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Better communities in Scotland: Closing the gap

Chapter 1: Our vision for Scotland's communities

1 We, the Scottish Executive, are committed to building a Scotland where everyone has access to the opportunities and benefits of a fair and equal society. Our aim is to tackle the inequalities between communities by narrowing the gap between the disadvantaged and everyone else. We want a Scotland where every person can contribute to, and benefit from, the community in which they live.

2 This is not just our vision. Our partners in local government and other parts of the public sector, the private sector and voluntary and community groups, nationally, regionally and locally, all share this vision. To achieve our shared goal, we must all work together.

3 Scotland has a long and respected record of community regeneration work, and there are many examples of local initiatives that have successfully tackled problems of deprivation, including education, health, crime, jobs, housing and the physical environment. Projects in Scotland have often led the way in providing new solutions to long-standing problems and, together with regeneration programmes in other countries, have tested and developed approaches which are now widely accepted as the heart of community regeneration. For example, local regeneration programmes have emphasised partnership working and community involvement, and much has been learned from this experience about the vital factors that are necessary for successful partnership working and meaningful community involvement.

4 We have also seen improvements since 1997 in wider economic and social outcomes - unemployment has fallen, and the number of children in households on low incomes is falling.

5 The proposals in this document build on these successes. However, despite these, poverty and deprivation are still firmly rooted in many of Scotland's communities. We have not seen the same level of improvements in all parts of Scotland and some neighbourhoods still have significantly higher levels of poverty. In these areas, people's expectations are lower, opportunities are fewer and the challenges we face go beyond improving the circumstances of individual people.

6 The quality of life for people can be very different in different areas. Here are some examples.

• People in North Ayrshire are more than four times as likely to be unemployed as people in Shetland.
• People live longer in Renfrewshire than in Glasgow - on average almost eight years for men and about five years for women.
• Children in the most deprived areas are less than half as likely to be breast-fed as children in the wealthiest areas, and are twice as likely to have a low birth weight.
• Wages in rural areas tend to be below the Scottish average - for example, people working full time in Scottish Borders in 2000 earned almost 50 a week less than the national average.

7 These differences are as great between local neighbourhoods as within the same local-authority area. We are committed to closing these gaps by improving the lives of our most deprived communities. We know that all communities are different and that there is no simple rule that determines whether a community works or not, but we want to build communities:

• where people feel safe in their homes and their neighbourhood;
• where people have a sense of belonging and trust;
• where people want to live;
• where people have the opportunity to learn, work and play; and
• where people can grow up, work, bring up children and retire.

8 Communities like this will offer people a better quality of life with more jobs, higher incomes, better qualifications and skills, improved standards of health, and less risk of crime.

Delivering change

9 We know that it is possible to turn disadvantaged communities around to create a better life for those who live in them. We do not accept the belief that deprivation and poverty cannot be avoided, nor the negative view that we have tried and failed and there is no more we can do. We have learned many lessons from our past approaches to regeneration but some are critical and these support our new approach.

• While individual communities have benefited, programmes have often overlooked the connections between deprived and other areas. For example, transport problems that prevent people in one area from getting jobs in another have not been dealt with. Money has been spent on one estate, while households two or three streets away face exactly the same problems and have no extra help.
• While central government grants for local regeneration initiatives have been very important, mainstream providers, whose programmes and budgets could have significantly more effect, have often not had the incentive or willingness to change their programmes and budgets in support of these areas.
• While many initiatives are models of good practice in how to involve communities, too often communities have not been involved in a genuine way.
• While there are many examples of past regeneration successes, not enough attention has been paid to collecting and sharing information to assess the effect of projects and programmes.

10 To bring about real and long-lasting change, we need to take a more strategic approach, mainstream providers need to target their budgets and programmes more effectively on deprived areas and work together better, local people need to be more actively involved, and we need to get better at knowing what works and why.

11 We need to take action in two main areas.

• We will make sure that core public services have as much effect as possible on disadvantaged areas. This means not only that these services are working well at a general level in Scotland, but also that they are working effectively in areas of disadvantage, so that we improve local outcomes in our five priority areas - health, education, transport, crime and jobs. We will also make sure that the main support services, such as housing, social work, and childcare are in place and working effectively.
• We will work to make sure people and communities have the social capital - the skills, confidence, support networks and resources - that they need to take advantage of, and to increase, the opportunities open to them. To do this, we need to build the confidence of our communities to do more for themselves and to ask for the services they need, develop systems that get people involved and let them have a say in their communities, and provide support and advice to individuals.

12 Doing these things together will produce a better result than doing them on their own. Good public services will build skills and confidence in our communities, and communities with skills and confidence will be able to influence and improve how services are delivered. In this way, we will improve the quality of life for people living in our more deprived communities and narrow the gap between them and everybody else.

Why public services matter

13 Disadvantaged communities tend to depend on public services more than other communities. We know that there are major barriers, for example:

• the only successful shop on the estate is often the off-licence;
• there are jobs but not the transport to get to them; and
• there are people who could and want to work but who cannot afford or get easy access to childcare so they stay at home.

14 People in deprived communities are also more likely to rely on public services as their only safety net when things go wrong. They are less likely to have assets, such as savings or property, or a salary they can use to take out a loan to help them meet the repayments. Also, their social networks will not give them access to jobs and other opportunities that are available to other people.

15 To improve the quality of people's lives we need to invest in mainstream and targeted services. Mainstream spending must be planned and delivered in a way that takes account of people's needs, which is why we have consulted on community budgeting. Work carried out in West Edinburgh estimated that just under 60 million of public money was spent in the area in 1999-2000 (not including money spent on social security benefits). We need to make sure that this money is being used effectively as an investment in communities. This means focussing on the people receiving the service and what it does for them. We must also be smarter about how we make money work to deliver change. Everyone has a right to the same outcomes, but the services to deliver these will not always look the same.

16 We also need to continue to invest in targeted local projects and initiatives. These are essential as they have a real effect on local people by delivering extra local services to 'top up' or fill in the gaps left by mainstream service providers. Targeted investment can also make an important contribution to building skills and confidence in our communities. Money is needed for the local structures and partnerships that make change happen, to build local networks, increase opportunities and provide extra services that help mainstream services work more effectively.

Building skills and confidence in disadvantaged communities

17 Service improvements are not enough on their own to bring about change. We also need to build skills, resources and networks, and motivate individuals and communities so they can take advantage of opportunities and work to promote their own wellbeing.

18 As we have already said, people in deprived communities are less likely to have access to the resources they need when things go wrong. Increasing individual skills - particularly literacy and numeracy - and building the resources and networks within a community can help people find ways of tackling problems locally and can also help stop those services failing in the first place. It will also mean that communities can influence and work with providers to make sure that they get better local services.

19 Communities are well placed to be able to develop and put into practice solutions to local challenges, and by working in this way we can build communities where:

• people do not have to rely on public services;
• people take greater responsibility for what happens in their communities and have a greater involvement in the decisions that affect their lives; and
• we have lasting change.

20 One of the main ways in which skills and confidence can be built is through community learning and development. These services support informal learning programmes and community action based on real issues in people's day-to-day lives. They are effective in improving people's confidence and motivation, their sense of power and their ability to influence public services.

21 The people who provide community learning and development have been working in this way with some success for many years. Public service agencies, together with voluntary-sector and community-based organisations, can also use the community learning approach to work with communities to identify and tackle local problems. This will allow communities to develop their potential, improve the quality of their lives, and take part in local and national democratic processes. We also believe that frontline staff and those working with communities will get better and longer-lasting results by working in this way.

22 To make this happen we will work with national and local partners to build a shared vision of community learning and development. We will also make sure that it is built into community planning so that local people can get involved in the process. At the same time, we want to increase the focus of those providing community learning and development on improving key service outcomes for deprived communities. We will also examine how we can build the skills of staff in using the approach so that it becomes a more common way of working.

23 We will prepare and consult on a new guidance document on community learning and development that will replace Scottish Executive Education Department Circular 4/99. A new development centre in Communities Scotland will support the work in this area and will help community learning partnerships. We will also examine whether it would be helpful to link funding for community involvement more directly to money for new programmes to make sure that communities are able to take part fully in their design and delivery.

24 As well as working with communities, we must also work to build individual skills, particularly literacy and numeracy. A high percentage of people with low levels of literacy and numeracy live in disadvantaged areas, have low-skill jobs and incomes, or have health problems and disabilities. We are supporting work to tackle these problems, both directly and by creating a development centre within Communities Scotland that will support the people providing these services.

25 The new development centre in Communities Scotland will have two separate but related responsibilities - adult literacy and numeracy, and community learning and development. Its purpose will be to raise skills levels and to make sure that community learning and development is an important part of the wider regeneration process. In taking forward adult literacy, its main function will be to develop a national curriculum and a national training programme for people providing literacy services.

Chapter 2: Making change happen

The challenge

1 Chapter 1 set out some of the main reasons why we have not yet made enough progress in tackling poverty and disadvantage in Scotland's deprived areas, and set out the changes necessary for this to happen. In this chapter, we discuss how we will do this.

2 We need to make sure that national and local organisations work together effectively to deliver local services that help all our communities have a good quality of life. Community planning offers an opportunity to make this happen.

Community planning

3 Community planning is the way in which councils and other national and local organisations agree local priorities with the community and then work together to provide the services that are needed at local level. We have recently introduced the Local Government in Scotland Bill. Under this Bill all local authorities must put arrangements in place for community planning in their area and identify other important organisations - for example, health boards, police boards and Scottish Enterprise - which must be involved in the process.

4 We believe that community planning offers a new opportunity to improve how community regeneration is delivered in Scotland by joining up national and local priorities and by tackling the problems of deprived neighbourhoods, not alone, but as part of the wider community plan. Local authorities and the Community Planning Task Force have already been working to develop guidance on the process, and will develop more guidance and good practice.

5 We believe that community planning will provide:

• better links between national, regional, local and neighbourhood priorities, and better plans for the services that are needed;
• a greater focus on the needs of local communities, remembering that where they work, rest and play can be different places;
• more effective working between councils, health boards, local enterprise boards and other important partners; and
• flexible local solutions driven by the needs and priorities of local communities.

6 In some places this is already happening. There are good examples of joint working and community involvement. Budgets are being brought together so that money can be spent flexibly on what is needed locally, not just on what it has always been spent on. Communities themselves are getting involved in delivering the services that are needed to make a difference. This last point is particularly important. Under the Local Government in Scotland Bill, Community Planning Partnerships must involve the community itself as the main partner in the process.

Joining up services

7 Community planning is the way forward, but there is more to do and we cannot be complacent. We have to make sure that community planning delivers all that it can. In particular, we must work to join up the services that are delivered by the big agencies, like health boards and councils, with the work of small community and voluntary organisations so that it all works together effectively.

8 We directly fund local activities to support social justice through programmes such as the 48 Social Inclusion Partnerships and the 54 Local Rural Partnerships, as well as through support for the Glasgow Alliance and the Capital City Partnership. These are all projects that bring together national and local organisations to develop plans for the delivery of services in a particular area and to fund local projects. The Glasgow Alliance is the community planning partnership for Glasgow, and the Capital City Partnership is the regeneration section of Edinburgh's Community Planning Partnership.

9 The Community Planning Task Force is developing a framework and guidance for local community planning. This should deliver results at local level and act as an effective bridge between mainstream and targeted activities. Over the coming months, we will work with local authorities and other community planning partners to develop the model for local community planning. This would allow the Social Inclusion Partnership programme to be controlled by Community Planning Partnerships instead of by us. The main principles - partnership working, filling gaps in services, and involving communities - are likely to be the same, but these would in future be firmly linked to the community planning framework.

10 We will not mainstream the Social Inclusion Partnership programme overnight and the earliest we would expect the first transfers would take place in 2004. Progress will depend on Scottish Ministers and communities having confidence that

services and outcomes in deprived areas will be improved and that the resources would not be taken away from the vulnerable communities that rely on them. Also, the money will only be available to:

• fund work at neighbourhood level;
• support local networks that plan and deliver services;
• develop local skills and confidence; and
• provide improved or extra local services.

11 The Community Planning Partnership will need to show it can work effectively with the local community. Communities Scotland, in consultation with their main partners, will develop the detailed framework for taking this work forward. We are also taking work forward on the future of thematic Social Inclusion Partnerships.

Knowing what works

12 Though we and others have invested in communities and neighbourhoods over many years, we do not always know precisely what has been effective or what changes have taken place. Arrangements must be put in place that will allow us to learn from what we do so we can do it better in future. Information is also needed that will tell us where we should spend money now. While we know where the most deprived places are, it is difficult for us to identify where we should invest to stop things from getting worse.

13 We are running the Neighbourhood Statistics project over the next three years. This will give us information about key outcomes - including education, health, housing and employment - at neighbourhood and small area level so we can measure the differences between communities and the change over time. It will allow us to tell for the first time whether things are getting better or worse at local level and so whether we are being effective in closing the gap between the most deprived and our other communities. The first information will become available in March 2003. This information will be presented using postcode sectors, wards, local authorities, constituencies and Social Inclusion Partnership areas. However, as the project develops, data will be available at smaller geographic levels.

14 The information from the Neighbourhood Statistics project will support a revised Deprivation Index which we will use to identify the communities which are most in need of help and which are most likely to benefit from the new local community planning arrangements. The Deprivation Index is due to be finished by the end of 2002 and will be based on ward-level data. As increased information becomes available from the Neighbourhood Statistics project, we will carry out more work to develop an Index using smaller area information. We are also working to get a better understanding of rural poverty and are taking forward work to split the social-justice milestones into rural and urban milestones.

15 As well as being able to understand the changes that are happening, we also need to know whether what we and our partners are doing is making a difference. We need to make clearer links between developing policy, setting aside resources, taking action, and evaluating success. We will need to be able to tell what is working, and why, and to use that information so we can do better in the future.

16 To make this happen we have committed 3 million over the next three years to set up a new Scottish Centre for Regeneration within Communities Scotland. The Centre will work in partnership with other organisations to improve the quality and effectiveness of tackling deprivation in Scotland.

Working together

17 There is a long history of partnership working in Scotland. Partnerships help people get together to set joint priorities and targets and to develop and deliver joint solutions. At their most effective, they can help public-sector agencies work together more effectively, co-ordinating resources and streamlining services, so that poverty and injustice can be tackled as effectively as possible.

18 However, partnership working is not always easy. It needs a different set of skills to the more traditional command and control arrangements where agencies tend to work on their own to deliver their own aims. Partnership working needs a willingness to:

• share aims and be open to change;
• work in new ways;
• work together;
• give up power;
• dedicate resources to deliver shared goals; and
• involve communities in new ways.

19 It is important that we learn the lessons - good and bad - from what has happened already. The main areas that need more work are set out below.

• We need to know more about the effects of successful partnerships - what the added value of the partnership is and how we can use that success elsewhere.
• We need to build the cultures, skills and abilities needed to make partnership work in practice. Together with the Scottish Urban Regeneration Forum, we have commissioned research into training for those working on partnerships.
• We need to make sure that partnerships involve the right people so they can have the greatest effect - this means the people who have budgets and power, and those from the private sector and the community itself.

20 Communities Scotland will work to identify best practice in each of these areas so it can be shared and used to improve the effectiveness of partnership working.

Chapter 3: Improving services

How we will work

1 In the last chapter we said that we will put improved services at the heart of our commitment to regenerate communities in Scotland. We are committed to providing first-class public services and will focus on our priority areas of health, education, crime, transport and jobs. In each of these areas we will firmly root the themes of social inclusion, closing the gap and increasing opportunities for everybody. This chapter says more about what we will do to improve local services, by working on the basis of the following principles.

• We will focus on the needs of those who use and need the service.
• We will develop national standards on which local excellence can be built.
• We will work in a way that means that decisions are made by those best placed to make the decision.
• We will make sure that frontline staff have the working practices that allow them to spend their time doing what they do best.
• We will search out best value to get the best possible return for every pound of public money.

2 These principles are already being used in programmes like the Better Neighbourhood Services Fund (which gives local authorities money to spend on improving local services) and through the Modernising Government Fund (which supports new ways of providing public services in ways that support people's needs). We are also improving services in rural communities by putting the recommendations in the Scottish National Rural Partnership report 'Services in Rural Scotland' into practice.

3 This is a significant programme of activity, but it is just a start. We need to work together with agencies and partnerships across Scotland to make sure that people living in disadvantaged areas have the services to which they are entitled.

Focusing on outcomes

4 At the heart of improving services is a focus on what those services are meant to achieve, not on the services themselves. We are testing the use of local outcome agreements through the Better Neighbourhood Services Fund. Local authorities are given money to produce local improvements and must involve the community in the process, but have freedom in how they use the money to achieve the results.

5 Our first analysis of this process is that it is worthwhile but that it is more difficult than some had thought and there are lessons we can learn.

• We need to know where action is needed most.
• We have to identify priorities and explain them in terms of outcomes.
• Local information is important so we can measure progress in delivering improvements.
• We must have a work plan in place which clearly shows how we will achieve the outcomes.
• We must have effective arrangements in place to involve the local community.

6 We have learned these lessons from the work we have done with local authorities on Better Neighbourhood Services Fund programmes and hope that this learning can now be used in developing local outcome agreements further. We believe that local outcome agreements can be used more widely and we will examine how we can take this forward. At the same time, we must be realistic about this process and understand that the approach needs an investment in skills and time if it is to deliver all the benefits we expect of it.

7 All public-sector agencies have their own performance targets relating to their own service areas. Since we published our social-justice milestones and targets in 1999, we have been encouraging the main public-sector agencies to use these as part of their planning and performance frameworks. This is happening more and more and we will make sure that this progress continues so agencies are increasingly held responsible for the quality of their services to disadvantaged areas and to excluded groups, for example, black people and those from ethnic minorities, vulnerable, elderly people and those with disabilities.

Valuing frontline staff

8 The staff working to deliver services to disadvantaged communities are dealing with issues of poverty and deprivation and the question of how to tackle these every day. This makes it particularly important that we make the most of the experience that frontline staff can bring to the process of improving public services. We are committed to listening to and valuing the contribution of frontline staff and volunteers, and we expect them to play an important part in developing local strategies for regeneration.

Voluntary and community services

9 A strong economy and a strong society are two sides of the same coin. Voluntary and community organisations have a particular role in delivering local services but also in improving skills and confidence in deprived communities. These organisations are close to communities and understand their needs and ambitions. This allows them to deliver appropriate and responsive services that create community confidence, increase community involvement and allow communities to have more control over their lives. We are currently carrying out a review of the social economy, which will assess the potential of voluntary and community organisations to help us deliver our shared commitment to improving services.

Private-sector services

10 Alongside issues of the quality of public services in disadvantaged areas, we must also remember the importance of private-sector services. Shops, banks and other businesses make a real difference to our quality of life. We also need to work together with the private sector to tackle issues such as derelict land to make neighbourhoods more attractive. We hope to tackle the problem of shops leaving estates (meaning that people do not have places where they can buy good-quality food) by making them more attractive places to do business.

11 We are also working to reduce financial exclusion through projects such as the community banking agreement in Wester Hailes, through the Credit Union action plan, and through our work with the Scottish banks to encourage people to open bank accounts. In rural areas we are working to develop a pilot project involving the Enterprise Networks, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities ( CoSLA), banks and the Post Office to test the 'Community Mall' concept. This would bring together public, private and community services, including banking facilities and cash machines, under one roof. This could help us deliver important services to rural communities.

Neighbourhood management

12 We intend to promote greater use of neighbourhood management to deliver particular local services to make neighbourhoods more attractive places to live. Neighbourhood management means organising and co-ordinating basic services locally - both 'indoor' services (such as housing management) and 'area appearance' services (such as cleansing, environmental management and security). It generally involves appointing an area manager, or introducing an area office from which a range of services can be delivered to a local area.

We believe neighbourhood management will result in:

• local residents being able to become more involved and have a greater say in their communities;
• more 'early intervention' which prevents problems arising at a local level;
• improvements to the physical appearance of neighbourhoods;
• positive effects on community safety, security and the fear of crime; and
• better work with delivery agencies to improve their mainstream services.

13 Neighbourhood-management approaches can be particularly useful for tackling the physical appearance of local areas and in delivering environmental services. For example, environmental improvement work such as removing graffiti, looking after gardens, or cleansing are all services that are suitable for a neighbourhood-management approach. Research has also shown that disadvantaged communities often have real concerns about this type of low-level environmental issue in their local community, and tackling them can be an effective way to start to build the confidence of communities and to start to make changes.

14 One problem with neighbourhood-management approaches can be measuring the benefits. An initial investment of resources and ongoing running costs is often involved in neighbourhood-management approaches, but any benefits and savings often build up in other parts of a provider's budget, or even in the budgets of other service providers. For example, a successful neighbourhood warden scheme funded by a local authority might have positive effects on education budgets, transport budgets or policing budgets, but may be paid for from the environmental services budget. It is important to recognise and take account of these indirect effects when deciding on and planning neighbourhood-management approaches.

15 Communities Scotland will support local authorities and Community Planning Partnerships to use neighbourhood management by developing a 'toolkit' for them and other delivery agencies that want to use this approach.

Chapter 4: Measuring progress and success

General

1 We have said how we intend to take forward community regeneration in Scotland by improving service delivery in deprived areas and by building the skills and confidence of our communities. It is important that we also put in place a solid structure that allows us to measure and assess progress towards our aims.

2 There are two elements to this.

• First, we need to set out our action plan for taking this strategy forward. This will allow us to measure progress in delivering the building blocks we have identified in this document as necessary for success.
• Second, we need to put in place outcome measures that allow us to track change over time in our communities so we can tell when things are getting better or if they are not.

Measuring progress - our action plan

3 Publishing this document is the beginning of the process, but there is more work we need to take forward in partnership with others to develop the ideas further. We have already outlined some of this work and the main steps are as follows.

Joining up services

4 Joining up services is at the heart of our policy. To promote this we will:

• create the framework for community planning through the Local Government in Scotland Bill and the guidance we have prepared with the Community Planning Task Force;
• prepare more guidance and advice on best practice on local community planning;
• if the conditions are right, pass responsibility for the Social Inclusion Partnership programme to Community Planning Partnerships to place those partnerships in the lead in taking forward community regeneration in urban and rural areas; and
• make sure that the work on the Cities Review takes full account of the need to tackle local regeneration from a city and regional level, and identify what other actions are needed to support this.

5 The Cabinet Sub-committee on Social Justice will co-ordinate policy across the Scottish Executive.

Building knowledge and expertise

6 To be successful - and to know when things are working - we will:

• continue to take forward the Neighbourhood Statistics project so we use its information to clearly track change over time for the main outcomes at neighbourhood level.
• introduce a new Deprivation Index for Scotland to help us identify the communities - both urban and rural - that need the most attention and support; and
• set up the new Scottish Centre for Regeneration, which will produce a solid framework for evaluating programmes and projects and publish advice on best practice in community regeneration.

7 These are the main building blocks in the strategy that will make sure we are able to learn from what we do and use that learning to develop policy, use valuable resources, and develop local planning.

Improvingservices

8 As well as the wider work being taken forward across the Scottish Executive and with our partners on improving core services, we will:

• work to develop neighbourhood-management approaches to service delivery;
• develop the use of local outcome agreements in planning service improvements, and explore how resources can be used more flexibly to deliver outcomes; and
• take account of the outcome of the review of the social economy to identify how we can work across all sectors to create solutions that draw on all the skills and resources within our communities.

Raising skills

9 If we are to deliver on our strategy, we need to work to make sure that the people planning and delivering services and the communities they are working with have the skills and knowledge that they need. To deliver this we will:

• provide support to partnership approaches to community regeneration and develop more guidance on what is effective in delivering change;
• prepare guidance on how community learning and development approaches should support communities to get fully involved in the community planning process and in developing local community plans;
• carry out more work to improve how we measure the effect of community learning and development services in building social capital and improving core service outcomes; and
• revise Circular 4/99 on Community Learning and Development to take account of the development of community planning and the focus on the main service outcomes.

10 Through these measures we will work to develop approaches that build skills an involve people in community regeneration at a local level. We will test new approaches to building communities' confidence that will help this happen.

Planning for change

11 In taking forward our commitment to tackle deprivation in our communities we will plan for and expect to deliver change. In doing this we will:

• consider whether we should set floor and convergence targets for deprived areas and how we should set those targets;
• set clear priorities for change based on our service outcome priorities, and monitor progress against an indicator framework based on those priorities; and
• continue to use the social-justice milestones to measure progress in deprived areas and in the whole of Scotland.

Bringing this together

12 Together with CoSLA and other important community planning partners, we will develop a detailed work plan to take forward this action plan and will publish the plan by the end of 2002.

Measuring success

13 Together with the action plan we need to create a solid framework to allow us to measure progress in tackling the problems our disadvantaged communities face. This must go beyond measuring particular inputs and outputs and needs to allow us to track change over time for the main priorities of health, jobs, education, crime and transport.

14 We are committed to developing the information sources that will allow us to take this forward, but we still need to do more work to make sure that the system we put in place will deliver the necessary results. In putting this framework together we will:

• develop a set of indicators that reflect the main issues that are important to our communities and which will allow us to track progress over a range of variables;
• avoid creating new targets when setting these indicators, but will instead measure progress for existing targets in closing the gap between outcomes in deprived areas and the median;
• track change over time for these key outcomes in deprived areas; and
• make sure that information will be available at neighbourhood level for those parts we are tracking to evaluate progress.

15 We have yet to decide what indicators we will include in the sets but, as examples to explain the approach, we are considering indicators for the following.

• Employment in deprived areas.
• Educational achievement.
• Health improvement.
• Child poverty.

16 We will also try to identify appropriate indicators for crime, transport and housing. Some of these indicators are easier to put in place than others, but it is important that we develop a balanced approach that reflects the issues that are important to people living in our deprived communities.

17 We expect that this framework will be the main system for setting outcome agreements and priorities at local level in local community plans, and we will work with CoSLA, local authorities and other community planning partners to develop it. We hope to publish the indicators towards the end of the year. Information for 2003/2004, based on these indicators, will then be used to compare progress in that year with progress in future years.

18 This will firmly root the work on community regeneration into the work on improving core services across the Scottish Executive. The Cabinet Sub-committee on Social Justice will monitor progress against the framework and publish an annual report from 2004/2005.

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