Chamber and committees

I am very happy for the Government to have open dialogue with Parliament and its committees—in particular, this committee—on ensuring that those processes are closely linked. Many of the internal discussions that I have had about the wellbeing bill have involved ministers and officials who are also involved in the national performance framework, so those are not compartmentalised conversations. However, I am happy to assure the committee that we will have open dialogue around those questions.

Audit Scotland’s observations are reasonable. I hope that the committee has got the sense from my observations this morning that I think that it is important that we look at the information in the round and that we do not just make glib judgments about individual components.

The Audit Scotland comments highlight the difficulty of making a direct connection between every single pound of public expenditure and every outcome that is achieved. That connection is more obvious in some areas than in others, but it can be difficult to make that link. A couple of weeks ago, the Auditor General commented on the ways in which we need to operate to ensure that we improve outcomes. He talked about approaches that are heavily based on collaboration, partnership working, disrespecting organisational boundaries and focusing more on outcomes than on inputs. Those comments help to structure the legitimate discussion on whether public expenditure is being used as effectively as it could be used to achieve the outcomes that are widely shared in our society. The national performance framework helps us in that respect.

We are in a better place, because we have a much greater focus today on the achievement of outcomes than was the case in 2007. The substantive policy development over those years has been that we have a much greater focus on the achievement of outcomes. That is a prize that is worth having, because Governments in general can be bedevilled by focusing on short-term and immediate high-profile issues at the expense of taking the necessary steps on the long-term outcome-based journeys.

That does not mean that everything is smooth and lateral—that it all takes a lovely neat course. The road is very bumpy, but focusing on the long-term policy direction and the outcomes that are to be achieved is a significant strength for Scotland today.

That will vary from area to area; in some circumstances, that will be the case. In relation to the early learning and childcare example, indicators would be in place to set a timescale for the implementation of such a policy and, as a consequence, to determine the timescale within which decisions were required and practical actions needed to be taken.

In other areas of policy—for example, eradicating child poverty—we will be aiming to achieve particular target dates and plans will be put in place to try to achieve those objectives. That will throw up challenges for the Government and public authorities, because the timescales may well be more demanding than we can achieve. However, milestones to structure the way in which decisions require to be taken will be available where they can be of assistance in achieving those outcomes.

My assessment of the situation with high-growth and innovative businesses is that it has been affected by two factors, the first of which is the historical trend of economic activity in this area being a challenge for Scotland for many years now. That said, in the aftermath of the financial crash, significant enhancements were made in the development of high-growth businesses, with the Government putting in place a range of different interventions to support that. I am thinking, in particular, of the Scottish EDGE—encouraging dynamic growth entrepreneurs—competition, which was a collaboration with the Hunter Foundation and other stakeholders; of support for the women in enterprise action group; and of the converge challenge, which encouraged the roll-out of more high-growth companies from the higher education sector. A number of different interventions have been put in place to address areas of poorer performance.

The second factor is the effect of the more general economic conditions in which we have been working as a consequence of Covid, as evidenced by the situation with economic growth. It is therefore a combination of historical and real-time issues.

The employee voice issue is slightly more difficult to nail down. All the policy interventions that we will take as a Government are designed to support the acceleration and intensification of employee contributions to the operation of organisations and businesses. I would argue that, from a business perspective, that is a very sound investment, given the added value that is attracted by capturing the input and contribution of employees in the development and running of organisations. That particular indicator will have been informed substantially by surveys of employees, and if that evidence reflects a lack of such input, the Government’s fair work agenda will have to be intensified. We will take that forward in the dialogue that we will have with a range of organisations including the business representative organisations and the Scottish Trades Union Congress, with which we collaborate closely on all aspects of the fair work agenda.

On all those different indicators, ministers and officials will be heavily engaged in assessing performance and patterns across the country. If I go back to the world of education policy that I occupied during the previous parliamentary session, at all times I was looking at differential performance around the country. For example, performance on educational attainment and the progress that I expected to see there was the subject of some frequently pretty robust discussion between me and individual local authorities.

I would not want the committee to consider that this is the only stocktake or the only discussion about performance. A lot of discussion will go on in and around the territory of the national performance framework to make sure that we are doing all that we can to intervene to improve performance.

The national performance framework is designed to be a helpful and useful guide to all public bodies and private organisations about the direction in which Government policy, supported by decisions made in Parliament, is heading, and what organisations can contribute towards the achievement of that vision. Obviously, a number of issues are properly and statutorily the responsibility of other public bodies, particularly local authorities, so local decision making is crucial. We will not get to a strong position on performance at the national level if we do not get to a strong position of local performance. There has to be an interaction and dialogue there.

There are obviously political choices to make here. There could be more directional decisions taken. Parliament has particular views about that; sometimes it is in favour, sometimes it is not. In the current environment, ministers have to operate within the statutory framework and the national performance framework, which is endorsed by our local authority partners, is designed to give a clear and coherent approach to the delivery of policy to shape the decisions that can be made at the local level and then influence the contribution that is made to achievement of the national outcomes.

I am very happy to do so.

Undoubtedly, decisions could be taken to tilt the balance in order to place more emphasis on, for argument’s sake, the outcome that

“We live in communities that are inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe”

as opposed to the outcome that

“We are creative and our vibrant and diverse cultures are expressed and enjoyed widely”.

We could say that there is much more importance in ensuring that we have greater progress on community empowerment than on cultural appreciation. I extracted those two topics randomly, but of course there is scope for the balance to be tilted. Obviously, we would have to be aware of what the implications of that might well be, because we are trying to achieve an approach that enables us to fulfil the purpose of policy making in Scotland. There is scope for us to reshape the balance of that to address other and particular priorities.

That is a really good example to focus on. When we come down from the national outcomes, believe you me, there is no shortage of data beneath the aspiration of children growing up loved, safe and respected. There is no absence of data. Indeed, that is highlighted in the national indicators, and they are only a snapshot of the data that is available.

As for what is required, as somebody who was immersed in that area of policy for five years, I would be examining a whole range of data sets to establish trends for whether we are heading in a positive direction or a negative direction as a consequence of the experience of children and young people in our society, and I would be intervening at an operational level to remedy instances where I thought that there was a need for stronger performance.

If we take an indicator such as the quality of children’s services, for example, that is an area that I would be examining very closely, looking at the data identified by the Care Inspectorate and Audit Scotland and at some of the wider collection of data on child protection and child wellbeing issues so as to determine—to go back to the convener’s point—the degree to which I needed more of a focus on area A versus area B in the country, where very different patterns might be emerging. What was driving good performance in area B versus poorer performance in area A, for instance? What would we need to do as a Government to be confident that we were doing all that we could to ensure that children were growing up loved, safe and respected and to intervene so as to secure better performance where that was required?

The question that Mr Johnson fairly puts to me is whether that can be more visibly set out in the national performance framework, somewhere in the gap between outcome that children and young people

“grow up loved, safe and respected”

and the half a dozen indicators. I think that there is a reasonable point to be considered as to whether the information that we promote to reflect the achievement of the outcomes represents the most effective collection of data, as there is a whole host of data that we could select from to enable that to be the case.

The link between public spend and outcomes is complex, but it is critical that it be properly understood. The national performance framework helps us in that endeavour, but there are other things that also do so. The process of audit and evaluation, particularly policy audit and evaluation, is critical in that journey.

There are other interventions, such as the independent care review, which took about three years to consider its evidence. I will summarise thousands of hours of research and analysis in the next couple of sentences not to be in any way disrespectful but because we have limited time. In essence, the review said that the money is not spent well on delivering good outcomes for care-experienced young people and, therefore, we should reshape that spend. We are now doing that, which we set out by our acceptance of “The Promise” report and the steps that we announced in the programme for government.

That is a good example of exactly the point that Michelle Thomson puts to me: we are spending our money one way, but it is not delivering good outcomes, so we need to think about shifting how we spend it, which is what we are doing on that issue. There are other examples that I could cite. In youth justice, over about 10 years, we have substantively realigned the way in which we spend our resources to deliver better outcomes. Many fewer young people have their life chances influenced, affected and undermined by interactions with the criminal justice system because diversionary routes are available to them to enable them to achieve better outcomes when they have faced difficulty in their lives. That involved realignment of spend from how we did it before to how we do it now.

There has to be a willingness to consider some of those questions and we must be prepared to spend the money differently, however complex it might be to decide on the priorities and challenges.