Chamber and committees

I have a last question on funding, and this might be a point at which to bring in our other witnesses.

Are there other solutions out there that are not being adequately explored? Perhaps there are other solutions that are, in some cases, having positive results, whether those are partnership models or provision through social enterprise or on a not-for-profit basis? Community ownership has been talked about—it has pros and cons. Are there other solutions out there that can help to increase or support provision and participation in the context of those local government finance pressures?

Unless there is an unexpected change, the picture for overall local government funding does not look rosy. Costs are continuing to be a bigger burden than would have been the case in previous years.

Are we yet at a point at which those who make decisions about how those pressures get managed are properly taking into account the role of sport and physical activity in preventing not only further human but financial costs? We are still seeing decisions made that will exacerbate those long-term costs for short-term expediency.

That is a fair point.

I will crowbar in one supplementary to Joe FitzPatrick’s questions about the framework. The question comes back to COSLA, in particular. Jillian, I do not expect you, as a representative of COSLA, to issue a scathing assessment of where local government is at on this. However, if you and your colleagues at individual councils who are focused on this topic are doing everything that you can and yet, across the other issues in the framework—such as active travel and economic development—if people who are making planning decisions about development end up generating more traffic between where young people live and where they want to get to, for all sorts of different purposes; if road traffic reduction targets are being scrapped; and if we do not recognise that we live in an environment that is built more for cars than for people and that there is a huge amount to change about that, then do you agree that we will not achieve what you and your colleagues who are working on this topic are trying to achieve unless a great deal else in local and national decision making priorities is changed? Where are we at with getting the issues in the framework understood, embedded and resulting in different decisions being made in other parts of Government, locally and nationally?

The briefing that we have been given suggests that local government investment in culture, sport and leisure across the whole country is down by at least 20 per cent since 2010-11. Is that accurate? Would local government recognise that figure?

I do not for a moment want to underplay the importance of the funding question, but, right at the beginning of this evidence session, a broad picture was painted of the levels of participation in sport not having risen but having been fairly static over the long term. If we are using funding effectively and it has gone down by 20 per cent, what explains that discrepancy? If the funding is effective in increasing participation and it has gone down but participation has not, is there a mismatch? Was there a problem with how the funding was previously used, so that, if we restored that level of funding, we could find a more effective way of getting increased participation?

Good morning. I am going to move on to funding, which follows on fairly neatly, but I also want to follow up Joe FitzPatrick’s questions, as he teed me up earlier with the questions he was raising.

I will ask about the funding stuff first, because it follows on a little more smoothly. There has been discussion about the capital that is available for facilities, the need for upgrades and the impact of that on pricing. More generally, can you give us an overview of the current state of affairs in relation to the funding of on-going services, beyond the capital issues that have just been discussed? In particular, to what extent is the funding itself creating barriers to participation?

Good morning. I want to focus on what you fairly bluntly described as a failure of the intergovernmental process. It is inevitable that those who are more sympathetic to devolution or to Scottish independence are going to place more of the blame for that failure on the UK Government, while those who are much more concerned about British independence and the sovereignty of the British state would place more of the blame on the Scottish Government. I would like to see whether we can find a way of breaking through that, because just saying that there is a logjam and a failure of the intergovernmental process leaves us kind of stuck.

What do you think that the Scottish Government can do to break through that? For example, are you considering a public consultation? Would there be scope for a joint public consultation with the Welsh Government, for example? We might not agree on everything but we could lay out the options publicly for how these relationships should work better, not only by comparing what is happening at the moment with what happened under previous iterations of devolution and under EU membership, but also what happens in other EU countries that have distributive forms of Government.

You will recall, for example, that the Government of the region of Wallonia has regularly been able to challenge decisions that the Belgian Government wants to make, whether on the comprehensive economic and trade agreement or on Brexit legislation. Other European Governments have multilevel or tiered forms of government where those issues are debated and agreed in a different and more successful way than in our current process, which you have described as a failure.

Would a public consultation that sets out what could be improved help to move things along if the UK Government is not willing to make fundamental changes?

Ah!

Thank you.

I will press you a little further on what “things changing” actually requires. Even in the current framework, I share the hope that you have expressed about relationships and meetings working better. We would hope that UK ministers would be willing to come and talk to Scottish Parliament committees on the record and give us evidence. So far, our efforts to achieve that have not met with success, but I hope that that will change. However, the Scottish Government’s position surely has to be that structural change is needed so that there is a requirement for not just the current UK Government but any future UK Government to make that relationship work. It cannot rely on the goodwill of individual ministers of the Government of the day—whether in Scotland, London or elsewhere—to make that relationship work. There has to be a structural requirement; otherwise, ministers will not have an incentive to do that.