Chamber and committees

That is my point. In many respects, we are trying to create new data sets. For obvious reasons, we have been severely restricted in the collection of data during Covid. When I pressed the education system for information on participation, engagement and attendance, there was a fair amount of resistance from a number of public authorities—not least, local authorities—to the data demands that I was placing on them, but I wanted to be satisfied that there was online learning and adequate engagement, and I could collect that information only from local authorities. We have to strike a balance in relation to what we can reasonably and legitimately demand at any one time during a pandemic.

That is an entirely fair challenge. I would not advise that a minister’s only interaction with the performance of a policy area should be to look at that chart and say, “Oh, that’s improving, I don’t need to worry about that”. We have to go beneath that and look at the patterns and the trends. I assure Ross Greer that when ministers are briefed about detail and performance—and this relates to my response to John Mason a moment ago and a number of other answers that I have given this morning—the underlying pattern in performance is highlighted, challenged, explored and compared against what might reasonably be expected, so that there is a proper understanding of whether the conclusion that has been arrived at is reasonable.

I want to see improvements in economic performance and economic growth, which is vital for us as a society. A multitude of factors affect economic performance. We are vividly seeing the effects of Brexit on economic activity, and we are seeing the impact of Covid on the economy. However, the growth figures show that the recovery is improving following the downturn as a consequence of the pandemic. That is welcome.

The Government is focusing on a range of interventions to improve performance. As part of the Covid recovery strategy, it is important to improve families’ financial security, which is critical to eradicating child poverty. To strengthen that financial security, we have to have better-paying employment opportunities in our society. Stimulating a higher-quality economic environment is crucial.

I encourage the committee to look at all this in the round. Some of the performance maintaining that is happening is the maintaining of a high level of performance. The level of performance that is being sustained is not pedestrian; it is of a high level. That is no mean feat, given the challenges that we face as a society.

I assure the committee that there is a culture in Government and public authorities that is constantly seeking improvement in the delivery of public services. I refer you to some of the examples that I cited in my discussion with Michelle Thomson, where there is a challenge to existing performance to improve further via a variety of reports and analysis.

I have been around in this area of policy long enough to have just about seen it all, frankly. One of the first things that I did as finance minister in 2007 was to remove hundreds of ring-fenced funds from local authorities to provide them with much greater scope and flexibility in how they could operate. A lot of that ring fencing has not returned, which means that local authorities have a huge amount of scope to act. They also have general powers in relation to wellbeing, which the convener of the committee has championed over the many years of his involvement in Parliament.

There will always be a demand for more money from local authorities—I do not expect that that will ever change—but the Government does all that it can within the resources that are available to it to ensure that local authorities have the funding that they can rely on to support local services. Of course, Parliament has a process by which it can shift that balance, if it chooses to do so.

I am keen to encourage the deployment of public expenditure in a way that is closely aligned to the achievement of outcomes. We should do that at all times. I have cited the example of the policy shift to expand early learning and childcare. That involved a deliberate financial choice to improve an outcome, which was about the quality of the start that children get in their lives. That is a good example of what we do with money to affect an outcome. The response to the care review is another good example. The review pointed out to local authorities, really quite bluntly, that their route for expenditure is not delivering good outcomes, and it presented a different way to do it, which we accept.

Much of the data analysis is configured around trends, rather than moments in time. Mr Mason’s point is best addressed by looking at the experience over time, because that will highlight whether an underlying, sustained period of improvement might have faltered because of Covid, in which case we might be optimistic about making a return to improved performance. That will be best detected by looking at the trend performance in the data.

After extensive stakeholder dialogue and parliamentary engagement, we tried to create a framework that gives the public and public bodies as clear a sense as possible of the direction in which the Government is trying to take the country, the purpose of our policy interventions, the values that underpin them and the outcomes that we are trying to achieve. The framework is a distillation of that journey.

That picture is designed to enable a range of organisations to decide what they will do and where they will spend their resources to contribute to the direction of travel. The approach is designed to influence, not direct, the choices that are made locally about priorities and policy making. Given our current statutory arrangements as a country, that is the right approach.

Organisations can then look to identify what they can contribute to the process. A series of measures and mechanisms of accountability provides us with assurance about how much progress has been made on the journey. All those measures are publicly available. Some are published under the NPF, some are published more widely and others are the subject of analysis by organisations such as Audit Scotland.

There is undoubtedly a debate to be had about that because, as I set out in my opening statement and my responses to the convener so far, the national performance framework is designed to give clarity of purpose and direction to the country, to which all relevant organisations—I use that term in its broadest sense—can look and ask, “How is it relevant to us, and how can we contribute to the journey that the country is on?”

Another purpose of the performance framework is to discipline us to make tangible progress in achieving these objectives over time. The issues that Mr Johnson raises are very relevant there, because there could be greater signposting in that exercise, and there could be more definitive targets about what could or should be achieved over a given period. That is a perfectly legitimate debate. That approach would probably require much greater policy direction of what was expected to happen as a consequence. Undoubtedly, there is a debate to be had, and the review that we undertake in 2023 will provide us with the opportunity to reflect on the genuine approach that was taken in 2018 to engage with a variety of interested parties—not least Parliament—and to design a framework that is relevant and effective for policy making in Scotland.

Undoubtedly the framework could be simplified, but the Parliament would have to come to a view on whether, in so doing, it would lose any of the national performance framework’s rounded nature. There are fine judgments to be made here, and I am not trying to suggest that there is any perfect science, but the fact is that some citizens will attach a greater priority to the country putting emphasis on a particular policy area rather than another and will want it to be more predominant in shaping our country’s future. All such considerations are subjective. It is therefore possible that we would lose some of that rounded nature if we were to simplify the framework. However, the upside of following the route that has just been put to me is that it might provide greater scope for making sharper choices about where we place our emphasis and make our interventions.