Chamber and committees

Thank you very much. I have one more question. Is there time, convener?

I will jump in on that point. The Government’s main consultation portal—consult.gov.scot—has the “We Asked, You Said, We Did” page on it. From a lot of the feedback from stakeholders, it sounds as though, for the direct stakeholder consultation, such as the kind that your organisation has been involved with—as opposed to the general public consultation that is done through the portal—that follow-through is not happening as much. Is that the case? Do you feel that the “We Asked, You Said, We Did” approach is not really your experience of Government consultation?

I am trying to knit them together into something much shorter, to be honest, rather than just waffling at you.

The core point was about the tension between consultation and the length of time taken for delivery. A lot of the time, the Government legitimately comes under criticism for not moving with the urgency that organisations believe is required in those areas. However, when there is urgency, people feel that they have not been able to buy into the process.

I want to pick up on what was in the SCVO’s written submission about the length of time for consultations. You did some analysis around comparing the 2004 commitment, which I think was for a 90-day consultation, to more recent commitments.

There is a tension between two types of criticism that the Scottish Government comes under—as well as the Parliament, often. One is that there is not enough consultation, co-design, or co-development to get buy-in from key stakeholders; the other is that it takes far, far too long to deliver anything in Scottish politics—the legislative process takes too long and policy change takes too long.

There is an obvious tension between those two criticisms, so how would you suggest we wrestle with that? If we are to do more consultation and more co-design, we might end up with better outcomes, but it will take longer, and if we are talking about child poverty, for example, or about a lot of the issues in our justice system, there is an obvious and urgent pressure to do something right now.

How would your organisation suggest that the Government wrestles with that tension? This is probably simplifying it far too much, but if you had to pick between the two—between a lack of consultation to get buy-in or taking far too long—what is a greater challenge for Government at the moment?

Thanks. I am going to ask Lucy Hughes a follow-up question, but it applies to all of the witnesses, so they should feel free to chip in.

I am going to be a bit challenging. I cannot remember a time that Engender advocated for a new policy that I disagreed with. However, I want to go back to the question of whether we should do less but do it better or if we should do more. If the Scottish Government followed through on previous commitments that it has made and improved policy delivery in areas that you have already worked to secure commitments on, would your organisation put less pressure on it to commit to new policies?

Ultimately, there is a political trade-off. The reality of politics means that the Government feels pressure to constantly commit to new policies, but if the organisations that are able to put pressure on the Government directed that pressure towards asking the Government to follow through on delivering commitments that it has already made, perhaps there would be a shift in political focus, and then there would be the resource and public sector capacity that comes with that. However, that requires give and take on both sides.

On the question of follow-through from consultation feedback, it sounds—certainly from your written submission—as though the national planning framework 4 process was perhaps quite a good example of that. Did you feel that you were getting some kind of direct response to what you were feeding in that said, “Yes, that has now been adopted,” or that explained why it had not been adopted?

I welcome your reading that out and putting it on the record. Bearing in mind the evidence that has been submitted to all of us in various guises at various points, how confident are you that the present reality reflects that?

Thank you, convener—not at all; those questions and answers were all important and useful for our evidence.

My line of questioning relates primarily to transport provision for secure accommodation. The questions will be mostly for Tony Buchanan, in the first instance.

You are probably aware of the evidence that we heard in previous sessions from secure accommodation providers, who laid out the complete absence, essentially, of transportation provision based in Scotland. They cited some examples, including worst-case scenarios whereby young people needed to be transported from one side of Glasgow to the other, or from Montrose to Ninewells hospital, and the transport provision had to come from Portsmouth or at least from somewhere in the midlands or somewhere else far south of here.

I presume that the local authority has to deal with the matter and find transportation provision. Why do you think that the situation is happening? Is it a case of market failure in Scotland, or is it something else that means that nobody is providing the service here?

Thank you. If anybody else on the panel wants to come in, they should feel free to indicate.

On the point about the centres themselves providing transport, what is currently blocking that? One way or another, transport needs to be paid for; at present, separate private providers are being paid to do it. Presumably, in an ideal world, the money that is being used for that could simply be reallocated and go straight to the centres, which would provide the service. It is obviously not as simple as that, so what is currently preventing the centres from putting on transport provision themselves?

I am keen to move on to talk about the COSLA-led working group and how we get to those solutions, but, first, given that evidence of such experiences is coming up monthly, as Ben Farrugia said, we face the issue of how to report it. My question is for Tony Buchanan initially. Are local authorities confident that, when a secure transport provider has had to physically restrain a child for whatever reason and by whatever method, the local authority responsible for that child is being informed of that? Are you confident that there is a consistent reporting mechanism for those instances? Does that vary by local authority? Are individual authorities making policy about what that reporting should look like, or is there something national?