Local Government and Communities Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Official Report 650KB pdf

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Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 (Parts 2, 3 and 5)

Item 3 is subordinate legislation. The committee will undertake its second evidence session on parts 2, 3 and 5 of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015.

Nine Scottish statutory instruments relating to part 2, on community planning, and part 5, on asset transfer requests, were laid before the Parliament on 10 November 2016. Further SSIs relating to part 3, on participation requests, are expected to be laid later in the year and therefore evidence relating to that section will refer to regulations that are currently in draft form and will feed into its formal scrutiny of the final instruments.

I welcome Assistant Chief Constable Andy Cowie of local policing north, Police Scotland; Sandra Holmes, community assets sector lead, Highlands and Islands Enterprise; Iona Colvin, director of health and social care North Ayrshire, NHS Ayrshire and Arran; Bruce Kiloh, head of policy and planning, Strathclyde partnership for transport; and Richard Davison, strategic manager, Scottish Natural Heritage.

Given the size of the witness panel, we are not having any opening statements from witnesses this morning. We will move straight to questions.

Welcome, witnesses. The SSIs that we are looking at relate to community planning and asset transfer, and there is a draft SSI on participation requests. How significant in general terms are the powers that are contained in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 for your organisation’s work? What do you think are the benefits and some of the challenges in implementing the new legislation?

I will kick off.

Sandra Holmes was the first to catch my eye. Just a note to the witnesses: I can be a bit absent-minded so please make an effort to catch my eye and I will not ignore you.

We very much welcome the direction of travel, which encourages us to continue to support communities and make any engagements that we have with communities meaningful and relevant to them. HIE has a unique remit that includes working alongside communities as well as undertaking work to promote businesses. We see the step change in having the statutory framework. We need to give communities confidence that, when they engage with us, we will give their input due consideration, reflect on it and engage appropriately with them.

I think that the act builds on some of the duties that we have under the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014. As the director of health and social care, I am interested in how we can develop those duties. In North Ayrshire and in Ayrshire and Arran, we have been developing a locality planning approach. That is a significant piece of work that we have done both in the community planning partnership and in the health and social care partnership, and it is really about the delivery of the health service in the community. Building on that, we have had a number of successful locality planning events that have fed into the development of our strategic plan for the priorities for health and social care as well as more widely into the community planning partnership. We are building in that direction and are trying to meld that together along with the requirement under the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014 to involve professionals—particularly general practitioners and other health professionals—in determining those priorities.

We have now established locality planning with the involvement of GPs and integration joint board members, who are a range of people from elected members of the council to staff representatives who chair those committees. That has been an interesting development, in which communities identify their priorities alongside medical practitioners and other practitioners who deliver the services and feed into the whole area of our communities of interest. We have had a number of participatory budgeting events and, in the spring, we will have a communities of interest event on mental health, because mental health has emerged as a significant issue for every community in North Ayrshire. The legislation may then allow that to develop further into looking at the delivery of some of those services in the future and the ownership of some of the assets.

One word that comes to mind is “opportunity”. We are using the new act to build on the strong partnership ethos that we have had going right back to 2003, when community planning came into being. I would anchor that against two particular things. First, we should simplify some of the bureaucracy within planning. As you are well aware, under the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012, there is a requirement for local policing plans in the 32 local authority areas. We have seized the opportunity of the local outcome improvement plans that came out of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 to simplify that so that, instead of our having silo organisational local policing plans, the direction of travel is to have in use local policing plans that are much more integrated or part of the LOIPs, as they are called. That simplifies the matter and makes us more authentic as an organisation. We would kid ourselves if we thought that we solve any problems on our own; working together has been the tradition in Scotland. We have seized the opportunity to make it simpler for us and for our partners to work together to deliver wider community benefit. That is one opportunity.

The other issue is localism and the need to be responsive to local communities. The participation options and requirements on us build on the direction that we want to move in, which is about empowering our officers and staff in the organisation to be more responsive to local challenges and opportunities. There is a real chance to build on some of the strengths. We see that there is already a lot of strength in community engagement, but the act takes it to the next level. It is not about forgetting those strengths but about enhancing them and moving them forward to the next level.

Thanks for the opportunity to come and speak to the committee this morning. You may be aware that SPT has been a statutory community planning partner since 2003. We have found community planning to be a useful process that has enabled us to engage not only with local communities and third sector bodies but with the wider council family. We have been glad to be part of that process over the past 13 years.

One of the ways in which we have done that is through producing annual transport outcome reports, which provide detailed information for each local area. They are available to all members of the CPP and councillors and we put them up on our website. That is just our way of demonstrating the value locally of the SPT services that we provide. For example, you will be aware that transport is strategic and cross-boundary buses often do not observe local authority boundaries, so it is sometimes a challenge for us to get things down to the local level. That is something that we are very aware of as we go into locality planning.That is something that we try to convey. For example, we run the Glasgow subway and, although it is based in Glasgow, people from other council areas use it. People in North Lanarkshire, for example, get the benefit of it.

11:00  

The current community planning system works well for us. We welcome the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. Our wee note of concern is that we are a strategic, regional and cross-boundary organisation so we sound a note of caution about our ability and that of other regional and national bodies to break things down to the local level to demonstrate the value that we are delivering in a local area.

We, too, welcome the broader and stronger framework that the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 provides. We have always felt that community involvement, engagement and empowerment are important from the environmental point of view. A lot of communities do good work around environmental issues. We therefore hope that the framework and the rights for community bodies to get more involved in those sorts of issues is really powerful.

The legislation is not without one or two challenges from our point of view. A bit like SPT, SNH is a national body and we have to deal with a lot of communities and local authorities and all community planning partnerships. It is very much an opportunity rather than a challenge. There are far more opportunities coming out of the legislation to put the environment more at the centre in how community planning partnerships work.

That gives us a context. Mr Wightman, do you want to drill down on some of that?

I have a couple of specific points, but I might come back in with them later.

Okay.

In our earlier evidence session, we looked at asset transfer requests. When we were thinking about local authorities, it was quite easy to think about what such requests might mean. We have a variety of organisations that we have in front of us today and I am interested to know if you have thought about what the legislation might mean for the facilities or land that you have. Have you given any thought to assets that the community might be interested in taking control or ownership of?

Absolutely, convener. We are grateful to colleagues in the Scottish Government who took account of our views in the legislation. For example, Glasgow subway is an operational piece of railway. We would not want somebody requesting that one of the stations was transferred to them, although we do try to work with local communities, obviously. There are national strategic pieces of infrastructure that need to be protected. I include the subway and our bus stations in that.

We have other land available and we will happily put it up on our website to let people know about it. You will be aware that it can sometimes take many years to deliver the planning and funding for transport projects, and it is important to remember that we might want to hold on to a piece of land because of a wider or longer-term strategic need for it. For example, old rail solums might need to be opened up some time in the future, or pieces of land might be needed for a park and ride.

There are huge opportunities for local communities. We would like to see a strong emphasis and responsibility placed on the community body when it is applying to an organisation such as ours or to anyone else to show that there is a clear demonstrable need for that land, a good governance structure in that community body, and something that gives us some reassurance in dealing with that organisation from a legal point of view. We welcome the opportunity that the legislation provides but, from the strategic transport of view, we are keen to protect our infrastructure.

In our case the main assets for transfer would be nature reserves and the buildings that we own. Last week, our board approved a rural land asset management plan—quite a long title—which reviewed all the nature reserves that we own, looking at the opportunities for engaging with communities about the transfer of assets to them and the sorts of issues that would arise from that. We are adopting what we hope is a pretty positive and proactive approach to that.

When asset transfer is talked about generally, people tend to think about local authority assets that are surplus to requirements. Things are changing on to a new footing, very much putting the power in the hands of communities to come forward to any public authority with requests not only to purchase but to lease, use or occupy public assets, buildings or land at any time in the future.

HIE has quite an extensive property portfolio, mainly built assets, and they are very much productive assets for us; we do not really have anything that we would deem to be surplus. We have a range of business units, most of which are units that we have constructed and we then seek tenants to come in and create economic opportunities. We also have sites for development that we are looking at quite strategically in order to get the most productive use out of them, and we have a range of operational offices as well.

Recently, in April 2016, we amended our disposals policy to better reflect the forthcoming requirements of asset transfer. We have introduced best-value decision making when we seek to dispose of our assets. We frequently put assets on to the market, and our default position has always been, when we have a tenant in one of our buildings, to offer the asset to the tenant at market-value terms. It is important to recognise that businesses develop economic and social benefits, as do communities.

The asset transfer policy that we introduced is that, if there is a community interest in any of the assets that we are seeking to sell or lease, we will take a best-value judgment in our decision making, taking account of the wider non-financial benefits that the bidders are going to take forward and including businesses alongside communities in that.

In one example, when we were seeking to lease an asset, we went through the process and we received only one bid, which was from a community organisation. The lease went to that community through the asset transfer process. We currently have a live case in which we have one business interest and two community interests in a single piece of ground; we are just going through the assessment process for that.

HIE has also provided grant assistance to communities to secure assets, either from us or from other private and public organisations. We supported a community in Tiree to purchase a business unit from us. They now have their own premises in that business unit and they also have other tenants—it is a way of generating income for the local community.

It is important to see that these are productive assets as well as surplus assets, but productive assets can do very well in community hands, as well as in other hands.

Thank you. Does Iona Colvin or Andy Cowie want to follow up on any of that?

Yes. Again there is an opportunity for us. To provide context, as the convener has referred to, the new chief constable has put in place collaborative work to develop a 10-year strategy, which is called the 2026 strategy. That looks at what service we are seeking to deliver with communities and partners in future, and it will be going out for public consultation in January or February 2017.

The estate is an enabler of service delivery; it is not the other way round. Therefore, as an organisation we are looking—internally, first of all—at where the current demands are for the estate, from the public and ourselves, and from that we are working through a huge number of collaborative opportunities, in which we can share roofs and work closer together with other public sector bodies and other people. We have seen examples, such as a community hub in Aberdeen, and there are all sorts of opportunities out there.

We are seeking to gain early change opportunities, and there are a number of consultations out and about with people, looking at that locally. However, given the geography of Scotland, we will always need to have bases for our officers to patrol from. They need to turn up, change into their uniforms, get their gear on and then out they go. We will always need a wide geographic spread of such bases.

The Scottish Police Authority owns all our premises, so the decision on what happens with them in the longer term is one for it. At the moment, we are looking at our estate and, on the back of the public consultation on the 2026 strategy, once we are clear and agreed in Scotland about what we are trying to do as a police service, we will have to look at the estate again. That will be coming out for wider public consultation in 2017. We have more than 420 operational buildings the length and breadth of Scotland and we will build the asset transfer policies into the processes for that to make sure that they are encompassed.

Does Iona Colvin have a view on how we should look at health and social care partnerships in the context of asset transfer? Where would they sit?

The work that we are doing with all our partners in communities is going in that direction. For example, we work with all the partners on the island of Arran to look at the totality of the assets that are owned by the national health service and the council—none of it is owned by the partnership—and how we will use them in future. We are looking at how we use the hospital on Arran in particular.

As we go forward, we can see different opportunities for parts of the estate to be used by the community. NHS Highland has done quite a lot of work in that regard; it has done a number of community asset transfers for its services. For example, in Lochinver and another couple of places in Highland, it has worked with community groups to look at those groups taking ownership of and running services in more isolated communities. We want to look at and learn from that work as we move forward with the model.

Okay—that is very helpful.

I have a number of bids from members for supplementary questions. We are trying to stick with asset transfer, so that we can cover it as a theme. Alexander Stewart is first. Is your question on asset transfer, or should I take it later?

It covers asset transfer.

It covers asset transfer, or it is on asset transfer?

It is on asset transfer.

Okay—thanks.

I have a specific question for Assistant Chief Constable Cowie. In your submission, you talk about

“responding to the needs of communities that lie at the heart of Police Scotland”.

I think that we would expect you to say that in your submission—if it was not in there, we would be wondering why. In your previous answer, you went into the complexities around the buildings that you have across your estate. That opens up some real challenges for you, but it also opens up some real opportunities.

I am aware that negotiation and consultation are taking place in some communities. There has been some criticism, because some people see the situation as an erosion, a removal or a loss. The question is how you balance things. In certain communities, the existing estate brought confidence in your role and responsibilities. If things change and there is a removal, a loss or an erosion, there is also an impact on the community, and you are left trying to manage that. Your views on that would be interesting.

The question is, quite rightly, framed around service—and erosion of service—because service is delivered by people, not by buildings. I suppose that we all have to manage something—whether it is a household budget or an organisational budget. If we are occupying only one of three floors in a building and it is costing us an arm and a leg because it leaks like a sieve, it makes no sense to maintain that building if there is a smarter and more collaborative option in the vicinity. That is what we are seeking to seize in these change opportunities, as we depict them.

It is important to remember that it is still local officers who will be deployed to help members of the public. Ninety-five per cent of our calls come in by telephone, and officers are then deployed. The feedback that we get is that people want to see the officers and have that service delivered.

It is absolutely a balancing act. We need to be able to fulfil our statutory duty but there may be a wider public benefit with an asset transfer. That is one of the questions that we are exploring with Government officials. Apparently, it is down to the accountable officer within the SPA to decide what is best value: public benefit versus the requirement to maintain our statutory function and receive capital receipts. That is going to be challenging. We can envisage a situation in which there are a couple of competitive community bids for premises or for a lease. How would we weigh up the public benefit in such a situation?

As previous speakers have said, I think that a lot of that thinking will evolve as we go through some of the early examples. It is about service delivery and how we can do that in a joined-up way within the budget that we have.

11:15  

We still have lots of questions on asset transfer.

I have a question for Sandra Holmes. One of the concerns that was raised in evidence last week was the horrendous amount of time that it takes to negotiate some transfers.

We heard of one local authority case in which, apparently, there was a willing buyer and a willing seller but five years later nothing had happened. You obviously have a lot of experience in the Highlands and Islands. What are you doing to overcome that problem so that community organisations do not become disheartened by the length of time that it takes to negotiate a transfer?

It is fair to say that some community acquisitions or asset transfers are measured in months and years rather than weeks. It really depends on where the community is starting from. If a community has a very clear, identified need that it can articulate, identifies an asset that can help it to meet that need locally and negotiates with a willing seller, things can go through quite quickly. However, it invariably takes the community some time to develop its case. That is where HIE, alongside our partners, can really help with community capacity building. That is a big part of the process.

The asset transfer provisions provide a framework for authorities to work to, but that is not the only route. If a public authority is looking to dispose of an asset, it is not mandatory for it to go down the asset transfer route; it can still be a willing seller. There is nothing at all to prevent something from being done really quickly.

However, if communities put forward an asset transfer request, the authority has to deal with that request and cannot dispose of the asset to any other organisation in the interim. That gives communities a lot of power in guiding and controlling the conversations. For me, the benefit to communities of asset transfer is having that engagement and that better traction with public authorities over access to buildings—it might be that a lease or just use of a building is appropriate.

Communities tend to have aspirations for ownership, which can bring them long-term benefits. A lot of the work that we do in HIE involves providing assistance on the funding side to enable a purchase to go ahead. Alongside colleagues in the Big Lottery Fund, we administer the Scottish land fund on behalf of the Scottish Government. There is a budget of £10 million for the current financial year to facilitate asset transfer and other purchases, perhaps involving the private sector as well. Asset transfer brings benefits.

I have read the evidence that the Development Trusts Association Scotland provided last week. It is vital that communities take the time that they need to prepare and do the relevant business planning. As soon as they take on a lease or, in particular, ownership, they take on responsibility. It is important that they get the right asset and that they have the means to manage and maintain it over the long term.

Fundamentally, this is all about delivering improved outcomes. There are lots and lots of communities across Scotland—including many in the Highlands and Islands—that have demonstrated very effectively that it can be done. I think that taking time to prepare and get all the ducks in a row is a very big indicator of successful community ownership of an asset. It is not a process that you would want to shortcut; going through it enables communities to look at things openly and do proper business planning.

I thank the panel for joining us. My first question is a general question that perhaps comes in on the back of what Sandra Holmes has just said. While the witnesses are thinking about it, I will ask Assistant Chief Constable Cowie a specific question.

We have heard in evidence that exploring an interest in an asset can be an expensive process for communities. At what point do you think that the asset should be frozen? There is some concern that a community can spend its funding to explore an interest and draw up business plans and so on, but before it finalises the process of getting the asset, the asset has already been disposed of. In addition to the rules that already exist, there must be a point at which it would make sense to freeze the asset. I will leave that question there.

My specific question for Assistant Chief Constable Cowie relates to the Police Scotland submission, which says:

“Legal clauses will also be required to ensure that a community group cannot obtain premises under the Act and then sell later at a substantial profit.”

I would like to explore that a bit more with him. Some local authorities might have assets that were gifted to the public sector—for example, Carnegie libraries or parks—but which they sell at a profit to the private sector. In what way would it be different if a community took on an asset? Why should it not then be allowed to sell the asset later at a profit? Would it be different if it were to put that profit back into the community? Why can public bodies sell such assets at substantial profits?

Assistant Chief Constable Cowie, we will come to you last to answer that point. That will give you more time to think of an answer.

Who would like to come in first on the more general question?

I will happily speak to that. I am comfortable with how the legislation provides for the freezing of an asset. We need to get a balance between the opportunities for communities and the day-to-day operation of a public authority’s management of its asset portfolio.

In some cases, there can be an active property market in terms of selling assets on, and in its contribution to the consultation, HIE was keen to express the need for asset transfer not to interfere with the property market. Organisations—whether they are community organisations or businesses—that seek to purchase an asset go through a big process, which gets stymied by a late asset transfer request coming in once the asset has been marketed. That has consequences. Because communities can act at any time under the asset transfer provisions, the idea is that they should be proactive and engage with us at an early stage so that we can enter meaningful dialogue. The guidance clearly encourages communities to come forward at a pre-application stage, but the asset transfer process does not take effect until we get a full asset transfer request.

The community right-to-buy provisions are also open to applications for public authority assets, so there are a range of opportunities for communities to secure assets. However, we need a balance and I am comfortable with the way in which asset transfer is provided for in the legislation.

Does Iona Colvin want to add anything?

It is not really my strong point.

Do not feel under pressure to comment.

The issue is the bit between the operational business and the ability to dispose of the estate and consider opportunities. We are working proactively with our local communities to identify need and we hope that a community asset transfer request would grow naturally from that work rather than come out of the blue.

It might be different for a health and social care partnership, which does not own the assets. It is a partnership, after all.

Part of the responsibility should rest with organisations such as SPT. As I said, certain assets—for example, pieces of land—might appear to be unused but be reserved for some future strategic transport use, such as a new rail line or new road. There should be a responsibility on organisations such as SPT to be absolutely clear about the future potential uses of an asset when we put information on our websites or when people are looking up a particular asset or checking the assets that an organisation has available. We should also be clear about the statutory basis for that, such as whether it is included in a local development plan, the strategic development plan or our regional transport strategy. I do not pretend to be an expert on property transactions, but I think that there is an opportunity there, so that when community bodies look at our assets, they can see clearly that an asset may appear to be available but has a potential future use for a strategic transport reason.

We agree that the legislation is right about the point at which an asset is frozen. Much of this is about providing support to communities in developing their ideas and proposals. When we have supported community land buyouts in the Outer Hebrides, we have provided a lot of environmental advice to help those community bodies generate good-quality business plans to oversee the transfer of the assets. We have to build that up.

The other element is that it should not really be a closed process up to the point at which the formal request is made. At your meeting last week, Ruchir Shah called for more openness and transparency, and we agree that that is the way forward.

I have a brief comment. We are involved in a live case where we are seeking to dispose of a commercial asset—it is an example of where public authorities can go beyond what is in the legislation. In the area where the asset is situated there is a very active community landowning development trust, and we have engaged with that trust to see whether it would have any interest in the asset before we enter further discussions on the transfer. There are things that we can do when we know the communities and their aspirations and what the local development plans are. We can be proactive, which goes beyond what the legislation requires of us, and we have embraced that approach.

We have eventually reached you, Mr Cowie, so I am sure that we will get a fulsome answer.

Is that the nod?

Yes.

I will give you the simple police officer’s answer to the question, from my understanding of the technicalities. On timing, our experience of the past few years is that it takes about 12 to 18 months, beginning from the thought that a property may be surplus, going through the consultation and the governance issues—both internally and with the Scottish Police Authority—and finally disposing of the asset, which, depending on the market conditions, can take a few months or 18 months to two years. Given that the whole process is quite elongated, the guidance on freezing an asset would not be particularly hard to bear.

I suppose that the other question was about best value. I do not want to talk about specific examples, but I have two general comments to make. Some of our surplus estate could bring a certain amount back into the public purse in capital receipts if we sell it as is—for example, as an old building that has not been used for two or three years. In such a case, the developer would buy it, knock it down, get planning consent for a shopping mall or something and reap a huge dividend. However, with a small bit of investment, the SPA could get the planning permission and the market value of the asset would be significantly higher, so the public purse would benefit more.

I have to be careful about what I say about huge capital assets, because some are well known and are still under negotiation. If a developer buys a massive property and makes a huge profit selling it on within a certain time period, a condition of the sale is that some of the money has to come back to the public purse. That is a general comment.

Translating that into an asset transfer request situation, the community body would make the case that there is public benefit to the transfer and make a lower bid than might come in from a private individual or company. We have to consider where that public benefit has gone if, in a couple of years’ time, the asset were sold for significantly more. We need to follow that thinking through so as to be consistent in respect of the public benefit. We are not seeking to say no to everything, but we want to make sure that the rationale for any sale is defensible.

We need to explore that further to see how such a clause would work for community groups if an asset was sold to them. Who would they pay that money back to if they were to sell the asset later? That needs more thinking about.

I am also concerned about leasing. We have had some evidence that the whole asset transfer process might make leasing more complicated than it is now. Do you have any views on that?

It would be complicated, in that the lease is between parties—who is it leased to and from—and, largely, that would not involve Police Scotland or the SPA; we lease properties from other people. It would need to be clear to community groups from the asset register that there would be no point in putting time and effort into a bid to lease something that we do not own.

11:30  

Two members still want to ask questions on asset transfer. We are going to move on to planning in a moment, Ms Maguire, I promise you.

My question will be very quick. Last week, we heard evidence that, if a public body is not as engaged in the process as Highlands and Islands Enterprise, it could quite easily wriggle out of asset transfer requests. Do you agree with that?

I have a follow-up question that relates to what Elaine Smith said. She suggested that bodies could make profits. However, what if a bid fails? Who takes on the asset if a community body has taken it on but the whole transfer collapses?

Mr Kiloh and Mr Davison were scribbling away furiously while that question was being asked.

I was just making sure that I did not lose track of the question.

Public bodies have to enter into the spirit of the legislation. I talked earlier about the cross-boundary nature of transport and the strategic nature—and, as we are all aware, the long-term nature—of some of the infrastructure projects that we carry out. There must be an acknowledgement that we will keep an eye on our assets as well as those of other agencies—councils and so on—for the long-term future infrastructure requirements of the transport network, as it could potentially lead to difficulties if they were transferred to community transport bodies.

I do not think that the spirit of the legislation is there for public bodies to wriggle out of it. As other panel members have said, it has to be the responsibility of the organisation to be transparent, open and clear on its website or when it publishes information that it or another agency—Transport Scotland, councils from a transport point of view, Network Rail and so on—may have a future use for an asset. That is the spirit that we must enter into, being as up front as we possibly can be, which is what we generally try to do.

When a transfer to a community body works and it makes a profit, that is for other people to talk about. However, we have discussed before what happens if it fails. Does the responsibility fall back on the agency that sold the asset? Does it fall back on the local council? In the current financial climate for local government, things are particularly challenging. Notwithstanding the resource implications in terms of staff, as long as there is good communication between the organisations and a clear monitoring of the use of the asset by the community body that has taken control of it, that should work. It is very much wait and see for some of this, and we will have to see what happens in the future.

I understand the argument about a public body wriggling out of its responsibilities, but there are a couple of things that need to be considered in practice. First, the policy presumption behind the legislation is pretty clear: the process is to support community empowerment and make it happen. We see asset transfer for community empowerment as being very much a force for good rather than a negative, because we want to see more communities looking after the environment throughout Scotland.

Secondly, there might be a bit of an issue around how an asset transfer request is assessed and the criteria that are used. In our case, it is hard to think of an example where we would say no. However, if a community wanted to buy a piece of land in a nature reserve with the long-term aim of planting a lot of trees, which would ruin its purpose as a nature reserve, that might be a legitimate reason to say that, in that form, the project was not doable. I would not class that as wriggling out, though; it would be an honest assessment of the implications for why the land was an asset in the first place.

Are there any other comments?

I will be brief. In terms of wriggling out, the default position is to agree to the request unless you have justified reasons not to. The process is open and transparent.

There is also a robust appeals process built into the legislation. If the community organisation is not satisfied either because it has been rejected or because it does not agree with the terms and conditions under which the asset is being offered by the public authority, it can appeal.

It is important to realise and accept that failure will happen, although it has not been a regular occurrence in community asset ownership projects. If the asset goes into community ownership and the community organisation suffers some form of failure, what would happen to the asset really depends on how the organisation is constituted in its governing documents. Once all the liabilities are dealt with, and depending on what is in the constitution, the asset will usually transfer to a similar organisation. If the organisation has been set up to comply with various parts of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016, ministers would have a role in determining what that organisation might be. The organisation will be no different from any other organisation—it will have dissolution clauses and the assets will have to be accounted for.

Failure is not a regular occurrence, but that is not to say that it does not happen.

What if there is not a similar organisation to step in?

It depends on how the organisation is set up, but sometimes the default position is that it could fall back to the Scottish ministers.

We can ask for more information about that when we have the minister here.

The final question on asset transfer—even if it provokes further questions from members before we move on to something else—is from Andy Wightman.

I have a brief question on registers of land. Under section 94 of the 2015 act, you have a duty to

“establish and maintain a register of land”.

Is everyone on time to do that by 23 January? Are there any issues around that?

My second question is specifically for HIE. You have leased the Cairngorm estate to a company called Natural Retreats since 2014. In that context, was there any attempt to do an asset transfer?

You can answer that question last, perhaps, as we did with Mr Cowie. The first question was a more general question about the register of land.

Yes, we are on track for completing that.

Yes.

Just for the record, I see nodding heads. Iona Colvin, this might not apply to your organisation, because it does not hold assets.

I am also a director of the health board and of the council, and the answer is yes for both.

Depending on what hat you are wearing, the answer is yes.

Yes—unless it is the integration joint board hat, in which case the answer is that it is nothing to do with me.

That is helpful.

Yes, we are also on track with that.

I am sorry; I thought that Sandra Holmes would have more time to craft an answer.

I was not close to the lease, Mr Wightman. The land that we have at Cairngorm includes the funicular. We are quite a localised organisation and we have local area teams, so the local team will have engaged with the local community.

From memory, I do not think that there was any desire from within the community to get involved in taking on the asset and delivering it. I will check that and come back to you with more detail.

Thanks.

I would like to hear a bit about part 2 of the act—the community planning aspect of things. I welcome the forthcoming specific focus on tackling inequality. I guess that that will sit more comfortably with some organisations than it will with others, so I am keen to hear your thoughts on that.

I imagine that, around the country, CPPs will be at quite different points and there might still be a need for a bit of a culture change in some of them. I would like to hear your reflections on whether there is a need for more clarity around accountability and performance among partners in the CPP.

Who would like to start us off? Mr Davidson, you are making eye contact with me.

Yes—at the wrong time. [Laughter.]

Especially in urban community planning partnership areas, where a lot of inequalities exist, you might wonder why Scottish Natural Heritage wants to be involved, but we see urban populations and improving access to good-quality nature and green space as being vitally important to reducing some of the inequalities to do with health and physical activity, for example. We welcome the focus on inequalities.

That is not without challenges for an organisation such as SNH, given that much of our staff resource and funding are outwith urban areas. However, we are moving towards our European regional development fund green infrastructure project, which is looking at ways to improve the quality of green space in some of the poorer areas in Scotland.

Although we were not a statutory community planning partner until the new act came in, for a long time we have recognised the value of getting involved in community planning partnerships and trying to put the environment into their thinking, agendas and priorities. It is not necessarily about getting an environmental outcome in a LOIP, a locality plan or a single outcome agreement; it is basically about showing how nature can help to deliver health benefits.

Even without being a statutory partner, we have been engaged to a greater or lesser extent with about 15 community planning partnerships out of the 32, either through groups or as full members of the CPP boards. We would expect that to increase steadily over time as the governance core of the CPPs starts to bring in what are now statutory community planning partners. We are ready to support that.

It is very much accepted that transport can play one of the main roles in tackling inequality and ensuring that the most deprived areas of our communities can have the same access to opportunities as others. That is something that SPT is continually focused on, particularly when bus services might be withdrawn and there are no services after 6 o’clock or at the weekend. That can sometimes be a very local issue, but it can also have an impact on the much wider transport network. Again, I make a plea for an understanding of the strategic regional and cross-boundary nature of transport. Just like inequality, transport does not observe local authority boundaries, wards or whatever locality areas we are talking about.

I am told that, so far, there are about 30 local outcome improvement areas across six councils in the west of Scotland. We would be looking at providing a regional response to some of that so that people can get the bigger picture of what is happening in the wider area, as well as specifically in their local area.

With regard to community planning, as with anything, there is always an opportunity for greater transparency and accountability. We have benefited from community planning. I was talking about this with Iona Colvin earlier, because there is dialogue going on between our organisations about improving transport access to healthcare in her area. That is the type of thing that comes out of community planning—as long as it is followed up and there is a formal process to ensure that the action is taken forward.

The committee will be aware that, over the past two or three years, one of our big things has been the west of Scotland community transport network, which is a hugely useful way of adding to the transport network, particularly for those deprived areas. It is very community led and something that we have been able to promote and really sell at the community planning partnerships across the west of Scotland. The west of Scotland community transport network is the first of its kind in Scotland, and it sets the standard that we expect from community transport operators and allows us to invest in them.

Huge opportunities have come out of community planning and we can build on those for the future. SPT will most certainly try to do that.

Iona Colvin was namechecked there. Do you want to add anything?

It is a good example and I really welcome this approach. I am not trying to teach granny to suck eggs, but in health and social care we are often dealing with the consequence of inequalities, and one of the things that we are doing with the integrated joint board and in partnership with community planning is highlighting the consequences of those inequalities for our communities. In areas such as North Ayrshire, East Ayrshire or even South Ayrshire, those consequences are quite different in the individual communities.

11:45  

For example, there is an area in which one part of the community is relatively well-off and lives longer while, in another part, people suffer ill health for long periods of time. That has meant that the demand on health and social care has been phenomenal and the increase in demand over the past couple of years has been remarkable.

Part of the work of the community planning partnership is about unearthing that and showing it for what it is, and working with other community planning partners to see what they are doing about it. After all, it is not just about health and social care responses; it is about transport and people getting jobs, because we know that, generally, when people get jobs—although there is an issue with low income—their health and wellbeing improves, as does the health and wellbeing of their children. It is also about childcare, education and attainment. It is about all those things.

In North Ayrshire, we have developed fair for all, which is an inequality strategy that puts a demand on all the community planning partnerships to look at our issues through an inequality lens to see whether an action is going to make things better or worse for people. Is the situation going to be improved for people who are the worst off and the most excluded in the area? In an area that has suffered badly through the recession, how will we shift the position of people who are experiencing the worst of the inequalities gap?

The inclusion agenda is very relevant to the work of HIE. We look at the disparity of opportunity across our region, particularly in the more remote and rural communities. Often, inequality is about a multitude of factors that are very deep rooted, and we cannot overcome those issues in isolation, as has been mentioned. Community planning can make a big difference by focusing on inequalities.

HIE does not tend to engage with individuals or service users who are at extreme risk, but we contribute to the wider environment to create better and wider opportunities to bring people out of disadvantage through employment, social enterprises and so on.

As the person responsible for policing from Perth northwards, I echo Sandra Holmes’s comments. My perspective is that rural deprivation can be different from urban deprivation but just as impactful. As we take forward locality planning, that is a difficult challenge, because the definition in the act talks about 30,000 people. If you take the example of Shetland, people there feel that the more remote islands are the most unequal locality and the one with the poorest outcomes. Those islands have nowhere near 30,000 people, but their inhabitants still feel that the principles of the act should be used to address that.

The vulnerabilities focus of Police Scotland will pick up and emphasise outcomes and inequalities. After all, 80 per cent of calls to us are not related to crime—they are about vulnerability, whether that is missing people, mental health or repeat victimisation. Vulnerability and inequality are very much in our sights.

The second part of Ruth Maguire’s question, if I recall correctly, was about accountability. As you would expect for a hierarchical organisation, accountability is one of our watchwords. I will anchor that in an example in Perth and Kinross, where five localities have been identified within the community planning partnership. The local community planning partnership has been renamed as an action partnership in order to focus everybody’s minds on what it is about, which is action, rather than talking about action.

One of our local chief inspectors is responsible for chairing one of the action partnerships—it is not a police-only function; it extends right across the board. It is working with the community choices fund, which receives funds from the Government that are matched by the local authority, so it is doing participatory budgeting. Our locality team is involved. Identifiable officers—from constable to sergeant to inspector—are named as being accountable for taking forward some of those actions. That is developmental for our staff, and we think that that is what our organisational effort and energy should be focused on delivering. That is just one example—we could give you many more from around Scotland.

Thank you for those answers. I just want to come back to the rest of the panel on the point about accountability and performance and hear whether they think that there is a need for a bit of clarity around that. It is good to hear that everyone is working well and to hear the good examples of where that is making a difference. However, on that specific point, do you think that more is needed, or are you comfortable that the public would be content with the arrangements as they are?

The outcome for improving on inequality sits with the health and social care partnerships and is a national outcome against which we are measured. It has always been one that has troubled me somewhat. As I said earlier, although there are things that we can do through health and social care, particularly through health improvement activities, they very much need to be done with other public bodies. We are looking at how we align those outcomes in relation to the LOIP to ensure that the outcome on improving on inequality sits with the wider community planning partnership as well as with health and social care.

It is not that I am trying to duck the outcome, because I am not. However, we know that more jobs in North Ayrshire will make a greater difference than more healthcare. There needs to be a very clear focus, though, and it is not an easy area to tackle as the research is mixed. However, we know that if we take action in certain areas, we will make a difference. That has been the focus in North Ayrshire and probably also in East Ayrshire. Some of it is about transport—what we do around roads and transport has been proved to make a difference to the inequalities agenda. The issue of jobs, which I mentioned, is important, as is the position of women and the issue of childcare, which the Government is trying to tackle just now and which obviously makes a difference.

I welcome the fact that we will all have some responsibility for the incorporation of some individual outcomes in the wider outcomes for the community planning partnership.

Iona Colvin happily signposted Bruce Kiloh during that answer. I wonder whether he has a comment in relation to accountability.

Absolutely. The need for accountability has never been greater, given that there is probably less resource available now for local government. Partners such as our organisation, working with colleagues such as Iona Colvin in health boards and councils, need to maximise the return for our investment. For example, our budget for supporting local bus services has remained broadly static for the past few years at about £12 million a year. It is still a significant amount of money, but we have done various things to try to make it stretch further, and we now have the facts and figures to back up what we have been doing. For example, our MyBus service, which is our demand-responsive transport service, has more than half a million passengers a year and is easily the most popular DRT service in Scotland and one of the best in the United Kingdom. That shows the demand that is out there, and we can see that much wider benefits come from that service. The people who use our MyBus service are getting out and about to the shops or the bingo, for example, and are doing various other things that have a huge impact on their mental and physical health and their ability to socialise with people. Perhaps we could do more work to achieve further improvements in that sense from the impact of transport.

Earlier, I mentioned the argument that transport is good for reducing inequality. I think that that argument has been won, but we need to move it to the next stage and start to look at the wider impact of transport on our communities. It is a derived demand, because people want to go to a place to do something. The question in relation to our provision of transport for access to healthcare is what positive benefit it has beyond just getting somebody to the place that they are going to. There could be improvements in that area from greater monitoring of accountability and performance.

Richard Davidson and Sandra Holmes have not responded to the question. Please do not feel that you need to, but do you want to add anything?

The only thing that I would add is that the benefit of the changes in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 is that they broaden the range of organisations that are classed as statutory community planning partners. I think that there will be a period during which existing community planning partnerships come to terms with that and bring in those wider partners. As I mentioned earlier, we are already heavily involved with some community planning partnerships, but we have had little if any involvement with a number of others.

I suppose that one of the tests from our point of view is how the relationship or arrangement changes over a period of time, but I do not think that that needs formal review to be built in. It will be picked up over time, I would have thought.

Responsibility for community planning is now shared across all partners, which supports accountability, but it is also important to note that, under the outcome-focused approach, community planning partners will have to set out the difference that they intend to achieve under one, three and 10-year cycles and to report on progress towards that. That is a helpful way to demonstrate accountability as it involves active monitoring and reporting back on step changes to ensure that things are still on track for delivery of the outcomes.

We are coming to the end of our time, but there is a further topic that I think that we should ask about because it was a theme in last week’s evidence session, and that is participation requests. We could ask a number of questions about that, but we will not ask all of them because of the time.

There is a feeling that there needs to be a structure to participation requests but that we have to be careful that there is still flexibility in the system. Lots of groups and organisations are already working well with organisations such as the ones that are represented on our panel today, and we would not want participation requests to be seen as so rigid that they exclude or dissuade organisations or community groups that are already in the system from participating.

I suppose that, if we were to be cynical about it—not that I am being cynical, of course—once participation requests are so structured, if a certain organisation or group does not follow the rules as they are rigidly set out, participation can be denied to them. Any comments that you have on how bodies such as yours should handle participation requests and the regulations and guidelines that will be coming into force would be welcome, because they will tie in with last week’s evidence.

As you say, the principle of participation requests is difficult to deny. I return to the point that we are a regional strategic organisation that covers 12 council areas and 2.14 million people. Within that, there are about 81 active community councils in one local authority area, which is Glasgow. You will be aware of the major projects that we have been involved in over the years, including smart-card ticketing, subway modernisation and Fastlink. If a series of participation requests came in, it could be overwhelming, given the resource that we have and the staff time that would be required to assist those people in participating. That impact is our biggest concern.

As I said with regard to locality planning, we will seek to find a way to work with organisations, perhaps on a regional basis through another forum. When we consult local communities directly, for example on subway modernisation and the accessibility impacts for disabled people, we try to work with them in ways that suit them and also us, and we will try to use that approach in dealing with participation requests. We engage with local communities all the time, but we would be fearful of an overwhelming number of participation requests coming in for particular projects. I think that we would seek to deal with them on a regional basis.

Before I bring in the other witnesses, I note that this will be—you might be relieved to hear—your last opportunity to make a comment, so if there is anything else that you want to draw to the committee’s attention, now is a good time to do it, as we will wrap it up in the next few minutes. I will bring you all in whether or not you want to comment on participation requests, because this will be your final chance to make a comment to the committee.

12:00  

To a large extent, the change actually increases the pressure—although that might not be quite the right word—on public bodies to take informal approaches and engage much more with communities on the services that they provide. At the end of the day, part of me thinks that, if community bodies have to go through the full process of submitting a participation request, there may be something not quite right in how the services are designed and delivered in the first place.

Our approach is about being more positive and proactive at the informal end. I will illustrate that with an example. The Scottish Government has asked us to lead the implementation of the route map for the Scottish biodiversity strategy to 2020. We are aware that young people are quite disengaged from biodiversity issues, so we have been working with Young Scot on setting up a national youth advisory panel to guide us on what would work from its point of view, what connections should be made between young people and biodiversity, and how we improve outcomes for young people from that work. That has not required a formal participation request but it is an example of how public organisations must work more creatively and imaginatively with communities.

I have one final point, which goes back to community planning. One of the things that we would look for from community planning would be a place-making approach that combines at a local level what is being done through community planning and spatial development planning. There is a real advantage in bringing those elements closer together.

Evidence from the Christie commission shows that the more that we involve people in decision making around service design and delivery, the better it is. That applies to everything from community resilience and dealing with flooding right through to the routine stuff. We are keen to do that both externally and internally with our own staff. Having come through the trauma of a merger, we are now emerging on the other side and driving forward. We want to empower our staff to be more involved with their communities. We already have constables going to community councils to give reports and take feedback, and we see the new approach as just another aspect of that.

To pick up an earlier point, participation requests may come in if a service is seen to be failing to deliver outcomes. There is already a fairly broad church of people participating at a local level. We have to be very careful—that is where accountability and the annual report comes in—to look at whether we are actually delivering the service in question. We are absolutely comfortable with the change, and we see it as a big opportunity for us as we move forward.

HIE feels that we do a lot already on participation requests, but we can always do more. We are very connected to our communities—we have a strong local presence, so people can engage at a local level with someone whom they may know already. Many of our communities are already very empowered, and the test for us will be to see how participation requests can reach out to some communities that perhaps feel less able to engage in the process.

On the point that it would be a shame if participation requests made the process more complex, we find that it is all about having constructive dialogue and taking an approach that is appropriate for a community, and taking steps to ensure that we make that easy and transparent for everyone.

I would love to say that we are working so well with our communities that we will anticipate all participation requests. However, given that the new guidelines apply to communities of interest as well as geographical communities, it is inevitable that there will be some conflicting views at some point. For example, we have just consulted on changes to learning disability services, and we have heard very different views expressed by younger parents and older parents of young people with learning disabilities about the types of services that should be available and the approach that should be taken. It is likely that there will be some disagreements. The issue for us is how we deal with those as transparently as we can, and we need to set out that process transparently. Everybody needs to feel that their view has been heard.

We need to work on and think through quite quickly the interface between the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014, looking at the desire to include the people who use and provide health and social care services, and the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, so that we merge everything together.

I thank all our witnesses. On Iona Colvin’s point, time has defeated us just now—it has just gone 12 o’clock—but please do contact us if you want to present any more information in that regard. Indeed, I make that offer to all the witnesses, as we are continuing to take evidence on statutory instruments relating to the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015.

Before we move into private session, I put on record that, on 30 November, as part of its further consideration of the statutory instruments, the committee will hear from the Minister for Local Government and Housing, Kevin Stewart. I thank you all again for your attendance this morning. We now move into private session.

12:05 Meeting continued in private until 13:03.