The final item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-15040, in the name of Jayne Baxter, on the fairer Fife commission report “Fairness Matters”. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament acknowledges the Fairer Fife Commission report, Fairness Matters, which was launched on 30 November 2015 at the Cottage Family Centre in Kirkcaldy; understands that the commission was established by Fife Council in September 2014 and is independent of the council and its partners; notes that its remit was to take a strategic overview of the scale, scope and nature of poverty in Fife, to review the effectiveness of the activity being carried out to address this and to report with recommendations to the local authority and the Fife Partnership by November 2015; recognises what it sees as Fife Council’s commitment to addressing poverty and acknowledges the commissioners and everyone who gave evidence to or participated in the process; commends the recommendation that outcomes should be delivered that will allow residents to be able to live good lives, make choices and reach their full potential and let children be safe, happy and healthy, and acknowledges all of the commission’s 40 recommendations for a fairer Fife, which it listed under the headings, ambitious, poverty-free, fair-work, affordable, connected, empowered, skilled and healthier.
17:04
I begin by congratulating Fife partnership on the bold decision to set up the fairer Fife commission. The commission was set up as an independent body with membership from across the public, private and third sectors and with support from a secretariat that comprised officers from Fife Council and from Carnegie UK Trust. I welcome the fact that the commission was established to provide a strategic overview of the scale, scope and nature of poverty in Fife and of the effectiveness of activity that is currently undertaken to address such poverty.
The commission was asked to report to Fife Council and Fife partnership by November 2015, and my motion acknowledges the significant contribution that I believe that its report will make to the on-going efforts to reduce inequality in Fife. I thank all the commissioners from the public, private and third sectors who gave up their time and energy to fulfil the brief that Fife partnership set out. The report is enriched by evidence from a wide range of witnesses and by the testimonies of community organisations from across Fife. We have a report that combines data with lived experience, which makes the recommendations all the more powerful.
I attended the launch of the report last November at the Cottage Family Centre in Kirkcaldy. The centre was originally developed by a group of local parents and established in 1987. Its purpose is to provide a family centre that serves Kirkcaldy and caters for the needs of families with pre-school children. The centre adopts a community development approach that puts the needs and aspirations of families and children at the centre of its service development and delivery, and it encourages their participation in the management and development of the centre. The centre embodies the ethos and culture that the report calls for and, along with six other organisations, it hosted visits by the commission and supported its service users to give personal testimonies to inform the commission’s work.
It is true to say that fairness is a broad umbrella that encompasses subjective and objective concepts. Fairness can mean different things to different people. The commission defined a fairer Fife as
“a Fife where all residents have the capability to live good lives, make choices and reach their full potential and where all children are safe, happy and healthy”.
Poverty and inequality are huge barriers to Fife achieving that vision, but poverty and inequality are not inevitable. They are created by the collective actions of society and can be reduced by the same process. The commission’s analysis states that
“ever widening inequality is neither natural nor intractable.”
As such, it is important to recognise the scope and ambition of the fairer Fife commission report in addressing this important issue.
“Fairness Matters” may be a report that is specific to Fife, but the messages in it are pertinent to all areas of Scotland and will resonate with many. Indeed, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a strong advocate of the argument that inequality is both a moral issue and a severe drag on a society’s economic performance. Although the report concerns Fife, it has value across Scotland, for it provides a route map for new ways in which public, private and third sector organisations can work alongside communities to reduce inequality.
I highlight that the report recognises the work that Fife has been doing to tackle the issues. It states:
“There is no doubt that Fife has hugely capable, knowledgeable and committed people working in all sectors.”
However, along with all communities across Scotland, Fife has no room for complacency, especially with the hard financial choices that now face councils in Scotland, so we must ensure that resources are targeted in order to develop person-centred and sustainable solutions. That will require more partnership working, co-location of services and a willingness to reach out to where people are rather than expecting them to come to us, so I am heartened that the commission’s approach to tackling poverty and inequality is truly citizen focused and puts community at its centre.
That inclusive approach can result in evidence that leads to solutions rather than in simply recognising the scale of the problem. It is the difference between data and knowledge, and more knowledge leads to better decisions.
The report includes recommendations that reflect the local perspective. For example, why not replicate the principles of the city deal concept with a Fife towns deal that would provide support to local geographies, have a free travel card for those who are seeking work or who have recently gained employment, or make a non-commercial broadband tariff available for social housing tenants? The report includes numerous such recommendations, which are rooted in local people’s lived experiences. The challenge will be to make them happen and to develop a “why not?” culture that releases the latent energy in organisations and communities.
I have seen for myself, through my work and political experience, that putting communities at the heart of decision making hugely increases the quality of decisions that are made and the likelihood that they will have a positive impact. I am therefore confident that the report’s recommendations—there are 40, which are gathered into eight groups under the headings “Ambitious”, “Poverty-free”, “Fair Work”, “Affordable”, “Connected”, “Empowered”, “Skilled” and “Healthier”—are relevant, have realistic timescales and targets and will reduce levels of poverty and inequality.
The big message that comes out of the report is the emphasis on maintaining a citizen focus, working together, being ambitious and achieving improved long-term outcomes for people, rather than just improvements in process or inputs. When the action plan that follows the report’s recommendations is published, I am sure that strategic partners will work together alongside communities to ensure that beneficial change is made.
I am pleased that the initial focus will be on supporting new ways of working and attempting to drive the cultural shift that will be necessary to create the fairer Fife to which the report aspires. I hope that Fife partnership will fully explore the more innovative recommendations.
Community action will be at the heart of making change. The report says:
“Top down imposed change will no longer be effective. Fife Council and the community planning partnership ... have an important leadership and convening role, but change requires action from everyone living, employing, doing business and working in Fife.”
I welcome that assertion, and I hope that the report will start a conversation in Fife between all sectors of our community and inspire a drive for change that is led for and delivered by the community.
The fairer Fife commission report tackles an extremely serious matter in our society. The Parliament must welcome any attempt to address the problem, and we must seriously consider all recommendations about how to lessen what is a great unfairness in our country.
I am pleased that my motion has been recognised with cross-party support. Only by working together to address the concerns that affect people in their daily lives can we build a better future.
17:11
I apologise to members: after my speech I will not be able to stay for the rest of the debate, because I have another engagement.
I congratulate Jayne Baxter on bringing this debate to the Parliament and I welcome the opportunity to speak briefly on the fairer Fife commission’s report. Since the commission was established in September 2014, it has progressed towards its remit, which is to
“Take a strategic overview of the scale, scope and nature of poverty in Fife and the effectiveness of activity currently undertaken to address such poverty.”
Tackling deprivation ought to be close to all our hearts. I am sure that members agree that a strategy in that regard is fundamental to achieving a better world for everyone, especially young people. I commend the members of the commission, who volunteered their time to work for the commission for the benefit of others.
In his introduction to the report, Martyn Evans, the chair of the fairer Fife commission and chief executive officer of the Carnegie UK Trust, said:
“Our report has been enriched by those taking the time to contribute their thoughts and experience.”
I am sure that that is correct. He went on to express particular gratitude
“to the looked-after children from Fife who, supported by the Scottish Children’s Parliament, spent the morning with us and provided outstanding evidence on what is important for all children. Their view was that all children should be ‘safe, happy and healthy’.”
That is undoubtedly the case.
I also commend the contribution of Steve Grimmond, the chief executive of Fife Council, who I understand gave valuable advice and support to the commission throughout its work.
As it says in the introduction to the report,
“concepts of fairness, poverty and participation are at the top of the political agenda in Scotland, as they are in many other countries.”
That is an important comment. One of the great problems in many western countries is that the gap between rich and poor, far from narrowing, is getting wider. As the report makes clear, there is no universally accepted definition of fairness, but what is clear is that
“Unfairness exists when inequalities are allowed to interrelate and compound, which results in those experiencing disadvantage in one area of their lives too often experiencing others. In our society, income and wealth inequality is strongly correlated with inequalities in education, health, housing and our environment.”
That is undoubtedly true.
The report goes on to note the OECD argument
“that inequality is both a moral issue and a severe drag on the economic performance of a society.”
It is undoubtedly the case that if we tackle inequality, we are more likely to have a growing economy—it should be a win-win situation.
Looking at the report’s recommendations, I highlight those in the section on fair work, which include not only recommendations relating to the aim of making Fife “a living wage region” but a recommendation to explore fairness in self-employment, with a view to encouraging self-employed workers to
“structure their work and enterprise arrangements to maximise their earnings and work security.”
In my view, self-employees are particularly at risk during economic downturns and recessions, and they are at risk of poor health, either physical or mental. I therefore welcome that recommendation in the report.
Jayne Baxter has talked about a number of the recommendations. There are too many to go through in detail, but another one that I think is relevant is the recommendation to
“refocus the geography of economic development activity from a ‘Fife outwards’ perspective, to one that focuses on the assets within Fife ... supporting towns to attract ‘good jobs’ to Fife.”
This is an important debate, and I welcome having had the opportunity to make that modest contribution. Once again, I thank Jayne Baxter for bringing the debate to the chamber.
17:15
I, too, thank Jayne Baxter for bringing the debate to Parliament today. The fairer Fife commission was an important step in the right direction in looking at how we tackle inequality and poverty in Fife, and I congratulate those who served on the commission for the report that they produced. However, it is important that we start to look at all 40 of the commission’s recommendations and that the partners in Fife who set up the commission start to set out in detail how they intend to put the recommendations into action. They must set out a timescale for the actions that need to be taken and say by whom they should be taken.
I had the pleasure of chairing the Fife partnership over a period, but it was not always clear—as is the case in community planning generally—what each partner brought to the table and what their role was. That is not a criticism of the Government, because I know that the Government is as committed to community planning as I am. However, we need to start getting much clearer outcomes and clearer information about who is responsible for what, what they are going to deliver and how all that comes together.
For example, one of the recommendations in the report is about the living wage. Employers have a large part to play in delivering the living wage, as they do in delivering apprenticeships, but I was never convinced about the role of employers and those who represented them at the table in the Fife partnership. Indeed, I would say the same about the third sector—I was never convinced that the body that came from the third sector actually represented all third sector organisations in Fife. Therefore, although the commission was a step in the right direction, there is a lot more work to do.
Back in the first half of the last century, the five evils that Beveridge talked about in his report were want, squalor, idleness, ignorance and disease. He set out clearly why we had to tackle those five giant evils in society, but the reality is that, in one shape or another, those five evils are very much with us in Fife and across Scotland today. The fact is that 75,000 people in Fife are living in poverty. Indeed, poverty in Fife has grown, in absolute terms, over the past five, six or seven years and because of the welfare reforms that we are now seeing. The evidence of that is the fact that we have food banks. Absolute poverty can be defined as people not being able to access what we would describe as the basics that are needed to survive, and I suggest that being able to eat and to feed your kids is a basic need. The growth of food banks in my constituency in Crosshill, Cowdenbeath, Rosyth and Inverkeithing—in fact, the growth of food banks right across Fife and Scotland—is the evidence that absolute poverty exists in our communities, and we need to work out how we are going to tackle it.
As Roderick Campbell said, the report makes a lot of recommendations. They are all worthy, and we need to see a programme for how they will be implemented.
I will use credit unions to illustrate my thinking. I am a member of the Dunfermline and District Credit Union, and I save and borrow at its Kelty branch. We need to see the development of credit unions not just for poor people but for the whole community. More must be done, and I believe that local authorities can do more. We can say nice words about the need to grow the use of credit unions by employers. Although I agree that we must do that and that part of the partnership should be about that, we need to set a clear strategy, with measurable outcomes, for how we are going to grow credit unions across communities.
One of the most successful credit unions in Scotland is Benarty and Lochgelly Credit Union, which is a small credit union in Ballingry. It has millions of pounds’ worth of assets. It has helped thousands of people in those communities over the years. It is a massive success story. Again, there are lessons to be learned there.
The key points are that I welcome the report and the work that has been done. However, all the partners need to look at the report and set out clearly how its recommendations can be progressed and achieved, how they will be measured and, more important, who is going to do what to try to achieve that.
17:21
I thank Jayne Baxter for her motion on the fairer Fife commission and for securing the opportunity to be here.
The debate has been quite fascinating for me as local government minister, because the fairer Fife commission is a wonderful example of a local authority leading a partnership approach and reconnecting with some of the spirit when—this was even before Beveridge—our local authorities were the pioneers and the experimenters at the forefront, before national Government had caught up fully with the need to deal with inequality. The term “municipal socialism” was fashionable in the early 20th century, but that sense of local authorities as champions for their areas, to advance wellbeing and to identify the ills in their local area, is an important one.
The fairer Fife commission’s work is remarkable in a number of ways. I have noted the division of the work into the four themes of paid and unpaid work, place, being well and life courses and transitions. That has produced a great piece of work. I will speak more about that in a moment.
The commission certainly has an impressive line-up. It has a series of people with distinguished and various backgrounds. I know one its members: Dr Jim McCormick. He sat with me on the commission on local tax reform to which he made a great contribution. Just as with that commission, the fairer Fife commission is not all about the people who sit on it; it is more important than that. Indeed, how it has worked—its participative approach—has been talked about.
I have been fascinated by my work on the commission on local tax reform and what I have seen from fairer Scotland and the fairer Fife commission about the sheer effect that having personal face-to-face contact with the people who have to live every day with the problems that we are trying to be solved can have.
To sit around a table and, as the commission did, to have people who are looked-after children, the users of food banks or people who have experienced sanctions to tell that story means the difference between knowledge and data, as Jayne Baxter eloquently put it.
In that way, the real experience can be understood with far greater colour than would otherwise be the case—and those colours are often stark ones. It is remarkable that—this can be seen in the report’s recommendations—the people who are facing the challenges are not short of ideas on how to fix them and on what needs to be done.
For many decades, the common approach to public policy of putting experts in a room and having them come up on their own with the ideas of what to do is seeing its day. The approach where Government does things with people rather than to them has a lot to commend it.
Jayne Baxter’s idea about developing a “Why not?” culture nicely summed up the issue. Instead of ideas sitting there and being felt to be impossible, with people thinking, “What can I do with that? No one will pay me any attention”, we need people to be thinking “If we want to have a social enterprise capacity in business gateway that is greater, why not?”
In the context of joining up services, another of the commission’s recommendations was that NHS staff should provide a bit of information on income maximisation. Why not? We must take such ideas and run with them.
One of the things that I have constantly tried to do as I have gone around the country in my capacity as the community empowerment minister—particularly when I have spoken to community planning partnerships—is emphasise the message of participation. The idea of bringing people in and getting them to give their ideas is very different from the old-style consultation. It is not possible to do that for everything, but on the core issue of equality and inequality in this country, the people we are trying to help should be in the driving seat on the action that is being taken.
The only way to empower the disempowered is by showing faith in them through having such conversations, by taking them seriously and by demonstrating the action that will come out of it. Nothing will compound cynicism more than bringing people in, listening to them and then going away and not acting on what they say or doing something else entirely. That is a circle that we have to close in all our public sector activity to make sure that we keep the faith of the public.
Alex Rowley mentioned some of the issues with CPPs. I agree with him on some of the areas in which they need to step up their work. Somewhat frivolously, I have sometimes referenced “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, in which someone else’s problem was recognised as a thing that could make anything invisible, even if that was a sofa flying across Lord’s cricket ground. If something is not someone’s problem, they just do not see it. Wherever I go, whenever I bang the drum for community empowerment and public service reform, I say that “That’s somebody else’s problem” is a phrase that should be banned.
The community planning partnerships exist to bring all the people around the table so that the priorities can be isolated and the problems that cannot be solved by anyone alone can be solved together. Making sure that there is buy-in lay behind some of the provisions in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, but I think that further work will probably need to be done on that in the next session of Parliament, building on that act.
As Alex Rowley said, perhaps the key is to make sure that we have strong employer and business representation around the table and that all third sector organisations can feed into the process. There is a very big difference between the big third sector providers that will work Fife-wide and, for example, a small neighbourhood association in a deprived area. Both have important things to bring to the table.
The fairer Fife commission’s report is a model of good work. It offers a model for combining the expertise of the different public and voluntary sector players and public participation, and I commend it. I do not envy the task of the people who must take the recommendations and turn them into an action plan, given how ambitious they are, but I commend the work that has been done and would recommend that any other council that is thinking about doing something similar should do so.
Meeting closed at 17:28.Previous
Decision TimeNext
Correction