Chamber and committees

Ultimately, how they employ and shape their workforce is a matter for local authorities, but there will Scotland-wide issues, particularly around skills gaps and the specific areas that, I guess, the committee will come to shortly: environmental health, planning and building standards. They are the challenges that you will have heard of, and it is absolutely appropriate that we work on them in collaboration with our colleagues in local government, further and higher education and the specific professions.

The area that I am most aware of is planning. The Government and COSLA are working with Heads of Planning Scotland and the Royal Town Planning Institute to make sure that we are taking that forward. A lot of work is being done where particular skills gaps have been identified. The first thing that we need to do is to recognise that there are challenges, and then work together to meet those challenges, and we are doing that in collaboration with our local government partners and others.

I will pass that to Ellen Leaver, if that is okay.

I agree with what Councillor Heddle has said about leadership, and I will add a couple of examples.

Part of the issue is that we need to ensure that it is not simply assumed that the local authority will always be the provider of leadership. That is not always the case. I have a couple of examples from recent visits in which other skills were brought to bear.

I mentioned previously the Wester Hailes community. In producing its local place plan, it used consultancy to supplement its skill set and that of the local authority. That worked for Wester Hailes and it gave the community more independence than there would be from a local authority person taking that leadership role.

One of the communities that I visited during my summer tour was the Struan community on Skye, which is looking at repurposing a building as a community asset for the future. The Struan community pulled in the support of Planning Aid Scotland to supplement the skills that it had around the table, although the community was pretty rich in that respect. It is not a case of one size fits all, but we need to avoid assuming that the leadership role should always be performed by Government, whether at national or local level, because that could remove a community’s independence.

We know for sure that there is some really good practice going on. It is important that it is shared across Scotland. It is also important to remember that we would not expect all community planning partnerships to look the same. By definition, they are impacted by their localities and communities, so there will be a degree of variability.

However, it is reasonable to assume that we should be trying to drive up the standards and effectiveness of all CPPs. That should not be done in a top-down way, in which we tell CPPs what to do or how to operate. It is about making sure that platforms exist for sharing best practice, and about looking at whether, based on that, there is a need to adjust guidance at some point in the future.

The Scottish Government works collaboratively with other bodies to ensure that we are sharing best practice. Obviously, COSLA, as the other arm of government, takes a very close interest. Crucially, however, there is also the community planning improvement board. It is a product of the pandemic, but I think that its role of bringing together people from across the CPPs to ensure that we are sharing best practice is still really useful.

There is also the community planning network, which Councillor Heddle mentioned. Using those bodies, we can make sure that we are sharing best practice. If the discussions around that suggest a need to update guidance, we can also look at doing that.

However, it is important that we do not ever suggest that we have got community empowerment and community planning right and that that box is ticked. We need to continue looking at how CPPs operate and how they represent the communities.

In some communities, I have engaged with people whose initial response when they have been spoken to about their CPP is that they really do not have any engagement with it. Obviously, the CPP is not an entity in itself—it is a body of its parts. When we drill down, we often find that many of the partners of the CPP are engaging directly with people. Maybe there is a need for those partners to think about how they can better articulate how they feed back into the CPP, whether those connections are through the police, the fire service, the local council or the third sector interface.

No one is suggesting that everything is perfect and that we cannot make improvements. I think that everyone in this field wants to do more and recognises that we are on a journey and that we can make this better.

I think that I am the minister that you are quoting. However, if I suggested that it was not happening at all in Scotland, that was probably unfair—I am not sure that that was what I said.

Clearly, in some areas, there is particularly good practice. For example, I am aware that Argyll and Bute Council and Perth and Kinross Council have particularly good interfaces with the third sector. In at least one of those locations, the third sector shares the chair of the CPP. I could be wrong, but I think that all CPPs involve the third sector. Can that be done better or could there be more involvement? I think so.

The current guidance provides the flexibility for that involvement to be approached in a way that works for different localities. We need to be careful that we do not say: “Well, this works really well in Perth and Kinross; therefore, you should all follow this model.” For the Government to instruct in that way would not be appropriate. However, it is appropriate to make sure that we are sharing best practice. The community planning improvement board helps us to do that along with the community planning network. It is right that the third sector is involved in that process.

The pandemic showed us that CPPs created the connections that provided resilience during that time. Some things during the pandemic could not have been delivered or achieved without a good interface with the third sector. Because of the work of the CPPs, connections had already been made, so there was no need to bring everyone around the table in order to be able to deliver for communities.

I am not suggesting that every CPP has it right, but I am suggesting that it would be wrong of us to impose particular models. The committee’s comments have been heard by Greg Colgan, chair of the CPIB, who will help us to look at the guidance. If there is a feeling that we need to refresh some of that guidance, then we will do that. Once we have had those conversations and have looked at the work of the committee—you took a huge range of evidence, which is helpful—it may be that we decide that there is a need for a short-term working group in order to look at how we improve the guidance so that we can encourage best practice everywhere.

I will pass over to Tom Arthur in a minute to talk about the “Democracy matters” conversation. Although there is a big digital part to that, it goes beyond digital. It is so important that we reach the communities that do not normally engage. Tom Arthur will be able to talk about how some of the partners in that conversation are helping to ensure that we do that.

Such engagement is the responsibility of all CPP partners in all of their work, not only in their work as part of the CPP. They are statutory members for a reason, and they have a responsibility to ensure that they engage across our varied and diverse communities. Having that meaningful engagement in everything that they do will enable us to get things right.

We have talked about the successes of CPPs, and maybe one of the successes—which is not really measurable as such; it is difficult to report—is the recognition by all partners of their role in engaging with all parts of the community. That engagement is in a better place than it would have been without CPPs.

The frustration, particularly from the groups that you mentioned, is partly because recognition of the value of community growing has grown in the past number of years and there are increasing numbers of community growing organisations across the country using lots of different models. The Scottish Government supports that work. Since 2012, we have awarded more than £1.8 million through various grants and funding mechanisms to directly support community growing and increase the land that is available for it.

I visited lots of communities through the summer. In some cases, I was specifically visiting a community growing facility. In others, I was looking at some regeneration but, often, even when I did not expect to visit a community growing facility, the organisers would say, “There’s where we are going to put the community growing facility.” One of the communities in Shetland was going to build a particular structure. I have forgotten the name of it but it was a Shetland-specific polytunnel that was able to withstand the winds. The community showed me where that was going to be fitted.

There is a recognition of the benefits of community growing. There is absolutely a role for allotments, but there is a wider movement and a range of community growing organisations in virtually every community. The benefits of those organisations need to be fully recognised. Community growing is not just about the growing of food, which is really important, given the crises that we currently face. There are wider benefits to community cohesion, mental health and physical health.

There are also education benefits. I visited a community growing scheme in Dunoon that was attached to a school. It was an old school garden and the community growing organisation went in. All the people involved were properly certified to work with the kids, so the kids were able to go in. Initially, it was a case of, “This is all really dirty and yucky and look at thae worms!” but now it is so successful that the school is saying, “Thanks very much. I think that we can do this now,” so the group is now looking for another area to develop.

We—the collegiate “we” not just of public Scotland but the wider community, because business plays a big role in this as well—need to think about what more we can do to enable that. One of the big opportunities is the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act 2022, which enables us to tie together a number of strands.

Last week, I was at a conference organised by SURF—Scotland’s Regeneration Forum—that specifically considered community growing as part of regeneration across Scotland. It was a really good conference. It had a combination of people from the standard regeneration groups across Scotland and a range of people who were involved in all sorts of models for community growing. We need to share the energy that was in that room more.

For its part, the Scottish Government supports a lot of the organisations involved through regeneration grants or other empowerment grants. Specific aspects of the 2015 act relate to allotments and waiting lists for them. The Government has surveyed local authorities to try to identify the work that is continuing.

Obviously, allotments are a local authority responsibility rather than one for the Scottish Government, but we are keen to work with COSLA and our local government partners to see whether there is more that we can do, particularly in light of the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act 2022. We now have contact points for allotment services across Scotland and are working with authorities to share good practice.

I have touched base with Councillor Gail Macgregor, the COSLA lead, to suggest that we might consider how we can better support local authorities across Scotland. We need to be careful not to cause an additional layer of bureaucracy with reporting, and we are keen to work with local government partners to see whether there is a way to bring commonality to the reporting that local authorities already do to make it easier for committees such as this to have transparency on what is happening across Scotland.

A huge amount of work is going on, and a huge amount of progress is being made across Scotland, particularly in the community growing forum. Previously, the only option for growing your own food was to have an allotment. That is really challenging for many people, and it is a substantial amount of land per person, whereas the use of community growing can potentially reduce waiting lists for allotments, including by giving some people more appropriate access.

It is a really exciting time in this area, particularly with the opportunities that the good food nation plan brings.

The starting point is respect for our different democratic mandates, because this cannot ever feel to local government that the Scottish Government is coming in to check its homework. An important part of the outcomes framework will be increasing transparency in a way that works for all of us; by that, I mean not overreporting but ensuring transparency and clear lines of accountability so that people know who is accountable for what part of decision making. That will allow our electors to challenge us and local government’s electorate to challenge it. It is important that we get that right; it will take time, but that work is on-going.

It is important that we develop clear lines of accountability and make clear who is accountable for what, and that is part of the work that we are doing.

Part of the question was about local government finance and it is appropriate to recognise that all public services currently face massive inflation, including energy price inflation, and that that causes challenges for all aspects of public service. To respond to your point, the Accounts Commission’s report makes it clear that we have increased local government funding over the years, but that does not by any means take away the challenges that local government is facing.

It is appropriate that we have a mature and transparent conversation so that we can show who is accountable, how the money has been spent, which outcomes have been achieved and where accountability lies if outcomes are not being achieved. It will be important to get that accountability framework right.

It is important to emphasise that local government pay negotiations are a matter for local government as the employers, and for the unions. It is enshrined in the Verity house agreement that that is the correct procedure and that the Scottish Government should not interfere in the process. However, in line with the Verity house agreement and despite the cuts that it has received, the Scottish Government has already committed to £155 million to support a meaningful pay rise for local government workers.

We have done things differently this year. In previous years, there might have been a threat of strike action and then Government would have come in and provided additional funding. We have recognised the challenges that you have outlined and £155 million was provided up front to support COSLA in its role as employer.