We seem to have been talking about community planning since 1999. I think that all parties were signed up to it. In the Christie commission report, which colleagues will remember, community planning was seen to be the answer to the future delivery of public services, which were seen to be unsustainable and working in silos.
I want to go over a wee bit of the history. I have in front of me three reports, and I know that more have been done. The March 2013 report says:
“ten years after community planning was given a statutory basis, CPPs are not able to show that they have had a significant impact in delivering improved outcomes”.
It also says that CPPs were not clear about their priorities:
“Too often, everything has seemed to be a priority, meaning that nothing has been a priority.”
It continues:
“there are no consequences for not participating”.
You would have thought that, after that fairly hard-hitting report, the next report would be better. The second report, from November 2014, says:
“There is little evidence that CPP boards are yet demonstrating the levels of leadership and challenge set out in the Statement of Ambition ... many still do not set out the ... improvements CPPs are aiming to achieve. They ... lack a focus on how community planning will improve outcomes for specific communities and”—
this is so important, especially for this Government—
“reduce the gap in outcomes between the most and least deprived”.
My huge concern is that CPPs are not, in any shape or form, tackling inequalities across Scotland.
The third report takes us up to March 2016. Being an optimistic person, I would have thought that, having seen all the problems, people would have addressed them, but we seem to be no further forward.
The third report says that community planning is
“not yet delivering the ambitious changes in the way public services are organised ... that were envisaged in the Statement of Ambition”
and that
“we have yet to see CPP partners sharing, aligning, or redeploying their resources”.
The report also says that “stronger leadership” is required. Paragraph 44 states:
“The failure of the Scottish Government and COSLA to clarify performance expectations of CPPs ... is a significant issue.”
So, 13 years after the introduction of community planning partnerships and—if I may say so, Auditor General—the huge amount of work that Audit Scotland has done on the issue, and the fact that the community planning partnership concept has the support of 129 MSPs, that is a significant failure and it should be laid at the door of the Scottish Government for lack of leadership. Am I right?