Chamber and committees

That system is beneficial because it creates the space for focused discussion of the needs of individuals. One of the big lessons that I have learned in my political life, especially in my life as a minister, is that cases hardly ever fit neatly into one single compartment. If Mr Mason has a constituency case, as I have had, that does not fit neatly into the health board compartment or the local authority compartment, the health and social care partnerships have the structure and the ethos to focus on the needs of individuals and to find solutions for them. Many practical impediments will exist in resolving issues; that third organisation provides the necessary focus.

Yes.

Such dilemmas are at the heart of every budget process that the Government and, if I may say so, the Parliament have to go through. A range of options are available to ministers. What the Government is able to do in terms of borrowing is fairly limited, but other financial options are available. However, Parliament has to endorse the budget. When the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy makes her announcement on 9 December, members of Parliament will have to reflect on it; if they believe that we need to disinvest in one area of policy in order to invest in another, the opportunity will be available to them to come forward with amendments to the budget. The Government makes its judgment based on what we believe is a reasonable balance across all factors, but it is open to any member of Parliament to make alternative propositions.

No.

There are a number that I can choose from, but I will highlight some that reflect different elements of the reform programme.

As far as structural reform is concerned, it is my firm belief that reforms such as the creation of a single police service and a single fire and rescue service were necessary and have provided both services with significant additional resilience, capacity and effectiveness across the country. Moreover, our reforms of policing in particular have attracted international commendation as being appropriate to the changing nature of the policing challenge that we face.

As for policy reforms that have been consistent with the work of Christie, I would cite the two very significant expansions of early learning and childcare, which have been about recognising the importance of early intervention in the lives of children and young people to ensure that they have the best possible platform for success. With those two significant expansions, culminating in the move to 1,140 hours of funded early learning and childcare in August, we have put into practice the principle of early intervention to ensure that children are given the best platform for their lives.

Thirdly, I would cite a reform such as the emergence of the young persons guarantee. There is a range of employment and training programmes and we recognise that each one of them individually has a justification and arguments for its existence, but what has been demonstrably proved to be the case is that, if you provide young people with a route that enables them to progress from school to whatever field lies beyond school—whether it is work, college or further training—the outcome is that we do not lose those young people from the labour market and we enable them to make a positive contribution to society. Again, that is a policy reform that is about improving outcomes as a consequence of the way in which we design programmes.

Those are three examples, and I could list more.

I welcome the committee’s interest in the Christie commission and the issue of public service reform. In this 10th anniversary year of the commission’s report, it is timely to reflect on its continued strategic, ethical and practical relevance and on what has been achieved.

In 2011, the Christie commission report set out a clear approach for how we could address the long-standing challenges of aligning our budgets across outcomes and making real-world impacts on people’s lives. The report set out key and aspirational principles for how public services needed to be shaped and delivered in the future in order to meet the expected financial, demographic and other pressures.

When our Government responded to the Christie report in September 2011, we worked with those principles and built a long-term commitment to public service reform, which was underpinned by the pillars of preventing negative outcomes, working in partnership, outcomes-based performance, making the most of our people, including front-line staff and communities, and, more recently, an emphasis on place.

A range of progress has been made since the report was published. The ambition, the commitment and the principles continue to live large in the minds and actions of those of us in public services across national and local government, public services and the third sector. A decade on, the term “Christie” remains the common language of reform and has been a cornerstone of our collective reflections on the experience of the pandemic, as it continues to help to provide direction and inspiration for what we now need to do to address these issues.

The ambition is huge and we can point to many examples of reform in action. Although those examples include some structural reforms, the impact of Christie has been more evident in influencing and reshaping how both national policy and local service delivery have been built on improving outcomes and making a tangibly positive difference to people’s lives.

We regularly see some or all of the pillars of reform featuring as ingredients in how policies and services are shaped and implemented. However, despite the many examples that we can point to, we have to ask ourselves why reform is not yet as deeply embedded at the heart of policy making and service delivery as it needs to be, and not yet as systemic as I would like it to be.

As the committee’s previous witnesses have said, to make a concerted shift to reform is challenging for many reasons. A key point is that, during the pandemic, we saw in some places that barriers were transcended, and traditional and embedded ways of developing policy and delivering services were revised abruptly and swiftly. We perhaps need to do more of that kind of work in the period ahead.

The committee will have heard me say this often—it is a critical point—but we need our public services to wrap around what matters to people and to be person centred, holistic and responsive to their needs, instead of expecting people to fit around what public services offer and to navigate complicated systems from positions of vulnerability and need. Such an approach is not straightforward—in fact, it is difficult and time consuming—but I am mindful of the observations and insights of your previous witnesses with regard to tackling this issue.

The challenge is as pressing for us in the Scottish Government as it is for other public services. When I assumed my current responsibilities after the election, the First Minister asked me to ensure that we as a Government worked across policy boundaries to secure policy solutions that could transform lives. That requires the Government to shift our thinking from portfolio-based to people-based solutions and, in the process, to work across the organisation on common challenges and to break down traditional policy silos. In other words, we need to build bridges, not erect walls, in policy making. We need to respond to problems as they present themselves to us, instead of reframing them to suit our structures and processes.

Our approach to Covid recovery has aimed to embody that way of working. Our Covid recovery strategy is built on the three priority themes of ensuring financial security for low-income households; good green jobs and fair work; and wellbeing for children and young people. However, those themes cannot be pursued in isolation, and success is contingent on working across silos and policy ambitions and building on the interconnections between them.

The kind of Covid recovery that we want goes beyond neutralising the negative impacts of the pandemic towards tackling complex and deep-rooted inequalities that too many communities in Scotland have experienced for generations. If we are to make that difference, our public services need fundamentally to work on what matters to those people and communities.

The Government’s commitment to Christie’s vision and public service reform remains strong, but making Christie a reality requires a collective national endeavour. I am committed to making that happen in the years to come.

Public sector organisations must think carefully about how they relate to and deal with private sector organisations. The Covid recovery strategy aims to do various things in relation to those themes. For example, on the first theme, which is tackling the financial insecurity of low-income households, one of the ways to do that is to do what the Government has said that it is going to do and double the child payment, but another way is to provide early learning and childcare so that parents can gain access to some of the good, green jobs that are around, which will obviously help to address the financial insecurity of low-income households.

I certainly hope that a private sector organisation will look at the Covid recovery strategy and say, “Well, there is a role for us to perform here, and we can make a contribution by taking forward our investment plans, collaborating with public organisations on staff training and creating employment,” and that the virtuous circle will carry on.

There are definitely lessons to be learned from the pandemic. The hard reality that we must accept is that, during the pandemic, the degree of change in the delivery of services and approaches by a range of public bodies took place at a pace that I have never seen before in my life. The change was welcome—I wish that I had seen a bit more of it in my time—and it demonstrates that such things can be done. That is the crucial point.

Why did the changes have to be made? We had a public health emergency that resulted in countless organisations disrespecting boundaries, working at pace, finding solutions and doing all that they could to support citizens. They wrapped services around people. The question that arises from that is, if we could do that because of the Covid emergency, what is stopping us from doing something similar on child poverty or the climate emergency, for example?

We have showed that such changes can be made, but we must be open eyed about the fact that we must ensure that the conditions are right to make such changes in other circumstances. The changes happened in March 2020 because we faced a public health crisis. We need to ensure that the same thought conditions and processes enable us to address other issues. Good lessons must be learned in that regard.

A number of ideas have emerged from the local governance review about how we might respond to the issues that have been raised by local authorities and local communities. The Government is reflecting on those ideas, and we need to take forward dialogue with partners on how best we can turn many of the propositions into practical reality.

There can be a conflict between some of the existing measures of accountability and—[Interruption.] Some of the waiting time targets, for example, can dictate a particular performance, and not having them might lead to another focus or other opportunities. That is one example of where the question might be relevant, but we have to be certain and satisfied that our accountability mechanisms are appropriate to deliver the approach and performance that we want to achieve.

I would be deeply concerned if a public body struggled to understand its function and purpose, because they are fundamental to how any public body operates. That should all be well set out to the board either through statute or through a letter of direction. In fact, it is not “letter of direction”—that is the wrong term. I am not going to recall the right term, but I will cite an example.

Every year, I would send Scottish Enterprise a management letter. We will tell the committee what it is properly called—I just cannot remember the term. I am being offered “letter of guidance” by David Milne. I am not altogether sure that that is the right term; we will give the committee the right terminology. Essentially, the letter said, “This is what I want you to focus on in your policy priorities.” I would send such letters to Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise annually when I was the finance secretary. The letters are about the general parameters of operation.

The example of Creative Scotland, which Mr Greer gave, is slightly different, because that body takes some very active funding decisions that are designed by statute to be taken at arm’s length from the Government. They are taken without any operational influence by the Government in order to respect artistic freedom in decision making. There is a specific type of arm’s-length relationship with Creative Scotland.

The function and purpose of a board should be absolutely clear. If it is required by statute, the board should operate within that statute. If it requires a letter of guidance from ministers, it should operate within that.

Mr Greer also put to me a point about the composition of boards, which is about the selection criteria for boards. To make sure that board appointments are made on the basis of capacity and capability, many do not have specific criteria about having X teachers and Y lecturers, or whatever. The criteria will be about attributes; there might be requirements for financial competence or legal competence. For example, boards must have a chair of their audit committee, so somebody on the board must have audit competence.

Parliament might want to have a wider debate about the attributes of boards, which I think would more directly address Mr Greer’s point.