Going forward

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After the outcome improvement process 

This guide helps you to think about the next steps to take and whether your participation request has led to an outcome you are satisfied with. 

What the legislation says 

The outcome improvement process is the discussion you have taken part in with the public body you made the participation request to.  

Once the process is complete, the public body must provide a report showing how the outcome has been improved and how your involvement contributed to this. The report must say how you and anyone else involved will be kept up to date on any relevant changes to the improvements which have been made. 

The public body needs to have involved you when preparing this report, and it must be made available online. 

Measuring success 

Before deciding on what to do next, you will want to know whether the outcome has been improved. Have a look at the What does success look like? guide for some help with this.  

You may also find Social Studios’ Participation Request Toolkit’s Measuring Progress and Real Time Report resources useful at this point. 

It will also be useful to ask yourself the following: 

  • How good was the outcome improvement process? Were you meaningfully involved, and were your views given proper consideration? 

  • Has the process led to better a better relationship between your group and the public body? 

  • What useful lessons have you learned from the process? 

The answers to these questions will help you to know whether the success you have achieved is likely to continue. For instance, if the process was good and has led to a better relationship with the public body, you should find it easier to raise any issues in future and work together to do something about them. 

Building on success 

If you are happy with how things have gone and what was achieved, in addition to having a well-earned rest, you may want to start thinking about how to build on your success. 

Here are some ideas for how to do this: 

  • Speak to the people you worked with in the public body about what kind of ongoing involvement you could have. For instance, your group might be able to help put in place the agreed change. See the case study of SDS Borders Forum for an example of this.

  • Share your positive experience, so that other community groups can learn from, and be inspired, by it. You could use social media or even get in touch with us at Scottish Community Development Centre. We’re always keen to help share learning. 

  • Social Studios’ Forum Formula considers what information you will share at an evaluation event but could also help you consider what information would be useful to share within the report. 

  • Check in with the public body to see if they have produced, or intend to produce, the report on the process (see above). This will help to make sure that important lessons are written down and lead to changes in how things are done in future. If the process of working together was a good one, it would be a shame if things went back to how they were before you made the participation request, e.g., poor communication, lack of engagement etc. 

What if things haven’t gone well? 

We’re talking about the real world here. Working together to improve things is challenging for a lot of different reasons, and in many cases a participation request will not result in the change you hoped it would. 

Broadly speaking, there are two main ways that a participation request may result in disappointment, even though it was initially agreed to by the public body. These are: 

  • That it didn’t lead to a good outcome improvement process. If you aren’t involved in a meaningful and well-planned discussion about how to improve things, then it is much less likely that the participation request will lead to a positive change in how the service is designed or delivered.  

  • That despite having been involved in what seemed like a good process, you still feel that the public body has made the wrong decision at the end of it. 

Both of these things will be very frustrating, and it may be hard for your group to see any positive way forward using the legislation. It is true that the Community Empowerment Act doesn’t say anything about what steps to take in these circumstances. There is (currently) no appeals mechanism and there is no overseeing organisation for ensuring public bodies stick to the legislation. 

However, it should still be worth doing the following: 

  • Checking that the public body has produced, or is producing, a report on the process (see above). This report should show how the process worked and how the outcome has been improved. The public body is required to produce this report, and also to have involved your group while writing it.  

A properly written report should show the different views that were given during the process, how these were considered and how a decision was reached based on this. Having all this written down formally will help you to highlight what went wrong, which should help you going forward.  

  • It might be worth looking back at the decision notice (the letter or email agreeing to your participation request) and/or any working agreement you made with the public body at the start of the process. This could help you to identify what was, and wasn’t, supposed to happen. You would then be in a better position to make a case to the public body as to why they need to revisit the process or decision. 

  • You should also think about what other options are available. To help with this, you could return to the some of the earlier guides in this resource pack, including Setting the Scene and Approaching Public Bodies.

  • The Community Empowerment Act leaves open the possibility that an appeals process may be added to participation requests in future. A Scottish Parliament review in 2021 recommended that an appeals mechanism be introduced and in 2022, Scottish Community Development Centre will be carrying out work with community organisations and public bodies to explore how this could work. 

  • Finally, it is worth mentioning that participation requests are the law. There are other wider legal requirements for public bodies to engage with people affected by decisions. People’s human rights are also protected by law.  

A Court of Session judgement in 2020 ruled that South Ayrshire Council had acted unlawfully by failing to carry out an Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) regarding the closure of an Adult Care Centre. The local authority was also ruled to have failed to consult with users of the centre and carers before deciding to close the centre.  The legal challenge was made by the father of an Adult Care Centre user and ultimately led to the court’s ruling that the centre remain open. 

It is unclear how legal challenges might arise from a failure by public bodies to carry out duties arising from the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act (2015). However, the above example shows how effective legal challenges can be made in relation to participation, particularly where human rights and equality laws come into play.  

Further information