Chamber and committees

I want to tease out a little more information on some of the areas where there may be contention. You said that 95 per cent of the land mass is covered. You stated in an email to the Scottish Parliament Information Centre that

“The remaining 4.4 per cent is comprised of smaller and older parcels of land which would be extremely time consuming and costly to complete, hence not representing best value for spend of public funds.”

Such parcels of land may often be used as ransom strips in other dealings. You say that dealing with them does not represent best value, but I imagine that some cases are taking you a very long time to resolve. Could you comment on that?

The question that I asked was whether that would be a priority for you. Obviously, everyone else will have to go through the process. That would be a priority for you, would it?

Before you go on, I want to give you an example. I will not give you an example from today because that would probably cause a great deal of grief, but I will go back to when I was first elected to Aberdeen City Council some 25 years ago. There was a small community who wanted to see street lighting on a certain path and it was impossible to decide ownership. At the time, I was very much in favour of the street lighting going in and persuaded the council to do that. An old solicitor at Aberdeen City Council said, “As soon as we do that, whoever owns that land will come forward and suddenly say, ‘You do not have my permission to do so and I am charging the council £X to do so.’” And that is exactly what happened.

Not dissimilar things happen in today’s day and age. The old solicitor back in the day said that those ransom strips were everywhere and had deliberately been kept. How many of those smaller and older parcels of land may be used as ransom strips that stop folk from doing things in their vicinity and even the likes of local authorities or other public services doing things in the vicinity of those bits and pieces of land?

As a minister, I introduced a fund whereby front-line staff could help homeless people quickly with small amounts of cash, and we could see the differences very quickly. For example, if folk who do not have the right official paperwork can get a wee bit of money to sort that out, we can see positive outcomes quickly because a lot of things are resolved. Sometimes, that flexibility can lead to positive outcomes quickly. The difficulty with that fund was that lots of folk were saying to me, “How do you audit that?” There was far too much emphasis on the audit requirements and worrying that we could not trust folk. Sometimes, with short-term funding, we can measure outcomes quite quickly.

Again, I will play devil’s advocate, because sometimes it does change things in the long term. Sometimes, little things can make big changes, but we do not necessarily measure that well. Do you agree?

I would like to tease out these issues a little further. Karin Earl mentioned audit requirements, and we have heard about risk. Trust factors are also at play. However, the key thing in all this is outcomes, which are—let us be honest—sometimes hard to measure. For example, you can say that you will feed 50 kids in Dundee next week but, in most cases, the outcome of doing that will be much greater than just feeding 50 kids.

How do we get all the balances right? Are we getting them right? Are audit requirements sometimes too rigorous? Is the appetite for risk sometimes too low? Do we trust communities and organisations enough to utilise funding properly? Are we measuring outcomes well? I know that I have covered a fair amount, but that is the nub of all this, as far as I am concerned.

I will challenge you on that point. You said that the shorter the funding period is, the more difficult it is to measure outcomes. However, is it not the case that sometimes, if there is flexibility around one-off funding or a change of funding, you get positive outcomes very quickly?

I will give you an example.

I want to follow up on that point briefly and, in doing so, perhaps come back to some previous comments. When we measure outcomes—obviously, you guys are the ones who go back to the organisations that are reporting—are we asking people enough about what difference they think the funding has made to them?

That is grand. It comes back to Professor Jung’s point about whether we are asking the right questions of people when we do this work. Perhaps Professor Jung will want to answer that question as well as making the point that he wanted to make in response to the previous question.