Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee – Improvement Service priorities
Dear Ariane,
Many thanks for your letter of 1st July 2021, seeking information on the Improvement Service's priorities within the remit of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I thought it would be helpful to begin by providing a brief overview of the Improvement Service, following which i will outline key areas of work that we are progressing that we believe are of most relevance to your Committee. I will conclude by highlighting areas of innovative practice that we believe should be a catalyst for further transformation as we move into recovery of renewal.
1. Improvement Service Overview
The Improvement Service was founded in 2005 as the national improvement organisation for Local Government in Scotland. We were established to deliver improvement support that would help councils to provide effective community leadership, strong local governance and deliver high quality, efficient local services.
We are the ‘go to organisation’ for Local Government improvement in Scotland. Our purpose is to:
We take forward our purpose by providing a range of Transformational Change, Performance and Improvement Support, Data and Intelligence Services and Digital
Public Services.
2. Our Priorities
Our Strategic Framework 2020 – 2022 was published in September 2020, and we have four strategic priorities for targeting support for councils and their partners (outlined below), which are clearly linked and interdependent. Our Business Plan 2021-22 takes forward the commitments set out in our Strategic Framework and sets out our deliverables and activities for the coming year.
i. We will support Local Government to live with Covid-19
We continually adapt our programmes, products and services as necessary to support councils with their Covid-19 response and recovery. This includes running online peer learning networks, publishing research, briefings, thought pieces and data dashboards (e.g. Covid-19 weekly data dashboard, Covid-19 Economic Impact dashboard), and facilitating online collaboration through the Knowledge Hub provided by the Improvement Service. We deliver facilitated self-assessment and improvement planning workshops for councils and partnerships, using the Public Service Improvement Framework, to capture learning from their response to the pandemic and to enable them to consolidate the new ways of working and innovative practice that has emerged. We deliver a range of secure and sustainable digital services, supporting councils to generate efficiencies from delivering services digitally and ensuring users can access services remotely and at a time that suits them. These include myaccount, a simple and secure sign-in service for online public services, which now has over 1.3M registered users in Scotland, parentsportal.scot, bisaccount, DataHub and getyournec.scot.
ii. We will support Local Government to re-build post Covid-19
We will work with councils as they transition from response and recovery to renewal. This will include working with Local Government to develop proposals for a future operating model for a 21st century council and for new service delivery models for key council services, with the person at the centre. Key drivers for this work include the financial challenges facing Local Government and a recognition that a return to ‘business as usual’ is not possible, with the negative impacts of the pandemic likely to be felt for years to come. This work will accelerate the changes that we have begun to see, and reimagine the delivery of key services in a truly transformative way.
We will also provide a range of change management and organisational development services to support councils with transformational and operational level change.
We will continue to facilitate access for Scottish citizens to secure digital public services and position our products and services in support of Councils’ service transformation and improvement plans. We will introduce inclusive omni-channel approaches to public services for those who cannot access digital public services, choose not to or who lack access to the right technology, connectivity or traditional forms of identity evidence.
We will collaborate with Local Government to better understand the impact of Covid-19 on their communities, particularly in regard to inequality of outcome as a result of increased socio-economic disadvantage from the economic and social impacts of the pandemic. We will advocate for the role of place-based approaches in supporting renewal, including 20-minute neighbourhoods.
We will build on the rapid progress achieved both locally and nationally in data sharing, data collaboration and data innovation facilitated by the increased focus on the role of data and intelligence during the pandemic. Across the coming period, the Local Government Benchmarking Framework (which we deliver on behalf of Solace) will be at the heart of progressing system-wide improvements in addressing current lags in data availability, streamlining data reporting/scrutiny landscapes, enabling greater automation and technical integration of data systems, and strengthening available insights from data and intelligence.
iii. We will support Local Government’s contribution to Scotland’s National Performance Framework
We deliver a range of improvement support to local authorities and partners in key policy areas, including economic recovery, employability, climate change and environmental sustainability, early learning and childcare expansion and health and social care integration.
We work with Scottish Government and Local Government to address socio-economic disadvantage and inequality of outcomes, strengthen community resilience and protect vulnerable groups. This includes providing improvement support in policy areas such as child poverty, tackling violence against women and girls, adopting a trauma informed approach , improving outcomes in money advice, Welfare Advice and Health Partnerships and the Fairer Scotland Duty.
These policy areas are clearly interlinked, with decisions being made in one policy area sometimes impacting on, or having unintended consequences for, another policy area. Our programme leads therefore work closely together to connect the improvement work they are delivering and to learn from one another, and to ensure those same connections are being made locally and by Scottish Government between those working in different policy areas.
In relation to planning, our priorities are to continue to deliver a Planning Skills Programme that leads the behavioural change required for those working within the planning system to deliver the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019, National Planning Framework 4, Scottish Planning Policy and the Digital Planning Strategy. Key areas of interest are the implementation of the Place Principle and the contribution of planning to the whole system delivery of Scotland’s public health and climate change priorities. We are working closely with the Partners in Planning Forum members, including Scottish Government, Heads of Planning Scotland, the Royal Town Planning Institute and the key agencies group to deliver this work.
We are also continuing to provide support to Heads of Planning Scotland, including supporting their input into the transforming planning programme associated with the Planning (Scotland) Act 2019, National Planning Framework 4, Scottish Planning Policy, the Digital Planning Strategy, public health reform and place-based working. We coordinate between planning authorities and other organisations within the built environment to deliver the Heads of Planning Scotland Business Plan and support the Planning Performance Framework.
We are contributing to the delivery of Scotland’s Digital Planning Strategy, including by being one of the Local Government members of the recently formed Digital Planning Transformation Programme Board. Building upon our successful delivery of the Digital Planning Pathfinder on data, we will undertake further work developing data standards and promoting improved data governance for planning. We will also work with Scottish Government to explore how we can utilise the rich array of data in the Improvement Service Spatial Hub as part of the digital planning approach. In the five years of our Spatial Hub’s existence, we have collected almost all the spatial datasets identified as being required for Digital Planning and we have funded the implementation of Idox’s Cloud Connector Framework to facilitate automatic data transfers. Finally, we will continue to promote the identified need for national data on health within the planning system, to deliver on National Outcomes on improving health and reducing inequality.
iv. We will support Local Government, working with communities and partners, to deliver place-based approaches
We are partnering with Public Health Scotland to support councils, communities and partners to work and plan together to improve the lives of people, support inclusive economies and improve health and wellbeing through the creation of more successful places. This includes co-funding a joint Place and Wellbeing Partnership Lead to encourage new ways of working across national, local, sectoral and disciplinary boundaries on policy and decision-making processes that prioritise shared Place and Wellbeing Outcomes.
We are supporting the realisation of the Place Principle and working with councils to take forward Scottish Government’s ambition for 20-minute neighbourhoods. We will also support the implementation of Scottish Government’s impending Place Framework.
Across the next three years, we will work with Public Health Scotland and other partners, including COSLA and Scottish Government, to deliver a three-year ‘Shaping Places for Wellbeing’ Programme funded by the Health Foundation and Scottish Government. This programme aims to create the conditions for better wellbeing by enabling system-wide partnership action on the social determinants of health at a local level, and to support local authorities in Scotland and their partners to deliver Scotland’s public health priorities. It will involve us working intensively with a small number of local authorities to make sustainable changes to local systems that will improve health and wellbeing outcomes.
Other relevant work
It is also worth highlighting a few key areas of work that cut across our four strategic priorities, which may be of interest to the Committee:
3. Examples of innovative practice
We have built up a collection of case studies showing how councils have responded to Covid-19, including how they have rapidly redesigned services, created innovative solutions to new problems and collaborated with communities and other organisations throughout the pandemic. These are accessible here.
These Covid-19 specific case studies are part of a wider collection of case studies which we gather on and ongoing basis, and which may be of interest more broadly to Committee members.
Over the last 18 months, what has been most notable has been the unprecedented pace at which councils’ operations, service delivery and governance arrangements have changed, and on a scale and timeframe not thought achievable in the past. It will be important to build on this level of change and innovation as Scotland transitions into recovery and renewal.
A number of key and consistent themes have emerged from the Covid-19 response, which we believe will continue to be a catalyst for transformation. For example:
I hope that our response is helpful in providing an insight into our priorities over the coming year, and highlighting the innovative work being delivered by Local Government over the last 18 months. If you have any questions or require further information, please just let me know.
Yours sincerely