Finance and Public Administration Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, May 9, 2023

Official Report 652KB pdf

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Effective Scottish Government Decision Making

Under the next agenda item, we will continue our inquiry into effective Scottish Government decision making. We are joined remotely by Sophie Howe, sustainability futures and wellbeing adviser and former Future Generations Commissioner for Wales; Professor Steve Martin, director of the Wales Centre for Public Policy at Cardiff University; and Professor Matthew Flinders, University of Sheffield. I welcome you all to the meeting, and thank you for giving us your time.

I intend to allow up to 90 minutes for this session. If any of the witnesses wants to come in on a question, I would be grateful if they could post in the chat function so that I know to bring them in. I also ask my committee colleagues to name the first witness to whom they are putting their question.

Liz Smith will kick off the questions.

Good morning. A key issue that has been exercising committee members’ minds throughout our evidence sessions relates to how much clarity of purpose there is when it comes to decision making. If there is not that clarity, it is very difficult to get good-quality decision making. How easy do you find it to set in motion that clarity of purpose? Do you have a good understanding of what clarity of purpose is when it comes to decision making?

To whom are you directing those questions first?

We will go to Wales first.

Two of the witnesses are in Wales. I will bring in Steve Martin.

Thank you for the invitation. I am pleased to be here with Sophie Howe and Matt Flinders to share what we can with you.

First, I should explain that my role is not as a policy maker. I am an academic working in an evidence centre whose role is to provide evidence to Welsh Government ministers and officials and to public services in Wales.

In relation to Liz Smith’s questions, we are often presented with evidence needs. We then engage in a dialogue with whichever policy makers have asked us about evidence on a topic in order to properly understand what they need and why. That is where the need for clarity of purpose comes into sharp focus for us.

Part of our role is to, I hope, help policy makers think through exactly what they are trying to achieve and how they will achieve it. It is often helpful to disentangle those two questions. Sometimes, when we are asked for evidence, people say that they want to know how to do X, Y or Z.

I will give you a very early example. When we met the then Deputy Minister for Tackling Poverty, one of his first requests was about how to establish a network of credit unions across Wales similar to the network in the Republic of Ireland. I was amazed to hear myself say, impertinently, “That’s really interesting, minister. Can we understand a little bit the policy objectives that that network of credit unions would be aiming to achieve?”

That led to a discussion about the underlying social, political and economic challenges that the minister wanted to address, and it turned out that credit unions were probably not the answer or were only a small part of it. Disentangling what you are trying to achieve from the way in which you are trying to achieve it is a really important part of the policy making process. I presume that that is the case in Scotland, and it certainly is in other territories with which I have had interactions.

Evidence can feed into questions such as whether something is a problem and for whom and where it is a problem, but it can feed equally well into asking what other people have done about the issue. A policy maker might want to do something about an issue, because they are sure that it is a problem—and because all their constituents are telling them that it is a problem—so they might ask what others have done about it.

Sometimes, we are asked a question further down the line. A minister might know that something is a priority for them and understand what they want to do about it, but they will ask about the best way of going about delivering the change that they want to achieve. At that point, we get into questions about evidence to feed implementation.

I hope that that was helpful.

Thank you, Professor Martin. The distinction that you have made between the two processes with regard to advising ministers is interesting. How easy do you find the second process—that is, looking at the evidence and guiding the minister to the data that might have been there previous to the decision that is made? Are you data rich or are there gaps in the knowledge that you have to provide to the minister?

It is more the latter than the former, but it depends on the topic and the policy challenge, as you would expect.

We have a process that we go through in discussion with policy makers to establish whether something is an issue to which we can meaningfully contribute. Where there is no evidence at all, the answer is, “I’m really sorry. There isn’t any evidence that we can find across the world and we can find no experts who can advise you on it.” That is quite rare and, in those circumstances, we would recommend that a process of primary research be undertaken, some pilots launched or some experiments or trials with a rapid turnaround done to try some approaches to find out what does and does not work.

More usually, there might be no rigorous academic research evidence, but there will be some helpful expertise that we can bring in from academia, and we can pitch to research colleagues questions such as, “If you were the minister, what would be your best guess as to what to do?” That is not a purist view of evidence, but we have found it to be much more helpful than saying, “Sorry, there is no randomised controlled trial on the issue—there is nothing that the academic community has to say on it.” More often than not, we find that there is evidence that we can deploy, but the quality and nature of it vary.

Are you able to access the information that you require relatively quickly?

Our modus operandi is designed to be much more timely than traditional academic research, because we are drawing on evidence and expertise that already exist. At our very fastest, which was during the pandemic, we turned round some think pieces in a couple of weeks. More usually, we spend four to five months from the first discussion with a policy maker through to the end of a piece of work.

Thank you. That was helpful.

Have the other two witnesses identified any difficulties in establishing clarity of purpose on what they are trying to achieve?

Wales is relatively unique in that we are clear on our short and long-term purpose, with the Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015 setting out seven long-term wellbeing goals that our Government and all our public institutions are required to set objectives to achieve. All policy making should be done in the context of those seven wellbeing goals. Because they are long-term goals, though, their span goes beyond political cycles, and they are therefore a level above the sorts of requests that Steve Martin described, where ministers are looking to take steps to achieve those wellbeing objectives and are asking what steps they should take, with all the various processes and discussions that then have to be gone through.

Therefore, there is clarity of purpose, and it is set out in law. The other part of that law that is really important for decision and policy making is the requirement to demonstrate that Government and other bodies across the public sector have applied five particular ways of working. Those are: considering the long-term impact of the things that they do; preventing problems from occurring or getting worse; integrating their actions across Government and across other sectors; collaborating with each other; and involving citizens.

Those ways of working provide a framework for taking decisions and the seven wellbeing goals provide a purpose for those decisions or for having a vision for the country. In my experience, the approach does not always operate absolutely perfectly, but it does mean that the whole of Wales—not just the Government, but the public sector organisations that are covered by the 2015 act and, increasingly, even those that are not—knows where Wales is heading. It is a bit like your outcomes framework, I suppose, but it is set out in law.

That is very helpful. Several of us here had an excellent visit to the Welsh Senedd a couple of months ago and were very taken with quite a few things that we heard. Please pass that back.

I ask our final witness to finish the discussion on clarity of purpose.

[Inaudible.]—maybe Wales is—

I am sorry, but we did not catch the start of that. Can you start again, Professor Flinders?

Clarity of purpose is often the key challenge. Ministers will feel that they want to do something, but what that something is can be up for discussion. It is often the role of external advisers and academics in various centres to narrow down which problem needs to be solved. That can be a key challenge; in many super-wicked policy areas with overlayered and different issues, narrowing down the core problem that needs to be addressed can be more challenging than might be expected.

To follow on from what other speakers said, I would say that it is interesting to think about what we mean when we talk about evidence. We now have a much broader understanding of the need to combine different sorts of useful knowledge, including academic and professional knowledge and lived experience. When we take that broad approach to evidence, the evidence does not always flow in the same direction, which can be a real challenge.

In recent years, an infrastructure has been developed to bring academic research much closer to policy makers at different levels of Government. I am not saying that it always works, but there are now more boundary-spanning structures that are designed to try to close the gap between research and policy than there were in the past.

Can you give us an example of a time when different types of evidence have pointed in different directions and the difficulties that that might have caused?

Rough sleeping would be a classic example. One minister might see that as being about getting people off the streets and into temporary accommodation or hostels. The issue is that rough sleeping might well be manifested in people who choose to be homeless, but the root cause is often something far more complex, such as mental illness or dependency on alcohol or drugs. Unless the problem can be approached in a rounded way, you might deal with the obvious manifestation but you will not deal with the root issue.

Policy interventions are often relatively short-term. There can be a spark and an injection of money or resources, but what happens when that funding finishes? Often there is either little development of the interaction between different policy approaches such as housing, mental health, education or a failure to develop the notion of policy momentum that understands that the funding stream for a policy is going to finish and asks what will happen next. We often end up throwing mud at walls to see what sticks and, very often, very little does.

Thank you.

Good morning. I will ask Professor Flinders a couple of questions from an academic perspective.

09:45  

Your submission makes comments about culture, behaviour, avoiding groupthink, confirmation bias, and so on. You also point out that there is a need for critical friends. How is that limited when power—for instance, over someone’s job, career or their future line of funding, in instances where third sector organisations rely on Government—comes into play? What are your general thoughts about how prevalent that is and how commonly it is understood as a risk in the public sector?

One of the great challenges, which is a contextual issue, is that we have what I would say is an immature approach to accountability and scrutiny. The approach often focuses on finding out what went wrong, who is to blame and who should take responsibility. Those things are one part of the discussion, but I would call that a “gotcha mentality”, which creates a negative view of accountability structures. Often, people will not speak with candour because they are scared of the implications that doing that might have for them or their ministers, which, by definition, would reflect on them.

The key issue is how we create a culture in which accountability is understood as finding out what went wrong, with an equally strong emphasis on what we can learn from the experience for the future, instead of focusing only on who is to blame. At the moment, our structures tend to be blame focused, rather than learning focused. I completely understand the issues that you are raising about power and the implications for honest straight talking. However, in my experience, I have rarely worked with ministers who were not happy to face constructive feedback and challenge, as long as that was evidence based. It is not a case of not being able to challenge, is about being able to do that based on a sound understanding of existing evidence. Often, ministers want that challenge.

Leading on from that, your submission also alludes to complexity—

We appear to have lost Professor Flinders. Perhaps Steve Martin could answer Michelle Thomson’s question.

I expect that Professor Martin will also have a view on that. Following my question to Professor Flinders about culture and behaviours, I want to ask about the relationship between complexity and risk and, therefore, any limitations on innovation. Based on your experience, how does the appetite for or attitude towards risk, linked to complexity, inadvertently limit innovation in the public sector in general terms?

Sophie Howe probably wants to come in on that and will have more interesting things to say than I will. I will respond to your previous question on how we create a culture in which criticism can be constructive, rather than raising antibodies within the system. That relates to your question about complexity—perhaps Professor Flinders can come in on that now that he is back online.

We have an interesting relationship with ministers, in that we are part funded by the Welsh Government, but we also receive funding from the research council and Cardiff University. We have had to navigate with ministers the question of how we give honest independent evidence that is at times challenging and does not necessarily point in the direction that ministers want it to. A lot of that is about developing the trusting relationships that you have talked about with other witnesses in previous evidence sessions, and a lot is about how we as advisers conduct ourselves.

I completely understand why policy makers might be wary of working with academics. The characterisation is that we take ages to report anything then heavily caveat everything that we say, and there is always a risk that we go into critical mode and start spouting in the media in an unhelpful way.

We have to be absolutely clear in our role that we will follow wherever the evidence leads and transmit that to ministers in a way that will not cause them any difficulty or surprise. For example, we have a publications protocol, which sounds very boring but has proved important, where we present the evidence that we have assembled for ministers. They have six weeks to assimilate that and then we make sure that it is published more widely so that everybody has access to what we are doing.

That steers a middle course between, on the one hand, not working in secret and depriving other policy makers of the evidence that we provide to ministers so that there can be proper scrutiny of the evidence that they receive and questions to them about why they are not following that—if they choose not to; it is absolutely their right not to—and , on the other hand, creating an environment where ministers can trust that we are trying to be constructive and help inform their decisions.

It sounds dull and obvious, but it is about relationships, culture and behaviour. It is important that if researchers want to engage with policy and practice, they are willing to take on some of the constraints that that relationship involves.

That is helpful. The middle-road approach to continuous improvement that academia brings is worth the committee exploring further when we look at comparables in Scotland. I know that Sophie Howe wants to come in on my earlier point, then I will head back to Professor Flinders.

Can you see me? I cannot see myself, so I am not sure whether you have lost me.

We cannot see you, but we can hear you clearly.

I will pick up on the point that Professor Flinders made around the immature approach to scrutiny. We saw that during my time as Future Generations Commissioner, particularly in relation to the Government’s willingness to self-reflect and be honest in that self-reflection.

It is interesting that the Welsh Government changed some of the requirements for local government to focus more around performance reporting, self-reflection, peer review and so on, but the Government finds doing that within its own organisation challenging. That is a slight criticism, but I have some sympathy, because everything that is around the Government makes that quite difficult to do.

In relation to our audit processes, there is generally more of a focus on trying to do something new, different and innovative but failing rather than continuing to manage the status quo. The politics of Government are often unforgiving if there are mistakes—likewise in the media. That sort of environment makes it difficult for a Government to enter a space where it might feel that it is washing its dirty linen in public, if you like, but I see being able to genuinely reflect on where you are as an important part of the self-improvement journey—I do not want to speak for my colleagues, but I think that they would agree with that.

As Future Generations Commissioner, my job was to monitor and assess the progress that the Government and all our public institutions were making on meeting the seven wellbeing goals. We did that through a self-reflection exercise. The first one that we did back in 2019 was really interesting. The organisations that were saying, “All is well—nothing to see here—we are all doing incredibly well” were the ones that we took a much deeper look at. There were also organisations that were genuinely reflecting and having critical conversations within a framework that we co-created with them, which was about looking at where they were on their improvement journey, what the barriers were to their making progress, how to address any barriers and whether there were things that they could be doing better with partners or internally. In my seven-year experience of being Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, I learned that those are the organisations that continue to make progress. The organisations that perhaps do not want to wash their dirty linen in public are those that do not necessarily make the same level of progress.

That was one of the reasons why I used my powers as commissioner under section 20 of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 to conduct a review into a particular organisation or a collection of organisations. I have only used those review powers twice. Once, I conducted a review into a number of public sector organisations on the issue of public sector procurement, and, latterly, in my final year as commissioner, I worked with the Welsh Government to consider how well the machinery of government was embedding the requirements of the 2015 act.

The review was interesting, because we did it collaboratively with the Welsh Government, which is not usually how such reviews start to happen. We had quite a long process of building trust, and some of that was bumpy along the way, because, as you can imagine, the Government does not necessarily like an external organisation or commissioner coming in to look at the ins and outs of how it takes decisions. However, we found the process incredibly useful, and I think that even the Welsh Government found it incredibly useful. I feel that we were able to push it more into the space of critically reflecting on where things were working and where things were not. At the end, we developed a jointly constructed improvement plan for areas in which the Government could improve on implementing that piece of legislation.

The main point for me is that it is difficult for Governments to be in that space, and it does not necessarily create a healthy environment for good public policy making.

Thank you. I would like to finish off with Professor Flinders, since he was cut off in his prime, as it were. Throughout this whole conversation is the theme of maturity, whether it is about how we deal with risk, innovation, complexity or power. Do you have any final thoughts or reflections on what you have heard thus far? This is the academic side of decision making.

Following on from Sophie Howe, I note that, although ministers and officials are often very open to considering questions about complexity and challenge, they have those very mature and open discussions off-stage. It is interesting that, when the discussions come on-stage in front of committees or the media, we tend to lock everything down in an immature way. One of the thoughts that I have had is about how to move on-stage the more mature off-stage conversations about the inevitable messiness of policy making and how to learn from failure, and how to do so in a way that might promote a much more sensible culture and understanding of the inevitable challenges of policy making.

Do you have any bright ideas on that?

There are issues around policy advice. If you look at accountability in government, you find that the policy advice that is given to ministers is generally still kept in the black box and off-stage. If there were a process whereby some level of accountability was introduced for the basic advice that is given to ministers, not only would that demand that officials lifted the quality of that advice—because they would know that they would be held to account for it in the future—but it would provide a firmer foundation on which to say to ministers, “Explain your decision”.

Again, one of the knock-on effects is one of the great issues that we have with regard to accountability and expertise, which is the amount of churn and turnover among civil servants and officials. It is a fluid system that means that, just as somebody gets on top of a role and develops the informal relationships and trust that are needed to really understand their specialist policy space, they move on and the whole process starts again.

10:00  

Therefore, we need greater stability and greater maturity around publishing to some level the policy advice that ministers receive. We also need an obligation on the media and scrutineers to fulfil their side of the bargain, which is not to jump in with both feet and go for the low-hanging attack fruit but to accept that these are complex issues for which there are no magic bullets or simple solutions.

Thank you for that. I am laughing slightly, given that we are operating in a political environment.

I will build on the point that Michelle Thomson was making by asking a question about transparency. Professor Flinders, in your submission, you talk about two different aspects of transparency:

“transparency of the decision-making process”

and

“transparency around the reason for why a final decision was taken”,

which I think is what you were just talking about.

In previous evidence sessions, we have heard that, in New Zealand, minutes of Cabinet meetings are published a few weeks after the meeting has taken place. From your point of view, would that be a good thing or would it—the expression “government by WhatsApp” has been used in previous meetings—drive a lot of the decisions away from Cabinet meetings if the process were almost too transparent?

No. Again, policy making is all about pragmatism. Of course, there will be unintended consequences of anything that you do and a degree of gaming. We are also working in a political—with a small p and a big P—context. However, publishing a statement—it does not have to be a detailed exposition—of the standard of policy advice received by ministers and an explanation for why they took a particular decision, particularly when they go against the advice that they received, would provide a firmer foundation for a mature discussion to take place.

New Zealand is an interesting example. It is the obvious example that everyone goes to, but it is a very small country. As you all know, it is on the other side of the world and it works on a much smaller scale. It also has a different political culture—I go back to the previous question, because that is what I am talking about. If you really want to have effective Scottish decision making, where everybody can make a contribution in an honest way with candour, you have to accept that everybody will not get what they want all of the time and that it will still be messy.

For me, it is a question of having transparency with regard to the quality of the policy advice that ministers receive and some post-decision explanation for why they took the decision that they did. That way, at least, you would have a much firmer foundation for sensible scrutiny. At the moment, everybody works almost in a vacuum. I think that that could improve the quality of advice that comes to ministers. It would create the knowledge among officials that the advice that they give would, at some point, be subject to public review and discussion. That would help and support the quality and, arguably, the range of advice that officials provide to ministers.

Do you think that there is a danger of some of those decisions being taken behind closed doors and of things being done in different ways?

I suppose that, at the moment, we might say that everything—all the decisions—is done behind closed doors. It is like a halfway house. People used to say the same about the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Again, New Zealand was a model for that. People said that we would have government by Post-it—that people would not write stuff down in official documents. Actually, that has not really happened.

It is interesting to consider long-termism. Often, things that happen are seen as quite radical at first, but they become accepted parts of due process; it is almost that the system matures around them. If you were to start to introduce the publication of policy advice, my concern is that, in the short term, that would be likely to fall in a political context that was very immature and it would be problematic. However, I would hope that, in the medium to longer term, the innovation would settle down and just be seen as part of due process, and that, before long, people would say, “I can’t believe we ever did things a different way.”

Thank you. Sophie Howe and Steve Martin, do you have a view on transparency in decisions that were taken?

Yes. I take a slightly different view to Matt Flinders. To give you a little bit of context, I worked in Government with politicians, the First Minister and the Cabinet for a number of years prior to being the Future Generations Commissioner. I am of the view that that would drive people to not express the full picture in terms of the full range of evidence and insight that they might otherwise take, because they would feel that it was not a safe space in which to do that. On the one hand, I totally agree with Matt that, in an ideal world, you would want that sort of transparency; on the other hand, we are operating in the world of political reality.

I am not convinced about the FOI point. I do not have any evidence to prove or disprove this, but I am guessing that the issue on FOI is that we do not know what we do not know. We do not know how much was only being recorded as a bare minimum as a result of FOI. With regard to Government policy making, I am not sure that such transparency would drive civil servants to take a really comprehensive approach; I think that it would drive them back to the bare minimum. I think that a more fruitful exercise—certainly in the short term—would be to focus on building that into your challenge within the system.

I agree with Matt that there are problems around the churn in the system and the level of expertise. Most civil servants are generalists, by the very nature of the way that the civil service operates. They move between different policy departments and there can sometimes be a reluctance to bring in external expertise to work alongside civil servants on particular policy areas. Where we have seen that happen, I think that we have seen better policy making.

I can give an example. For the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015, which was passed by the Senedd a few years ago, civil servants who were generalists worked alongside experts from the field. The experts were seconded into Government for the period of taking that bill through the Parliament, doing the policy development and so on. In the short term, I think that that is a safer way of building in that expertise.

The other area is creating some safe space around internal challenge. One of the things that we did as part of the section 20 review was to look at a number of ministerial submissions and to critique them in a safe space, so that we could help officials who filled in those submissions to understand how that could have been done better from the perspective of using future trends, looking at things in an integrated way or involving citizens. There was quite a reluctance to do that and to have that kind of space, even though I would say that we were in a space of safe internal challenge. If we could build that in somehow, that would be quite fruitful.

The final element is the role and expertise of more senior civil servants in providing that challenge. I am assuming that the process in the Scottish Government is similar to the one in Wales, where policy development will often start either from a minister or from a particular pressure from outside, and officials will look at what policy can be developed and so on.

When a submission goes up to the minister, a more senior civil servant will consider that submission. That comes back to the question of how skilled that senior civil servant—or perhaps, in some cases, that group of senior civil servants—is at critiquing the submission from the perspective of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the five ways of working, and whether there is work to do with senior officials on that. Even if they have done a really good job of critiquing, we need to consider how well that process is used as a learning exercise for civil servants so that, in their policy development role, they could say, “Okay—this is where we could have done better,” “This was done really well, so we’ll share it—here’s the learning,” and so on. I am not convinced that that happens effectively enough.

I would very much like to get to the point at which we have what Matt Flinders described, but I would like it to be done in a genuine way rather than as a box-ticking exercise. I would like to get there but, in the early phases, it is a question of improving the internal culture mechanism and creating a safe space for external people to come in and challenge things.

Professor Martin, do you have anything to add?

I have a brief additional thought. I, too, am agnostic on Matt’s proposal, but I think that it is entirely legitimate for you, as scrutineers for the public and the media, to require policy makers to explain the evidence base behind the decisions that they make. If a decision is not evidence based, they should have to explain that, too.

Evidence is only part of the policy process, of course, because ministers have a democratic mandate and they can decide to implement whatever they feel is right, but sometimes there is a lack of inquiry into the basis on which decisions are made, whether those decisions are about what to do or how to do it, as was said earlier.

The mature questioning of whether ministers have looked at evidence and asking them what their take on it is would be a very helpful injection into the policy-making process. It would, at least, make more transparent the basis on which decisions are made, but it would not necessarily make the process by which they are made clearer.

The points that you have all made about accountability provoke some questions about the role of private sector consultancy companies, which all Governments in the United Kingdom involve in policy advice and policy development. Do you have any reflections on the role that you have seen those organisations play and on how they are involved in the decision-making process?

Private sector consultancies play a key role. They are often brought in to provide expertise and specialist knowledge that the more generalist civil servants might not have. The key issue is that, often, part of the culture is that private sector consultants know best and know exactly what should be done. However, they often bring in private sector-based ideologies and models. Those might improve policy and have some element of challenge, but the idea that private sector consultancies always know best is problematic.

When we talk about decision making in policy, we are talking about decisions that are taken at the very highest level, but my understanding is that consultancies are more involved in the fine tuning of operational issues, organisational structures, management and things like that, rather than at the top end, as an interface with a minister, a senior official or a special adviser. We are talking about how we make sure that they understand what effectiveness might, could and does look like.

10:15  

A Conservative minister was quoted in 2020 as saying that Whitehall had been “infantilised” by the use of consultancy companies. Reflecting on Professor Flinders’s point about where they are positioned in the policy-making chain, I thought that that was a highly critical comment.

I will bring in Professor Martin, as he is on the screen.

I worked a lot with the UK Government 15 or 20 years ago, and it seems to me that there is a contrast between its use of public sector consultants and that of the Welsh Government, which I am now much more familiar with. In part, that is a reflection of civil service policy-making capacity, which is a serious issue that we need to address in the short to medium term. Often, I feel that Government asks us to take on roles that we would not be asked to take on if the civil service was fully up to capacity and was given the capabilities that it should have.

The issue is partly about gap filling, as well as opportunism on the part of the private sector. I think that that directs our attention towards understanding what the capacity and capability of the civil service, local government and other policy actors currently is. Every time we have some form of engagement, we are reminded that we are in a state of permanent crisis. We are told that it might be very nice to be able to analyse the evidence in a measured way, but that that is not the world in which we are operating.

To me, that speaks to the need to be realistic about our policy ambition. Can we actually do everything that we would ideally like to do, or do some of our strategies and policy ambitions outstrip our current capacity? Rather than questioning too much whether private consultancies are the right or the wrong vehicle, I would prefer us to turn our attention to how we can develop the capability and capacity within the system to deliver what ministers want.

In their recent book on the role of consultancy firms in government, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington say:

“The more governments and businesses outsource, the less they know how to do.”

Does that ring true to you?

Based on our experience—and on what Sophie Howe and Matt Flinders said about ways of bringing in external expertise—I would not formulate it in quite that way. It is, of course, true that that will happen if you outsource policy making to the big four consultancies all the time. However, I think that the co-production principles that Sophie Howe talked about enrich policy making. If you take different forms of evidence from different forms of actor, that greatly enhances your chances of being able to deliver on the policy that you are trying to enact.

It is a good idea to involve local government, the voluntary sector, users of services—including, for example, women who have lived experience of domestic violence, as Sophie Howe mentioned—and so on. You should also bring in academic expertise, as there really is a wealth of expertise and research in our universities. My personal mission is to make that much more accessible and help policy makers to tap into it much more easily.

Sophie, do you have thoughts on this area?

I agree with Matt Flinders and Steve Martin. On the use of external consultants, and particularly the big four that Steve Martin mentioned, I do not think that our experiences in Wales reflect the Whitehall experience at all. I would not describe the situation quite as Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington did. I think that we have a much stronger approach around co-production with the sorts of groups that Steve Martin outlined. Increasingly, we are seeing those groups not only taking part in ministerial advisory groups that are slightly outside Government, but also being brought into the civil service.

That was the case with the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015, which I mentioned earlier, and it is also the case with the Social Partnership and Public Procurement (Wales) Bill that is currently going through the Senedd. That bill is about putting the social partnership between trade unions, the private sector and Government on a statutory footing, and trade unionists were seconded into Government to help with the policy development around that. That is a good model that results in better policy making.

Going back to Steve Martin’s point about the pace of people being able to provide evidence, I add that, sometimes, politicians just want to borrow our brains. They do not necessarily want us to spend five months crafting all the evidence, although I completely agree that that would be absolutely ideal. They are continually responding in what is—this is a new word—a polycrisis; they are responding on many different fronts and often very quickly, because there are real lives out there, as well as political pressures.

It is partly about how to convene experts in a safe space to have conversations with ministers and civil servants, who will set out their boundaries in the context—for example, the amount of money that they have, the political reality that they are working with and the scale and pace at which they need to deliver. Borrowing those experts’ brains, they can ask those people to help them to craft the best possible solutions within those boundaries. That is what ministers want. That is why they often rely heavily on their special advisers and their trusted networks, if you like—perhaps people from their own backgrounds or professions or contacts that they have developed throughout their careers. We need to recognise that and the system as a whole needs to respond to it.

It is about trying to develop that internal capability and capacity. Part of it is certainly about secondment into Government. I have mentioned a few things, but if there was one thing that we could do to drive better policy making across the whole of the public sector, it would probably be mass job swaps or secondments with, for example, the social worker working in policing and the green infrastructure expert working in health. Such cross-fertilisation is not often encouraged in Government, but it needs to be.

Our former permanent secretary, Shan Morgan, made a small intervention in that regard. I am not sure whether it continues, but it was quite good. It was called the short-term experience programme, or STEP. Civil servants were given time to go into an organisation outside Government for up to six months. It could involve people going in for a day a week or undertaking a placement for a month, for example. Some really interesting things came from that. For example, someone from the Government’s major events division came into my team, and now, two or even three years post-pandemic, the major events strategy in Wales is built around the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 because that civil servant was immersed in a team that gave her a completely different perspective from what she might get internally.

There are such innovative ways of shaking up the system and building in that expertise. Civil servants, even senior ones, are so busy managing crises. There needs to be some capacity in the system for people to lift their heads up and ask what they could do in the medium and long term—and sometimes even in the short term—to craft better responses when we are in a constant state of crisis.

I like Sophie Howe’s concept of borrowing people’s brains. It has certainly been our experience that ministers and officials welcome the opportunity for dialogue. For us, it is more usually about borrowing a number of different brains.

I am an academic. When I started in this role 10 years ago, I envisaged that we would be writing reports and that there would perhaps be a summary or a policy briefing alongside that. However, we rapidly found that the most useful thing that we can do is probably to convene safe spaces—round-table discussions where experts can come together with officials and sometimes ministers to talk an issue through over a couple of hours.

It is not a question of just throwing those people together; we structure things carefully and pick experts who have a range of complementary experiences and expertise. It is rare to find the renaissance woman or man who has all the answers, so bringing together a group of experts to work through what the evidence suggests and how it might apply in Wales has probably been the most fruitful thing that we have done, if we listen to the feedback that we get. That does not need to take five months; it could be done in two or three weeks.

I think that there also needs to be an intermediary there, because even the most confident of academic colleagues are wary of going into those sorts of fora. They need help to understand that the expertise that they bring will be relevant.

I am taken with the point about mobility and short-term placements. World-class policy-making structures are often defined by the capacity to facilitate the mobility of people, talent and knowledge across traditional institutional and professional boundaries.

The emphasis on facilitating the flow and mobility of people so that they can learn in different environments and the setting up of formal and informal linkages is important. There is a great example of that in the Scottish crucible programme, which is all about innovative thinking and bringing together people from different backgrounds who would not normally meet. It is about how we can create structured serendipity that allows ideas, linkages and perspectives to emerge that would not normally happen in traditional siloed environments.

Continuing with the theme of who does what, I am interested in the concept of commissioners, so I will start with Ms Howe. You and your position have been held in high regard and it has been suggested that we in Scotland should copy the Welsh model and have a commissioner for future generations or something like that. At the same time, a multiplicity of commissioners are being sought in Scotland and I can see us ending up with 14 or perhaps more in the short term. Where do commissioners fit into decision making? Are they taking away work that members of the Senedd should be doing?

I will speak to my experiences and some of the interactions that I have had with commissioner colleagues such as the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales and the Welsh Language Commissioner.

We provide scrutiny. The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 covers all policy areas and potentially every decision that could be taken for anyone who is alive now and anyone who is yet to be born, which is a huge remit. I could not look at every issue, but the remit enabled me to have a helicopter view of policy making at the Government level and across Government departments, and also to see how that policy making flows down into the rest of the public sector.

I often think that the position under the 2015 act is a bit like when we talk about mainstreaming equalities or gender and that sort of thing. The overall aim that we want to get to is, I suppose, for commissioners and that level of intensive and specific scrutiny to no longer be needed because what we are trying to achieve—in this case, to ensure that we take decisions in a way that meets today’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs—will be completely embedded in the system. Everything that we have heard this morning and, I am sure, everything that the committee has heard throughout all the evidence that it has taken points to the specific significant challenges in doing that.

Perhaps I can give the committee a flavour of what my daily interactions looked like in order to show the role of a commissioner. Sometimes it was about taking time out, commissioning my own research and convening people and experts to put what I would call progressive policy ideas to Government, a number of which have been taken up. Some of them would perhaps not have been considered possible. For example, a first pilot of a basic income was not on the political agenda at all just a few years ago, but we are now seeing that pilot in Wales. That is the result of a lot of my work with people in communities, non-governmental organisations and the third sector, for example.

10:30  

I would often look at particular policy areas and make connections with other organisations, and I spent an inordinate amount of time introducing civil servants in different departments to one another. We would not necessarily think that that is the role of a future generations commissioner, but there was a requirement relating to long-term preventative and integrated policy making.

The example that Matthew Flinders gave involving homelessness was a really good one. We still see silo decision making and people trying to do short-term fixes rather than taking a long-term view. A lot of what I did involved working directly with civil servants to try to join up the dots between different aspects of public policy making, asking them how they were applying the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and, in many cases, holding their hands to apply that act. I also tried to provide a link to what was happening outside Government on policy areas—with the private sector and the voluntary sector, for example—in order to bring integration.

The other area that we were heavily involved in was building capacity and capability among civil servants and the civil service around applying foresight, long-term trends and future generations thinking. That was entirely new to civil servants when the 2015 act came into force.

I do not know whether any of that would have happened if there had not been a commissioner. I cannot say that for certain. However, I am not at all convinced that it would have happened if there was not an institution—whether that was a commission or a commissioner, or whatever it was called and however it was set up—whose primary role was to do that and that had a legislative mandate to directly work with Government and others to do it.

Thanks. That is very helpful. I will come to Professor Flinders shortly, but I will press you on something that you said. You mentioned the short term and the long term quite a few times in your answer. Do you think that it is impossible for politicians and civil servants to take a long-term view unless there is somebody outside kicking them?

I am not sure that I would use the term “kicking”; rather, I would use the terms “working alongside”, “enhancing capability” and “helping with learning and development and so on”.

Nothing is impossible, of course, but taking a long-term view is very difficult when the system is continually in a state of crisis and is continually being asked to respond. That is incredibly difficult without external challenge and support to require the system to lift its head above the polycrisis that it is continually in.

I saw Professor Flinders nodding at one point. Do we need commissioners to look at the long term?

I would use the word “nudging” rather than “kicking”. Commissioners can be very useful in nudging and creating oversight. That goes back to an issue that we discussed earlier that relates to politics with a big P. One of the benefits of having an independent commissioner is that they can come to topics, issues and challenges with slightly less heat than might be expected if those things were being examined by a parliamentary scrutiny committee.

There are, of course, similar issues at Westminster. In recent years, there has been a rather ad hoc growth in the number of commissions and commissioners there. That creates a cycle of reviewing how many there are and whether we should get rid of them, merge them or amalgamate them. However, given their capacity, particularly on policy, and because they are slightly depoliticised, they have a good role to play in nudging sensible discussions, reviewing and integrating.

I am sorry if I am telling people stuff that they are well aware of, but I want to touch on an issue that Sophie Howe raised. The amount of fragmentation and disconnection in Government is incredible. I often have officials in Whitehall contact me in Sheffield to ask what is going on in different directorates of their own department. The simple role of joining people up and introducing them in order to let them know what is going on is key. You would think that it would not be needed, but the integrating role that a commissioner or an organisation such as the Wales Centre for Public Policy can play is crucial.

Thanks. Professor Martin, do you have any comments?

I do not have much to add to that discussion. I agree with what my colleagues have said. We have exactly the same experience: sometimes I think that my function is to introduce civil servants to one other or to remind them of an initiative that one of their predecessors undertook. Commissioners and the centre can helpfully provide that organisational memory.

I am interested in the Wales Centre for Public Policy, which other witnesses have spoken of quite positively. Does Scotland need something like that? In Scotland, we have an ad hoc relationship between Government, Parliament and academia; we bring people in to talk about a particular issue and then do not speak to them for a while. Is there just a better relationship between the Government and the universities and academics in Wales and that, as a result, it is a longer-term relationship?

Ten years ago, the relationship was certainly similar to what you have described, with different parts of Government and local government, health and others having their own links to research centres and individual academics in Welsh universities. I was often contacted about issues about which I knew next to nothing, just because I was a professor of public policy in Cardiff and the civil servants knew me.

First, we have tried to open up the policy-making process here to a much broader range of different kinds of evidence not just from Welsh universities, but from across the UK and internationally. When we first started, some of my colleagues thought, “Oh, this is great—we will be able to have even more interaction with the Welsh Government through the Wales Centre for Public Policy”, so they have been slightly disappointed to find that, most of the time, we draw in expertise from much further afield. One of the differences between what we do and the relationship that you have described is that we draw on the much wider world of evidence.

Secondly, there is a danger in ad hocery in that certain kinds of voices get privileged. For example, because people know me, they come to me. There are many other sources of expertise and advice that do not get taken into account, because they are not known and have no pre-existing links. The more systematic approach that we have taken, which involves scanning the horizon to determine who the experts are in a field and what they can bring to the table, has been a really helpful part of what we are doing.

Thirdly, we find that there are parts of Government that are well served by evidence and other parts that are largely evidence-free zones. Much of what we have tried to do in the past three years has been about providing evidence to the directorates and departments on those policy issues where there has not been a strong evidence base in the past. In very broad terms, health policy is often underpinned by evidence and education policy is reasonably well served by the Welsh Government’s internal research function and relationships with the universities here in Wales, but there are other areas, such as housing, net zero and tackling poverty, which historically have not had those links to good, reliable sources of evidence.

I recognise your description of the picture in Scotland, as it is a good description of how things were in Wales 10 years ago. However, having an infrastructure of evidence and intermediaries who can help define what is needed in the discussion with policy makers, in the way that I described earlier, and then going out and seeking sources of advice and evidence that specifically address that particular evidence need is a different ball game to the one in which people depend on existing links, serendipity and who knows who.

Matt Flinders referred earlier to the very big investment that there has been in evidence infrastructures of different kinds not only here in Wales but across the UK. I would be concerned that, if you do not have something that carries out a similar role to ours, you might be missing out on sources of evidence outwith Scotland, which you might want to tap into, in spite of the political differences and the need to navigate those.

There is a what works network of 13 what works centres of which we are a part, and we provide Wales with a strong link into those other centres to look at, for example, educational attainment, regeneration, early intervention, children, social care and higher education policy. At the moment, Scotland does not have a link into that network, and that, I suspect, is a missed opportunity.

That was all extremely helpful.

I have a final question. Earlier, you talked about round-table events and how they are safe spaces. Are those events recorded or the proceedings published? Is a summary of what happens provided? How does that work?

It is exactly as you have described. We want the round-table events to be a safe space where people can ask the questions that they want to ask, but we also want to ensure that it is not a secret space. We publish our work programme in advance, so that Opposition parties and others can understand what we are working on, on behalf of ministers. We publish key findings from events such as a workshop or a round-table event, which means that the evidence is available to everybody—and, indeed, without our identifying who said what and who asked what, as the events all happen under a sort of Chatham house rule.

The key evidence points to emerge from the advice are then made available to the whole world. They would probably be subject to a freedom of information request if we did not do so, but we choose to do it anyway, because we think that it is a good thing to do.

Okay—that is great. Thanks, convener.

Thank you, convener—I mean, thank you, Mr Mason. I am the convener. [Laughter.] I thank all our witnesses for joining us and taking the time to speak to the committee today. Your evidence has been invaluable.

With the committee’s agreement, we will rejig the agenda slightly and move to item 4 now, which we will take in private. We will then reconvene in public to take evidence from the minister at 11 am. Do members agree to do that?

Members indicated agreement.

10:42 Meeting continued in private.  

11:01 Meeting continued in public.