if people take the opportunity at the same time to strip away things that have been superseded by community planning and ensure that all their efforts are directed towards achieving the vision that the partnership has set itself.

The comments about rationalisation and stripping away, particularly with regard to pre-existing partnership structures, are important. However, I am concerned about where the leadership will come from to achieve that, because there are 32 local authorities, along with all the health and police boards and others, and, as you pointed out, they overlap. Leadership is important if rationalisation is to happen. Is there any indication of where leadership is coming from that might help that process?

That is a good question. Formally, the councils have the responsibility under the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003 to lead the process of community planning. We identify in the report the particular issue that a number of national organisations, such as the enterprise network, are being pulled in two directions: nationally, towards the Executive and the national organisations, and locally, towards the 32 councils with which they work. Those different accountability arrangements can make it hard for people to decide whether local or national priorities take precedence. Similarly, a number of health bodies told us that they are committed to engaging in community planning at a local level, but they are clearly held to account at the centre for targets on waiting times and a range of other national priorities. It is that balancing of national and local that we think is difficult to achieve in the current framework, with the different organisational boundaries, funding streams and performance frameworks that are in place.

I will pick up on that point. I am aware locally of some of the tensions around community planning. You mentioned Scottish Enterprise in particular being pulled at a local level and a national level. That organisation must split itself among 32 councils, as do the police and colleagues in health. Each council has different issues, problems, opportunities and challenges. That impacts on the larger organisations, which have their own priorities. Did you get any feedback to the effect that they feel they are being pulled in too many directions and that, because they are having to spend time on community planning as well as on setting their own priorities, their ability to deliver services is being affected?

We did. That is an issue not just for the national organisations but for organisations such as Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS Board, which I think is involved in eight community planning partnerships. There is obviously an overhead there. That is one reason why we think it is important for partnerships to have a highly explicit performance management framework, through which agreement can be reached on which national and local priorities will be focused on, how progress will be measured and what contribution each of the partners will make. The tensions need to be made explicit so that a way can be found of managing them. They will not go away—people have dual accountabilities—but at least the framework would set out clearly what people agreed to do and would provide a basis on which the various partners could hold each other to account on the progress that had been made. Miranda Alcock or David Pia might have something to add.

If value is to be added through community planning, the partnerships must focus on working together. It is undoubtedly the case that tension is created for those larger organisations that must balance the needs of the various community planning partnerships that they encompass. There are ways round that, but they take time, negotiation and commitment to the area concerned.

We suggest in the report that local authorities and partner organisations should provide annual statements that show the link between the community plans with which they are engaged and their corporate plans. In that way, they could demonstrate how things fit together.

Did you obtain any information on the amount of time that larger organisations are having to spend on the various local authority community plans?

We did some costing of the direct costs that are being incurred as a result of community planning, but it is difficult to capture the amount of time that organisations spend on something that is not separate from their mainstream business. We decided that any estimate that we could make would not be robust enough to be worth reporting.

But that issue was raised with you.

Yes.

You seem to have described a jungle of organisational complexity. The problem is how drive and direction can come out of that massive complexity. You say that the Scottish Executive has too many priorities, that there is a lack of co-ordination between national and local priorities, that funding is complex and that there is a lack of agreed goals and priorities. Your recommendations are clear—there should be a limited number of priorities, the integration of national policy initiatives should be improved and funding streams should be rationalised. However, delivery is the problem. How easy will those goals be to achieve? The situation is complex and involves conflicting interests. You have identified that community plans are one way of addressing the complexity. Will it be possible to create drive and direction from such complexity?

To be fair, I am not sure that we are telling people much that is not already known. We are providing evidence and quantification of a situation of which people are aware. It is clear that there is a link with the Executive's debate on public service reform.

There are probably two levels of answer to your question. Partnerships can take some measures fairly readily. Some of the better performing partnerships are already seeking to clarify which national and local objectives they intend to focus on and they are doing what they can to rationalise their structures by examining how one plan might serve the needs of two or more Executive policy areas. Such streamlining is under way in some parts of Scotland.

Other action will be more difficult to take. We all know about the tensions and challenges that exist around the reorganisation of public bodies. There is a risk that reorganisation could introduce more turbulence than it resolves. That is where the wider debate on public service reform comes in. However, there are measures that organisations can take to lighten the burden in the meantime.

I get the impression that, although there is good will to get things done at all levels, there is a lack of focus on whether national or local goals take priority. Who takes the initiative when it comes to providing that central focus?

In the best partnerships, people have come to a shared understanding of the most important needs in their area. Such an understanding reflects the economic circumstances and demography of the population and the history that has led to the current situation, which enables people to say, "We will concentrate on these five areas. Other areas must take a back seat until we can demonstrate progress." In other areas, partnerships have not developed to such a stage and have tried to address 20 or 30 priorities, which is not an effective way of working. That is why we think that there are things that local partnerships can do even when bigger questions remain to be addressed nationally.

Are you saying that before partnerships expand they should do less but do it better, rather than have an expanded programme and take a scatter-gun approach? Who should provide direction and take decisions about the focus of work?

Good partnerships have managed to do that by securing good, shared information about what is happening in their area. For example, partnerships can gather information about the demographic challenges that are presented by an increasingly elderly population and a fall in the number of young people, or about pockets of deprivation or ill health in their area. Such information can be used to develop a shared understanding between all partners—the council, the health board, the police and fire services and the enterprise network—of what must be done to address the problems. There must be agreement if many agencies are to sign up to the work. We found that the information base is often a good starting point for developing that shared understanding.

There is local knowledge of problems and needs. However, £1.25 billion is provided centrally, which is an awful lot of money. What is the mechanism whereby central funding can be linked with the local knowledge that can produce results?

The partnership must find a way of understanding local needs and matching its agenda to the national priorities and the national funding that is available. Organisations must also find ways of using their mainstream funding more effectively, which is a challenge. Each organisation has a significant budget that is committed to services, staff and so on, so a key to success is to find ways of ensuring that staff activity contributes towards the partnership's goals. If people focus only on the new money that is available or the money that is attached to a particular initiative they are unlikely to make the cultural shift to an attitude in which they say, "How can we work together to meet our area's needs?"

I see that local action is the end point, but do we lack a mechanism at central Government level that could provide drive and direction?

During the study, people often said that community planning is about not just local initiatives but the Executive. A finding of our report is that the Executive probably could do more to ensure that its policy development is more joined up and gives more consideration to the impact on the 32 community planning partnerships in Scotland. There are moves in that direction, but work on the number of plans, funding streams and accountability regimes, for example, could be developed further to make it easier to join up policy locally.

The Executive should get its act together.

I welcome the report. Caroline Gardner is right to say that it tells us much that we already know, but sometimes it is useful for such matters to be set out for us to see. Over the years, the Audit Committee has expressed concern to Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission that the vision for community planning is not necessarily being translated into practice in many parts of Scotland. The report identifies significant deficiencies.

I make an observation—I will give the deputy auditor general for Scotland the opportunity to say whether she agrees with me. It strikes me that much of the practice that is described in the report is far removed from the original aspirations for community planning. That is not due to a deliberate desire on the part of any individual or organisation to depart from the original vision, but the reality is that in many instances what was meant to be a living and breathing process that involved not just agencies working together but communities having a say in shaping the future has become locked into an overengineered and dysfunctional process in which people spend a hugely disproportionate amount of time preparing paperwork and plans instead of getting on with the job of service delivery. A lot of professionals are triumphing in joint working and improvement despite, rather than because of, much of that machinery.

You may or may not choose to comment on that observation. I feel that we must address serious issues. Not for the first time, we are dealing with a failure of policy implementation or, if not with a failure, how policy translates into practice. The policy is not in any sense flawed. I see nothing that would make us question the original aims, aspirations and ambitions of community planning.

That is the context for my questions. My main question is: what is the Scottish Executive's role? In a practical sense, ownership lies at local level and much can be done locally. However, by definition, surely the Scottish Executive must take the lead role in driving cultural change, which concerns its work with local agencies and how it changes its own practice. As you said—the report provides evidence on it—part of the problem is the number of plans, reports and processes that the Executive generates. The Executive could lead from the front by changing its own practice. What is the Executive's role, particularly in leading cultural change?

You are right—nothing in the report challenges the vision and the aspirations for community planning. In the process of finalising the report, we said that if community planning did not exist, it would have to be invented. Some problems in communities around Scotland cannot be tackled by organisations working on their own.

I know that the Executive aspires to tidy how it engages with community planning partnerships on planning, funding, monitoring and accountability arrangements. We saw that recently in the Minister for Finance and Public Service Reform's statement about aspirations to move forward public service reform.

The Executive faces a tension in balancing the mechanisms that are at its disposal for showing progress with some of the important policy initiatives that are under way and giving people flexibility locally to find innovative solutions for local circumstances. We were surprised at this point in the development of the community planning process to find few examples of people genuinely pooling budgets and staff and of people considering the roles that professionals play in delivering services locally.

In many ways, that links to some of the questions that we considered in relation to the leadership development report, such as how we develop leaders of Scottish public services rather than leaders of local government, the health service or the civil service. It is important to bring people together so that there is a shared goal not just for the community plan but for what public services are intended to achieve. That will not be achieved quickly, but it needs investment from now to develop it.

You pre-empted my next question, which is about links with other work that has been done on leadership initiatives. That was screaming out, and I am glad that you mentioned it.

I return to the question of the Executive changing its practices and, in so doing, driving cultural change. You mentioned various stated and restated aspirations on the Executive's part to make change. The Minister for Finance and Public Service Reform repeated them last week. In your work, did you identify practical changes to the Executive's leadership role in community planning? Is the Executive moving towards a more people-based approach, lightening its touch in the demands that it places on public services and moving away from top-down guidance and requests for reports and plans, or is it continuing with its previous approach? If the latter applies, how can that be changed?

We have seen attempts to move away from the pattern of the past. People have experimented with measures such as outcome agreements and considered whether, in some areas of Scotland, services such as those for children can be brought more closely together. However, that is some way from becoming wholesale change. I will sound as if I am ducking the question, but you would probably do better to direct to the Executive than to us your question about what needs to happen to make that central to how the Executive does its business.

Thank you. I appreciate those comments.

The final issue that I wish to raise is public involvement, or community engagement, to use the correct term in this context. I am aware of the references in the report to that and to the national standards for community engagement, which are produced by Communities Scotland. Could you elaborate on that, not least because, in the context of what we read in the rest of the report, there is a real concern that there are yet more documents and words about community involvement, yet the culture and practice at a local level are such that people feel as disconnected and disenfranchised as they were before? Can you tell us anything further in that regard to reassure us that community planning is not just about agencies working together, but is also about involving local people and communities?

I will ask Miranda Alcock or David Pia to speak about this in a moment. We feel that councils and their partners have been overly tied up in the processes and structures of community planning and have not reached the stage of actually changing the way in which people think about what they are doing. There has been a lot of focus on surveys of local people's views about priorities and service quality. However, there is not yet a sense of wanting to open things up and engage people in what needs to happen.

The report contains some interesting, innovative examples of different approaches to involving people at quite a high level. In Stirling, for example, young people have done a lot of work on giving out the information that they need and on establishing how to proceed with the money and information that are available. There are scattered examples of interesting and innovative work, but it is early days. The study is more of an overview of community planning rather than just community engagement.

You will note from our future study programme, which the committee is considering later on the agenda, that we propose to undertake a study focusing on community engagement. That has come out of some of the current work. We did not consider community engagement in detail, but we did pick up on it. It is a fundamental part of community planning. A lot of effort is expended in that area, and some of the work that gets done is interesting and innovative. However, the approach needs to be more joined up and it needs to be applied across the board. It is early days, but there are some big commitments, with some interesting, innovative initiatives.

One thing that helps explain the rather uneven approach to community engagement is the finding that we have reported about the involvement of members in community planning and about their whole approach to engaging communities and different groups of people. We have reported on the uneven commitment among members to community planning. It varies considerably, from a very strong commitment in some places to relatively little commitment in others. There is even opposition to it in some areas.

I have a quick, Highland-specific question. You have spoken about some of the difficulties with agencies not working in coterminous areas, with overlaps and so on. There was recently a fairly abrupt reorganisation of the local enterprise companies under Highlands and Islands Enterprise, but none of the boundaries is any more coterminous than before—arguably, they are less so.

Highland Council is anticipating the change in the voting system next year, with the move to multimember wards. There is talk of changing the council's area committee structure. When organisations and public bodies are reviewing their own structures, is it still the culture that they consider only their own structure? Is there any change towards bodies considering how their structures mesh with those of other organisations? That does not seem to me to be the case. I do not know whether the situation in the Highlands is unique or whether other councils will wish to change their structures after the new voting system comes in.

It is a bit of both. I will ask Miranda Alcock to give you some more detail on that point in a minute. A number of organisations still start with their own priorities and history when they consider future reorganisation. On the other hand, a number of police forces—Lothian and Borders police being a good example—have altered their command structures to focus on not just council areas but the neighbourhood community planning structures within them.

The police have been especially good at organising their command structures to reflect local community planning structures. Increasingly, fire and rescue authorities are also doing that.

It comes down partly to a commitment to the area. If all the public organisations in an area are committed to the area, they will organise accordingly. Commitment must come not only from the local council but from all the public services, as Caroline Gardner has suggested. If that commitment exists, people will say, "Okay, we'll organise so that it's easier for everybody to work together." Leadership is important, but it is commitment to the local area that really moves things along.

I thank Caroline Gardner, Miranda Alcock and David Pia for providing us with that briefing. You have given the committee food for thought, and we will discuss the issues when we move into private session later in the meeting.