You are right that, as community planning started in 2003, what the report shows is disappointing. The difficulty is that we concentrate a lot on the financial aspect. The focus is on saying that if we had a joint budget everything would be okay. However, it is clear from the report that buy-in from the leadership of the various organisations, and not a pot of money sitting in the middle, will move the process forward. We have seen that from measures such as the early years collaborative, with which I have been involved, and which is a similar approach. We can all see the benefits of early intervention, but the problem is in getting commitment and buy-in from people to provide not only the finance but the capacity in staff and resources to push things forward. I have seen that from being an early years champion in Aberdeen. I have seen the frustrations of staff on the ground who feel that perhaps they have not had support and buy-in from leadership. We all have to take responsibility for that.
I cannot speak for the Borders. The reason why you have representatives from the two CPPs here is that the Borders CPP is coterminous with the NHS board area and the Aberdeen one is not. Susan Webb will perhaps want to come in on that, because it has caused NHS Grampian difficulties that it has to try to service three different community planning partnerships and get involvement and buy-in of their staff.
Because we concentrate a lot on the financial aspects, we maybe do not sell ourselves enough when we talk about our good practice. Obviously, we have heard about our community safety hub. Although it sounds like we are dealing with antisocial behaviour issues, there is a lot of preventative work going on through the co-operation of staff who sit around the table from the council, the police and fire services, the NHS and social services. We pick up very early from those discussions families that are perhaps in difficulties, so we can work with them. There is a lot of preventative work in our community planning partnership and across the country, I am sure.
It is about the outcomes and how we measure them. To be honest, we are data rich. All the organisations collect lots of data, but we must join up and share data to ensure that we improve the outcomes for people. We have not done that very well in the past, which is why we are obviously looking to make improvements and why we have brought analysts from our various partnerships to sit round the table to try to ensure that things get better. We have work to do. I cannot speak for what happened before I was part of things, but the people who sit round the table in Aberdeen now have a commitment to making improvements and to improving outcomes for the people in our community.
There must also be community buy-in, which has maybe been lacking in what has happened before. We have tried to get more of that in Aberdeen. We have community partners in our fairer Aberdeen board, which used to be the fairer Scotland board. People from our most deprived communities sit around the table and decide where money will go to.
We are also keen to get involved in the participatory budget schemes that are on the go. Obviously, we have put forward people for training in relation to that.
We have made a commitment. Progress has probably not been quick enough for our communities, but we need to deal with where we are now and how we will move forward.
The integration agenda has helped our cohesion with our NHS partners. There is now a shadow board, but we had a transitional leadership group before that. We have appointed a joint accountable officer, who will help to bring together the two organisations. That will align budgets, which we spoke about earlier.
At the end of the day, we cannot carry on doing the same as we have done before, especially in healthcare, because of our ageing population. The budgets would be a third more than we expect them to be at the moment. Therefore, we have to consider the preventative aspect, and we need to do that when we get round the table.