Hansard

Amendment 1021 is a minor drafting amendment that has no substantive effect. It provides that duties for CPPs in section 4(5) apply to “Each” instead of “A” community planning partnership. Amendments 1023 and 1024 are likewise minor drafting amendments that have no substantive effect and simply replace “such” with “those”. Amendment 1030 is a minor technical amendment that provides spacing I turn to the substantive amendments in the group. Amendment 1022 relates to the focus on addressing inequalities. That theme was a feature of written submissions, and a recurrent subject of debate at stage 1 in committee evidence sessions. We know that some communities are better placed than others to have their views considered and acted on. The Local Government and Regeneration Committee’s stage 1 report referred to the risk of empowering only the already empowered. Many organisations, including Barnardo’s Scotland, Oxfam and the Poverty Alliance, emphasised in their evidence that community planning partnerships need to ensure that they take account of those who are experiencing the disadvantages that are associated with socioeconomic inequalities. Community planning partnerships are already addressing inequalities in their work, but we want them to do more. Amendment 1022 will make it explicit that community planning partnerships, in considering which community bodies are likely to contribute to community planning, must do so by “having regard in particular to which of those bodies represent the interests of persons who experience inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage.” That will then trigger the requirement in the bill to make “all reasonable efforts to secure” their participation. Amendment 1025 relates to the committee’s recommendation that “there should be a specific duty on CPP partners to reduce inequality and focus on ... prevention.” 10:30 The Scottish Government and our partners on the national community planning group agree that taking action to reduce inequalities should be at the heart of what community planning partnerships do. In fact, as we have shown from the outcomes, it should be at the heart of what the whole of government does. Amendment 1025 will introduce a general duty on community planning partnerships to “act with a view to reducing inequalities of outcome which result from socio-economic disadvantage”. The duty will apply to the way in which community planning partnerships undertake all of their functions under part 2 of the bill, from securing participation by community bodies to the local outcomes that the CPPs prioritise in their local outcomes improvement plan. It also includes how community planning partnerships review progress on the continued suitability of their plans and how they report on progress each year to local communities. The amendment includes a qualification that will allow a community planning partnership not to act with a view to reducing inequalities of outcome that result from socioeconomic disadvantage if it “considers that it would be inappropriate to do so.” The qualification recognises that, although a community planning partnership may undertake its general duties with a view to reducing inequalities, it may have certain important actions that do not in isolation contribute to that. For instance, a community planning partnership should be able to support the development of high-skilled, high-earning employment opportunities, even though that might not in the first step contribute to a reduction in inequalities. Alex Rowley’s amendment 1055 would require local authorities to maintain a list of community bodies that might participate in community planning. Although I am interested in the proposal, community planning partnerships already have access to a Scotland-wide directory of third sector organisations via the get involved website. That is a database that provides identification of local community bodies by postal code and activity. The information is maintained by the local third sector interfaces, which, among other things, are funded to build in the third sector to community planning in their local areas. The database includes details of community body location, website, main contact, charitable and legal status, the number of paid staff, committee members, geographical reach, aims and objectives, main areas of work and financial data. The fields are fairly extensive. It is therefore not clear what additional benefit there would be in requiring each local authority to maintain a list of community bodies in its area, nor what potential implications there could be for a body that, for whatever reason, did not end up on the list. We do not intend to require any form of registration for community bodies to be allowed to participate in community planning. Amendment 1056 would require community planning partnerships to produce an assessment of the wellbeing of communities in their areas, and amendment 1059 would place a duty on CPPs to take account of “the most recently published” assessment of the wellbeing of communities in their area before publishing their local outcomes improvement plan. The bill already requires community planning partnerships to understand the needs and circumstances of persons who reside in their area. Section 5(4) requires community planning partnerships to take account of those needs and circumstances as well as any representations that are received in their consultation with community bodies and others before publishing their local outcomes improvement plan. Another issue is that there is no requirement to update the provisions. Amendment 1059 refers to “the most recently published” assessment, but there is no duty to regularly publish such assessments. A Welsh provision in a parallel bill has such a requirement. Furthermore, wellbeing has been purposefully left undefined in local government legislation, and particularly in the 2003 act, which sets out the general power for local authorities to advance wellbeing. The introduction of the definition of the term in the bill could potentially cause confusion. I do not believe that there is any need for Mr Rowley’s amendments 1055, 1056 and 1059. All that they would do would be to impose a new burden on community planning partnerships. Amendment 1058 would require CPPs to “make all reasonable efforts to secure representations” from persons who are identified in the assessment of wellbeing as particularly vulnerable or otherwise disadvantaged. However, our amendment 1022 goes further than that, as it will require community planning partnerships, when considering which community bodies are likely to be able to contribute to community planning, to have particular regard to community bodies that represent disadvantaged communities. As I said, the community planning partnerships must make all reasonable efforts to secure the participation of those bodies and take reasonable steps to enable community bodies that wish to participate to do so. Furthermore, under amendment 1018, community planning partnerships will also be under a duty to participate with community bodies that wish to participate. Unlike amendment 1058, our amendment 1022 will apply those duties of participation with community bodies to all aspects of community planning—not just the finalisation of the local outcomes improvement plan but the review of progress against the plan, the review of the plan’s continued suitability and progress reporting. Those are much broader in their scope. Amendment 1057 seeks to impose a more explicit duty on CPPs to consult on the local outcome improvement plan. The bill secures the participation of community bodies throughout the community planning process. That goes beyond preparing a plan to include the review of progress against the plan, the review of the plan’s continued suitability and progress reporting on it. That focus on continuing participation with community bodies, including third sector bodies, distinguishes community planning from the development of other plans for which consultation provides the main formal means of engagement with service users and stakeholders. It is about partnership. In that context, the existing provision seeks not to be overly prescriptive. It is purposefully broad so that a local CPP can determine from its knowledge of local needs, circumstances and resources which community bodies and other persons it would be appropriate to consult. That broad provision is more effective than the narrow specification of bodies that Alex Rowley suggests. I also note that his amendment 1057 would have community planning partnerships consult their own partners, which seems a little unusual. Amendments 1060 to 1062 represent an attempt to bring locality planning into the bill as part of community planning. I have very considerable sympathy for the intention behind the amendments. I am not sure that there are not other ways to achieve their aim, but I believe strongly in the value of neighbourhood planning. That level is where we really get the link between community planning, which can be quite strategic in its view, and the clearest example of people’s wellbeing in local places. It is also where we can often make the biggest difference in influencing priorities for public services and their delivery and contributing directly to the improvement of the community’s general wellbeing. However, the community action plans that are described in amendments 1060 to 1062 would have a slightly more limited purpose. They would link the local outcomes in a community planning partnership’s local outcomes improvement plan with each community council area in the community planning area. The plans would set out the extent, if any, of improvement expected in that community council area for each of the local outcomes that are set out in the local outcomes improvement plan. I want the purpose of locality planning to be more ambitious, broader and high achieving. I want community planning partnerships to develop and apply neighbourhood-based approaches wherever they can offer the most value. Amendments 1060 to 1062 have issues in that regard. To take the example of Fife, which Mr Rowley knows very well, they would require community planning partners to work with community councils and other community bodies to produce no fewer than 105 community action plans. That is the number of active and inactive community councils in Fife. That would be quite an immense bureaucracy to prescribe and would distract community planning partners and community bodies from efforts to improve outcomes where improvements were most needed, such as targeting additional work on more disadvantaged areas, or taking a more flexible approach to the definition of a neighbourhood than using the community council area. We need to ensure that community planning can concentrate on where it can provide the most benefit—that is, improving the local outcomes and reducing inequalities on a set of priorities that is identified from the partnership’s planning and local understanding. That is the key principle of the CPP provisions in the bill. It reflects the recommendation in the Accounts Commission’s and Auditor General’s recent national audit report “Community planning: Turning ambition into action” that community planning partnerships should “set clearer improvement priorities focused on how they will add most value as a partnership, when updating their” single outcome agreements. I wish to return to this in guidance, but I also think that there is potential to work with Mr Rowley to develop this to present more technically robust and perhaps more flexibly applied amendments that he could lodge at stage 3. Amendment 1029 addresses the committee’s request in its stage 1 report for confirmation that the community planning partnership is required to publicly publish reports on progress. The amendment provides that community planning partnerships must publish their progress report for each reporting year. One of the principles for part 2 that has attracted universal support is the importance of community participation at the heart of community planning. Amendment 1031 imposes a new duty on community planning partnerships to account for the participation by community bodies in community planning for the area. It requires that a community planning partnership’s annual report must report on the extent to which the partners have “participated with community bodies ... during the reporting year” and the extent to which “that participation has been effective in enabling community bodies to participate in community planning”. I commend the Government amendments in the group to the committee and I ask Alex Rowley not to move his amendments, although, as I have said, I am sympathetic to amendment 1058 in principle. I move amendment 1021.