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Company: Audit Scotland

Community planning update – March 2016
Podcast transcript - I’m speaking today with audit officer Zoe McGuire, who worked on Audit Scotland’s latest update report on community planning. 
Zoe, can you first of all explain to me, what is community planning? 
Yep, so community planning was established in 2003 and involves councils and other public bodies coming together and working with communities, businesses and voluntary groups to try and deliver better local services that improve the lives of local people. 
So, it’s led by 32 Community Planning Partnerships or CPPs. They cover each council area in Scotland.
The Scottish Government and COSLA have ambitious expectations for community planning, and it’s actually been positioned as having a really pivotal role in public sector reform in Scotland. This comes alongside other big changes like the integration of health and social care services, there’s new community empowerment legislation that’s designed to make it easier for local people to have a say about local public services, and in some cases even take them over.
So why should the public care whether or not community planning works?
Like the rest of the UK, Scotland faces growing pressures from increasing demand for services, and reducing budgets. So everyone recognises that we can’t afford to continue providing public services in the same way they always have done. 
So new ways of working are needed to deal with these pressures, otherwise there’s a real risk that as funding cuts start to bite it leads to a negative impact on people who really need and rely on vital services, and these are often some of the most disadvantaged people in society.
So, community planning has a real potential to improve quality and efficiency by bringing together different public services and reducing the overlap in duplication and effort. It should also help to reduce inequalities by allowing public bodies to jointly target resources at the most disadvantaged communities in society. 
Also, the Community Empowerment legislation should give people a much greater say in how services are planned and delivered, and in some cases community groups can even take over these services and provide it better than the public sector. 
What did you find in your recent audit?
This is the third overview report published by Audit Scotland on community planning.
We did find that there had been some progress, some local and national progress since we last reported at the end of 2014. 
CPPs have improved leadership and scrutiny, and the way they use data to set clearer priorities; 
However, community planning still isn’t delivering the big changes in the way services are planned and delivered in communities;
So, some of the areas where progress hasn’t been so good is around public services changing how they actually deliver their services to shift resources towards prevention, and CPPs also not so much engaging at the moment with local communities to really understand their concerns and focus their improvement efforts accordingly. 
So lots of great things are happening but they’re mainly quite small scale, a gap still exists between national expectations of CPPs, and how the partnerships actually deliver these services. 
So that’s why we’re recommending that the Scottish Government and COSLA provide stronger national leadership and support community planning to help meet its full potential. 
So what else does Audit Scotland want to see happen in order to address improvement around community planning?
Community planning is definitely still on a journey, and we want to see the Scottish Government and COSLA set out a really clear route map for improving community planning, and how it will measure the success of the reform in the short, medium and the long-term. 
To do that, there needs to be less focus on short-term national performance targets so that community planning partners have more freedom to start shifting resources towards joint, long-term priorities in their local areas. 
It’s also really quite crucial that communities have a strong voice in planning, delivering and assessing local public services, and that means more work by CPPs to give local people real opportunities to get involved. 
Doing this benefits CPPs as well, as partners will be in a better position to build a really clear picture of what’s needed in their local communities and start to get down to the business of reducing inequalities and transforming services in a way that really make a difference to people that use them.
Zoe, thank you.
And the report is available to download from our website, www.audit-scotland.gov.uk