Chamber and committees

Those are important questions and I welcome Katy Clark’s thoughts and contributions in that respect. The Government is undertaking a number of employment-based interventions. For example, the transition training fund is designed to address exactly the circumstances that Katy Clark has put to me in supporting individuals to move from one sector to another.

In relation to sectoral activity, the situation will vary around the country. For example, Mr Gibson’s question about the north-east of Scotland raised the issue of oil and gas transition. I assure Katy Clark that at the heart of the Government’s employment strategy is a focus on the communities that have been hardest hit by Covid and are at the greatest risk of disruption due to the end of the furlough scheme. Our interventions will be focused on supporting individuals to sustain employment in such circumstances.

We are actively supporting economic recovery in Mid Scotland and Fife, as we are across the whole of Scotland. That includes more than £150 million to support local businesses and additional funding of more than £170 million for the area’s four local authorities.

We have committed more than £495 million across the three city region deals in mid-Scotland, which will help to drive a sustainable recovery from the pandemic in the long term. That includes £25 million for the industrial innovation programme in Fife, which will support growth of cutting-edge businesses that can deliver good and fair jobs for local people.

Claire Baker raises a fair point. The economic interventions that the Government is taking forward are designed, in part, to create long-term sustainable economic and employment opportunities for people. By their nature, that involves ensuring that the interests of young people are very much at the heart of the design of the interventions.

We will make sure that all the interventions that I talked about in my original answer will have relationships with higher and further education institutions—with which Claire Baker will be familiar—in the Mid Scotland and Fife region. All the institutions will have particular roles and responsibilities in ensuring that the needs of young people are adequately and fully represented.

I am confident that the challenges that young people have faced in the past 18 months through Covid can be properly and fully addressed by ensuring that we have in place an approach to skills, education and investment that meets their needs, ensures that they are able to access opportunities for the future, and are in no way disadvantaged by their difficult experiences during the course of the pandemic.

Thank you, convener. I welcome the opportunity to appear before the committee today.

The national performance framework is Scotland’s wellbeing framework. It explicitly includes increased wellbeing as part of its purpose, and it combines measurement of how well Scotland is doing in economic terms with a broader range of measures. The national performance framework is also the means to localise delivery of the United Nations sustainable development goals in Scotland.

The NPF provides a framework for collaboration and for the planning of policy and services across the spectrum of Scotland’s civic society, including the private and public sectors, voluntary organisations, businesses and communities. It is based on achieving outcomes that improve the quality of life of the people of Scotland.

The NPF is also a reporting framework that helps us to understand, publicly and transparently, the progress that we are making as a nation towards realising our long-term vision. Its data helps us to understand the challenges that we all face in achieving better outcomes for the people of Scotland, and to focus policy, services and resources on tackling those challenges.

The NPF promotes partnership working by making organisations jointly responsible for planning and spending to achieve shared outcomes. Although the Scottish ministers are accountable to the Parliament for the NPF’s development and delivery, the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 places a duty on public authorities to “have regard to” the national outcomes. To reflect that partnership approach, the current NPF was launched jointly by the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. Local government plays a key role in achieving the national outcomes.

Given my remit, I am keen for the NPF to continue to guide our approach to Covid recovery. During the early stages of the pandemic, the Scottish Government’s approach looked to the national performance framework. The coronavirus framework for decision making explicitly reflected the core values of the national performance framework: kindness, dignity, compassion, respect for the rule of law, openness and transparency.

Analysis has shown that the pandemic has had significant and wide-ranging impacts across the national outcomes. As would be expected, the impacts have been largely negative, particularly in relation to health, the economy, fair work, business and culture. Covid-19 impacts have been, and will continue to be, borne unequally. The impacts are expected to widen many existing inequalities and to be borne disproportionately by some groups, including households on low incomes or in poverty, low-paid workers, children and young people, disabled people, minority groups and women.

However, analysis shows that there might also be positive future developments, including the acceleration of the shift towards digital technologies and services, partnership working between the public sector and other partners to improve outcomes for disadvantaged groups and shifts in the empowerment of communities to make decisions for themselves. Understanding those impacts will be important in driving the recovery and in achieving the national outcomes, as reflected in our recent programme for government.

We are preparing for the next statutory review of the national outcomes, on which we will consult widely across Scotland, including with Parliament. Following the outcome of the 2018 review, when the NPF received cross-party support, we will revisit the round-table approach to further political engagement on Scotland’s future wellbeing, building on the shared policy agreement that the Government has reached with the Scottish Green Party. The review will focus on how we can better achieve impact that is recognised and felt by the people who live in Scotland.

We strongly believe in our duty as a Government to protect the interest of future generations, including by restoring the natural environment and reducing our consumption in line with what the planet can sustain. That duty to future generations is spread across many policies and institutions.

The national performance framework provides for intergenerational wellbeing and improving opportunities for all, and means attending to the conditions that are required to ensure wellbeing into the future and for future generations, and not only for the present.

The national performance framework tries to put a concept such as GDP, which is important, into a proper and full context. In other words, the framework tries to set out the factors that we as a society and country need to think about, one of which will be GDP. There will be a range of others, but it is about putting them in a proper context.

Daniel Johnson asked about the balanced scorecard; the aim is to have a framework that enables people—and, indeed, parliamentarians—to judge where the balance of our policy making should be struck after seeing the range of different patterns of development in particular policy areas and how we can take decisions that better reflect a more rounded approach to policy making instead of just saying, “I’m only going to look at the GDP indicator at the expense of everything else.” That is clearly the antithesis of the NPF, which is our attempt to put concepts such as GDP into their proper context.

I am happy to give the committee an update on where we are.

That may well be the case. I am worried about the situation with Brexit and its impact on our society. We are beginning to see the sharp effects of that, and I am worried about what it will do to our economic performance. The data and indicators will speak for themselves in due course. Undoubtedly, when we face economic threats of that magnitude, they will show up in the indicators. We will try our best to withstand the threats, as we always do. We will do our level best to put in place a level of performance in all aspects that will overcome the difficulties, but I have to be candid with the committee that I have my anxieties on those points.

It is inevitable that there will be much greater focus on shorter-term issues in relation to service performance or configuration. That is essential, but we need to have our eyes on the long term as well as the short term and have greater focus on the national performance framework. Looking at current trends, are we satisfied that we are making enough progress in particular directions? We could do with strengthening that attention.

To take the example of child poverty, my colleague with responsibility for social justice will make statements to Parliament about progress on tackling child poverty, which is a constant and on-going priority. That is an example of a long-term focus that is the subject of updates to Parliament. My colleague who is responsible for net zero has to make climate change statements to Parliament that are about how we are progressing towards our long-term policy direction. There is always scope for more focus on those issues, and the Government would be happy to participate in that scrutiny.

That is correct, but the audience for the national performance framework is decision-making bodies. If a decision-making body such as a local authority or public body takes decisions that are contrary to the direction of travel of what is hoped for in the national performance framework, that is a problem. The key audience in my view is the organisations that will be part of delivering on that journey and that need to, as statute says, “have due regard to” what is in the national performance framework. A local authority that pays no attention to the national performance framework in its formulation of policy would be an item of concern to me.

We should always be mindful of that balance, because time-limited targets can provide greater focus and impetus for progress. We just have to be absolutely certain that we are putting them in the right areas to make the greatest possible amount of progress. We have time-limited targets on climate change and child poverty, which are fundamental issues in our society. A lot of activity will be focused on ensuring that we are in a position to achieve those measurable targets.