Chamber and committees

I do not want to go into why you are possibly going down to five days for letter delivery frequency, as other colleagues will raise that issue. However, if you go to five days, will that have an impact on the number of staff that you have?

Thank you for your service to my office and to me personally. I enjoyed my recent visit to the centre in my constituency.

To follow up on the employment theme, it is suggested in your submission that you were having challenges in relation to recruiting people in some areas. Will you expand on where, and why?

I will not push that; I was just playing devil’s advocate.

You mentioned the police. When witnesses from Police Scotland gave evidence to the committee, they said that the radical reform of merging the separate police organisations into Police Scotland would not have happened without a drive from the centre. When you look at local authority and HSCP reform, are you tweaking what is there, or would you ever consider a merger with another council?

Mr Emmott, Dundee has a slightly different situation. The city started with a health board and a council, and now it has the health board, the council and the HSCP, or the integration joint board. Has the landscape become more complicated?

Thanks. My time is up.

Perhaps I can pursue that with you a little, Mr Burr. Are you talking about a single islands partnership or an authority? In my mind, a partnership would mean that you keep umpteen different bodies but you work together more closely. An authority would suggest that you come down to one organisation that would run the council, the NHS and everything else.

Do we have to have a national health service that is the same all over the country? There is a health board in Glasgow: does that mean that we have to have a health board in Western Isles? It gets raised all the time that there is a postcode lottery or that it is different here and there, but it seems to me that it has to be different here and there.

Yes. Your population is quite small. I love the Western Isles, and I love going there and so on. Does there come a point when you just do not have enough people to have your own council and should just go in with Highland?

Okay. I might come back to you afterwards.

As I understand it, there is one health board for Ayrshire—the committee had them in—but there are three councils and three health and social care partnerships. That is seven bodies. Could we cut that down? I think that the health board would like to have just one HSCP for the whole of Ayrshire.