Procedimiento de Evaluación

The Forth Bridge is identified in both positive and negative scenarios as being critical to Fife’s success. It connects Fife with Edinburgh and beyond—not just the rest of Scotland but England too (in fact, only half of the traffic crossing the bridge southwards is actually going to Edinburgh). However, despite its identification as such a key issue to Fife’s (and the rest of Scotland’s) economic prosperity, as a local authority, Fife has little control over its own destiny. Part of the reason why can be attributed to bureaucratic structures, and competing interests and agendas.

In 2007, the head of the Transportation service in Fife described the problem:

“The crazy situation is that we have a bridge that is managed by one organisation, the Forth Estuary Transport Authority (FETA); the road at the other side is owned and managed by the City of Edinburgh Council, not the Scottish Executive, and the road this side is owned and managed by Fife Council, not the Scottish Executive. The A8000 is an Edinburgh Council project but will be taken over and managed by the Executive when it’s finished.” (FCE 3)

One of the problems seemed to be that while FETA is responsible “for the existing bridge, technically nobody has the responsibility for any new crossing” (FCE 3). FETA is also a deeply political body:

“The governance of FETA is such that there [are] four politicians from Edinburgh, four from Fife, one from Perth and Kinross, and one from West Lothian, the chair alternates between Fife and Edinburgh and holds the casting vote. At least on two occasions they’ve come out with absolutely absurd decisions because they forced it to the vote, and if you can get your buddy in West Lothian to join up with you, or Perth and Kinross, for that matter, you end up with a situation where you’ve got one of the most important transport links in Scotland being governed on a casting vote.” (FCE 3)

FETA is also only one level of transportation bureaucracy that exists. There are three levels: • Council/Local – for example, Fife Council’s Transportation Service

• Regional – Transportation Partnerships, SESTran (South-East Scotland Transport) • National – Transportation Scotland, run by the Scottish Executive, and FETA

The impact of such bureaucracy on Fife’s ability to manage its own destiny is substantial: “All that Fife has is a seat at the table to influence” (SLS 1). Thus all the “big ideas” and “aims and objectives…and goals and targets” are largely out of reach: “if you’re not in control of the piece of infrastructure or funding related to do it, then it’s very difficult” (SLS 1). In turn, this restricts the perceived effective of scenario planning: that it is “too aspirational”, and out of touch with the strategic context in which the organisation operates. However, the counter to that argument is that scenario planning has highlighted the areas where Fife Council has little or no control and has thus

2004 Community Plan—something which the head of POD and newly appointed Fife Partnership manager saw as a major shortcoming:

“One of the things that [the Fife Partnership manager] and myself have really had to really crack the whip on is to get this thing simplified again because it’d grown arms and legs and was creating lots of complexity and we’d lost the brevity of what we’d been trying to do. There was a disjoint that had emerged between what we had used the scenarios for to develop these sort of overarching outcome themes, and then what was actually going on, on the ground. Some of that is to do with the fact that there were lots of different planning processes going on underneath the community plan, all at different stages and all at different time periods.” (FCCP 3)

However, as long as the Community Plan remained at the forefront of everyone’s focus, it was thought that these competing processes would not have had a detrimental effect:

“But my view was that if they were always going back to the community plan it wouldn’t have mattered, but what was happening was that folk were paying lip- service to that as a strategic document and either able to hang their hats on it any which way they wanted just because it was so broad, or just quietly ignoring it, and they would write paragraphs saying, ‘this is consistent with…’, but actually it wasn’t, they were on a completely different planet from where the community plan was actually headed.” (FCCP 3)

This bears relevance to the previous point about the assumption of strategic singularity, except what is being referred to here is more deceitful, where services and managers are guilty of constructing the illusion of strategic alignment. However, a lack of change is not always an attempt at strategic duplicity. In transportation, a “well-established strategic development process” (SLS 1) was identified as a reason why the scenarios had not “really” improved the policy process. However, the recognition of the importance and consequence of work, especially as part of other plans, has been a positive outcome.

On a partnership level, the situation for non-council organisations like NHS Fife, and the Police, is even more difficult to balance, especially considering natural frameworks and regulations:

“I think it’s also quite difficult for people like health, and probably police and fire, because they are much more reactive in terms of the issues of the day, and

in terms of emergency services. Their long-term planning is about...the Open golf tournament coming.” (FPS 3)

In the NHS Fife, it was described as almost a continuous flow of strategy: “there is an overarching compendium of strategies to which we are always adding and reviewing and refining” (FPM 3). Similarly, another partner from Scottish Enterprise Fife echoed this notion of a constant stream of strategy and strategic documents: “the number of strategic documents that pass my desk are vast and many” (FPM 8). Scottish Enterprise Fife, like NHS Fife, sits between a national framework and local objectives:

“Our strategic hierarchy starts with what was the framework for economic development for Scotland, which which was then translated into a document called the A Smart, Successful Scotland: Ambitions for the Enterprise Networks. The task of an organisation like SE Fife is to sit between the national strategic environment and the local strategic environment and to build a bridge between the two.” (FPM 8)

Even at a local level, SE Fife’s ambitions are driven through the Fife Economic Forum, one of the strategic partnerships that sits beneath the Fife Partnership, and the local economic development strategy:

“The local economic forum is the primary conduit for the economic theme [and] Growing Fife’s Future, the local economic development strategy, is effectively the blueprint for the development of the Fife economy.” (FPM 8)

CVS Fife are perhaps in an even more complicated position because of their reliance on (usually short-term) local, national and European funding and the concomitant requirement to adapt their strategy accordingly: “Our biggest funding source up to this year has been European funding, but that’s all dried up this year” (FPM 5).

With so many layers of planning (as described in section 4.1.3), perhaps it is unsurprising that one of the greatest challenges of the scenario planning process is other local and national strategic requirements:

“the strategic direction comes from all sides: from the Scottish Government, especially if ministers want to see specific outcomes in specific areas and if there’s funding associated with that, from the Council’s structure plan, and from the Community Plan.” (FCE 4)

Although the scenario development process was supposed to align the overarching strategies, the Structure Plans, Service Improvement Plans, National Frameworks, etc., are so deeply embedded that they compete against, and, to some extent, dampen the impact of the scenario and community planning processes.

4.3.4 Fife’s Structure Plan

Fife’s Structure plan, entitled ‘Fife Matters’, sets out the development strategy and strategic land use policies and identifies the general scale and location of development. The Structure Plan also sets the context for Local Plans which combined for the Fife Development Plan. The consultative draft Structure Plan, published in March 2005, was subject to widespread public consultation—in fact, the statutory process began in January 2003. Almost 600 consultees participated and over 3000 comments were received from members of Fife Council and “interested parties” from external bodies.

The Structure Plan was required to fit into a wider legal context set by European Directives and to be guided by the Scottish Executives Scottish Planning (SPPs), National Planning Policy Guidelines (NPPGs), Planning Advice Notes (PANs), and Circulars. In the introduction of the plan, it stipulated that “the content of these documents is reflected, but not repeated in the policies of this Plan” (FR/FC/1). It then mentions that the national planning framework (2004) “identifies the likely change to 2025 and sets out an achievable long-term for Scotland” (FR/FC/1). Similarly, that “the Fife Community Plan (2004) sets out the shared vision of public sector providers and the wider Fife community over the next 10 years” (FR/ FC/1).

Much of the the forethought upon which the Structure Plan is based comes directly from the Community Plan. The driving vision refers explicitly to the one described in the Community Plan, as do the “challenges for the future”. However, the most significant link to the scenarios is the expanded scenario-style vision (which extends to 2026) that introduces the document. Thematically, it is very similar to ‘Bridging the Gap’ but it does not use any of the

same language, nor was there any reference to the scenarios at the initial presentation of the draft plan to the Fife Partnership. However, respondents believed this to be an explicit consequence of the scenario planning exercise and evidence that the scenario planning process was beginning to become etched into Fife Council’s strategic toolbox:

“I think [the scenario exercise] influenced quite a lot. It found its way into the structure plan, which is a document that goes all the way to 2026, so it wasn’t just on the day then forget about it, which can quite easily happen in a lot of things”. (FCE 3)

Despite the apparent impact of the scenarios on the Structure Plan, especially in terms of the focus on the housing market, regenerated communities, an educated workforce and improved transportation network, it is difficult to judge accurately the true impact of the scenario process. Although it was thought that the scenarios did have a significant effect, much like with the Community Plan, a number of respondents felt that although the scenarios helped, they did not alter the path that they were already on.

4.3.5 Other Strategic Processes and Monitoring Systems

The scenario planning and community planning processes were the significant strategic initiatives of 2003 and 2004. In 2005, this focus shifted to a broad array of other strategic processes, for example, Fife’s Structure Plan (above), the Efficient Government Initiative, the establishment of a new partnership to oversee the “strengthening our communities” theme from the Community Plan, the Fit-for-Purpose Review of Strategic Partnerships, an incorporated Fife Partnership, and the State of Fife Report. It was during the discussions of the State of Fife Report in September 2005 that the CPIG recommended that the scenario planning consultants from the University of St Andrews be re-engaged to facilitate the finalisation of the report (see section 4.3.6). During this time, Fife’s economic partnership, the Fife Economic Forum, also published their development strategy 2005-2015, called “Growing Fife’s Future”. This document was being refreshed to reflect both the Community Plan and Fife’s Structure Plan: “a pragmatic approach to opportunity must be the core of our economic strategy” (FPM 8). Similar to the situation described above with the Structure Plan, while there were no direct references to the scenarios, the effect the scenario planning

process had on the Community Plan implies that the scenario exercise had at least a tacit impact on the strategic and economic direction of Fife.

What followed from POD was an attempt to use the scenario planning process to propel Fife Council’s intelligence gathering to a more relevant and inter-connected level:

“From ‘Bridging the Gap’, we had a template (for lack of a better word) to see how well we were doing…We had a report to tell us we were doing, if we were ‘Bridging the Gap’. In some areas, we were doing well, and in other areas we were not succeeding. It gave us a starting point.” (FPS 2).

The ‘Milestones’ were envisioned as a means of “collecting evidence from other services about environmental context and what indicators could be used to say whether economic, financial, and demographic changes were taking place” (FCCP 1). The objective of the data collection was to bring “evidence into strategic thinking to understand what sort of future is rolling out for Fife based upon the external drivers” (FCCP 1). The Community Planning Milestones was a quantitative process, where a colour of red, amber or green was assigned to a number of indicators which were part of each Community Plan theme. Interestingly, despite overwhelmingly negative findings with regards to Fife’s Resources (see table 4.15), the analysis for the Milestones report was significantly more optimistic—out of 65 indicators, 14 were classified as red54_{, 9 as amber}55_{, and 42 as green}56 _(FR/FP/4).

There was also a belief that a more qualitative analysis was needed. A memo written by Fife Council’s Corporate Research in February 2005 detailed the unit’s desire to embed scenario planning into the organisational psyche of Fife Council. The paper described the process undergone, illustrating the “iterative nature of scenario planning” (ID/FC/6), before stipulating the next challenge: “to continue to encourage free thinking and to incorporate this into the formal strategic planning process” (ID/FC/6). The memo proposed to “embed

54 _{Red indicates that should performance continue, targets for 2010 will not be met.}

55 _{Amber indicates that while progress is being made, if performance continues at the current rate, targets for 2010} will not be met.

56 _{Green indicates that performance has already met or surpassed or, if performance continues at the current rate,} will meet or surpass targets for 2010.

the scenario planning process as an annual element of strategic review” and “adopt a framework for scenario review” (ID/FC/6).

The framework for strategic review was intended to review the scenarios, determine the range of future directions, and to deploy appropriate strategic options. This process had four elements:

• Monitoring quantitative environmental information

• Monitoring qualitative environmental information

• Identifying significant events

• Testing key drivers and significant events against strategic options.

The actual manifestation of this proposal was known as the “Winds of Change”, first presented in April 2005 and subsequently refreshed and reviewed in November 2005. The “Winds of Change” provided a simple, colour-coordinated way to visualise the progress of the key drivers in the context of the scenarios. For each major driver, a number of significant data points were placed in either the ‘Bridging the Gap’ or ‘Mind the Gap’ column. For example, for connectivity, the data point, “Rosyth-Zeebrugge ferry sailings are halved as Superfast withdraw one boat”, was seen as being a signal of the more negative scenario, whereas, “Exploratory studies into 3rd _{Forth Bridge and cross-Forth commissioned; Edinburgh}

rejects road charging” (FR/FP/5), was more symptomatic of the positive scenario.

The Winds of Change reports were based upon significant analyses, combining demographic, economic, social data from a multitude of source both within and outside of Fife. Within POD, the opinion of the Winds of Change was high, and that it had a significant impact on the Partnership. It was noted by a member of POD that the above point about the ferry, and its implications for connectivity, had a significant effect on the partners:

“I think one of the times we produced that document, it was just after Superfast Ferries had halved the ferry service from Rosyth, and we, because there had been quite a big play made on that in the scenarios, specifically around the connectivity issue, thought that this was a bit of a setback. Interestingly, even by just putting it in the document and saying that it was taking us down the wrong road, we caused quite a stir with some of the partners who felt that it was maybe