West Lothian CPP – podcast transcript 
I’m here with Douglas Sinclair, chair of the Accounts Commission to talk about a report on community planning in West Lothian. Douglas, can you tell me what this report is about…
Yeah. It is a review of the West Lothian Community Planning Partnership. Community planning partnerships were set up in 2003 to bring together a range of public bodies – the council, the health board, the enterprise company, the police and the fire services to work together to tackle problems – because the solutions to these problems are never within the gift of one organisation. It needs common working across boundaries. Problems like reducing inequalities, improving public services, creating more jobs…..
So what are your main findings?
Well, the Commission found lots of positives in West Lothian. And it many ways it has set the standard for community planning across Scotland… and many other partnerships can learn from the good work in West Lothian.

Why? It’s because the council and its 14 partners have put in a real effort into working together and building trust across the boundaries of their organisations. Our report has measured good progress in several areas, especially in relation to the economy, community safety, which matters a lot to people, as well as aspects of health and wellbeing. 

But how does this affect the public?

To give one example.. a common bugbear is that if you’ve got a problem with a service sometimes you’ve got to go to one office and then they tell you to go to another office to find the solution to your problem.

We’ve all had that experience and it can be enormously frustrating.

What West Lothian did was to bring together under a single roof a whole range of services. And that’s a good example of community planning putting the public first and making sure that services are as joined up as possible

And we can easily forget the scale of public services. It is worth making the point that each year in West Lothian they spend over a billion pounds on public services. And. by any measure that’s a great deal of money. What we need to ensure and what the community planning partnership is trying hard to ensure is we get the maximum spend and every public pound is spent effectively on behalf of the community..

So what do you want to see happen next?

Well, the partnership like very other partnership in Scotland, faces real challenges.  Money is tight, the population is growing older and their needs are greater. And that brings new challenges. And the partnership now needs to raise its game to meet them through more effective leadership and challenge and scrutiny, making sure that each partner can hold each other to account and making sure each is making the maximum contribution they (can) make. We want them to improve on how they report back to local people but what our report does show is that West Lothian has a strong and solid foundation on which to build.

Douglas, thank you.