Chamber and committees

There were advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages was around the content of the census and being able to carry it out according to when we felt was the best time. The disadvantage was the UK-wide publicity around the census. I will bring the permanent secretary in on some of the detail around that, but such judgments will be made by looking at the pros and cons and whether it is the best thing to do. Clearly, the most important thing with the census is to have a return at a level that is reliable. That is the top thing.

Of course, ministers have supported all the improvements that have been made and that you have just heard the detail of. In my inbox, I regularly have minutes that have come through rapidly, not just of meetings with external organisations but of meetings with officials around decision making, all of which have been recorded. Everything is minuted, which is how it should be. If you are asking me whether that has always been the case, the answer is no. You have just heard why the improvements were put in place—it was because of concerns such as the one that you have just highlighted. Apart from anything else, it is extremely helpful for ministers to have those minutes, because it enables them to refer back.

They were not in place to the extent that they are now. We have heard about the changes that have been made. Minutes are now required and are taken in every single one of those circumstances. As I say, the minutes of every meeting that I have had pop up in my inbox—

That is certainly not my experience and it is not the practice that I see in place at all.

You have heard some of the detail around why it is important to record decisions and improvements are being made in the recording of decisions and how they have been reached. I hope that what you have heard here today gives you some reassurance around that.

I see where you are getting to. Clearly, we need to guard against that, but any organisation that we fund is funded in order to carry out particular tasks. It would have applied for funding on the basis of meeting Scottish Government objectives that were set out. Where the Scottish Government is taking policy decisions and consulting, we would look at what organisations were saying in the round, alongside all the other organisations, whether we fund them or not. My expectation would be that there is no hierarchy of importance of an organisation’s views on a subject that in any way correlates to whether it is being funded. It is important that we make that distinction. Organisations are, as I say, funded to carry out particular tasks, so that distinction is important.

One of my reflections is on whether there was a way of building more of a consensus around the issue. I felt very strongly that it was important to try to do that. Could we have done that at an earlier stage? Was it possible? The difficulty is that I do not know what trying to bring people together to coalesce around compromises would have looked like, because the debate had become so polarised, not least on social media—far more than it was initially, six years ago. For a minister in charge of a piece of legislation who can see the public discourse being so polarised, the room for compromise becomes quite difficult. However, I am the first to reflect on whether things could have been done more effectively.

I was not party to any discussion in the Cabinet.

The permanent secretary would not have been in post—

It is a difficult balance and you are then looking at how much risk you will be carrying. You will have the best advice in front of you but nothing is ever 100 per cent certain; everything carries a risk. If you have three options in front of you, the relative risks of each option will be set out and—not always but quite often—a recommendation will be made by civil servants, who will have drawn on their experience in order to present the relative risks of all those options to ministers. Ultimately, again, you have to apply some judgment to that.

On speed, you are right that you will hear quite differing views. Some are criticisms of things taking too long, and at other times there is an accusation of too-rapid decision making. The truth is that differing decisions require different time frames and time for analysis. Drawing again on my personal experience, if I look at something and I am not sure about the relative risks and it just is not clear to me, I will not make a decision on the basis of the submission in front of me. In such cases, I call all the officials into a meeting so that I can probe more fully what lies behind some of the assumptions and the risk analysis. In that way, I can get at what inevitably lies behind, for example, a six-page submission. That takes time, but it is better to take that time so that I make a decision with the full facts in front of me and an understanding of all that.

That is how I go about decision making. All the frameworks, standards and steps that were mentioned earlier are there to ensure the quality of the advice that comes out.

I have a final point. Nobody, including civil servants, can be an expert on everything. Inevitably, you have to draw on other stakeholders such as the business community, who have a level of knowledge and experience, and a view. You draw all of that in to try to make the best decision on the information that is in front of you.

I will come in first while this thought is in my head. The relationship does matter. Human nature being human nature, ministers build up a particular relationship with key officials, whom we come to rely on and who are our go-to civil servants, because we have had good, clear, sound advice from them previously. In every ministerial job that I have had, that is how it has panned out.

There is something important in what you have said about ministers’ behaviour. We cannot have a position where civil servants would be wary about putting difficult advice in front of a minister because of the reaction that they might get. That can lead to poor decision making. Therefore, with regard to ministerial behaviour, it is critical that ministers accept that, sometimes, they will get information about something that they have absolutely wanted to do that shows that it is just not doable, for all the good reasons that are set out in front of them. Sometimes, you just have to accept that, because it is the best advice that is being provided to you.

With regard to civil service support—particularly senior civil servants, who interact with ministers more often—it is important that there is absolutely that respect and a culture that respects the fact that the relationship is not always one of equals. Ministers have to recognise that in the way in which they respond to news that they are not so happy about—we have all experienced that—and recognise that, at the end of the day, civil servants are only providing the best advice that they possibly can.