Convention of the Highlands and Islands minutes: November 2025

Items and actions

Attendees 

• Kate Forbes, Deputy First Minister (Chair)
• Ivan McKee, Minister for Public Finance
• Henry Acres, Scottish Government
• Francesco Bertoldi, Scottish Government
• Stuart Black, Highlands and Islands Enterprise
• Raymond Bremner, The Highland Council
• Sandy Bremner, Cairngorms National Park Authority
• Malcolm Burr, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar
• Caroline Cameron, North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership
• Angus Campbell, Highlands and Islands Enterprise
• Anna Densham, Scottish Government
• Anthea Dickson, North Ayrshire Council
• Rob Dickson, VisitScotland
• Sharon Drysdale, SFC
• Karen Greaves, Moray Council
• Anthony Gurney, North Ayrshire Council
• Craig Hatton, North Ayrshire Council
• Alan Hill, North Ayrshire Council
• Kate Lackie, The Highland Council
• Ellen Leaver, Scottish Government
• Kerry Logan, North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership
• Jim Lynch, Argyll and Bute Council
• Emma Macdonald, Shetland Islands Council
• Euan McVicar, Crown Estate Scotland
• Rhoda Meek Tiree Community Development Trust
• Pippa Milne, Argyll and Bute Council
• Ronan O’Hara – Crown Estate Scotland
• Frances Pacitti, Scottish Government
• Oliver Reid, Orkney Islands Council
• Kathleen Robertson, Moray Council
• Maggie Sandison, Shetland Islands Council
• Stephen Sheridan, University of the Highlands and Islands
• Paul F Steele, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar
• Andrew Thin, Crofting Commission
• Kerry Wallace, NatureScot
• Stephen White, Scottish Government
• Heather Woodbridge, Orkney Islands Council
• Damien Yeates, Skills Development Scotland

Agenda

• 11:45 – 11:55 Opening and Welcome remarks
• 11:55 – 12:00 Review of previous actions
• 12:00 – 12:10 Convention to note written papers
• 12:10 – 14:10 Community Wealth Building
• 14:10 – 15:10 Integrated Health and Social Care
• 15:10 – 15:40 Workforce North
• 15:40 – 16:00 National Islands Plan
• 16:00 – 16:10 AOB, Summary and Close

Start of Transcript

Anthony Gurney

Well, that was lovely. Good morning, everyone, welcome to Arran. I'll stand up so you can see me. Welcome to Arran, my name's Tony Gurney, I'm the Cabinet Member for the Economy at North Ayrshire. Welcome and in advance, apologies, because I've been told that I have to do this.

Feasgar math a h-uile duine. 'S e toileachas a th'ann a bhith fosgladh ar co-chruinneachadh foghair an-diugh agus fàilte a chur oirbh uile don Eilean àlainn Arainn.

[Good afternoon, everyone. It’s a pleasure to open our autumn meeting today and to welcome you all to the beautiful Isle of Arran.]

Sorry, so good morning. I'm never doing that again. Sorry, Kate, I know you're really good at it, but you can give me notes later. It's my great pleasure to welcome you all to the beautiful Isle of Arran.

For those of us who aren’t Gaelic speakers, that's me, thank you for joining us today. I extend a particularly warm welcome to the Deputy First Minister, Kate Forbes and to the Minister for Public Finance, Ivan McKee and of course to all the members of the Convention of the Highlands and Islands who have joined us today. Before we begin, of course, I want to say a big thank you to our wonderful musicians, Holly Hayman, Evie Southwick and Aisling Coyle, for sharing their wonderful talent with us today and for making this start feel so special.

For those of you who haven't been here before, Arran is a truly special place. It's renowned for its diverse and striking landscape, its habitats and of course, its cultural heritage. Of course, it's no surprise that the island attracts between 350,000 and 500,000 visitors a year. I'm tempted to say something about most of them stay longer than they expected to, but that's probably in bad taste today.

The significance of the island's outstanding landscapes, diverse habitats, cultural monuments and worldclass geology was recognised through the designation of the Arran Geopark as a UNESCO Global Geopark in April 2025. That was only one of 10 in the UK alongside the North West Highlands and Shetland. Somebody who wrote this speech has said I should say that Shetland's in Scotland. I'm not going to do that. If you don't know that Shetland's in Scotland, you're in the wrong meeting.

In 2021, North Ayrshire Council launched a three-year islands recovery and renewal pilot in partnership with the Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Scottish Government. This unique initiative supported inclusive and sustainable economic recovery for Arran and Cumbrae, tailored to the island's unique needs post-pandemic. Ten-year island plans codeveloped with local communities now gain the development of our wellbeing economy, focused on economic, community and environmental priorities. These strategic plans address longstanding challenges and are helping to unlock opportunities for both islands. The pilot demonstrated a strong commitment from the council, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Scottish Government in providing dedicated resources and funding.

Due to the success of the pilot, it was mainstreamed, so it's now the North Ayrshire Islands programme, to advance the next phase of development for Arran and Cumbrae. Part of my portfolio includes climate and I'm proud to say that our plans incorporate a strong net zero approach. Specific projects, including the bespoke net zero islands accelerator, have been designed to improve energy efficiency and sustainability across the islands, aligning with North Ayrshire Council's ambitious target to become net zero by 2030. These efforts are also in harmony with wider strategies, including the Highlands and Islands and the Ayrshire Regional Economic Strategies, contributing to the strategic objectives of the National Islands Plan for Scotland.

Equally, I'm proud of our pioneering work in community wealth building. Some of you may know that North Ayrshire Council was the first in Scotland to adopt a Community Wealth Building Strategy way back in May 2020. This was followed by our Keep it Local campaign and the launch of our Community Wealth Building Anchor Charter in October of the same year. Since then, we've seen significant progress with many local businesses on the mainland and on the islands benefiting from this approach, including through the innovative and nationally recognised Ayrshire Growth Deal CWB programme.

Of course, while we are here on Arran, you'll hear about examples of how our local businesses align with the principles of community wealth building. This includes the Auchrannie Hotel Resort, the Arran Candle Company and Arran Dairies. I'm delighted to anticipate a special experience later today, as we'll have the opportunity to sample some of the exquisite ice cream produced locally by Arran Dairies. That's not just what I was told to say, I've tasted it, you're in for a treat, it's great. In addition, in front of you, you have a gift from the Arran Candle Company, take that home as a memento.

As you'll see from today's agenda, our substantive item is community wealth building and I look forward to hearing your insights and experience on this vital work. We'll also be discussing the pressing issue of social care provision on our islands. Many of us face challenges in recruiting and retaining health and social care staff to support our ageing populations and I'm keen to hear your thoughts on how we can work together to address this issue. We have a full and important day ahead of us. I'm confident that through continued collaboration, we'll make meaningful progress for our island communities today and in the years to come. Thank you very much. To chair today's meeting, would you please welcome Deputy First Minister, Kate Forbes?

Kate Forbes

Madainn mhath agus taing mhòr dhan Chomhairle airson a’ cho-labhairt againn an-diugh a chur air dòigh.

[Good morning and many thanks to the Council for organising our conference today.]

Thank you so much to you, Councillor Tony Gurney, for the warm welcome this morning. The warmth inside the room makes up for the cool, damp weather outside. But I do think it's absolutely remarkable and worth noting at the outset that despite some of the troubling weather forecast for this week, this is a full house.

I think that reflects the importance that all of us put on the Convention of the Highlands and Islands and the value of the conversations that we'll have today and hopefully the actions that ensue. My sincere thanks to all of you for prioritising this convention. The pipers were absolutely superb. We haven't quite got to the lengths, I think, of councils trying to compete to put on the best show, but it's starting to get that way because I think Highland Council did a brilliant job, Shetland has done an outstanding job in the past, but neither of you had free candles, so I think that - I was reflecting on that point until I realised that the only person that has the actual room scent is the two senior ministers at this end. I don't know what that says about what you expect to be coming from this end of the table, but wonderful to be here.

We're also grateful for those that are doing the technology. We obviously have the convention being livestreamed, it'll be recorded for transcription as well. You all know the drill, make sure you put the microphones on to speak, switch them off when you want to mutter and those in the gallery are very welcome as well to hopefully enjoy proceedings. We'll see about that.

This is the autumn 2025 meeting of the Convention of the Highlands and Islands. I was going to say at the very end, but I think I'll say at the beginning because it allows us to have some conversations over coffee and in the lunchbreak, that normally we would of course have a second, another convention in the springtime. We would normally have that scheduled in May next year, but you'll know that we have a Scottish Parliament election in May next year and the pre-election guidance means that if we are to proceed with a spring Convention of the Highlands and Islands, then we would need to hold this is February.

That is quite a constrained window for organisation, for delivering on actions, being able to show progress. But I'm going to leave it with you as to whether or not you think that there is value in still having a spring Convention of the Highlands and Islands, even if it means that we would have to organise something at breakneck speed in February. Something to ponder today, because there are pros and cons either way.

As we start this convention, we have a packed schedule ahead of us. Very delighted to welcome my colleague, Ivan McKee, Minister for Public Finance, to chair the substantive discussion on community wealth building. We're also delighted to announce today 23 projects that have been successful in securing funding through the islands programme and the carbon neutral islands capital funding schemes for this finance year. That's worth a combined £5.9 million, including £324,000 to provide new and upgraded facilities for the beautiful venue, Brodick Hall, where we're convening today. Congratulations to all those recipients of that funding, the 23 projects scattered across our islands.

That sets us up for today. I'm going to move to the first agenda item, which is a review of the previous actions. That is as noted in the actions dashboard and I'm just going to look for members to note updates to the outcomes from the previous conventions in paper 1. Any comment on any of those outcomes or actions?

Of course, if anything comes to mind following the meeting, you can let the Secretariat team know. No? In which case, let's move on to the written papers. There are three papers, thanks to those who have produced these papers. We've got the Highlands and Islands Regional Economic Partnership update, we've got the paper from Crown Estate Scotland on creating lasting value for Scotland and we've got the joint paper, paper 4, from the Crown Estate and Crofting Commission, making more of crofting tenure when it comes to rural repopulation. I am going to ask if there are any comments on any of those papers.

From my end, in terms of the Regional Economic Partnership, great to see that work is continuing on the two-year delivery plan and that it's being informed by the Regional Economic Strategy and the regional transformation opportunity work. That will help focus on the actions that are going to deliver the best outcomes in the Highlands and Islands. Also delighted to see the good work that's being produced under community wealth building, in particular, HIE's research around key emerging challenging, which hopefully will inform the conversation we have later on today and inform the work to the bill as it progresses through parliament.

The third paper, from Crown Estate Scotland, that was an action from the last meeting. There's obviously been constructive dialogue between Crown Estate Scotland, local authorities and officials in this space and I think there's an opportunity to continue to engage.

Then finally, paper 4, I know that in recent years the commission has increased its enforcement of crofter duties and continues to do so, which in itself is helping to create crofting opportunities. Now the Crofting and Scottish Land Court Bill which is going through parliament will hopefully help to facilitate that enforcement. I am mindful of the increases in croft prices in recent years. As that work develops it'll be interesting to see what measures you would plan to implement to ensure that that exercise doesn't add to those concerns.

I'm going to ask in the round, the first paper we have before us which is paper 2, Regional Economic Partnership, if anybody wants to comment on that, particularly the authors or the owners of that paper. Any comments to make? If not, I'll move to paper 3, Crown Estate Scotland. Does anybody want to comment on Crown Estate? Any interest, Ronan? Anybody want to - yes?

Ronan O'Hara

Thank you, Kate, Deputy First Minister. I think really just to flag that we're on the cusp of entering into our third corporate plan. We're still very much a fledgling entity and what the paper attempts to articulate is that in the five-year period ahead, we know we want to and need to deepen engagement with both local government and communities in a way that we have not done to date. Also we have agreed with government for the first time that we will provide a guaranteed floor of £62 million over the five-year period, that's the revenues raised within 12 nautical miles which will pass to Scottish Consolidated Fund.

I think it is yet to be determined as to whether or not there will be a back-to-back arrangement where surety will be provided to local authorities, but that is a new development. I think we are extremely keen to understand how we can work in partnership with local authorities across Scotland to leverage that, using the moneys that we have at our disposal and the assets under management.

Kate Forbes

Thanks for that. Okay, we will move on to the last paper in this section, paper 4. Any comments? I don't know if either Crofting Commission, Andrew wants to say anything.

Andrew Thin

Minister, thanks very much. I just want to make one point actually. The paper speaks for itself, I think. There is a tremendous opportunity here, there's no question in my mind that creating new crofts, building on the residency duty and linking the residency duty to housing, helps us to tackle a thorny issue, frankly. It cannot be done unless it's done jointly with the planning authorities, that is so important. It's built into planning policy already and that's great, but it will be absolutely vital that this is done hand in glove with local authorities.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Any other comments? In which case we will take those as noted and accepted. Again my thanks for producing these three papers. We always at these conventions have a wonderful set of papers and I'm conscious that a lot of hard work goes into all of them and they're very much appreciated. Okay, in which case, somewhat ahead of schedule but that's not a bad thing, we will move to community wealth building and I'll hand over to Ivan McKee to chair this item.

Ivan McKee

Thanks very much, DFM and good morning, everybody. It's a real pleasure to be here and yeah, we got here. I'm not sure how we're getting back but we absolutely managed to get here safely this morning. Community wealth building, I think, is a subject that's clearly got a lot of interest and a lot of enthusiasm behind it and there's obviously been a lot of work happening in this space over a number of years around different parts of the country.

The fact that we're taking forward the Community Wealth Building Bill, I think it's important to see that as the next stage in the process. It brings together a lot of the requirements and I think it's a common baseline for us to move forward and ensure that community wealth building continues to reach its full potential as a transformative economic development policy tool, strengthening local economy through that collaboration between communities, public sector anchors and partners in the private and of course the third sector.

Delighted to be able to introduce North Ayrshire Council to talk us through the work that they’ve been doing on community wealth building. North Ayrshire are absolutely a pioneer in this space, launching Scotland's first Community Wealth Building Strategy in 2020 and then refreshing it just last year. I think it sets us up well for the work that we want to take forward through the bill to roll that best practice out across the whole country.

I had the pleasure last week of visiting Lochshore Park in North Ayrshire to see the fabulous work that was happening there. The investment, but probably more importantly, the joined up work between different organisations, as in third sector, public sector, private sector, working seamlessly together to take forward the community wealth building agenda and sparking a lot of cooperation. But real benefits on all sides as a consequence of the work that they were taking forward. Without further ado, I'll pass over to Craig Hatton, Chief Executive at North Ayrshire Council, to talk us through some slides and provide some context for the discussion that I'm certainly looking forward to.

Craig Hatton

Thank you, Minister. I think there's some slides, I don't know if I need to - there we are. Really good to be here today to talk around community wealth building. As the Minister has said, we were amongst the first in Scotland to really push on with this new model. It was great for the Minister to see firsthand last week at Lochshore Park where we had the council here, but also a number of community initiatives, but also a private sector business there who transitioned to an employee-ownership model and launched that on Friday.

That's a company with 350 employees, how they’ve taken that leap of faith and worked really hard and embraced that community wealth building model, but the importance of employees within a developing and growing business. It was really good to see that and I think the Minister enjoyed that experience. For myself, as Chief Executive, because you know that lots of things are going on, but you're not always there right at things that are happening there and then, so it was really good to see that for myself.

Just a little bit around that company, they're based on the mainland and they're very much at the heart of the digital agenda, things like AI and digital engineering. They were owned by - they were a local company, started in the 1960s in Saltcoats and then grew and then got taken over by a multinational based in Australia. That Australian company about three years ago fell into administration, so the owners bought the company back, all the senior management bought the company back and then have moved to this employee-ownership model. It really is a great example of community wealth building.

But wealth building itself is a long-term practical approach to transforming the local economy, as we're familiar with and we see it in North Ayrshire as a key mechanism to deliver that wellbeing economy. It aims to change the flow of wealth and economic power and bring those closer to communities, something that we're really, really interested in on the islands. I always think the islands are closer to the communities than many other areas in Scotland. I think it is really, really important. But to increase community ownership and control of assets and develop and grow more generative enterprises, such as small locally-owned enterprises and that can be one, two, three people, or it can be many, many more, such as the example that I've given earlier. Cooperatives and social enterprises, to lock in and share wealth in that local area.

We've all got examples of where wealth just leaves the area and local people, local communities don't benefit from that. We use wealth building as a strategic framework that aligns the economic power of public sector anchor organisations and I suspect in all of our areas we will be one of the largest, if not the largest employer in the area. The vast majority of our employees will live in the area as well. But it's how we align that work with the needs of local communities, fostering inclusive economic growth, maximising economic opportunities associated with investments or initiatives and focusing on local empowerment.

Community wealth building transforms those traditional economic models into more equitable systems. It encourages the use of local resources, supports community-led initiatives and promotes long-term resilience. The approach ensures that economic benefits are retained within the community, thereby reducing inequality and enhancing social cohesion. Again I think certainly since the pandemic, social cohesion is really, really important. It's always been really important, but I think the pandemic really shifted the dial to ensure we have that in place. I think we should have a video here, if that works. There we go.

[Video playing]

Craig Hatton

Our journey started back in 2016. North Ayrshire, since the deindustrialisation in the 1980s, has suffered from high levels of unemployment and the poverty and deprivation that goes with that. I always used to say we're either the highest level of benefit claiming count per head of population in Scotland, or second highest, that's where we were and we simply couldn't break that cycle. We needed a new model, because the traditional models simply weren’t working for us. Lots of conversations with colleagues in government about how can we shift this, what do we need to do, because North Ayrshire doesn't stand alone with those challenges.

We undertook an inclusive growth diagnostic back in 2016 to look at some of the key constraints on developing a more inclusive and resilient economy. Particularly looking at those groups of people who were excluded from those traditional economic development approaches to economic growth, such as young people, females, people with long-term health problems. It's really important to us to identify how we can help these people into work to create that vibrant employment market, but also to enable businesses to grow and attract new businesses to the area. We looked around the country, UK and wider, about what we could do and Preston was probably the pioneering community wealth building in the UK.

We worked with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies and Neil McInroy was part of that, who's now - I don't know if he's still doing work with government, but certainly has been doing work with government around the Community Wealth Building Bill, to undertake a diagnostic and we did that 2019. We used that to inform our strategy, which was launched actually during the pandemic, in May 2020. We also tied that into the Ayrshire Growth Deal because we feel so strongly about these principles and they're really essential to how we can grow the economy, but also make sure more people benefit from that growth, because this is what it's about.

It's not about that wealth just going out the area, it's about ensuring that local people, local communities really, really benefit from that. We developed that through the Growth Deal, but we also recognise the role of the islands and we're really lucky on the islands, we've got some great people who want to work with us, some people who are sat in the gallery above, watching today's events. We developed the North Ayrshire Islands programme, which is a partnership with the council, government and Highlands and Islands Enterprise and stakeholders on the islands.

That work developed two 10-year strategic island plans, one for Arran and one for Cumbrae, with community wealth building at the heart and looking at just transition. It was really good to hear the announcements today around the investment in Arran from the islands plan, the islands programme, to show how that work with stakeholders is working and how they can develop bids. We support them using those community wealth building principles to get more investment into their communities.

We refreshed recently the strategy. That's run really well, but clearly we're all learning, we're all learning in Scotland around community wealth building. Everybody is progressing with that and that's really good to see. That's allowed us to refresh that approach and take the lessons learnt to move forward. But one of the big lessons is community wealth building is not a bolt-on, if it's a bolt-on it won't work. It's got to be absolutely integrated and run through everything you do as a council.

Within the council plan, one of the strategic priorities is wellbeing. Wealth building in economic growth is absolutely within that wellbeing piece about how we work with partners, the Regional Economic Strategy, I mentioned the Growth Deal, the HIREP strategy, our Sustainable North Ayrshire Strategy, again one of our strategic priorities, regeneration, highland plans, vacant and derelict land strategy, everything that we do, community wealth building is at the heart of it.

It is not about a bolt-on and if you treat it as a bolt-on it will not realise any benefits, because you'll move onto a new bolt-on. It's got to be absolutely at the heart of everything we do. That's been really successful with our 7,000 council employees, they all understand community wealth building, they understand their role that they play in that around how we work with communities. But also with the anchor organisations, because it's not just about the council, it's about the other public sector bodies. But also how we can stretch that wider into community organisations, the private sector, to become anchor organisations as well.

You'll be familiar with the bill, really good to see that bill. A lot of work with Scottish Government, working as a true partner in that. You'll be familiar with the three other duties there about a duty on ministers to publish a statement about wealth building, a duty on local authorities and relevant bodies to work in partnership to produce and implement a community wealth building action plan and a duty on ministers to bring forth guidance to support the production of action plans and implementation of principles.

Now that doesn't mean that it's one for Scotland, because community wealth building is about community and we've all got different communities and different dynamics. But it's really helpful to have that framework in place, because there are lots of public sector agencies and they are the key to the delivery of this. But everybody is dealing with their own challenges, finances in particular, we're all aware of that, of our partners as we've gone through I think is it 17 years since the start of austerity, 2008. We're still battling through that and everybody has got their challenges.

This really says look, you need to work with community wealth building around this, because there may not be any immediate benefits for you in the here and now, but in the longer term it will help reduce demand on your services. I think that's really, really important as we want to shift demand. We always talk about early intervention and prevention and sometimes under financial pressure that's the first thing to go, isn't it? But we know it's wrong for that to go, but if we work differently, a lot of those things will happen naturally, so it's really, really important that we do get in that space and other agencies work with the council, in our instance, or councils across the piece.

As we've gone through, I'm just going to speak about a few opportunities, how we work, some of the achievements as we've gone through our wealth building journey. The North Ayrshire Island Skills Initiative, skills absolutely at the heart. We're again working with government, secured funding to develop a small-scale pilot and a bespoke plan, initiative, to support education and skills interventions on the islands of both Arran and Cumbrae. It distributed skills development grants to seven island-based individuals, 19 businesses in Arran and six on Cumbrae and supported a total of 32 skills initiatives.

There are some of the members of the team over on my left-hand side who I'm sure will be able to pick up some of the detail of that later in conversation, as it seems that we'll probably be on the island a little longer than what some people were planning, so it does give us that opportunity. But the success is a range of training interventions, retaining young people and services on the island. We all know the challenges with population, the challenges with retaining young people and families on the island, because they are absolutely essential to the future sustainability and viability of many of our islands. Some of the examples, veterinary nursing, accountancy, paddleboarding, MOT testing. I'm not sure if I've got a video now, is there a video? But clearly a range of issues there coming through and it was really good to see that.

[Video playing]

Craig Hatton

I spoke about the Growth Deal and that was Ayrshire and we recognise that there is a North Ayrshire economy, there's an Arran economy, there's a Cumbrae economy. But if we're really going to make wealth building work, feed into the larger companies and get them in that corporate social responsibility that large companies talk about. But we really want to access some of that and show that the local change - we did that on an Ayrshire basis as part of the Growth Deal, as we said.

There was a programme that ran for initially three and we stretched it to four years, but we had community wealth building officers operating across Ayrshire, a number of principles around fair work, around a wealth building business fund that came forward. But it was that direct investment to support local enterprise development through the Growth Deal. Lots of key successes, you can see those down the left-hand side there. I suppose it's one of the things with the Growth Deal, is that governments are always asking show me the money, what are you doing with it? What's happening? What are the outcomes? We've got that really robust framework to demonstrate the achievements there. You can see some of those in the figures on the screen there about some of the successes and some of the examples of how we've really embedded wealth building.

Community, it's easy to focus on wealth building but community wealth building is important. As the council leader who's unfortunately not able to be with us today says, community wealth building, you've got to put the community into community wealth building. The Millport Town Hall project was a great example. That was a town hall probably built in the late 1800s, it actually was in the common good and it had deteriorated over the years. I actually had to go and close the town hall because our guys came back and said look, we've got some issues, we don't think it's safe. There was a bit of a community reaction to that and I went across. I think I took three steps in it and said this is closed, it was really that bad.

But the community really wanted it and they wanted to overcome the adversity of water running down the walls and the electrics in varying places and the rest of it. But for me, it was completely unsafe. We looked at a range of options around that, could we do something with the HRA to turn it into flats, do we just need to demolish it. It was very difficult getting something to come forward, but the community wanted to keep this building. We had some tremendous volunteers on the island who came together. We worked with them to help them build a business case to bring the town hall back into use and it was opened two years ago.

It has not been an easy journey, far from it and it’s a tremendous credit to the people who've driven that project. But we sat down and we said what do you want to achieve? We helped them with the business plan. This wasn’t just around opening a community space, because we know the sustainability of community spaces is really challenging. What they wanted was something that would bring in an income stream, so the upper floors have been converted into holiday flats, so it gives them an income stream and makes the whole project sustainable.

We helped them sit down and make grant applications, helped them appoint contractors, a range of things around that. It has been a very difficult project, there's no doubt about it, but it was a building that was really important to the community. The council has given them some funding to get the project finished, but also help them access other funding that we wouldn’t have been able to access as a council. But also it's community-run, it's got a business model that makes it sustainable through the holiday flats. I think that was a real key difference around that.

It's open now, I think it was two weeks ago when we were over on the island and opened that. You can see the project there, full of council officials and members, but we did the little part, the community really drove that. That was the thing, because today as council, we can't do everything. We've never been able to do everything, but even less with the financial environment that we're operating in. But also that will employ a couple of people in running the centre as well, a couple of local people, so really, really positive project.

It's easy to talk about, this is easy, we'll just get that done, no problem. It's never that easy, is it? There are challenges, there's no doubt about that. At the start of the journey, we recognised we needed to put investment in there and put a number of temporary posts in place on a three-year period to get community wealth building up and running. But as I say, identifying the resources at a time of financial pressures is difficult, but we did that as a council and we've retained some of that resource, because it's not just a three-year programme. This programme, we really want to embed it in everything we do.

Procurement, we've been quite successful in shifting that procurement. Prior to the wealth building programme, we spent 19% of - well 19% of our expenditure was on businesses in North Ayrshire and we've increased that to 26%. I think people sometimes misinterpret community wealth building around procurement. They think it's just giving work to local businesses. It's not, it's not. If you think that's the way, that's wrong. It is about supporting local businesses and helping them develop the skills to deliver the contracts competitively that you procure and you and the wider public sector procure.

It's really, really important. This is not just giving money to what might be an inefficient business that wouldn’t win a contract. It's working two ways. Also we have a procurement wave plan, I'm sure you all do, about that future work programme, future procurement opportunities. Our business development team go out, share that with businesses who might fit that, so they are ready for it. We've also listened to a lot of what they’ve said around bureaucracy and we've tried to reduce that, smaller value contracts. We've increased the threshold where we just get prices from three companies.

What happens now, say for example one of the services wants to procure something, they go to the procurement team and it's below the threshold, the procurement team go to the business development team and say what local businesses can deliver this work? We're still getting three prices locally, so we're going through a competitive process, but we're using local businesses. We're not going to a default or using Jack Smith Esquire to deliver something because that's the way we've always done it. We want to build local businesses.

Then how we work with them further is around what are your fair work practices, what's your corporate social responsibility, how are you linking into local community? It's making sure that you look at it in the round. But anybody who just says simply that's just about awarding contracts locally are wrong. They don't get community wealth building. It's about working with businesses and helping them develop their strengths, capacity, capability to deliver those contracts and that is really, really important.

Energy, we've had many discussions around here and people who've known me a long time around here, my frustrations with the grid, we are all really frustrated with the grid. There's a particular example on Arran where the grid date has been put further back for a community energy project. I think it is a great opportunity for communities to get a slice of the wealth and how can they take a percentage of ownership in an energy generation project? There's lots of work we can do, there's lots of opportunities, but the skills, the knowledge, again I'm looking up at the gallery and I see people from our community who've tried to drive things forward and haven't always got that experience, that capacity as the private sector companies have, because they're doing it every day.

Communities are just picking it up, so how do we help them develop those skills? How do we get that sort of guidebook almost around an energy project and how a community can play into that? We've just had the community benefits consultation with government a few months ago. We know that most of the powers lie with UK Government, but how can we work across the piece to enable communities to access more of that energy within their area?

Then there's a final one and that's where some businesses will pay lip service to win a contract. It's really important that we follow up on that and make sure they are delivering the commitments and working closely with business. There are lots of challenges, but successes far outweigh the challenges. But it's really important to be mindful of that as we go forward.

I hope people have found that helpful. There are some points to help with discussion there and I will just leave those on the screen. I've spoken for quite a while around this. It's something that is really important to North Ayrshire. I think it's showing success, we are starting to shift the dial but we need to do more, we recognise we need to do more around that.

But some of the examples of how we've worked with local individuals, so the skills initiative, the community in Millport Town Hall, the procurement successes, employee-ownership, hitting those five pillars of community wealth building can be difficult at times, but you can achieve things. Some of the team are here with me who might have to answer some of the questions, they're close to the coalface, but I'll hand back to the Minister, thank you.

Ivan McKee

Thanks very much, Craig. Excellent guide through of the issues here, which I'm sure you'll all be very familiar with. A wide range of work that we're already doing and work that is being taken forward comes together under the community wealth building banner. I think that's the intention of the bill, is to be able to pull that together locally and promote best practice. I'd like to open up the discussion. I don't know…

Emma Macdonald

Thanks very much, Minister and thanks very much for your presentation, Craig, that was really, really interesting. From a Shetland perspective, I think from our council we've always looked at what can we do to make sure Shetland's sustainable, so it's not about looking at just the council services. I think we've done an awful lot of things that if you imagine them now it would be under community wealth building. I think we do a lot of that already.

There's obviously more that we can do and I think there were some really good examples in your presentation. But the area that I was quite interested in your discussion points that I thought would be good to pick up on is around the governance. I suppose there's some real concerns that it just becomes another layer of - I'm trying to be polite - another layer of burden that as a small local authority and small organisations that we have in Shetland, it's just another thing that we have to then report on.

We have to provide reports, all the things that come with a duty to deliver on. How do we make sure that we do this in a way that means that everybody is working together for the benefit of everybody in Shetland? To make sure that they're doing their bit for this, but that it doesn’t become a real burden on people's time and just makes people not be able to move forward and make the progress we want to do. Thanks.

Ivan McKee

You're absolutely right to raise that and Stephen will tell you, one of the first things I said when I saw the bill was oh no, not another reporting requirement. But I think that's why it's really important that we get that right, because we're in the business of taking out layers, not adding more in and taking out reporting requirements and complex, adding more into it. It's really important that as we take this bill forward, we design it in a way that allows it to be as simple as possible while delivering on what we want to do, which is make sure (a) everybody's taking forward the community wealth building agenda and doing it in a way that allows us to identify and share best practice.

You're absolutely right to say that a lot of the stuff that we are doing, you're doing anyway, is community wealth building, we just don't call it that. That's a hugely important part of it as well. The guidance, I think, to the bill is going to be really critical, so getting that in a good place as we develop that is very, very important. Who was next?

Raymond Bremner

Thanks very much. It's nice to be on the island, I've never been here before, would you believe it? Sorry about that, Craig. In terms of the discussion that we're having here just now, Highland Council launched its community wealth building strategy a year ago. I think some of the points that Emma makes are well made. It should actually be an integral part of what we do. We have looked at many new initiatives at Highland Council. One of the ones that I'm particularly keen on taking forward is the social value charter for renewables investment in the Highlands, where we embed a greater benefit to our communities through that and the opportunities that we see coming to the Highlands.

I also think that it's, in terms of some of the points that you're asking us to contribute to, Craig, is actually working with the other agencies, working with the REPs, working with community planning partnerships. Also there are lots of other investors in our communities, in our local areas, that represent the employers, that represent those who we can work with to realise the maximum benefit. That includes everybody from the forums that exist, like the Chambers of Commerce, like the Federation of Small Businesses, but also to those who also support the skills development initiatives. I know that Damien is sitting next to us and we've just looked at the Workforce North, we've just launched that recently in Inverness.

All of that comes together to be able to strengthen community wealth building. I think that we should see it as being integrated, rather than a standalone vision that we have to report on singularly. I think we should be mindful of community wealth building when it comes to everything that we're doing, that's reporting to either council or reporting to the REP or all the other forums, so that it's part of our psyche. Sharing of what the members of CoHI are doing in that is a good idea and that's why you're asking us for our contributions. I think between our officers, we have the ability to be able to collate a lot of that initiative-taking to date to see how much more we can actually embed it in our psyche and in the being that we are as local authorities and other businesses right across the whole of the Highlands and Islands. Thanks.

Angus Campbell

Thank you and thank you, Craig, for that report. A lot of the things that I actually noted down to say in this was covered in what you said. I think that's a very common theme. I think for us at HIE, community wealth building is one of the main pillars of what we've done, what we do. I think Stuart says quite often it's in our DNA of what we're there as an organisation to do, but there is always more to do. One of the things I would say is, in answer to Raymond too, we have to do these things together across the sector, we have to work together. There's no point everybody going away and inventing new things if we're already doing them.

The second thing, for me it should apply to all parts of supply of service into communities and I'll just pick one at random. If you have, for instance, the design of ferry services not being included from that aspect of looking at community wealth building and how it can contribute to that, then a lot of the other initiatives you might have will fall off the end, because they have to be joined up. We recently commissioned a report looking at what communities did in our area and one of the things that came out was a real worry about capacity and ability to do it.

Also the demographic of those that were involved. There was - I don't want to say a tiredness, but it's the same people doing the same thing. I think one of the challenges is to get our younger generation in and making sure they're the ones that are involved in and making the most of this. Last week we went to a green charity in Nairn and the chair there told us they had made 400 applications just to get revenue into the system to keep them going. They were doing fantastic work, training, volunteering, green agenda. The stick, as he called it, the stick percentage of that was something like two per cent.

It was a huge amount of effort going into just finding the revenue to keep going, as we all know, so it's important. That's why one thing we should maybe look at is the community benefit from largescale developments that are happening in our area. If we could set a gold standard for that and a common thing where we're not competing in terms of community benefit, but an expectation for high level and then refeed it into community wealth building, I think that could be the engine for it. Thank you.

Ivan McKee

Thanks very much, Angus. I should have said congratulations, it said on here you're the Interim Chair; you're now the Chair, so well done on your appointment. Some very valid points there and I think that point about community benefits is well made. I'm working out how we use that to best effectively leverage forward this agenda.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, Minister and thanks, Craig, for that presentation. It made some really great, inspirational examples of how we can increase the impact of community wealth building. I think they also show that the sheer effort and adaptability that's needed to tackle the challenges that we're facing. There are great initiatives happening right across the country.

I'd just like to make a couple of pleas to government and the first one underlines the point made by Shetland. That while the coming legislation and any guidance that follows supports that spirit of innovation, enterprise and collaboration, that we don't end up with an overly complicated, onerous set of processes and requirements for reporting at scale. I think that's really important.

Secondly, that we make sure that there are robust, long-term systems in place to share best practice among CoHI members, as reflected in the paper from North Ayrshire. There are lots of exciting new ideas across the country and our communities really stand to benefit from the lessons that we can learn from each other.

Ivan McKee

Absolutely, thank you. DFM.

Kate Forbes

This is undeveloped thought that was prompted by Angus's comments in particular. I'm very conscious, Angus talked about capacity within communities, but communities are at very different stages in terms of engaging with formalised processes. You've got some communities that have got generations of owning their future and owning assets and progressing work. Then you've got other communities that are in a different place.

But in terms of capacity, it strikes me that there are three inhibitors of community capacity. One is volunteer fatigue, so the same people doing the same things and it's consuming their lives for too many years. The second one is around the skills element. Where particular expertise is required, so when it comes to energy initiatives, for example, it's quite a technical area, that there may not be the expertise there and communities need to outsource that expertise.

Then the third area is around paid capacity, because we all know that where you have a local development officer with the support of HIE or with the support of other organisations, they're just able to make greater progress because they're not squeezing it in and around a day job. But different communities will have different access to paid capacity and this is where we hold a mirror up to ourselves, this is not anybody else's responsibility, but also being able to make plans for multiyear rather than one-off year. Just feeding back the fact that I hear that from all of you all the time, so I have heard that.

Then the other factors that some communities have are much more advanced, some communities are just starting. But those communities that are more advanced nearly always have identified revenue streams that allow them to, therefore, make greater plans than others who are just starting out. We all know that in this day and age, post-LEADER, post-additional access to funds, it is harder to get off the ground than it might have been 10 years ago. I see that particularly with some initiatives.

We've had a lot of work with VisitScotland around say tourism congestion and the fact that communities are all reinventing the wheel multiple times in their own locality to try and resolve something. All that's to say that it strikes me there's an interesting question around whether there has ever been a multi-public body audit of community capacity. Where some communities have made greater progress because they’ve been able to access resources and some communities have not been able, has there ever been an audit of what support is actually available?

I'm conscious that even in two of the organisations that I have some responsibility for, HIE and Bòrd na Gàidhlig, there are two different local development officer schemes and the question has been raised at previous CoHI meetings whether we could ensure that there's a strong overlap. But that might be the case too with other public bodies, but whether there's ever been an actual audit and a more standardised approach.

Then secondly, whether there is some guidance for public bodies that don't normally face the public to the same extent as others, but whom communities are engaging with. I don't mean to in any way criticise any, but there'll be some, say Transport Scotland, who have high standards for safety and security on our roads. But community groups that are trying to engage on that technical basis find it a lot harder and whether there is a clear issue of guidance for public bodies who are not normally public-facing, but who are engaging with communities to provide additional support to how they help walk them through these processes.

Then a standardised approach to accessing greater capacity, whether it's around skills, funding or otherwise. It was those three things, whether there's ever been an audit. Secondly, guidance for public bodies that aren’t normally public-facing. Thirdly, a more standardised approach to all of this across our Highlands and Islands region would probably be a good foundation for the bill.

Ivan McKee

Thank you very much, very though provoking. Certainly with regards to multi-agency and audit, the work we're talking forward in, is it workstream 4 of the Public Service Reform Strategy, around about reviewing structures absolutely leans into that space but that's a very interesting angle on it. Who wants to come in next?

Ronan O'Hara

Thank you, Minister McKee. A reflection, if I may. Firstly, Craig, thank you for the presentation and the paper, very informative. I note that in both you reference capacity and resourcing limitations, which face us all, all the time, in every sphere. But if I may, joining the dots, I referenced earlier the fact that for the first time ever Crown Estate Scotland will provide a guarantee of a minimum of £62 million payment to Scottish Consolidated Fund arising from the activities where the revenue normally flows to local authorities in Scotland.

I can't help but feel that given when those moneys are passed across to local authorities, they come with recommendations as to their use, that there's a relationship here to the principle of circularity, strengthening social licence, as well as building capacity wealth and of course ultimately supporting just transition. I do wonder whether or not Scottish Consolidated Fund or the Exchequer and local authorities would have any appetite to see some of those moneys coming from Crown Estate Scotland directed to supporting community wealth building and practice and that would be something that we could in turn ourselves work to and support.

Ivan McKee

Thanks for raising that, I shall speak with Exchequer colleagues. Anyone else want to…

Speaker 2

A key point about governance, which is key to this, or we will just add a lot of waffle. I think we can learn from what we have experienced from Community Planning Partnerships over the last few years, where I think because governance has often been weak, Community Planning Partnerships often delivered a lot of talk and not a lot of outcome. In getting this right and getting the governance right, I think we have to be clear that the focus of governance systems and structures is on outcomes and it's on indicators, it's not on process. Leave people alone to figure out their own process. Free people up, free organisations up to figure things out for themselves. Don't try and put governance structures around process. Focus the governance on what are we trying to achieve, have we achieved it, what have we learnt, I think that would be a helpful focus for that.

Ivan McKee

Absolutely, hugely valid. Do you want to come back in?

Craig Hatton

It was just in the governance piece. It's about how we work with partnerships, because at the start everybody was - the other partners, yeah, yeah, this is really good, we want to get involved in this. The first meeting is really senior people, then the second meeting a bit less senior, then the third meeting a little bit less senior. It's about how the legislation makes sure that other public agencies have to take a community wealth building approach. This is not just about councils, because if it was just about councils it will not work. I think that's really important.

But then picking up on your point, what do we achieve, what are we going to do, what are we achieving now, do we measure success, because nobody wants to be part of something that's just another talking shop, that doesn't deliver anything. But the big thing is make sure that all the public sector organisations have commitment at the most senior level. That is the big thing and we don't just get deterioration where you've got senior council officers and the leader of the council, for example, at meetings and people coming from other organisations who aren’t empowered to make decisions. That's the thing, people in the room have to be empowered to make the decisions, because otherwise it won't move forward. I think that's really important in that governance space.

Ivan McKee

A key word, empowerment, absolutely central to a reform agenda. Paul, did you want to come in?

Paul Steele

Thank you, Minister and thank you, Craig for the presentation. Like Emma, I think there's an awful lot of things that you're talking about we're doing as well, so there's a lot of commonality there from the local authority point of view. I think your point about the partnership element kind of bleeding into that as well is really, really important. Governance as well, I think most people touched on governance today as - I don't know if it's a concern, I think it's just making sure we get it right.

For us, in the Outer Hebrides, obviously at a local level it makes more sense feeding into a regional sharing of best practice. I think having too much this is what you need to do isn't going to work, because then you're not really going to get the best practice; you're going to get the same practice. I think actually having that local ability to do what suits your area is going to be really, really important in terms of the governance side of things. The other points I was going to make have already been made, so I think I'll leave it at that. But yeah, need to just get the governance side of things right.

Ivan McKee

Thank you, a common theme coming through there. Anyone else want to - Craig, do you want to just comment on any of the other comments that have come in, in general? Thanks, that will be helpful.

Craig Hatton

Thank you. Really interesting that a couple of people have said well we're doing bits of this already, we were doing bits of it already, we're probably doing 60 per cent of it already. But how joined up was it, that's the key, is joining the dots in your own - how you operate as an entity. It must run through every policy you do. That way you are - if it's integrated into everybody's daily work, the pressure on resources is a little bit less.

But you know if you've just got a community wealth building team sat over here on the third floor at the end of the corridor and it's just there and you think community, oh, that's them, it's got to be integral to everything that everybody does. I think one of the best examples was that linking more strongly the business development team with procurement, with services, with fair work employment and employability teams.

You've got businesses doing this, do services who procure things that they do know that they do it, for a start, role of the business development team. Then for that business, how are they getting the skills coming through? Linking to education service, linking to the college. How are they getting young people in that pipeline, the link with employability? It's how you join all that up and that's a challenge for any large organisation, because councils are large organisations as well as the other public sector partners.

But how you join that, so it's an integrated approach and when people are doing something in their daily work, they think right, that ties with pillar 4, but I'm working with that business around - or I'm doing that thing around pillar 4, but how does it link into pillars 1, 2, 3 and 5? It won't pick up all five at once, but it might pick up two or three and that's when you start really getting the benefit. It absolutely has to be running throughout your organisation and your policies. I think I can't emphasise that enough.

Ivan McKee

Yes, it's hugely important. Anyone else want to come in? I was going to ask Stephen from Scottish Government just to give a wee update on where we are with the bill and any other reflections on any of the comments that have come in so far.

Stephen White

Thanks very much, Minister. Yes, just a quick summary of where we are with the bill. Obviously there's a parliamentary election next year, so all legislation needs to be through before the session ends, so the team leading the bill expects quite a brisk period. I can't share exact dates, that's the Minister for Parliamentary Business's job, but you can expect the stage 1 debate on the bill to be very soon, so you'll be able to watch that and other officials watch that. Then that will be followed quite quickly by the stage 2 consideration where the bulk of amendments in the bill would be considered.

The stage 1 report was very constructive, very positive about community wealth building, but there were a few challenges in there which lend themselves to thinking about amendments and obviously opposition MSPs will be thinking about amendments. Then eventually the bill will have to be passed before the election, but I think that's before the end of the financial year, so a very pacey period ahead.

Just picking up on a couple of the things, the thing about reporting. I think from the outset of the bill, working with ministers on this, to paraphrase it's about reporting progress and commitment and change to communities, local businesses, local third sector, rather than reporting up. The bill doesn't feature any obligations to provide reports to the government.

But what is important and I think the Minister noted this, is that we need a conversation about good practice through the guidance and monitoring and evaluation, so there's at least some consistent capture of information, so the stories aren’t too disparate all over Scotland. Because part of the reason for legislating is that consistency.

I don't know if they’ve set the terms that have been used, it's a jargon term, but this is inside the whole system. I think Craig's been getting at that a few times in his points, is that it needs to be a comprehensive partnership, dialogue, agreed actions. Then in that sense it's got a better chance of bearing more fruit in an economic sense. Hopefully that quick update on the bill's helpful and I'll be here after the discussion, so if anyone or anyone's officials want to speak to me about it, I'm happy to talk in more detail. Thank you.

Stuart Black

Thanks, Mr McKee. I was reflecting on the DFM's questions and trying to think if I knew the answers. On the audit of community capacity building, that is one of the things that our research looked at, was how communities are supported across the Highlands and Islands in particular and it does vary. One of the key things I think is that often, just as you mentioned, development officers are important, but we also have joint funded posts.

There's a great example with North Ayrshire where we have the islands officer and that post has made a huge difference to supporting development - I see Craig nodding - supporting development here. That's jointly funded by ourselves and North Ayrshire Council. I always remind you that revenue support is important for these kinds of things and that's why it's significant for us as an agency. I'm sure there is guidance for public bodies on standards of community engagement. I recall something on that when I was working with Highland Council and that's designed to set a standard for consultation across the public sector.

In terms of a standardised approach across the Highlands and Islands, I think we do collaborate extensively with the local authorities and it tends to be ourselves and the councils leading on this. I was reflecting, this is the week that the HIDB was founded 60 years ago and we're having a small celebration at the end of the week. But one of the key things about what they did in the 1970s was community cooperatives. These were communities coming together in often island situations to run services like retail and other things. Those have become, I think, very significant.

The other thing I wanted to add to that was employee-owned businesses and again, on Arran there's a great example, the Auchrannie Resort, which is probably the biggest - well it is the biggest tourism organisation owned and run by its employees in Scotland. Last week, as part of our board visit, we were at Aquascot and where employees have a huge stake in their business, i.e. they own it, that makes a huge difference to the confidence and the success of the companies. We saw in Aquascot, fish processing is not the most glamorous of sectors, but they have a very longstanding workforce, huge loyalty to that business and I think it's another part of community wealth building that's worth thinking about.

Just my final point is that last year in community enterprises, we invested around £7.5 million in about more than 200, so as Angus has said, community wealth building, support for social enterprises, is very much at the heart of what we're about. Thanks.

Ivan McKee

Thanks, Stuart. DFM.

Kate Forbes

Thanks, very helpful answers to my questions. Thanks very much. I think that shows perhaps the point I'm making, that there will be a lot of, let's say, jointly funded posts which maybe don't make it onto a more formalised number of development officers funded and actually that's not the full story. I guess I'm using the Gàidhlig example because I think it's just a really brilliant example that when you look at all the different posts that are funded in different communities, you start to get a realisation of just the scale of officers.

Then if you add in HIE and then jointly funded posts and then there'll be local authority posts, it just gives you a real sense of who is out there that is doing this work and how many are there in total. It just gives us a sense, I think, of the scale of it and where they are predominantly and whether there are any areas that are not as well represented.

I think on the standards of community engagement and the standards for consultation, that makes a lot of sense. I suppose my thought was where a community group are doing something that would normally be a company or a privately funded organisation in some capacity and they are engaging, so I can think of a number of examples where community groups are doing big energy projects, for example, they're treated in the same way that another small private energy company are being treated, but it's for very different purposes.

Or where they are doing something that has interactions with the road network and they're viewed or treated as the same as a private company. Whether, slightly differently from consultation, whether there's any adaptation. I suppose the way of summarising what I'm trying to say is how do you embed the principles of community wealth building in every part of the public sector? I think that's maybe a simpler way of me saying it than the complex way I've said it.

Ivan McKee

Anyone else?

Rob Dickson

The conversation between Stuart and yourself, DFM, has made me think about the work that VisitScotland has just completed on events. We tend to talk about tourism around this table, but of course events is part of the VisitScotland portfolio as well. We've just completed some review work on that and we will, in the course of the next six months, begin to pilot with local authorities, some of whom may be here. If you wish to volunteer during the course of the day, happy to have a conversation with you about looking at how we can develop more all-encompassing regional event strategies or local authority level event strategies.

It's occurred to me that actually they may provide an opportunity for community wealth building to be built into some of what happens, particularly at the community event level. Part of what we're trying to do is to make sure that we get a much more consistent approach in terms of ground level events, leading up to regional impact events, national and then potentially international events.

We've got examples in the Highlands and Islands of where those types of events have been grown from communities. Etape Caledonia cycle race in the Highlands area, now owned by the company that runs London Marathon, started on a kitchen table as a community event. There are opportunities, I think, to explore how something like events that might not immediately look as though it's got community wealth building opportunities around it could be tied in. I guess that's how a public body such as VisitScotland can contribute, but we will look to pilot with two or three authorities in Scotland over the next six months the development of these strategies. If there are authorities interested, I'm happy to have a conversation about it and see what might be possible.

Ivan McKee

I suppose that just goes to show the breadth of scope and the DFM's point about embedding this community wealth building approach through everything that we take forward. Does anyone else want to come in? Okay, well thank you very much. I think that as we move forward with the bill it will be an interesting process, because as anyone of you who watch these things will recognise, the temptation for amendments to be brought forward to add complexity to this process, some will find hard to resist.

But certainly from a government's perspective, I'll be seeking to keep this as focused and taking real recognition of the fact that we don't want this to be an overly complex, overly burdensome process. But we'll certainly be engaging with you through it and feel free to get in touch if there's anything you want to talk about this agenda separately as we take it forward.

We've found ourselves in the fortunate position, due to the high productivity of the cohort here this morning, that we're running significantly ahead of time, which is to be welcomed. I think rather than surprise the lunch team and everybody, stun them with an early lunch, we're debating whether to pull forward an afternoon session. I think that is exactly what we're going to do, so back to yourself, DFM.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much. We've done some logistical change here whilst you were all engaged with the substantive discussion. Caroline is happy to do the presentation on the next agenda item before lunch and that is on integrated health and social care staffing. If this runs for the full hour, it means we'll start lunch at 12:15, if everybody is okay with that. Wonderful, so this agenda item was essentially scheduled because of the conversation that happened at the spring 2024 meeting, where there was a discussion about the challenges of delivering social care services in remote, rural and island areas.

We have a paper produced by North Ayrshire Council in advance of today's meeting and that sets out the challenges of delivering health and social care in Arran, including the demographics of the population on the island, recruitment and retention issues due to location and issues with the estate itself, infrastructure challenges, including digital connectivity. So much of that, I think, would be echoed by conversation in our other island communities and indeed parts of the mainland as well, because there are quite obvious challenges around sustainable staffing.

We have recently announced a scheme to support displaced social care staff from across the UK to move into social care roles in Scotland, to alleviate some of the pressures and further boost the local economy. As the scheme details are being finalised, officials are working to ensure that remote and rural and island communities will be some of the first to benefit from that offer. I'm sure that those challenges are replicated.

I'm going to pass to Caroline Cameron, Director of North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership, to talk us through the North Ayrshire case studies presented within the paper. Then I'm hoping we're going to have quite a candid, broad debate after that. I think Caroline is going to do a brilliant job of highlighting the challenges, assuming that those challenges are replicated elsewhere. It's always nice to move from the challenges to the solutions, so feel free to say that's the case with us too, we've got big challenges.

But I guess what would be nice to come out of this conversation is what are some of the solutions that the convention can get behind. Are there shared solutions we can get behind, unusual ideas that haven't been considered, or actually we know what the solutions are already and it's about faster implementation or more collaboration around the implementation? That's where I'm keen we go with the discussion afterwards, assuming that the challenges are going to be well documented. But Caroline, over to you and with thanks for bringing that forward.

Caroline Cameron

Thank you very much, Cabinet Secretary. My name is Caroline Cameron, as described, I'm the Director for the Health and Social Care Partnership in North Ayrshire. Thank you very much, really delighted to have the opportunity to come to CoHI today and speak to our response of how we deliver integrated health and social care services on the Island of Arran.

We're now 10 years into our health and social care integration journey in North Ayrshire and Arran is probably the best example of the most integrated approach to how we deliver services across the island. Arran is unique and it presents us with a range of challenges, but also opportunities in how we deliver health and care services on the island. We have a population of around 5,000 people, but with a similar geographic footprint as mainland North Ayrshire, so this presents significant challenges due to the island's remoteness and unreliable transport connections, which impact on residents and the workforce.

Responding to the challenges and meeting the health and care needs of the local population and visitors has required a different response and approach on Arran. On Arran, we've got a fully integrated workforce and management structure across our teams. Services are fully integrated from cradle to grave on the island and we have a number of small teams who work closely together to provide really cohesive, joined up services for our residents. This includes having a single GP practice with registrations of around 5,000 meeting the needs of the whole population of Arran across four GP practice sites on the island.

The GPs also provide all medical cover for our inpatient beds at Arran War Memorial Hospital and they provide in and out of hours support for the hospital as well. Our Arran War Memorial Community Hospital has 12 inpatient beds, an emergency department and provides outpatient clinics and maternity services. A transport protocol is in place for all those with greater needs which can't be met within the local hospital by ferry and by helicopter and every year we have around 160 helicopter transfers.

The hospital acts as a base for the community nursing team, and the hospital and community nursing teams work really closely together and flexibly. They provide resilience, cross cover and continuity of care for our residents, patients and service users. Our community teams work as a single integrated MDT and this includes on Arran having quite uniquely an all-age social work team that covers children, adults, right through to older people, cradle to grave health visitors, school nursing, CTAC nursing and community mental health supports.

We have a single partnership-operated care home on Arran which currently cares for 12 residents and provides access to respite care on the island. The care home provides nursing level care and we're able to support that through our local community nursing team, who are able to provide the nursing input into the care home.

Ongoing care in the community for older people in particular is provided by our care at home teams and our enablement staff. They support around 50 service users on Arran, with daily personal care and other care needs to support people to stay in their own homes, to live as safely as possible for as long as possible at home. In addition to this, we maximise the use of technology through the use of community alarms and other telecare to over 150 people across the island.

All our teams operate under a single management structure within the Health and Social Care Partnership, but we have very small teams who individually are fragile. However, we attempt to mitigate this through close integrated working and a flexible approach. We want to continue to develop and maintain local services for health and care delivered and aligned with our local population need on Arran and we are committed to doing this. The population on Arran has reduced over time and the future projections indicate a continuing trend of further reductions in the overall population.

Arran has a smaller, more dispersed and significantly older population than the average across Scotland, so around 34.4 per cent of the population are over 65, compared with the Scottish average of just over 20 per cent. Life expectancy is relatively high, at almost 80 for men and 83 for women, which is also higher than the Scottish average. However, Arran's population, along with this, have a higher prevalence of long-term conditions and obviously the support and care that comes with supporting that older, but also having those long-term conditions that require support from health and care services.

This is also compounded or doesn't align with our workforce availability and the sustainability of the workforce is the greatest challenge that we face. On Arran, less than 50 per cent of the local population are of working age, leading to high dependency ratio around care and support services.

Arran has a very different SIMD profile to mainland North Ayrshire. No one lives in the most deprived areas in terms of SIMD on Arran, or in the least deprived, with the majority of the population being in the middle SIMD-ranked areas. As we all know, that's ranked across seven factors, so income, employment, health, education, access, care and housing.

Most mainland areas in North Ayrshire are impacted by wider factors, such as income, employment and education, whereas Arran's factors for deprivation are found in access and housing. This includes access to key services, including health services, education, shops, public transport, including the travelling distance for people in the rural communities to access those services. In relation to housing, that's around availability, quality and affordability in housing, which is a huge challenge on Arran.

The partnership is focused on supporting implementation or I suppose the improvement of the health and wellbeing of our own residents on Arran and across North Ayrshire in the round. Whilst Arran has a different demographic profile to the mainland, there are significant challenges that come with that. There's a greater number of people than the Scottish average who are living with long-term conditions, including cardiovascular, respiratory conditions, arthritis, cancer and diabetes.

For over-65s on Arran, 27 per cent have two or more long-term conditions and Arran has a higher percentage of people with the top five long-term physical conditions than the Scottish average for each of those. The population depends on local health and social care teams to support their health and care needs, with a real focus across our MDTs on anticipatory care planning and MDT working to meet the needs from a rounded health and social care population need.

Across the partnership, we've got over 4,000 staff on the mainland and Arran and about half of those staff are healthcare staff and the other half are social care. We have predominantly a female workforce, with over 84 per cent of our staff being female and since 2022, we've seen a 17 per cent growth overall in that workforce. Now that's across the whole of the partnership, so the mainland and Arran and island-based services.

But the growth in health and social care workforce on Arran has been more difficult. Despite significant recruitment efforts, we face particular challenges with recruitment and retention. More than half of our workforce on Arran is over 50, which is slightly older than the Scottish average, but that's compounded by the small island, disparate, fragile teams that we have. This further compounds our future challenge for a greater number of over-65s in meeting the needs of the elderly population against that reducing working age population availability on the mainland.

I think we've come to the point of acceptance that there is going to continue to be in the future a reliance on staff from the mainland travelling across to Arran to make sure that we can continue to deliver health and care services.

There are lots of positive strengths on Arran, as described and further detail of that is within the report as well. We do have a much higher life expectancy and healthy life expectancy for our residents on Arran. There are low levels of deprivation and poverty in Arran, low levels of unemployment. There's a thriving employment sector on Arran, particularly around the tourism and hospitality industry and there are low levels of unemployment.

That also means that we are competing in a very competitive pool for workforce on Arran for health and social care services, but there are very low levels of unemployment. Low levels of crime on Arran as well and high levels of educational attainment for our young people. There's a really vibrant community and third sector base within Arran and a real resilience there from a community perspective.

Against the backdrop of that positive outlook for Arran, there are some particular challenges around health and social care services, as I've described. The demographic challenge that we have with meeting the needs of an increasingly older population, with I suppose a higher level of long-term conditions and greater health needs for a longer period of time than some other areas.

The island's geography is a particular challenge. As I described, we have a continued reliance on mainland workforce to travel over and support services on Arran. The reliability of the ferry in particular, we were all experiencing that today with not being able to get back to the mainland today. That has huge impacts for our workforce and the reliability and resilience of our island services.

Workforce supply, we have tried a number of ways to try and innovatively address some of our workforce issues. We have robust workforce plans in place, we have ambitious and different training programmes for our workforce that we have worked nationally and locally with partners to develop. We have looked at, for example, we have modern apprentices within our local care home. We have an ambitious approach to recruiting nurses for our community hospital, including a recruitment and retention premium which is in place to try and attract nursing workforce into the hospital as well.

We do have some significant challenges around the infrastructure on Arran, in particular the buildings that our services operate from. In 2020, we took forward an ambitious plan around the Arran initial agreement. This was in alignment with NHS Ayrshire and Arran's Caring for Ayrshire programme and it outlined a programme of improvement and investment from a capital infrastructure perspective, which did allow us to co-locate some of our services and provide more resilience for services and to consolidate some of our workforce. There have been constraints to taking that forward.

The capital cost at the time was estimated to be in excess of £40 million to provide that single-site model and therefore, the plans around that are currently on hold. Housing affordability and the constraints in availability for housing compounds some of our challenges as well. We do have significant challenges with attracting workforce to the island to work in healthcare services, where housing is not immediately available or accessible for affordable for individuals to move to Arran.

Financial constraints, the cost of delivering health and care services on the island is far more expensive than it is for the mainland equivalent. That's something that we've committed to investing in, to make sure that services are able to continue to be delivered locally on the mainland. But as health and social care resources in particular become more constrained, it's become more and more difficult to invest in growing island-based care services.

There are a number of innovations that we've taken forward that are outlined in the report. We have fully integrated teams, as I've set out, but we also have integrated IT systems. We're working towards further integration of those. We've taken forward Netcall and that's a way where we can route through as a single point of contact across our health and care services on the island, to make sure that our residents, patients and service users get to the best or the most appropriate service on the island as quickly as possible.

We have looked at how we work within the hospital around unscheduled care services and also looking at intermediary care in terms of the hospital beds within Arran War Memorial Hospital. Working very closely around how that links in with acute services on the mainland and also it's stepped down into our care home as well.

We've got really proactive arrangements in place across our MDTs, in particular with a focus on frailty and supporting those residents with the greatest needs. Ensuring we've got anticipatory care plans in place and that our community teams are sharing information and we can show that the service user, patient and the resident is at the heart of that.

To try and tackle some of the housing challenges and in particular, the challenge that we have around mainland staff travelling to the island to provide cover and support for services, in 2023 we purchased a previous B&B on the island, 12-bedded B&B, Glenartney House and now that operates as staff accommodation. Not long-term staff accommodation, but temporary staff accommodation for those that are travelling from the mainland.

Glenartney House currently operates about 90 per cent occupancy on a regular basis. It's a really nice space for staff to come over and stay. It's got a wellbeing suite for staff and it very much feels like a home from home and a nice environment that staff look forward to coming to stay in when they come to work on Arran. It's been absolutely fantastic in terms of supporting some of our challenges around the workforce.

We've had some really innovative approaches, in particular how our work teams are working more flexibly, that have arisen because of the pandemic. Those are now embedded in terms of how we deliver services on the island. Our GPs on Arran are absolutely key to the medical cover within the hospital, but also in terms of that integration between primary care and our community services. We have a really resilient GP model through the medical practice on Arran that is absolutely at the heart of how we're delivering all of our services.

We have some national links to work around the skills pipeline and national collaborations, particularly around frailty and our nursing roles within the hospital that are making huge benefits to patient care, but also in terms of attracting individuals into those roles. Also taking forward some ambitious education and training programmes for our staff as well.

We wanted just to take the opportunity to just talk a little bit about a recent example of service change that we've required to take forward with our communities on Arran and through our integration joint board. Montrose House care home on Arran is now the only care home on Arran and it is a dual-registered nursing and residential care home. It's owned by the council and operationally managed by the Health and Social Care Partnership.

It opened in its current location in 2015 and hopefully you can see from the picture in the report on the screen, it's a really modern, purpose-built care home. It's a fantastic building and it's been purpose-built to meet the needs of residents. Also attached to the care home is a day service building, which pre-pandemic operated as a building-based day service for older people.

When Montrose House opened 10 years ago, it was opened with the facility to accommodate 30 residents. The reality is that the care home has never operated at a capacity of 30. When Montrose House opened, there was another care home that operated on the island and we've never had to take in 30 residents into Montrose House at that time. It's an older people's care home, so supports individuals over 65 from nursing and residential.

It is now the only care home on the island and the last care home closed in 2022, a few years ago. We previously reduced, two years ago, the capacity in the care home, really because of the staffing constraints and the workforce constraints. Some of the feedback from the care inspectorate about the reliance on agency and temporary staff into the care home was impacting on the quality of care. We reduced back two years ago to having 15 permanent beds and one respite bed in the care home.

We have a range of obviously social care staff that operate in the care home and as we know, staff that work in care homes need to be SSSC registered and appropriately qualified as well. Obviously as a registered care home, that care inspectorate inspection regime has led to a number of recommendations around improvements within the care home.

There's a real strength of feeling in the community of Arran about wanting to maximise the bed capacity at the care home. Obviously as I've described, we have a huge demographic challenge around the older population on Arran and a desire for the community and residents to want to remain on the island for every part of their care journey, including if there's a requirement for residential care later in life.

From a financial point of view, Montrose House has a budget of £1.2 million per year, which is quite significant in terms of the size of the care home and the number of beds that that provides. For the last few years, we've carried significant financial challenges in delivering care in Montrose House because of a huge reliance on agency staff. Recently 30 per cent of the workforce in Montrose House has been through agency staff, which is significantly challenging. That's obviously a far higher cost per bed than mainland care homes.

Across North Ayrshire we have 16 mainland care homes and all of those are operated by independent or third sector providers, so Montrose House is the only local authority-operated care home in North Ayrshire. The significant staffing challenges, as described in the case study, we have 30 per cent staff vacancy, high turnover. We were using over 1,500 hours of bank and agency staff monthly, a position that isn't sustainable from a financial, workforce or quality of care perspective.

We undertook an options appraisal at the start of 2025 to look at the future delivery of care within Montrose House, undertook community engagement over the summer, including undertaking a quality impact assessment and an island impact assessment. There is strong community opposition to change, in consultation feedback 97 per cent of respondents were opposed to any reduction in bed capacity at Montrose House.

However, in August this year an integration joint board approved one of the options which was set out in the options appraisal to move to a permanent bed reduction of 10 beds with the continuation of one bed for respite in provision. This would allow us then to eradicate in the future the use of agency staff, ensure we've got a future viable and sustainable workforce model that we can recruit and retain staff and increase the quality of care for those residents that are within the care home. It also allows us to look at different options for how we maximise the use of the rest of the care home building facility, which is a fantastic facility which is currently underutilised.

Alongside that, we are committed to developing an admissions policy so that we prioritise access for those residents on Arran that have family ties and need that ongoing contingent relationship with the island when they move into the residential care. We have particular challenges on Arran, where people want to come to Arran later in life to retire and there's probably a level of expectation about the level of services that will be able to be offered in terms of those for older people. We want to make sure that we can maintain our services, particularly residential care, for those that need to continue to have family ties on the island.

The decision around Montrose House and to reduce the number of beds was about having an honest conversation about what we're safely able to deliver and be able to afford to deliver moving forward well into the future. We're currently working on implementing that change. Alongside that, we've taken the decision that we'll no longer provide building-based day services, but actually have an outreach model from Montrose House and take day services to areas across and the communities across Arran, where individuals would want to see that support.

It's just really a case study to bring to life some of the really honest but difficult decisions that we've had to take from a health and social care perspective. We're really just wanting to open the discussion up now, I think, as described, to see whether we can learn from other areas in terms of other innovative examples of how we can ensure the future resilience of health and social care services, particularly from an island perspective. How we can collectively manage community and public expectations around how we meet the unique demographic profile and requirements from our island communities.

Also how locally we can make sure that the needs of our island and rural communities are prioritised, particularly around capital infrastructure investment. Whilst it might be a small population that would benefit from that, I think that capital infrastructure investment moving forward is how we ensure we get the future sustainability from our workforce and modern health and care services for our island communities in the future. Thank you, Chair.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much, Caroline, for that. I'll go out to yourselves and look for some thoughts and responses. I'm very conscious, I've obviously laboured the fact that we're all very aware of what some of the challenges are at the moment. I think we are aware of what the challenges are. It will come as no surprise that I always believe that the best and most innovative solutions are found in the Highlands and Islands. Actually there's an opportunity to do some pioneering work, I said that quite intentionally sitting next to a Glasgow-based minister, that we…

Ivan McKee

I agree with you.

Kate Forbes

Good. That we've got the opportunity to do something quite innovative. That's why it would be good to get some conversation going and this might not be the end of it. Some excellent questions up there, but Stuart mentioned a few minutes ago that in a couple of days you're celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Highlands and Islands Development Board.

Obviously we're 10 years away from celebrating the report that was commissioned by the Cathcart Committee into the Highlands and Islands Medical Service that started in 1912 onwards as the blueprint for the NHS. I don't mean to make this all a nostalgic conversation, discussion, but the point is that as we look ahead to the future of health and social care more generally, I think there is an opportunity for the Highlands and Islands to pioneer innovative solutions to some of the very well documented challenges that we have.

I was just really quickly reflecting on some of the commentary in the Cathcart Committee report of 1935. It laboured the point that the success of the Highlands and Islands Medical Service was based on a system of cooperative effort that included medical professionals, local authorities and many, many, many others. In other words, it was that devolved approach incorporating the work of so many different parties that made the difference.

Just to raise our eyes and see that some of these conversations have the potential to set in train innovative solutions that deal with some of the well documented challenges that we have. At the heart of that, I think, is the resilience of our community. Any thoughts in response to what Caroline has just set out from the North Ayrshire examples and any innovative solutions that you think could really be established? Look at all those hands, that's what we love. Malcolm first.

Malcolm Burr

Thank you, Deputy First Minister and thanks to Arran colleagues for that fascinating presentation. It's a comfort, I think, that everybody's situation is unique, but there's a huge amount of commonality with certainly what the Comhairle has looked at with partners for the Barra and Vatersay Community Campus, so there's an offer there, I'd be very happy to share that information. That's been quite a process, as ministers will know as well, but it's now back on track and that's an integrated education, social care, health, police and other bodies to really have a whole community campus for the islands of Barra and Vatersay, with a population of around 1,200. That's a model I think I would commend and very happy to share that information.

By way of answer to some of the questions, I've got a question in return, which is really about housing with extra care, which I didn't see mentioned in the presentation. That has been the debate in Barra, that the community there took a fair bit of convincing that moving away from a care home model to a housing with extra care model, which could provide care home level services in individual services if those were required and of course they will be from time to time.

That took a lot of effort and a lot of argument, I'll be honest. But one thing that helped that process was the production of very detailed, obviously anonymised, case studies for individuals which said this is what will happen, this will be your journey if you end up needing the services that would currently be provided in a care home. There are good, worked examples with which the community could identify. The advantage of that model is of course there is a small NHS hospital, three to five-bed hospital, which will also serve the housing with extra care. But there's some learning there, I think, but a question to Arran colleagues just about where housing with extra care features in the model. Thank you.

Kate Forbes

That feels a substantive enough question that, Caroline, do you want to come back to it? Then I'm going to go Emma, Raymond.

Caroline Cameron

Housing availability overall is a particular challenge, but I think our fear would be from a North Ayrshire perspective that extra care housing would be a step below residential care. Our real drive on Arran is to try and take forward the spirit of the Arran initial agreement and get all of our bed-based care in the same site. The challenge we have just now is we have Montrose House care home, which isn't very far from here, we have the hospital at the other side of the island. That presents a real workforce challenge, particularly around 24/7 cover from a nursing and workforce perspective.

We're working really closely with housing colleagues, particularly from a workforce point of view and how we ensure that we - we've got the Arran Local Letting Initiative, where key workers that come and work for the partnership get additional points around access to social housing on the island. We're looking at different models of supported housing for individuals as well. Our real barrier just now, or challenge that we have is that our bed-based carers are split from one end of the island to the other.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Emma.

Emma Macdonald

Thank you very much. I just wanted to talk a little bit about some of the ways we've looked at some of our social care staff. A lot of what you showed was very similar to what we have, so I'm not going to go over the challenges. But we took a really close look at our pay and grading model for our social care staff. We did a re-evaluation and we really did something that really made it so that it was a - I think people felt that they were more valued. We took a lot of time to make sure we did that properly.

Another area that we focused on is a different type of recruitment. We've been using values-based recruiting rather than - so taking that kind of - recognising that people might be able to be supported to develop the skills they need, providing they have the right values. It's just helped us be able to bring different people into the organisation that might have not - the original applying for a job, they might not have met the criteria. That was something that we found to be really useful and it has made a difference, both of those things. But it hasn't made enough of a difference, that's the challenge.

I think we're also looking at how we shift that model of care that we have. We have, I think, seven maybe eight residential care homes, which is a lot for a small island, but they're very small bedded units, very ineffective financially but very difficult to staff. We have reduced beds in all of them, which makes it really difficult. It's about how do you have that conversation with the community about shifting to something different. We are looking at that housing with extra care, but it's that challenge around people think that they're safer or that their families are safer in a residential unit. We need to make sure that we try and take communities with us so that they recognise this is about how do we make sure your care services remain really good. We can't currently do that with what we're currently dealing with, so it's about how do we do it differently. Thank you.

Kate Forbes

Thanks, Emma. Raymond, Kathleen, then Henry.

Raymond Bremner

I'm sure the list will get longer as the debate goes on as well. Thanks very much, that was a really interesting presentation. So interesting that there were probably lots of little conversations that were going on between us at the table. One of the reasons that I'm absolutely delighted that it's our Assistant Chief Executive for People that's sitting next to me rather than the - not that I would…

Kate Forbes

Careful now.

Raymond Bremner

I'll be very, very careful because there are so many people, do you know what Raymond said about you not being here, Derek? But because this is one of the areas that we have a really particular focus on at Highland at the moment, because of our transition from lead agency model to an integrated joint board of some description, because of the fact that we know that not one size fits all and therefore, we have that opportunity in Highland at the moment to try and tailor whatever it is that we need to better meet the demands of service provision. We've got that opportunity at the moment.

I recognise that there are so many NHS boards right across the CoHI area and whilst we reflect on lots of common factors that affect us, there are different ways and different initiatives in how we are actually tackling them and how we're trying to support our rural communities and our island communities in particular with any areas where we have hubs of delivery. For us, that's the like of Raigmore and then the subregional centres like Caithness General, Oban and Lorne, the Belford and others in the likes of Skye, we're looking at innovative solutions in terms of challenges like staffing accommodation and supported accommodation for vulnerable adults and the use of digital solutions.

I noticed in your report about the use of NHS near me and sometimes I wonder, even with the NHS near me and the use of digital solutions, or even just the simplest of digital solutions which can be a phone call or a facetime in terms of social care support and understanding the safety and security of some of the folks in our rural communities that require that. I just get the funny feeling that we are not utilising that anywhere near the level that we could. I suspect that there needs to be cultural change in some of our thinking and some of our management practices that needs to be engineered and supported and encouraged and we need to see the timeline on how we develop that to become - as our younger people become older, their use of digital technology is far greater than those of us who are already old, me, and how we can help develop that whole picture as we move on.

But these themselves won't address many of the issues that are fundamentally about what I would call a failed social care market. For interest, we're actually pursuing a self-service role of care technologies and I was actually mentioning this to my father the other day, how many of you have actually heard of Alexa? My father hasn't a clue who Alexa is, but when he was introduced to her he found her a very interesting person. Apart from some of the answers that he got in terms of the questions that he was asking, we're probably not based around where his mindset was. But these are opportunities that are prevailing for us going forward in terms of digital technology.

In terms of the national care home contract, it's got significant impact and still looking for changes such that the Highlands and other island communities are taken into account in terms of rates paid. There may well be a change in approach by Scottish Care, which will also have an impact on any role that CoHI can have in terms of supporting a change to delivery of the contract and that ought to be supported.

For me, in terms of the need to address the quantum of funding for social care across Scotland is probably a fundamental issue. In particular, the remote, rural and island communities where structural issues are more severe. For us, we forecast on Thursday at our full council, I was letting folks know about a £19.8 million overspend in adult social care in 2025/26 and an over £4 million similar challenge in children's social care. That's been driven by factors that we all recognise around the table in terms of inflation levels of contract and commission service increases.

Also the unsustainability of the current social care market, provider closures, failures, the challenges that we've been facing in some of the areas that are close to us around the table and the unsustainability of the social care market. We could go into that, but that is something that we can share around the CoHI partnerships. There's a lot of other points that we could share around the table, but what we can do is maybe share them between ourselves and in some way of being able to take them forward corporately.

The one - just my last two points. In terms of the capital investment, we have looked at taking forward the Highland Investment Plan which looks at points of delivery, which we are very keen to speak to lots of agencies. Particularly NHS Highland for us in terms of how we can improve that single point of access and the provision of service to a single point, rather than lots of different areas and lots of different locations.

The very last point, in terms of the housing challenge that we've launched at Highland Council and the focus within that project in respect of supporting housing needs, that would be appropriate in supporting particularly social care needs. The Lochaber care project that was in our Highland Investment Plan report recently, was part of the masterplan approach, where we engaged with all the stakeholders and what that could look like. I suppose there are lots of initiatives that we're all bringing to the table to be able to challenge the future - sorry, to meet the challenges of the future of social care delivery. Thanks.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Kathleen.

Kathleen Robertson

Thank you. Really interesting paper. Malcolm and Raymond have touched on quite a few things, but it goes back to - I think we mentioned in one of the previous papers about that whole system approach. It's all knocking on to things like our delayed discharges and all the rest of it. I think for us, certainly in Moray, although we don't have an island, out of area placements, for example, are costing us an absolute fortune and is possibly the one thing that is going to probably tip our IJBs over the edge.

I think when it comes to the care home contract, it's woefully inadequate for rural areas. As an example, I was asked into our only third sector care home last week and they are getting £880 a week for a council resident. They're charging their private residents anything between £1,400 and £1,600 and they reckon the breakeven is £1,200. Actually the private people are subsidising the council and that's just not fair. That's one element.

I think one of the things that was mentioned to me there too is that the lack of care home beds across Scotland is potentially going to be a big problem. Because although care at home - and everybody wants to stay at home as long as possible - is fantastic, it's actually leading to a huge issue of social isolation and loneliness in older people. Because there's lack of funding, it means that the daycare things that are available, or the third sector clubs and societies for older people are falling by the wayside, that it's impounding on social isolation and loneliness. Loneliness is a massive, massive problem in older people.

I think the other thing about the care home accommodation is it's often something that comes around about when it's a crisis, it's somebody goes into hospital and then they're needing to go into a care home. We don't have in Moray the number of those in-between beds that we need, so when you come out of hospital and then it's what do we do next? I think there's a huge piece. I'm going to bring you a slight solution, rather than just giving you a list of problems, but I think part of it is education. It's actually teaching families and teaching communities about the needs of what we're going to come to in later life and Malcolm touched on that.

It's things like how do you navigate what you're entitled to? Do you know you're entitled to what was attendance allowance and is now Scottish Disability Payment? Do you know you can do self-directed support? Families often don't know until they're in that crisis situation. One of the simple things that you could do a promotional thing on is power of attorney, making sure that people know that they can get power of attorney. A lot of the bed blocking is because these steps aren’t in place, so then it takes time to get all of that done. Also some people can't afford to have a lawyer to draw up a power of attorney for them, so there's a huge issue around that. I think there's a few things that I think as a collective we could probably throw in there. I'll stop there, I think that's probably me covering some things.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much, very helpful. Henry.

Henry Acres

Thanks, yes, it's a really useful presentation, Caroline. I think one of the things that's been flagged up around staff accommodation, I think the example that you gave around Glenartney House is really interesting. I'm wondering if there are other examples that people have of how they’ve overcome that challenge around staff accommodation, is one question. The second bit is have people had experience of using the key worker housing fund and are there challenges with that that we should consider?

Kate Forbes

Do you want to just introduce yourself first?

Henry Acres

Sorry, Henry Acres, Scottish Government. I've recently taken over the coordination of the service renewal framework and recently was doing social care response and resilience, so a very interesting discussion for me.

Kate Forbes

The guy to speak to at lunch, in other words.

Pippa Milne

Lovely, thank you. I recognised a lot of the things that Caroline set out as ones that we face as well as others have. I suppose similar to others, I'd echo many of the points that have been raised, in terms of Argyll and Bute. Some of the things we're looking at is a review of care homes and I suppose what I'm conscious of at the moment, separate HSCP colleagues and health board colleagues are also looking at what they're doing in terms of some of the community hospitals and looking at their capital planning.

I think an integrated approach to that capital planning would provide us opportunity to do something more innovative with those sites. I suppose that's something just to highlight in connection to single authority model. I think that's something that that model could help us develop more work on. I suppose again in what others have raised, it's a whole systems issue and I think sometimes that doesn't come through in terms of that holistic approach we need.

Certainly we're looking at it in terms of housing particularly and I suppose it's a separate - mentioning the key worker housing fund, for us it's also we don't have the flexibility around the RPA and some flexibility around tenures in terms of that, so we found it a little bit harder to navigate. We have done some work with the Health and Social Care Partnership to invest in some of their properties, to release them for housing and we've created HMOs in some of what was teachers and nurses housing to deal with that. But it would be - there are quite a lot of hoops to jump through from that.

I suppose linked beyond that, we have what we're doing in response to the housing emergency, we've got a population strategy and we've got an islands plan. I think picking up the theme we did in terms of community wealth building, it is how is this integrated through all of these things? Because I would echo the points, all of these systemic problems actually long term go to the things like delayed discharge and are fundamental to us tackling those issues. I think it's recognising it, that systemic nature of these issues in those other strategies so that they can respond accordingly. Thanks.

Kate Forbes

Thanks, Pippa. Angus.

Angus Campbell

Thanks, just a couple of thoughts in terms of solutions. I know when I was growing up there were key workers like health workers and police that had designated housing. You had a job and you had a house come into play, so that was a great attraction for people coming to provide services like that. When you set that with the general housing shortage that we've got, you can see that it's just adding to the problem. But that might be something worth thinking about, how you could develop that in terms of bringing new workers into it.

The other thing we've seen is as we look at taking more skills and more people into work in the Highlands and Islands, the issues around childcare are becoming more and more apparent and the need to have a strategy for that, I think, is crucial. But there could be synergies there if we work the right way and see how we can bring forward both initiatives together, because the skill of care can be applied across different things and having hubs and how you provide that might be one of the answers.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Oliver.

Oliver Reid

Thank you. Actually it's quite horrifying in some ways when you just keep hearing the same things over and over and realise that actually the issues and the challenges that we've got are so shared. There's something in my mind about the fact that the demographic pressures and the resource constraints that you see in island communities are actually just the tip of the iceberg that's going to impact across the whole of Scotland if we don't really change fundamentally the way that we approach things. I think there is also something in the fact that if we can manage to use the islands in particular, but remote communities, as a way of thinking differently about how to tackle this agenda, there's an opportunity to fix things maybe before we've gone over the edge of the precipice.

The real constraint for us, the thing that really pushes back all the time is around staffing. In our integrated agenda we have around 60 agency staff that we're relying on for care homes and social care. Our underspend on our vacancy budget, if you like, is about £1.7 million at this point in the year. Our overspend in total is about £2.2 million and that's been driven by the cost of agency staff and bringing them up to Orkney, paying for their transport, paying for their accommodation, as well as the increased cost of just having them as agency as opposed to permanent staff.

We have to do something and we're trying to in Orkney, to professionalise social care so that it's not seen as something that you do for a bit and if you're lucky you might become a nurse or go on into something else, but actually it is the vocation that we rely on. Our population is ageing so much, our vulnerabilities are increasing, we need to treat the people who we're going to rely on to look after us with the respect that they deserve.

It's not just pay, actually these people are motivated less by money than almost any other group in the community. They do it because they believe it's the right thing to do and somehow as a society we need to capitalise on that and professionalise that and open that up as an opportunity. There's a way of integrating in terms of how we link it into education at school level so that it's seen as a true profession. How we use in Orkney the fact that we've got a further education college that's owned by the council and the community, how we use that to create the training and the professionalisation right the way through to routes to senior employment.

Kate Forbes

Very helpful, thank you. Stephen.

Stephen Sheridan

Thank you. Just a couple of comments from a UHI perspective. I think, first, thanks to the council for the paper. I think it's really good in terms of the evidence base and it's really what we need in terms of looking at provision. I think it's been mentioned a few times, it's skills and education that's certainly part of the solution. We're certainly looking at what we can do at a local level. I think it's been discussed at previous CoHIs about the need within remote, rural and island communities and the support there, for example, around social work.

We certainly offer the graduate apprenticeship in early years in childcare just now, but we're actually looking at the social work graduate apprenticeship just now and seeing how we can roll that out across the piece. Some of the other developments, even UHI Perth, we're looking at an integrated master's in social work as well, so that will be the network trying to partnership as well. Certainly just recognising, I think, the need to do more locally around these key areas, particularly for the more rural locations as well.

Speaker 3

Thank you very much, DFM. I'm not really sure where to come in on this one. It's such a difficult topic for us all. We see our demographics, we've got ageing communities so this problem is just going to get worse and worse. Thank you very much for the presentation. It kind of worried me slightly when you've got a care home of 30 beds and you're reducing to 10, because obviously there's probably going to be demand for the 30. Resource is important, staffing is really important, but there's something we need to do around combining those two to make the jobs more attractive.

I like what you're doing in Shetland, making it more a - not vocation, but you're selling the values of the job. But cash helps, so if you're trying to make the job more attractive, I think we had a discussion before about the funding that's going to Gàidhlig and is taking people away from childcare, we have to be careful of unintended consequences of focusing on certain areas. But I think we can all agree that focusing on social care is really important. It's entitled health and social care, I don't know if there's anyone from health here who can discuss how they're approaching this, but from a local authority point of view I think we're all doing lots of innovative things to try and make this a bit better.

Angus's point about actually making sure that there's housing, that's really key and the model of buying the - I forgot the name of the house that was mentioned earlier on for the staff. That's such a good idea and I think that's probably something we might have to think about ourselves. Again, I'm not really sure what point I'm making here, but I think just it's something we really need to grasp and it's so good to hear the different ideas and ways of approaching this. But it's coming at us fast and we need to start moving on it really, really quickly.

Kate Forbes

Thanks, I think I have a question and then some thoughts. I suppose my question is, bearing in mind that the opportunity through the Convention of the Highlands and Islands is to speak with one voice, to look at ways of jointly working to try and improve outcomes for the people that we jointly represent, in light of that, do you want to pursue the issues around social care that have been highlighted in our conversation and bring back a more substantive paper and discussion at the next meeting, with a view to that paper being really focused on the areas that we actually can influence?

Because I think in this debate there are a lot of issues that are obviously very challenging, but we are unlikely even jointly to necessarily make huge progress on them. I won't go into them because that's the kind of stuff that makes the headlines, but you can probably think of what they are. But I see already from the conversation, there is a way of organising a paper which would look at some of the key issues that you're wrestling with and actually maybe share some solutions to those.

For example, the way that I've prepared it, writing down some notes, firstly, do we have on a Highlands and Islands-wide basis a really clear understanding or appreciation of what the joint demand is going to be over the next 10 to 20 years? I don't know, maybe you do, maybe you don't, do we have a sense with our demographic? If we have nodding heads, then actually what is the Highlands and Islands-wide picture, if we can share some of that data. That's the demographic data on need and demand.

Secondly, what are the primary issues confronting staffing? To Oliver's point around agency, Angus's point around childcare, other points around housing, there's a really obvious clear list there of issues that need to be resolved to help with staffing. One of them is budget, I would characterise and a thing that needs to be done Scotland-wide, not Highlands and Islands-wide, but childcare, key worker housing and training would be the three obvious ones. Actually there are people around this room that can help resolve all three of those things, so that is within our gift, so that's a staffing point.

The third one is around preparation and education, which I think is a really interesting one from Kathleen, because obviously the people that generally find themselves tasked with supporting an elderly relative, let's say, on care are not necessarily the ones that are up to speed with what is expected on that education and preparation.

Then fourthly, this point around small residential care homes versus housing with extra care versus a third model, I think having a real analysis of case studies where it's working really well and other case studies where it's not working well and case studies where - for example, I know that the Highland Council have had to go in and help take over care homes that have hit crisis point, well what does the model look like there? But just an analysis of how do you support residential care in the Highlands and Islands? What is the new model that needs to be developed and is there something that can be done jointly?

Then the last one I had down was just around digital technology, which again is something that is so much easier to do on a collaborative basis, rather than each local authority taking forward - sorry, a lot of this is done obviously on an NHS-wide basis, different technology, what can be done more jointly. That could be a really targeted approach with some clear actions that come from it. We can't have that conversation without the NHS and the NHS aren’t here, so that in itself would be a suggestion.

I'm thinking of the conversations that we had in a totally different sphere at the beginning of year around the investment pipeline. That prompted HIE to do your quantitative analysis on what the pipeline really is. That's prompted Skills Development Scotland to do its workforce plan, it's prompted Highland Council in particular to do a housing plan.

In other words, the Convention of the Highlands and Islands initiated one piece of work that's actually allowed us to collaborate a lot of the work that comes from that. I'm just wondering if there's a similar approach with social care. Equally, feel free to tell me that's not of interest, or you want to do this in a different style or different approach, because we don't want to just be commissioning papers for the sake of it. It would have to be something that is really focused on actions and helping to support. Heather and then I think it was Raymond.

Heather Woodbridge

Thank you, Deputy First Minister. I would really welcome a substantive paper that we can engage with that addresses the issues you outline. I think it's really difficult to engage with an agenda item today that's integrated health and social care without NHS in the room or a representation from IJB. I think a lot of the conversation we have about public sector reform is about talking together and working collaboratively and that doesn't sit comfortably. I don't think there's a lack of engagement, that's my belief, I don't think that's the case at all, why we don't have NHS representation here today. But I think we need to really think about what are we doing in CoHI to enable that engagement. Is it cost, is it perceived value of sending representatives here today?

I think we really need to have a look at that to be able to have a really meaningful conversation. I think with bringing forward a paper there's a risk that we could have a paper that's looking at how do we rearrange the deckchairs. I would like to see a paper that's looking at how are we talking to the captain about how we can avoid the iceberg ahead of us. I think it really does need to make sure that the outcomes or whatever comes forward is meaningful and worthwhile discussing. Thank you.

Kate Forbes

Thanks and Fiona Davies as Chief Exec sent her apologies for a reason that she couldn't avoid, so that's just in terms of speaking on her behalf. Raymond.

Raymond Bremner

Thanks. Similar to Heather, absolutely, I think that one of the opportunities that that paper gives us is the ability for each of the NHS authorities that we have right throughout CoHI to be able to also feed into that, so that we can get a better understanding of the picture across the NHS authorities. I would also, with the greatest of respect, put it back to government as well.

Because I can't imagine that there is representation that has been made through COSLA from each of the authorities that are around the table here. Also to the Cabinet Secretary for Health's own office and it would be good for that office to feed into that process as well with their understanding of what we've all - out of all the different representations that have been made. Because I know that I've written as many letters in terms of letting government know exactly what the position is at Highland.

Also answering a number of questions that have probably been asked of our local authority and I can't imagine that that's not been similar around the table here. It would be good not just for ourselves to feed into, but also to get that understanding of what the understanding of government is, NHS Highland, NHS Western Isles and local authorities. It will allow us to get that much, much bigger picture. Thanks.

Kate Forbes

I think that's totally fair for that to be shaped by government as well. I guess my three priorities of this as an agreed commission, is this paper could very quickly result in hundreds of trees being felled such would be the length of the report. What I'm suggesting is a really structured, focused, targeted commission on the issues that were just highlighted and not chapter and verse of everything that's ever happened in social care and every letter that's ever been written, or every concern that's ever been flagged. For example, if it was just a health approach, you may not include any element on childcare, but actually if we know from a Highlands and Islands-wide perspective that one of the primary issues facing staff is childcare, that would be the suggestion. But absolutely I'll need to speak to my colleague in terms of the Cabinet Secretary for Health.

I think the second element would be that it should be Convention of the Highlands and Islands-specific, so it should be specific to the local authorities. There will be issues that are true for all local authority areas and it's absolutely right and proper that that goes through COSLA. I am delighted not to be chairing COSLA today, no disrespect to COSLA.

We're chairing the Convention of the Highlands and Islands, which is why it needs to be issues that are specific to both local authorities that operate in the Highlands and Islands region and other public bodies that work in the Highlands and Islands region. I know that HIE, for example, have been doing a lot of work around childcare, so you can incorporate that in a way that might be more difficult if it is broader than the commission. But those points are very, very well made and we'll factor them in. Kate.

Kate Anderson

Thank you. I was wondering if we make sure one of the headings is workforce, because actually what you're talking about, there are barriers to workforce and it's not just how much we pay people. It's the sort of work that they do, it's their access to work through childcare, it's their access to work through housing. I think if we look at workforce, then we will be covering off all of those things without making it too specific to one thing or the other.

Kate Forbes

Great. We could probably issue a very short remit and invite any thoughts. Stuart.

Stuart Black

Just on the solutions side, I know that because we fund a lot of growth deal projects around the piece, there's the Fit Homes initiative that is in the Inverness and Highlands City Region Deal. That was designed to put sensors into people's homes to enable them to live independently for longer. Again that's been operating now for it must be over five years. There should be some evaluation from that.

Moray also has a digital health initiative, so there are quite a lot of digital things going on. Just as Raymond said, part of the solution here is different technology and using technology to save on things that are otherwise very expensive. I think it's definitely worth looking at some of the good practice that's out there already and how can that be extended. Thanks.

Kate Forbes

Absolutely and sometimes we just forget, we deliver something and we forget and we move on to the next thing. But both of those initiatives are totally transformative and absolutely brilliant to highlight. Okay, in which case, thank you very much. Caroline, over to you for the last word and then lunch.

Caroline Cameron

Thank you very much. Really welcomed the opportunity to share and clearly there's a lot of similarities with challenges across other members. I suppose some of the discussion's been really helpful as well. Probably just a reassurance that I suppose things that we're taking forward in the mainland from a health and social care perspective, we always have Arran, Cumbrae and island and remote and rural areas in mind around how we replicate that as well.

We're having active discussions around the service renewal framework, around virtual care, for example, models on the mainland and how we'll take those forward on the island as well. I think the point around young people and being more digitally enabled and how we maximise that, there's probably an even greater opportunity around island-based services to maximise that than on the mainland as well.

I think it's really helpful to note the challenges around the financial context as well. We know from an integrated health and social care perspective across Scotland, the gap's £497 million for this year and we know that that's going to be greater next year as well. We really need to see if there is any investment, it's really directed towards those community-based health and social care services.

These are the services that are keeping people away from the front door of our acute hospitals and that's both from a capital and revenue perspective as well, because I do think that our buildings and our infrastructure are holding us back in terms of the future care models we need. I think probably just the points as well about the cost of care and the increase in that. Care's really expensive now and I think there's a lack of understanding across social care and health services and then any investment that we have hasn't really aligned with that real rise in the cost of care as well. Really welcomed the opportunity to come along today and hopefully be able to feed into the future report as well. Thank you.

Kate Forbes

Great, thanks very much. We will halt for lunch just now and come back at 12:55. If you could take advantage during the lunchbreak, not just to eat food but also to share your thoughts on whether or not we have a CoHI in February or wait until after the summer or not, that would be very helpful. Either to me or the Secretariat. Enjoy lunch, thanks.

[Break in proceedings]

Kate Forbes

It's 12:55, that's one reason for starting. The other reason for starting is that I am aware that there's one ferry at 2:30pm, which some people are minded to get today. Therefore, with apologies, I'm going to try and compress the next section, if that's okay, Damien and others. We've got three agenda items, I'm really keen that we still go through them. I'm going to try and allocate about 10 minutes, but I really want to do them as much justice as possible in that 10 minutes.

We will start with the Workforce North update. This, for me, is one of the most important items of work that has come out of the Convention of the Highlands and Islands in the last few years and has the potential to be transformational. There's a temptation to allow it to grow arms and legs, considering the conversation we've just had about social care workforce as well.

But keen, Damien, that you can speak to the headings of this paper and I'm just very keen that we are very focused on monitoring progress, that we feel like progress is being made with this work and we start to see the results. Because not to exaggerate, but I don't think HIE can continue their sterling work of delivering brilliant transformational projects and attracting inward investment without the success of this work. Is that true, fair? Okay, they're caveats. Over to you, Damien, roughly 10 minutes and then we'll progress on.

Damien Yeates

Thank you very much, Deputy First Minister. Just apologies from Frank Mitchell, who couldn't be here today. He's attending the Scottish Energy Advisory Board meeting in St Andrew's House as we speak, I think. I'll ask Claire Sim, my colleague, who's been doing a lot of the legwork, just to give a run through the update, Chair. But just to say a huge thanks to you and to all of the partners. I think you coined the phrase for Workforce North earlier when you said it's a system of cooperative effort. It's absolutely that. I think the difference with respect to Workforce North is that what we're also trying to do is to leverage industry and employers into the solution.

Just to say, Deputy First Minister, employers invest £4.1 billion in workforce development every year in Scotland. The opportunity is to leverage more of that £4.1 billion into the solution that we're looking for here. Good progress has been made. I'd also like to acknowledge the Deputy First Minister's support. SDS has delivered £5.5 million worth of saving in this year and we've been able to redirect £2 million of that saving to support a co-investment fund. That would be a co-investment fund with industry to drive out solutions to build the workforce that we need to deliver on the opportunity that Highlands and Islands presented in the report. Deputy First Minister, in the interests of time, I'll hand over to Claire and we'll take it from there.

Claire Sim

Thank you. In terms of progress to date, what we did initially was back in April we had a Workforce North Summit, we brought together 70 key partners and really through intense discussion at that event we looked at what are the critical challenges that we need to really be looking at in terms of addressing workforce challenges. What also came out of that is as much as energy sector developments and investment was the driving sector behind the work initially, we have heard from in fact all the local authorities right across the Highlands and Islands now, that we cannot just pay attention to the energy sector. We have to be looking at the workforce issues and I think that point has been strengthened today in our current agenda items today.

Out of that initial event, we created a high level implementation plan, which identified five key themes that need to be looked at. This is very much about a systems-wide approach, we cannot go in and just do specific pockets of activity. We need to look at how the entire system is functioning together and where greater collaboration and efficiencies can be gained across the entire system. The five key themes were extensive campaign, making sure people out there in our communities, key influencers of people making decisions about career choices as well, that there's an extensive campaign to really raise awareness of where are our sectoral challenges.

Where are our growth sectors as well, what is coming, what's on your doorstep, where are the opportunities, where do we need people to help work and contribute within our communities. But also making sure that those who are making the decisions, they have the right support in place and that they're getting the right messaging and doing that effectively right across the Highlands and Islands.

The second theme was school and wider community, going into schools and doing more intensive work around experiential career learning. There's a real drive in terms of academic attainment within schools. DYW career service are doing a great job trying to make sure people get as much exposure as possible into what is going on within their communities. But we really need to ramp that up, as well as looking at opportunities in our communities.

Apprenticeship expansion, absolutely critical. We know we lose people every year to go and take up opportunities outwith our region. We want to make sure we've got really good quality opportunities on our doorstep and try and retain as many people as we can. Upskilling and reskilling, again a significant theme. Making sure where we do have sectors that there is shrinkage, that there are good opportunities for people to take up upskilling and reskilling opportunities so that they can move into our in-demand sectors. Talent attraction is absolutely significant. We know from the data that we do not have the workforce. We have a shrinking working age population, we have to attract people into the area.

Those were the five themes. Off the back of that, we have then gone out to each of the local authorities. Within Highland we are probably furthest forward, with Highland region we've created an operational roadmap that's outlined very specific key actions. We've had all the partners work together to achieve that and we're just finalising signoff with the key partners in terms of who's leading on the activity, who the partners are and we're finalising the specific timescales that we're going to work to. We've put in place project management around that to ensure that we can manage to achieve what we are aiming to achieve.

In the other local authorities, we have Moray next door, which are scheduling a summit for themselves for early December, with the intention to create a roadmap as well. In terms of the Northern Isles, we have engaged in terms of their local skills groups and are looking to make sure that we can take forward Workforce North activity via the skills groups.

What also has come across very clearly and this has been mentioned earlier, we need to make sure this isn't an add-on. This is not adding on another level of complexity to local activity. We need to make sure that this joins in very closely with the other skills work, with community wealth building as well and make sure that there's good correlation amongst it all. That we're not adding extra layers of complexity into what are already quite challenging situations out in our communities.

There are other activities, we've engaged with all local authorities now. We held a roundtable discussion with North Ayrshire colleagues as well in terms of the right approach for Workforce North. There's been activity in Argyll and Bute as well and the Western Isles too, I think I have covered everybody. There has also been a previous ask from CoHI, there has also been some further detailed workforce demand mapping and there is an appendix of that information for people to have a look at. What we are also doing is trying to map as well the co-investment opportunities that are already in existence and where there could be opportunities for further co-investment, so that activity is underway.

We've established an employer group as well to make sure we do have a strong voice of industry, making sure we're heading in the right direction and really trying to tackle these workforce issues in a way that meet the needs of our industries and our key sectors. Finally, another ask that came from CoHI at the last meeting was to ensure that we had governance for Workforce North through HIREP and particularly the best home for that has been through the labour and skills subgroup. We are currently finalising our two-year delivery plan skills actions and making sure that there's alignment to Workforce North and again we don't have two separate plans running concurrently for that.

Recommendations, that really is just a whistlestop to our update. You'll obviously get much more information in the report. Recommendations is really we've been really blown away by the level of engagement from all of the partners right across the Highlands and Islands, so that is much appreciated. It makes this work much easier to drive forward.

There's a long way to go and we really just ask for that to be continued, to pool our expertise. We will continue to map the co-investment, we will continue to make sure we're aligning to community wealth building and looking at all possible opportunities where those can work well together. We will continue as well with the governance through HIREP and through the labour and skills group to make sure that we continue to drive Workforce North activity in the right direction and listen well to partners in terms of what's required.

We've just pulled together some discussion points. Obviously I know that time is tight for getting the ferry, for those that are needing to leave. But really our three discussion points were recognising the distance travelled, how do we ensure that the substantive progress to date continues and that we can really capitalise on the potential economic investment that is coming to the area. At the same time, not to the detriment of our current sectors that are already looking and facing into workforce challenges. What opportunities do we have for CoHI members to continue to commit to building this legacy outcome, maximise all possible opportunities to expand our workforce.

I found one in here too, do CoHI members recognise a benefit in reinforcing the urgency and acute challenges across the region via a new local workforce index? Would it be helpful to have some sense of risk dial in terms of relative deficit and workforce supply, so we get a sense of how urgent this situation could be? How do different local authority areas across the Highlands and Islands compare in terms of that current picture? Apologies, I do like to talk fast, but hopefully that wasn’t too fast.

Kate Forbes

One question before I go out to everyone, what do you need from the assembled to increase the pace of delivery?

Damien Yeates

One, I guess, is just sustain the commitment that we have. We are going to convene a partnership meeting very soon, just to make sure we're all singing from the same hymn sheet. I think the next step is action, we've really got to get into the hard yards of where is the workforce going to come. Accepting we're adopting a systems approach, there are really some areas of pressures starting to build, so action is the big thing.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much. I am very keen to hear from HIE, but I'll go to Raymond first.

Raymond Bremner

Thanks very much. Yes to all of that, by the way, but not just in terms of that, but I think that we need to recognise as well that there is some fantastic work that's going on in our Highlands and Islands area. I think we need to also recognise the discussion that needs to be ongoing with our communities, because myself and the Deputy First Minister, we were at the launch of the Workforce North strategy at SSE in Inverness, following my attendance of the opening of William Smith House in Thurso in Caithness, where Murphy are going to be based.

It's understanding what actually can come out of really good partnership working with the likes of UHI, with developers, with contractors and all those who are actually in our midst and screaming out for skilled, talented workers, with really good well-paid jobs that are providing a sustainable future. That's what's really important in the Highlands and the Islands. In rural areas, where many years ago we probably did not actually know whether these jobs were going to come forward in the future to try and help us sustain our populations into the future and it's exciting.

It's not just in terms of renewable energy and in terms of infrastructure, but in terms of the skills gaps that we see right across a number of sectors. We've mentioned them, tourism is one, health and social care is another. How in that strategy we can best facilitate outcomes, because there's lots of effort, we just need to make sure it's being channelled in the right place.

In terms of everybody will want to talk about money, it's the one thing that - in terms of funding. It was great with the information that the Deputy First Minister actually brought to the table at that event and understanding how we can make the best of funding opportunities that become available to us and get the best outcomes, the best bang for our buck, if you like, taking that forward. Lots of work to do, lots of opportunities, not just in specific sectors, but multiple sectors right across the Highlands and Islands economy. I suppose that's where I'll leave it off at the moment, but thanks very much.

Kate Forbes

Thanks so much, Raymond. I'll go to HIE and then I'm probably going to bring that to a conclusion, just so we do justice to the other items as well. Stuart.

Stuart Black

Just to say how much we welcomed the report from Skills Development Scotland. It's been great to see another agency step up to the plate and support us in the activity. It isn't just in the Highlands that the opportunities are though. We've taken a paper recently looking at Arnish and there are significant plans to grow the workforce there, so it is a feature across the region.

I think that there probably are some opportunities around funding through the Green Freeport mechanism and that might enable some money to come forward for that area. But we do need to look at partnership with UHI in particular, I think, around modern apprenticeships. We need to bring the private sector into the equation as well, which I think is happening. But some of the opportunities that we've got are really of a national scale and I think they do need the national agencies like SDS to come to the table.

In terms of the questions, I think the opportunities for CoHI members to continue to work is definitely important, but that has to be beyond the Highland Council area and I know there's good work happening there. I think in terms of the workforce barometer, I think we need to be careful that we don't give the message that there aren’t skilled people in the region already. For example, last week we were at Sumitomo and their recruitment experience has actually been very positive, so they are seeing some local people, they're seeing local young people take on apprenticeships. But they're also attracting people from other parts of the country to the area. I think it's a combination of those things that's needed. Thanks.

Kate Forbes

Hence your very fair pushback on my earlier comment as well. Good, unless there's anybody else with a burning 10-second comment to make, I'm not seeing anyone, we'll look with interest at Moray's route map in December as well. In which case, Damien, last line or two on that?

Damien Yeates

No, just a big thank you to all the partners. End of.

Kate Forbes

Fantastic, thanks, Wonderful. Francesco, we are going to move on to our discussion about the National Islands Plan. I am conscious that the latest draft was shared with local authorities and CoHI members individually only about a fortnight ago, if that's correct. I appreciate this is still early stage and ministers have not signed off on this yet. It's still very much in draft format, just for reassurance, but I'll ask Francesco to give us an update on the progress and keeping it really quite tight please.

Francesco Bertoldi

Thank you, Deputy First Minister, I'll do my best. Good afternoon again, everyone. I've got a few shiny slides, as I promised some of you last week, so I'm quite keen to use them but I'll just keep a few. Those of you who were at CoHI in Elgin last year will remember my colleague Erica providing a presentation on the public consultation that informed a review of the current National Islands Plan. On this slide I've summarised again the key themes that emerged from that public consultation and all this evidence, all this feedback was brought to the attention of Scottish ministers. In spring last year a decision was made and an announcement was made that the Scottish Government would develop a new National Islands Plan.

What has followed since, I think it's fair to say, is very extensive engagement with communities, with many organisations, in fact I believe every single organisation represented here today and also very, very extensive engagement across the Scottish Government. Essentially every single corner of the organisation there have been discussions, opportunities have been explored, a wee bit of negotiating, lobbying, pushing, as you can imagine. I'm quite keen to stress though that as a team we've also been privileged to go out to communities in person, so we've held a number of in-person on-island events from Yell and Fetlar all the way to Bute and Arran and many islands in between, although in fairness the Arran event had to move online because of issues with the weather.

On this slide, I've tried to summarise what feedback we received and what we propose doing in response. We were told that the new National Islands Plan has to feature fewer strategic objectives and fewer commitments compared to the 2019 iteration. What we have done, you'll have seen in the draft that has reached your inboxes hopefully, we have condensed, reduced strategic objectives from 13 down to seven and I have another slide to provide more detail on that. We were invited to consider whether those strategic objectives should also be prioritised.

Like the first iteration, the new National Islands Plan takes the firm view that every island is unique, so with a unique set of challenges and opportunities. We heard earlier today that there are similarities, but the mix of challenges, the mix of opportunities is unique to every island. On that basis, we don't think that a top-down prioritisation, centralisation in that respect would be desirable, so at present we are not proposing a prioritisation of that sort. One key message that emerged from the public consultation points to the importance of being clear about the links between national and local.

I have to admit that that is perhaps one of the most complex issues that has emerged and we're still working with local authorities to try and capture that in the plan of actually seeing a very, very nice slide during Craig's presentation, so North Ayrshire Council colleagues will expect an email from me imminently. We were told that we need to be clearer about timescales, about who does what, so as well as the National Islands Plan, prepare the main document, we will also publish an implementation route map where for each commitment we will set out delivery partners and also delivery timeframes.

A clear, clear message that emerged from the public consultation, from the engagements that we have had so far, is one where the plan should not be used to summarise what's already underway, but should be used to add value, to add to things that are already being delivered. With that in mind, but also conscious of the pressures that were recognised, acknowledged earlier today, we have sought to have a greater focus on forward-looking actions, of course island-specific actions as much as possible and also strengthening the island dimension of initiatives that are already underway.

On this slide, I'm summarising essentially the structure of the new National Islands Plan, which is also I guess a summary of the strategic objectives that feature in the latest draft. Population retention and attraction again has come up quite regularly over the course of today and did come up regularly during the consultations that we have organised. Population retention and attraction has been proposed and quite warmly agreed as the overarching theme for the new National Islands Plan, with all strategic objectives and commitments essentially collectively geared towards that. Seven strategic objectives, you can see them on this slide, you can see them on the draft that you have received. I also thought I would add a title about monitoring, so there will be a section in the National Islands Plan about monitoring progress.

Going back to perhaps where the Deputy First Minister started, next steps, we will continue to seek feedback. We have heard back from a number of your organisations, some detailed feedback sometimes, so thank you very much for that. As Ms Forbes set out, we haven't approached ministers yet. We decided we would go out to local authorities, our agencies, delivery partners, to be reassured that what we have got is robust enough. But we propose approaching ministers essentially in the next few days with the view, hopefully, to securing signoff.

After that, we will be laying in parliament. As you will know, the islands plan is a statutory document and under the Islands Act, needs to be laid before parliament for 40 days, not counting periods of recess. That will give MSPs the opportunity to review the plan as well. When we hear back from parliament, we can finalise and publish what I would call the final-final version with the implementation envisaged to start in 2026/27. That's me. I'm actually sticking around this afternoon and I'm very, very happy to have chats with any of you, in fact I would welcome that.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much for that speedy work. Because it's still with councils, I think the recommendation here is to come back obviously in writing in your own time, but also to catch Francesco in the aftermath of this conversation. But I'll take - it's very tight, so I appreciate people are starting to leave as well, hence why I'm - Angus.

Angus Campbell

Just very briefly, I think that HIE would very much welcome population being the main issue in this, because everything we do, whether it's in terms of community growth, community wealth building, the businesses that have come in, it's population and skills and people that we need. Very, very happy to work in partnership with yourselves in terms of bringing that to the top of the agenda for the next iteration. Thank you.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much, Angus. Great, yes, Paul.

Paul Steele

Thanks, just briefly, the island community impact assessments, I think there needs to be a bit more focus on that coming out earlier and more forcefully in the plan ultimately.

Kate Forbes

Okay, still a process to go here, which is good and lots of opportunity to feed in. Wonderful, thank you very much. This dovetails very nicely into our next item, because it's always good when theory comes into contact with reality. The next section I was keen to incorporate, because it flows very naturally from the community wealth building section earlier on, namely about resilience and then the islands plan. I notice at the top left-hand of the box on priorities was connectivity.

For the next item, I was really keen that we heard directly from representatives from Tiree and Shetland about the serious challenges that they have been encountering with lack of connectivity. I'm aware that there is a telecoms resilience summit being hosted by, I think, your local MSP and MP and presumably with Shetland Isles Council support in all of that. I've proposed that there should be a debrief as well around the connectivity issues in Tiree.

You will all be aware of the impacts of Storm Amy, the resultant damage to telecoms cables serving Shetland and Tiree. Shetland cable was repaired last Thursday, the repair to the cable connecting Mull to Tiree has still to conclude. We had high hopes that it would commence today, but obviously with the weather as it is, unfortunately that has not been the case. I was keen to hear directly from - I think we've got two residents from Tiree who'll be joining us, representing Tiree Community Development Trust.

I know that Highlands and Islands Enterprise have been heavily involved in various different parts of this. I was keen to hear directly both from representatives from Shetland Isles Council and representatives from Tiree about the impact on them and then hear a little bit maybe from HIE, from your perspective in terms of support. Then we'll have a more general conversation about island resilience and also response. This is not going to be a debrief on the whole situation, but I think it's something that we should be discussing because of the impact on other islands, if that's okay. Everyone comfortable with where we're going? Great.

I'm not seeing colleagues online yet. Are we getting colleagues online? Wonderful, right, Rhoda, you're bigger than anything else in this room at the moment. Hopefully you can see us and you can hear us, you can obviously hear us because you're laughing, so that's good. Rhoda, can I come to you first to introduce yourself and just in maybe three to five minutes tell us what happened. More than anything else, we want to know what the impact in real terms has been on the community of this outage and some of your experience of the resilience points. Then I'll come to Maggie. Over to you.

Rhoda Meek

Thank you very much and thank you for inviting us along today, it's much appreciated. I'm Rhoda Meek and I am Head of Communications and Gàidhlig at the Community Development Trust and very heavily involved for the last few years in running our community broadband network. We're exactly a month since Storm Amy hit. During the storm, Tiree lost all communications. We lost our mobile signal, we lost power, we lost pretty much all means of communication. We were kind of left that way until early the following week. It wasn’t until Wednesday the 8th that we became aware that our cable was broken. Up until then we'd been kind of blaming the exchange in Mull, was what we heard and we were all sitting patiently waiting to be reconnected, because these things happen.

It was on 8 October that we realised that the cable was actually broken and it wasn’t so much panic stations, but trying to get ourselves prepared for what would come next. The effect on the community of that cable breaking was enormous. We have recently been finishing off here, hopefully we should be finishing off the digital rollout, the fibre broadband rollout and it has been a long time coming. A lot of people had started to move away from analogue and onto digital, Digital Voice, including our surgery. When a single cable goes down, bringing all of the services that are required, everything falls off.

Our mobile masts no longer functioned, our surgery could no longer take emergency phone calls. Our first responders could not be reached and these had huge impacts on the confidence of the community. We were very, very fortunate that there was no disaster struck during that period of time. The ongoing reconnection, our BT resilience team arrived on 9 October and started reconnecting things. It was six days before the GP surgery could be connected to voice telephone calls, for example. For those six days there was a notice on the surgery door telling people that in an emergency if they could not contact the doctor, this is where the doctor was living.

It was Saturday 11 October when the EE masts were reconnected. If you were living down my end of the island and you could pick up a signal from Mull, you had some connectivity. But that was only a very vague, low EE signal. It took until then for the masts to be reconnected and of course, EE is the emergency services network. That was quite a concern for us. It has taken until Wednesday last week for our surgery to be fully online and functional. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we've been involved in connecting the care home, the school, the Co-op, working with BT and we've been fortunate enough to have Starlink deployed in a variety of locations, including to our community broadband network.

Our community network has been running for around the last 20 years and was in the process of winding down. We have wound back up and we are now providing connectivity to around 160 households in Tiree whilst we await the restoration of the cable. For those who were on fibre broadband, they're working on a 4G EE signal and Vodafone is now back up. It took until 21 October for Vodafone and O2 to come back up. To say that there has been an impact in the community, I think, would be an understatement. People who work remotely, some went to the mainland temporarily to be able to work.

Our older folks who moved to Digital Voice have been really struggling with connectivity and so everything has just become that little bit harder. We still have Starlink positioned outside the community hall, for example, for people to go and do emails and download large files. We're encouraging everyone not to stream, not do Netflix, so it's books in the evening. Whilst it sounds slightly idyllic and blissful to some, the way that digital connectivity has impacted every corner of our lives now means that actually it's not so much idyllic and quiet; it's really quite stressful for an awful lot of people.

Kate Forbes

Thank you very, very much for bringing that to us. I don't know if you can see us, but you've basically got all the chief execs and leaders of all the Highlands and Islands local authorities, as well as all the public bodies that operate in the area. Probably of all the audiences, this is an important audience to hear your experiences. I'm going to go to Shetland Islands Council now for the Shetland experience. Maggie, can I invite you to share a little bit?

Maggie Sandison

Thank you, Deputy First Minister. The recent outage caused by the damage to the SHEFA-2, which links Shetland, Faroe and Orkney, has led to a total lack of a broadband provision for some residents and businesses in Shetland for more than three weeks. It's the latest example of a significant lack of resilience in telecommunications infrastructure, providing vital services to Shetland. This outage is far from a one-off, we've had similar incidents of varying degrees of severity which have occurred recently and point to the vulnerability of subsea cables, often unprotected, sited in areas of marine industry activity and it's extremely time consuming and complex to repair these cables. This situation is often exacerbated by a lack of communication by providers and their commercial arrangements, which fail to provide for alternative arrangements to provide connectivity.

Resilience of provision is key to ensure the wellbeing of residents, businesses and services is being prioritised. In the wider context of connectivity, while the continual rollout of R100 is welcome and is providing fibre services to rural communities, there are significant gaps in rural provision. This, combined with the lack of information on Project Gigabit and continuing substandard mobile connectivity in many areas, including in the centre of Lerwick, gives the impression of a community being left behind by government and by providers. This is at odds not only with the Scottish Government's priorities and pledges, but also with Shetland's status at the forefront of industrial development and energy transition.

Shetland's position at the head of development in renewable energy, decarbonisation, oil decommissioning, space and marine industries should place the community at the heart of Scotland's economic future, but it doesn't seem to be recognised by efforts which would sustain our connectivity and lead to secure services. The community's frustration is made worse by the fact that the Scottish Government paid BT to lay a new cable from Shetland. Whilst it's been on the seabed for nearly four years, it's not been switched on yet and it's only live between Lerwick and Fair Isle. The switch off of landlines is adding significant additional anxiety among our community about reduced community resilience, especially in bad weather, which we also get a lot of experience of.

Kate Forbes

Thank you very much, some extremely weighty matters in all of this. Can I go to HIE, I don't know, Stuart, if you want any reflections on some of the work that HIE have been doing. Then I'll come to Argyll and Bute and then I think we should have a quick conversation, I think some of these themes should feature in some work that CoHI takes forward.

Stuart Black

Yes, thanks, Deputy First Minister. We actually have a member of staff based on Tiree, Philip Coghill, who works for the Scottish Land Fund, he was keeping me up to speed with what was happening. One of my colleagues, Andrea Rutherford, we have a small digital team, she's actually based on the west side of Lewis, so she works in a location which is very IT-dependent. Just as Rhoda has said - and I think I met Rhoda earlier in the summer, in July, it was good to get to Tiree - everything in the island is so dependent on the digital telecoms.

One of the things that's been raised there is the importance of resilience, so if a cable is damaged can there be another way of dealing with that. There has been an upgrade recently on the island of Coll, so one option might be to put a cable across the relatively short bit of water between Tiree and Coll and that would create a bit more resilience and reduce the dependency on the single link. But we do understand how frustrating it was for everyone on Tiree and that's why Andrea was particularly working with Robbie McGhee, who did a really good job, I think, with the Scottish Government to try and get BT to move this along. Those are the kinds of things we've been doing. Thanks.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Pippa, do you want to comment?

Pippa Milne

Thanks, Deputy First Minister. I think you couldn't give it better than Rhoda has of the implications on our islands. I think we were particularly concerned as well when it first happened, when the estimates were December to get that repaired, so it's good to see that that is moving forward more quickly. We did have some issues as well when it first happened in terms of what were deemed as priorities to get connectivity. The council deployed its own Starlink systems to supplement BT, but interesting that the school wasn’t considered a priority initially and that school relies on virtual learning as well as in-person learning.

Obviously as Rhoda so very eloquently set out, the implications are still quite significant on the islands and we hear more broadly, particularly through Storm Amy, but that's not an isolated incident, just how isolated and vulnerable the communities feel when you have an instance like that. In terms of our ability to coordinate our resilience response, that becomes limited or non-existent and we're wholly reliant on local staff using their excellent initiative. But still not an idea situation and obviously as Rhoda said, it's that access to make emergency calls or seek assistance if you need it becomes totally absent.

I think it goes to our wider discussions about population earlier and just how attractive our communities are for people who are increasingly choosing to relocate, but rely on being able to work remotely and then that isn't a reliable service that they can count on to enable them to do that. We saw other islands, Mull and Islay, that were significantly cut off during Storm Amy, thankfully not for as long as Tiree. But that is a real concern and they’ve reported significant worries about that to us. Thanks.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much. I'm going to see if anybody has any short comments to make. Based on this, I can see four actions really in this particular order, which is obviously the priority for restoring connectivity in Tiree, Shetland, slightly better news. I think from CoHI it's the need for ongoing continued engagement from members, particularly where there are other public bodies, for example, the NHS or the other emergency services too and there has been some of that engagement but it's ongoing engagement.

There is going to need to be - and we've started talking about that already - a big debrief on what - in terms of the response and where the response can be improved, because the risk here is - and the reason why we're bringing it to CoHI is that this is inevitably we need to ensure that the response when there's another storm, in particular islands, is learning the lessons from what worked and what didn't work in Shetland and Tiree.

Then the last one is that we have previously had a CoHI agenda when it was the RTS switch off and we had Ofcom, I think, a representative from UK Government and some commercial operators there. Subject to the convention's agreement, I foresee the need for another agenda item at the next Convention of the Highlands and Islands with all of those representatives there to talk about resilience and to ensure that there are some very clear approaches or agreements to how everybody will work together to ensure that the impact is minimised. We've got another few minutes and I'm just going to see if anybody wants to come in to agree or disagree with that suggestion. Oliver.

Oliver Reid

It was really just to pick up on your last comment and to welcome that, Deputy First Minister. Because I think that the understanding in other places of the need for good connectivity, physical connectivity and digital, to sustain life and be resilient, isn't there. Actually it was really apparent at the last CoHI, that misunderstanding and the good news that we're only five per cent that don't really have that.

Yet the drive through AI and through the way that we want to change services and protect people is to use that connectivity more and more. It needs to be more than one cable, it needs to have resilience, or else communities will not be sustainable and they will always be at risk in our most vulnerable communities. I really welcome the point you've just made, thank you.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Paul.

Paul Steele

Thank you. I just think back to the last CoHI when we had a very similar discussion and we were told we weren’t a political priority. I think it's absolutely right that it's back on the agenda and I think that we might need some corporate representation there as well, because they have a big part to play in this.

Kate Forbes

Just for the minute taking, it wasn’t me who said you weren’t a political priority. Yes, Jim.

Jim Lynch

I think it was just self-evident to me that the people in the islands feel as if they're - Maggie summed it up, that they're left behind and they are. I think that's something we need to remedy very quickly.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Raymond and then Emma and then I'm going to finish.

Raymond Bremner

This is just a very quick point. There are an awful lot of points where it's within our own gift around the table as CoHI representatives and where it's within the devolved gift of Scottish Government. But there are a number of times we're talking around the table where it's not a devolved issue and we do not have UK Government representation at the table. It might be something to consider in terms of that.

We had a conversation where the UK Islands Forum used to exist, it hasn't existed since the last election and there is, therefore, no voice for the islands of Scotland to be able to make representation in terms of things that are not devolved to the Scottish Government. If we can at least have that representation at CoHI, where it's available to us, if the Scottish Government could facilitate that, that would be really handy.

Kate Forbes

Thanks, Raymond. Emma, last word to you.

Emma Macdonald

Thank you, yes, I'll be very brief. Just that I welcome the opportunity to have that discussion at CoHI. I think there was a real sense in Shetland of if this was happening somewhere else, if this was happening in Edinburgh or in somewhere more central, it would have been fixed really quickly. But there didn't seem to be that priority and people feel that they're not a priority and that's not good enough. Thank you.

Kate Forbes

Thanks very much for that. Rhoda or Mark, I don't know if you want to add anything - Maggie, add anything to that conversation and then I'll bring it to a conclusion. No? Go for it, Rhoda.

Rhoda Meek

Just to thank you, Deputy First Minister, for the opportunity to have this conversation. I think it's really encouraging to hear the interest and the understanding around the need for resilience and particularly digital resilience as we look at issues such as depopulation and population retention. It's not just this issue, this immediate crisis, but I think it speaks to a much bigger picture in terms of our Highlands and Islands and future resilience.

Kate Forbes

Thanks. Maggie, any summary?

Maggie Sandison

I think our community will be reassured knowing that that intention to really look at the recovery plan for these companies and how when incidents happen - and we accept that they’ll happen - that the response is better. I think we learnt a lot about electricity resilience after Storm Arwen and I think that learning exercise really could help with this as well, so I appreciate that being taken forward, thank you.

Kate Forbes

Thank you very much. Well, huge appreciation, particularly Rhoda and Mark, thank you. I know we changed the time last minute, so we're very grateful that you could accommodate the new time, mostly because some of us are trying to get the last ferry today because of the weather. That's wonderful, thank you. We will take that forward. We will move now to the last item, which is just any other business. If you have any - sorry, Heather, were you wanting to come in, apologies?

Heather Woodbridge

On any other business, if possible.

Kate Forbes

Yes, all yours.

Heather Woodbridge

Fabulous, I'll be very brief because I know I'm standing between you and the ferry. One is I would just like to request publication of CoHI papers to be circulated a week earlier than currently, just to give enough time, particularly for the smallest local authorities in Scotland to be able to allow a briefing to get to their politicians. Keen to just have a little bit more time with papers and to get the advice on that. Second one was just an opportunity to ask, what is the process for members of CoHI to request items on the agenda, other than AOCB?

Kate Forbes

Yes, we need to get papers earlier, can we do that?

Karen MacKinnon

That's dependent on us getting papers in on time, so it's a collective effort.

Kate Forbes

Okay, so the collective point here is get your papers in earlier and we'll maybe set some earlier deadlines in the hope that people meet them and get them to you. In terms of items you want on the agenda, please, please, please tell the Secretariat. If you've told the Secretariat and it didn't get on the agenda, tell me. I want this to feel like it is a really good use of your time, that the conversations are lively, that the issues are dynamic. If you've got ideas for what you want on the agenda, I think it would be great if you told the Secretariat and me. Although only until February and then you can tell someone else.

Great, any other business? No, great. In which case, I'm going to leave you with an invitation to let the Secretariat and me know what you want to do about a spring CoHI, if you haven't already. There's been a few ideas circulated, there was one idea about a really tight, focused, shorter version and others are suggesting it just can't be done by February. We're very relaxed, but I'd really like it to feel like it was members who are informing what we do and not just us making the decision. If you have thoughts, let the Secretariat know.

My last one is just to say thank you very much. I know that many of you have travelled quite a distance, a lot of island hopping going on. We're really, really grateful to the council and to Councillor Gurney and your colleagues from North Ayrshire Council for hosting us today and for all the support in putting on today and for the team who do such a great job logistically, particularly when they're looking at the meteorology reports and suggesting - and concluding that we may be swimming. But thankfully we're not swimming and very grateful. Safe journey home and see you later.

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