Meeting of the Parliament 12 June 2014
I, too, am pleased to take part in today’s debate. Like others, I have expressed an interest in the cashback for communities programme for some time, through making freedom of information requests and asking questions in the chamber, and through the work of the Health and Sport Committee in respect of the programme’s accountability and outcomes and the impact that it has on communities.
We will hear a lot of examples today. I could recite many of the good ideas and good causes in my community. I have supported efforts to get cashback money, which have allowed good initiatives to take place. However, what we are discussing today is the first national evaluation of the programme’s outcomes. We all agree that cashback is a good idea, but the issue is how it has been working and how it could be made to work better, particularly for those communities that are hard pressed because of deprivation, poverty and associated crime.
I give a qualified welcome to this long-overdue evaluation of the programme, which has been produced seven years after the programme began, with £40 million already spent. The evaluation does not give us information about which children were reached, which communities were reached, where facilities have been set up and how that will transform that part of the community. It lumps together all the local authorities, when we know that within local authority boundaries there are extremes of crime and poverty; it does not give us any of that detail. The minister can stand up and make broad assertions such as, “Well, it’s solved crime”, but there is nothing in the evaluation that confirms any of those assertions.
Like Graeme Pearson, I am disappointed by the difficulty of getting information from the various partners over a long period of time. How is it possible that partners that are recipients of millions of pounds of public money are not subject to FOI requests in relation to that money? I simply pose the question.
Inspiring Scotland began its work in 2012. The concerns that I and others have raised regarding the lack of accountability, transparency and clear and consistent objectives in relation to the programme were confirmed in the evaluation. It was put in a very nice way, but the evaluation confirms that Inspiring Scotland had to tell organisations how to produce effective external evaluations of their programmes. Perhaps it would be useful to have some of that explanation here. It had to explain to organisations the difference between inputs, which is the money that goes in, outputs, which is the impact on communities, and outcomes. Goodness only knows what the evaluation found, given that all that had to be explained. The Government has not shared that information with us. I would like to see that information—in the first report to the Government—placed in the Scottish Parliament information centre for us all to see.
We need to learn lessons from the lack of financial accountability and strategy. I am not blaming the sports partners, because if an organisation is presented with money as a windfall and it is not asked to account for it very much, it will use that flexibility. I am not saying that the partners did anything criminal with the money, but did they use it to best effect to meet the objectives that have been set by reaching those communities?