Chamber and committees

Okay. Thank you very much for your evidence this morning. It was very helpful to the committee. We will continue taking evidence on this subject after the summer recess.

That concludes our public evidence taking. As the next item on our agenda will be taken in private, I will call a five-minute recess to allow our witnesses to leave.

Mr Emmott, all the evidence suggests that, even when you know that funding is only for one year, medium to long-term planning is extremely important. Do you not agree?

Staff will always be a major component, if not the major component, in all local authorities, no matter how digitalised they become.

Do you see digitalisation as an on-going thing or as a goal where you feel that you will be able to reach optimum service delivery?

I have talked about shared best practice among local authorities for many years. Should other local authorities look at how East Ayrshire does asset transfers? What could you learn from how other local authorities deliver services?

I thank the committee for my appointment, and I thank in particular my colleagues Michael Marra and John Mason, who have convened the committee’s meetings in my absence.

As I rejoin the committee, I declare that I have no relevant interests.

Under our next agenda item, the committee will continue our inquiry into the Scottish Government’s public service reform programme. Today, we will hear from Sarah Watters, who is director of membership and resources at the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and Cleland Sneddon, the chief executive of South Lanarkshire Council, who is representing the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers Scotland. I welcome both of you to the meeting.

I intend to allow up to 75 minutes for this session. If the witnesses would like to be brought into the discussion at any point, they should indicate that to the clerks, please, and I will call them. We will move straight to questions.

I was impressed by the quality and detail of your joint submission, which is an excellent piece of work. There was one very clear and overriding statement from local government. Paragraph 9 in the summary of key points states:

“Local Government requires fair and sustainable funding and greater empowerment.”

Such themes run right through the document. However, something that I have found frustrating with COSLA on a number of occasions is the fact that, although there is talk of fair and sustainable funding—I think that everyone on the committee is very sympathetic to that; for example, three members of the committee who are here today are former councillors, and Douglas Lumsden was, of course, a council leader—there is no detail on what that really means. It would be good if that could be expanded on a wee bit. We will touch on that and then go on to other points.

That is a point well made.

I know that Sarah Watters wanted to come in, but I am trying to move on because I want colleagues to come in. I could spend the whole evidence session asking questions, because there is so much really good detail, but I will just ask one more question about best practice.

What is good about the document is that there are tremendous examples of good practice—for example, Renfrewshire Council’s tackling poverty commission, North Ayrshire Council’s skills for life programme and East Dunbartonshire Council’s snack and play programme. You also give the example of North Ayrshire Council’s community wealth building programme, which is expanding throughout Scotland.

I have asked over many years on a number of committees how such good practice can be spread throughout local government, because a concern that I have always had is that council X might have a great project and council Y might have another brilliant project, but there is not as much sharing and cross-cutting as there should be to ensure that those projects are implemented more widely.

Yes, I think that that is a positive development. I certainly hope that it will prove to be so.

One of the things that the Scottish Government has been doing is increasing benefits relative to south of the border, such that, by about 2028, the figure will be about £1.4 billion. I have spoken to people in local government who have told me that some of that money would be better spent on the local government services that help to underpin work to reduce poverty.

Has local government in Scotland undertaken any cost benefit analysis to look at the benefit of a pound being spent in local government, for example, compared with its being spent on one of the measures in relation to benefits or, indeed, any other measure in the Scottish Government’s spend, so that we can be clear about the value for money aspect of the work that local government does?

Thank you. I will now open up the questions to colleagues.

Indeed. I call Douglas Lumsden, to be followed by Liz Smith.