Audit Committee, 26 Sep 2006

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Official Report 224KB pdf

---

“Scottish Executive: supporting new initiatives” and “Leadership development”

Item 4 is consideration of the Executive's response to our report on its "How Government Works" publications "Scottish Executive: supporting new initiatives" and "Leadership development". I invite comments from members.

The response is not as concise as the one that we commented on at our last meeting—it goes on a bit. I had hoped that someone would have got the message that we wanted responses to be concise. Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but I think that in some areas the Executive has just cut and pasted its responses. That is how the document read to me.

I find the Executive's response and the beautifully obscure English in which it is written absolutely disgusting. In our report, we stated:

"The Committee considers that the Executive lacks a clear set of criteria, common to all Executive departments, for the use of initiative funding."

In its response, the Executive stated:

"We are committed to evolving all aspects of the way we do business".

It says that it is aware that regular reviews are needed and talks about engaging in a wide range of activity, which includes strategy, review and piloting. In other words, the Executive describes a continuing process of development, but does not commit to providing the assessment criteria that we asked for. The response contains beautifully obscure English, but it gets us nowhere.

I could make similar observations on the rest of the response, because it is of a piece.

I will make a positive observation first. Given that we explored the subject at length when taking evidence, it is important to note that the Executive has decided to commit to the Scottish Leadership Foundation additional funding of £1.5 million between 2006 and 2009. At one level, that is not a huge sum, given the expenditure on training and development generally, but it could have a significant impact by levering greater activity throughout the public sector. I would be interested in pursuing that—if that is how we proceed—to try to find out what impact the Executive and the Scottish Leadership Foundation expect that additional resource to have and how it might be used to lever further activity and investment by public sector bodies.

On a slightly less positive note, I am bound to say that the continued exchange and discourse on the issue are Orwellian at times. Much of the process that is described is the antithesis of what we recognise good leadership practice to be. If the best that the Executive can point to as a way of pursuing effective leadership throughout the public sector is yet more dialogue events, which I presume relate to the reform agenda, it does not strike me that we will achieve the momentum, the dynamic or the outcomes that we would like. When Tom McCabe made his statement on public sector reform, I asked about leadership. The response was perfectly positive, but I am still left asking, "Where's the beef?"

A straightforward question is how the Executive judges outcomes. The Executive says that it consults on policy funding, but that forces me to ask where the assessment criteria or measurements of outcomes against resources are deployed.

I must draw your attention to the point at the foot of page 2 of the response, which says:

"The creation of a formal set of criteria for the use of initiative funding, even assuming that were possible, would be of no real assistance in the decision making process."

I was coming to that.

Good.

That statement raises the question why not.

The Executive says that it does not think that criteria would be of any use.

The fundamental question of what constitutes an initiative in the context of Scottish Executive business has never been resolved, which leads me to wonder what on earth is going on.

The Executive mentions objective setting. If objectives are set, surely a way of measuring whether the objectives have been met and at what cost must exist. That is what we asked about.

I return to outcomes. In response to our recommendation that key staff should have the necessary knowledge and skills, the Executive talks about professional skills for government, skills for success, better policy making, facilitation skills for stakeholder engagement, analytical services divisions, the centre of expertise and so on. I am forced to ask why, with all that, the system does not work wonderfully.

The Executive says that its

"Guide to Policy Evaluation strongly recommends the publication of the results of evaluation."

We recommended that the results should be made public, but the Executive only recommends publication. All that we want to know is whether we are obtaining value for money. That should be clearly set out. We asked a straightforward question and got a great deal of waffle back, which is totally inadequate.

We are talking about the advisers to our policy makers. If whoever is in government is not well advised by advisers, we will have bad policy. The lesson is that our whole system must sharpen up to ensure that ministers are given the best advice to allow them to make decent policy. We have seen examples of failure to achieve that.

Sections 12 and 13 of our report were on delivering objectives. When the Executive talks about pre-expenditure assessments and

"the embedding of PEAs in the Executive's policy making process",

I think of princesses and mattresses, but I do not think that they are going to be particularly uncomfortable because the whole thing is so vague. I go all the way through it and do not see the word "statistics" anywhere. Evidence gathering is mentioned, but there is no evidence of any structure being imposed in that section. That is just a comment.

Auditor General, do you or your team have any observations to add?

Members might find it useful to know that the Executive's leadership development course for senior staff is being developed as we speak. We have had the opportunity to do some joint work on that with the Executive, so we have direct experience and feel that it is developing very well at the moment.

Thank you.

Now, we have to decide how to respond to the Executive's response. I sense that members would like to draft a letter articulating our concerns and possibly include a copy the Official Report of this meeting. Is that sufficient for members at this stage? Obviously, once you have seen the letter, you can tell me or the clerks whether it is adequate.

I have an observation to make. Reading the Executive's response, we can clearly see where two of our agenda items have come from. The first one is the relocation report that we have just considered, which says that there is no clarity about what the Executive is trying to achieve and how it is going about achieving it, and that there does not seem to be any monitoring of changes. The second one is the national health service consultant contract; I appreciate that there is a United Kingdom dimension to that but, in essence, the problem is the same.

Why is that the case? The answer is contained in this document. I hope that the committee's response will reflect the comments that members have made because I believe that we are genuinely concerned. That concern might be expressed in a certain way at committee, but behind that is a genuine concern that the people who are supposed to be driving the civil service forward are going round and round in circles.

It goes to the heart of good government. We now have a Parliament, but unless it has good back-up and our ministers are well advised, Scotland will not have the good government that it should have. It is a very important question that has to be answered.

I have a practical point to make. Recently we had an example from the Education Department in relation to the McCrone—

Are you not thinking of the response to our report on Inverness College?

I stand corrected. I recall that we found the response to be very helpful. It was concise but focused and it addressed the issues about which we asked. Sometimes the responses that we get cause problems because of their style. Perhaps they are in danger of masking some of the progress that Caroline Gardner has highlighted, for example. I concur with Margaret Smith. We are genuinely concerned that there should be progress in these areas. I wonder whether something could be done to feed back the view that we have received responses from the Executive that we are comfortable with. However, we have received others in a range of different policy areas in which, even if the Executive is not setting out to be woolly and unspecific, that is certainly how it comes across to us—that is in nobody's interests.

I take on board what you say. It had occurred to me and, indeed, Margaret Jamieson mentioned it at the outset. To be fair, given that this response was signed off on 11 August, its layout could not have been affected by our discussion of the Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning Department's response to our report on Inverness College.

Nevertheless, it is important that, once a committee receives something that it likes and thinks is the way that something should be done, that should be encouraged as best practice. That is a job for the committee to consider not just as a legacy issue, but before the Parliament is dissolved. We can discuss the matter at another time, but you make a fair point.

Can I have the committee's agreement that we will draft a letter in response to the Executive's response?

Members indicated agreement.