Hello. So my name 's Claire Bynner. I work for What Works Scotland and I 'm a research
associate based at the University of Glasgow. So in this presentation, what I 'm aiming
to do is to cover four main areas. First I want to talk about What Works Scotland and
the Scottish approach to public service reform. Then we're going to look at four rationales
for place based approaches. And then we're going to discuss community planning partnerships
and their use of data at a local level. And finally I'm going to share some thoughts,
reflections on some of the challenges and opportunities for place based approaches in
tackling inequalities. Okay, so What Works Scotland is a three year
project. It started in 2014. We 're split over two universities and really our remit
is to support and enhance the potential for public services to address some of the challenges
that we're faced with around public service reform. So we're working at a national level
with nine different improvement agencies and at local level we're working more intensively
with these four community planning partnerships. So our method at local level, working with
the community planning partnerships combines collaborative action research, capacity building
and a focus on how evidence can be turned into action in practice.
So we're situated within the context of dramatic challenges across, well internationally. So
we're faced with reductions to public sector funding across all post industrial societies.
We're faced with technological changes, globalisation, migration a whole series and host of challenges
that mean that across all countries are having to respond in some way by changing their public
services. So we're situated, following the commission
on the future of public services which is known as the Christi Commission, the Scottish
Government highlighted four pillars for public service reform, sometimes referred to as the
four P's. That 's Prevention, that 's which is similar to early intervention, Performance,
Participation and Partnership. So the Scottish approach to public service
reform, also is characterised by focus on asset based approaches. This notion of co-production
in the design of services and partnership and prevention, but crucially I 'd add to
the four pillars of Christi an additional fifth P and that 's a focus in Scotland on Place.
Unlike England, in Scotland we have this framing of our policy that place, is seen as a magnet
for partnership working and a focus for community participation and that 's key to understanding
the Scottish approach. So why this focus on place? Now for any of
those who remember the Goon Show, I thought this was rather insightful little quote from
Eccles "since everywhere, everyone 's got to be somewhere, everyone is in place, everyone
all of us have a relationship to place." It therefore follows that it 's a very useful
concept for policy makers because you can more or less attach, for more or less any interventional
programme, to the notion of place and that can present its own challenges.
So if we do a quick review of Scottish policy and try and identify what are the drivers
for rationales for a place based approach. There are four key rationales that I would
argue driving place. The first is the civic rationale, now this is the notion that people
identify with local places, particularly low income communities that they are motivated
by where they live and there 's the policy agenda here is about animating local people,
mobilising individuals into action, mobilising assets (both relationships, networks, buildings)
and this policy is expressed in England in the form of the Localism Act and in Scotland
it 's really embodied in the Community Empowerment Act.
The next rationale for place is the age old challenge of coordinating public services.
So the idea that if we could only get all these various services at a local level to
work more effectively together, we would have some responses to the challenges that we face.
Yeah, it 's a challenging one, and it 's probably one that we'll be working on forever
I think. The political rationale, this is a really
critical rationale. Now the commission for strengthening local democracy highlighted
that Scotland has one of the worst ratios of elected members at a local level to citizens.
So if you look at our ratio, one councillor is to represent 4,270 individuals, compare
that to Finland where one local elected member would represent 500 people. So effectively
what place based approaches are trying to do, is to fill this void in local democracy.
And finally the economic rationale, and of course there 's got to be the economic rationale,
which is that place based approaches are a way, we think, perhaps, to improve efficiency,
to be more effective in joining up public services but also looking at more personalised
services, intervening earlier and a chain of outcomes to offset the negative cycle,
of negative outcomes, in the red. So this diagram from Dundee Community Planning
Partnership demonstrates the need to try and stay on the green side in a cycle of positive
outcomes and that 's also an economic rationale for a place based approach.
So for many of you here are very well aware that place based approaches are nothing new.
The Institute of Government had a look back to the start of New Labour 1997, they found
59 different national programmes around place and the picture in Scotland would be very
similar. In fact I 'd argue you could trace it further back, you could go back to the
1960s, you could back to the community development projects and you would see place based approaches
have a long history. So in Scotland, the key structure or for place
based approaches is community planning, established in 2003. Now they haven 't the best track
record for reducing inequalities, there have been some successes around reducing knife
crime in Glasgow, and some signs of some positive indicators in Glasgow but overall they haven't
had the radical effect that perhaps we'd hoped for. Nevertheless they continue to be
given a pivotal role and there are very ambitious expectations for them.
Added to that, the Community Empowerment Act further strengthens the role of community
planning partnerships and it 's been described as a potential game changer for achieving
that transformational change. So how is local data being used by CPPs? So
what we know is that in three main ways CPPs tend to use the local data, the data that
you may be involved in producing. They use it sometimes to, well often they use it identify
their most deprived neighbourhoods and to target resources towards those neighbourhoods.
They also have used it to focus on a smaller number of priorities, so the single outcome
agreements could be a list of a vast array of priorities which community planning partnerships
were trying to achieve. They've, the use of data has helped them to define their priorities
more tightly. And the last way in which data is used is
to help, particularly at the moment, is around developing local outcome improvement plans.
So looking at the example of West Dumbartonshire, we've at What Works Scotland been working in
West Dumbartonshire and little background to this area, it 's the tenth smallest in
terms of population of any of the local authorities in Scotland and it 's the second smallest
in terms of its land mass. It shares many of the similar challenges to its neighbour
Glasgow. So many of the first year economic inequalities we find in Glasgow you also find
in West Dumbartonshire. The concentration of population density is
around the Clyde Bank and Dumbarton with, beyond Dumbarton there's a more rural hinterland.
Again, high levels of welfare claimants in West Dumbartonshire. I was just looking at
the Scot Pho Profile, some really interesting data there showing 20% higher levels of mental
health issues for individuals in West Dumbartonshire. So we were asked by the local community planning
partnership to come and help them with their place based approach, and what they were looking
for was data at a local level on a range of indicators and they didn't have the skills
within the partnership to produce this data. So we set up a partnership project with Glasgow
Centre for Population Health, NHS NSS ISD and we compiled 17 neighbourhood profiles
at the level of community council areas and these profiles cover population, culture, environment,
health, education, housing, a whole range of different indicators.
We produced them both as an interactive mapping tool available on your mobile or on your laptop
and also as downloadable PDFs. So we had, in doing this project we started to look at
how data was being used and the capacity of local practitioners to use data and we compared
that experience to another community planning partnership, Fife.
So comparing these two partnerships and their capacity to work with data was quite striking.
Firstly, we know when we look at the SIMD data that these negative outcomes are clustered
and highly localised. So we know that getting that level of microscopic, you know down to
streets and up to other scales, it 's very important to be able to work flexibly with
that data to understand the nature of inequalities. Now in West Dumbartonshire, until we worked
with them, they had no means of doing that, they had no means of actually extrapolating
that data and analysing it. On the other hand, Fife since 2007 have been working very flexibly
with data integrating social justice and analysis very effectively. But we are talking about
different scales of work. West Dumbartonshire only have 17 community councils whereas Fife
are working with 104. The other issue and challenge is that the
alignment of partnerships can be different. So in West Dumbartonshire there is no alignment
between the locality working of the health and social care partnership and the CPP. On
the other hand in Fife they have that alignment. One member of staff was sort of allocated
towards data work in West Dumbartonshire, Fife have a research team 11 people strong,
working both on statistical data and integrating local data and they're very keen on it not
being all about statistical data. So this gives you an example of the differences
between different contexts. So bringing us to some challenges, contextual factors, when
you 're looking at CPPs the, they 're widely different these context for working, widely
different starting points for partnership working and histories of relationships in
local areas. When you look at the actual resource to work
with evidence and to work with research widely divergent resources and staff capacity. Issues
of partnership alignment can also be challenging when you 're talking about local geographies
and you, we also have a challenge that I don't think is talked enough about which is there
are an awful lot of agencies at national level seeking to work with community planning partnerships,
but there's an issue around the time it takes to negotiate the different types of support
on offer and finding a fit to the programmes and projects that community planning partnerships
are already committed to, and that can take a considerable amount of staff time and a
significant impact on a small team. Opportunities and some risks; so the Community
Empowerment Act, it presents some opportunities, definitely. The locality planning requires
an in depth understanding of local places. Actually the more important opportunity from the
Community Empowerment Act is that it has an explicit emphasis on tackling inequalities and we really
need to focus on that, but also the emphasis on locality working and having a more in depth
understanding of places provides an opportunity to bring research and data into play.
The improvement agenda, I think, also offers us an opportunity to focus more on context,
practices and the behaviours of practitioners and to actually realise that they have a vast
wealth of local knowledge, experience, expertise and they have aspirations at a local level
to do excellent work around poverty. And, you know, we need to realise that potential.
We 're also hoping at What Works Scotland, that our new project called Making Data Meaningful
will be some, a project that will provide some insights into some of these challenges.
That project is looking, in practice, at how practitioners understand evidence and how
they work with evidence and how and when they find data and evidence useful to make some
transformative decisions and changes. But I do have a word of warning, a word of
caution around place based approaches. The evidence for their impact in terms of life
outcomes is not robust. It 's fairly weak just at the moment, we don 't have a lot of
evidence to show that the types of issues Denise was talking about are likely to be
tackled that easily by place based approaches. So there 's a risk of overstating the potential,
nevertheless I think we should recognise as well that it 's not all about outcomes and
processes of participation can be of value in themselves.
The other caution I would add is that there is an enormous risk of overload with the current
policy agenda. There 's a real pressure for reform and radical change but with that pressure
is the potential for overload at a local level and because place is everywhere as we discussed
earlier, there 's also a risk that those all, those communities that are mobilised already
and are most ready to take these opportunities that the Community Empowerment Act will bring,
that they take precedent and we lose focus on the really important and unequal spacial
effects of public service cuts and welfare reform.
So finally I 'd say that place based approaches are not a silver bullet but they can have
some contribution to make, they do have a potential to make an important contribution
but I think we need to focus in a much more responsive way to the needs of practitioners
on the ground working in community planning partnerships.
Thank you very much. [Applause]