Meeting of the Parliament 24 February 2016
I thank Jayne Baxter for her motion on the fairer Fife commission and for securing the opportunity to be here.
The debate has been quite fascinating for me as local government minister, because the fairer Fife commission is a wonderful example of a local authority leading a partnership approach and reconnecting with some of the spirit when—this was even before Beveridge—our local authorities were the pioneers and the experimenters at the forefront, before national Government had caught up fully with the need to deal with inequality. The term “municipal socialism” was fashionable in the early 20th century, but that sense of local authorities as champions for their areas, to advance wellbeing and to identify the ills in their local area, is an important one.
The fairer Fife commission’s work is remarkable in a number of ways. I have noted the division of the work into the four themes of paid and unpaid work, place, being well and life courses and transitions. That has produced a great piece of work. I will speak more about that in a moment.
The commission certainly has an impressive line-up. It has a series of people with distinguished and various backgrounds. I know one its members: Dr Jim McCormick. He sat with me on the commission on local tax reform to which he made a great contribution. Just as with that commission, the fairer Fife commission is not all about the people who sit on it; it is more important than that. Indeed, how it has worked—its participative approach—has been talked about.
I have been fascinated by my work on the commission on local tax reform and what I have seen from fairer Scotland and the fairer Fife commission about the sheer effect that having personal face-to-face contact with the people who have to live every day with the problems that we are trying to be solved can have.
To sit around a table and, as the commission did, to have people who are looked-after children, the users of food banks or people who have experienced sanctions to tell that story means the difference between knowledge and data, as Jayne Baxter eloquently put it.
In that way, the real experience can be understood with far greater colour than would otherwise be the case—and those colours are often stark ones. It is remarkable that—this can be seen in the report’s recommendations—the people who are facing the challenges are not short of ideas on how to fix them and on what needs to be done.
For many decades, the common approach to public policy of putting experts in a room and having them come up on their own with the ideas of what to do is seeing its day. The approach where Government does things with people rather than to them has a lot to commend it.
Jayne Baxter’s idea about developing a “Why not?” culture nicely summed up the issue. Instead of ideas sitting there and being felt to be impossible, with people thinking, “What can I do with that? No one will pay me any attention”, we need people to be thinking “If we want to have a social enterprise capacity in business gateway that is greater, why not?”
In the context of joining up services, another of the commission’s recommendations was that NHS staff should provide a bit of information on income maximisation. Why not? We must take such ideas and run with them.
One of the things that I have constantly tried to do as I have gone around the country in my capacity as the community empowerment minister—particularly when I have spoken to community planning partnerships—is emphasise the message of participation. The idea of bringing people in and getting them to give their ideas is very different from the old-style consultation. It is not possible to do that for everything, but on the core issue of equality and inequality in this country, the people we are trying to help should be in the driving seat on the action that is being taken.
The only way to empower the disempowered is by showing faith in them through having such conversations, by taking them seriously and by demonstrating the action that will come out of it. Nothing will compound cynicism more than bringing people in, listening to them and then going away and not acting on what they say or doing something else entirely. That is a circle that we have to close in all our public sector activity to make sure that we keep the faith of the public.
Alex Rowley mentioned some of the issues with CPPs. I agree with him on some of the areas in which they need to step up their work. Somewhat frivolously, I have sometimes referenced “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, in which someone else’s problem was recognised as a thing that could make anything invisible, even if that was a sofa flying across Lord’s cricket ground. If something is not someone’s problem, they just do not see it. Wherever I go, whenever I bang the drum for community empowerment and public service reform, I say that “That’s somebody else’s problem” is a phrase that should be banned.
The community planning partnerships exist to bring all the people around the table so that the priorities can be isolated and the problems that cannot be solved by anyone alone can be solved together. Making sure that there is buy-in lay behind some of the provisions in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, but I think that further work will probably need to be done on that in the next session of Parliament, building on that act.
As Alex Rowley said, perhaps the key is to make sure that we have strong employer and business representation around the table and that all third sector organisations can feed into the process. There is a very big difference between the big third sector providers that will work Fife-wide and, for example, a small neighbourhood association in a deprived area. Both have important things to bring to the table.
The fairer Fife commission’s report is a model of good work. It offers a model for combining the expertise of the different public and voluntary sector players and public participation, and I commend it. I do not envy the task of the people who must take the recommendations and turn them into an action plan, given how ambitious they are, but I commend the work that has been done and would recommend that any other council that is thinking about doing something similar should do so.
Meeting closed at 17:28.