Chamber and committees

What about best practice?

I will open out the meeting to questions from colleagues.

To be fair, I did not really think that the career advisers were saying that about going to university, but that is the message that a lot of young people are picking up. I have raised the issue in a number of fora, because I think that it is certainly something that schools need to address more directly. I know that, when I have held employment fairs, some schools have been very snotty about sending kids along—even kids who are not even going forward for exams, never mind those who are likely to go to university. Therefore, I think that graduate apprenticeships are hugely positive.

I want to stay with the issue of demography for a wee bit longer. The figures are quite stark. They show that, by 2045, the number of people of a pensionable age in Scotland is expected to increase by 21 per cent, while the number of people in the workforce is expected to decline by 2 per cent and the number of children is expected to decline by 22 per cent. That shows what the long-term situation is going to be. With 192,000 fewer people in the working-age population, the economy is going to have to be a lot more productive if we are to cope with the people of pensionable age at that point—I include pretty much everyone in this room in that number, of course.

I want to ask about the migration figures specifically, because they are slightly ambiguous. Your submission says:

“Almost twice as many people left Scotland and moved overseas (31,300 out migration in 2019/2020 compared to 19,700 in 2018/2019)”.

When you say “overseas”, are you including England and that, or are you talking about countries beyond the United Kingdom? Last year, the birth rate in Scotland was 48,000. If we are losing 31,000 people in one year, that is pretty disconcerting at a time when the workforce is shrinking.

Do you know anything about the age, skills and educational profiles of the people who are leaving Scotland? As I have said in this committee before, many people come to Scotland to retire, but we are losing a lot of people in their 20s and 30s who are moving to the rest of the UK or beyond.

What are we doing to attract more people from the rest of the United Kingdom to live and work in Scotland?

I am sorry that there is a lot in there—there is so much to ask about, and I am trying not to ask everything.

We will open up the session.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Michelle Thomson is next, to be followed by Daniel Johnson.

Thank you very much for that opening statement. You hit the nail on the head, because the most significant issues that have come out of the evidence sessions so far have been accountability and budgeting for outcomes. That has certainly been what I have been hearing. In the round-table session and in others, a number of witnesses made those points. The Scottish Leaders Forum said:

“typically, the NPF is not actively used to shape scrutiny, provide sponsorship, undertake commissioning of work or shape the allocation of funding.”

Witnesses have said that the national performance framework could be more closely linked to budget planning. Questions have been asked about that, but no real answers have been forthcoming. How can we make the national performance framework more responsive to those concerns?

I feel somewhat frustrated, because there is so much else that we could ask questions about, from the rural and islands productivity lag to research and development and the core growth sectors. However, I will finish by asking a couple of quick questions.

First, people at school often assume that, whether they get an apprenticeship or go to university or whatever, they will get a job working for someone. I do not know that enough is being done to try to teach what we might call entrepreneurial skills. It is accepted across the Parliament that Scotland has a low rate of new business start-ups relative to the rest of the UK and beyond. What is Skills Development Scotland doing to address that? At what level should it be addressed? Should it be addressed in schools, for example?

I will ask my second question now as well. It is about people with disabilities, which we have not touched on. I remember that, when I was a councillor way back in the 1990s, there was a policy that, if possible, 3 per cent of all employees should be people with disabilities. Interestingly enough, the public sector lagged behind the private sector in that regard. There have been a number of initiatives over the years to try to increase the number of people with disabilities in the workforce, in order to improve productivity and those people’s quality of life.

My questions are on those two issues: entrepreneurial skills and people with disabilities.

That is interesting.

A number of people said that one of the difficulties with the national performance framework for the wider population—most of whom, I believe, will probably not even have heard of it—is its remarkably dull name. The title “national performance framework” brings to mind the national planning framework, which has the same acronym—NPF. People have suggested calling it the national wellbeing framework, although “ambitions for Scotland” sounds like a better title to me.

If the framework is going to be reviewed, could the title be reviewed? Could it be something that people feel has a bit more vitality? Somebody said last week the one way to ensure that a document is not read is to put the words “framework” and “performance” in the title. That was not a flippant comment; it was a serious comment about trying to ensure that we get buy-in from more people. I ask the Deputy First Minister to take that issue away and consider it as we review the framework. The Parliament is much more enthusiastic about, and has much more knowledge of, wellbeing—as do the public—than the two-dimensional gross domestic product measure that we used to use in the past. The framework talks about that.

I have one final question to cover a couple of issues that some of our witnesses really struggled with, about how we use the national performance framework—or whatever they call it in future—to declutter the public sector landscape and to share best practice. There is a plethora of documents and it seems that whenever the Government wants to do something new, it brings out an additional document rather than replacing existing documents and strategies.

I asked one of our witnesses directly about best practice and how they share it and they talked about sharing it internally. What I was clearly asking about was how they share best practice with other organisations. For example, if a local authority has an excellent way of working and is delivering on poverty outcomes, how can that be shared with other local authorities? One would assume that would happen through COSLA, but it does not seem to be working in the way that it should.

How we can use the NPF to underpin those aims of decluttering and sharing best practice?