Chamber and committees

Dr Elliott, I have not asked you anything. Do you want to come in on that?

I am interested in the use of the word “performance”. You are quite critical of it and others seem to want to keep it. Is that because “performance” suggests that we can measure things, in the way that we can measure the performance of a car? We can say that it is 99, 100, 98 or whatever the figure happens to be. “Performance” suggests that we can measure it and that we can hold the Government or someone to account, whereas “wellbeing” is a vaguer word.

Will we then end up with a situation in which, instead of the Government saying that we have got to the 1,140 hours for childcare, some councils will say that they will use the national performance framework, they will have 1,000, 1,200 or 900 hours, and there will be a varied picture around the country? Would that be a bad thing, or would it be okay?

I want to make a couple of points. I am slightly more sympathetic to the team than some of my colleagues are. To be fair, the project has come in roughly on time and on budget, which is a good result, given that we have much experience of IT projects that have not done so.

I do not use the new website that much, and I find searching for things a little difficult. I was looking for a motion that I had lodged on councillor pay, but when I searched for “councillor pay”, the website gave me no results. I thought that the wording might have been something else, so I searched for “councillors’ pay”, and the system gave me one result, which was my motion. I wonder whether the public might struggle with things like that; unless a person knows the exact wording of a motion, they will struggle to find it. I will leave that with the team, because you said that the site will be developed.

In making my other point, I will probably reiterate what others have said. I do not think that I was on the Finance and Constitution Committee when the project started. Ms Hegarty, you said that you will present information slightly differently in future. I want to emphasise that it is important for a finance committee to know that a project will run on for several years. I think that that happened with the security enhancement project: I remember that the committee asked about that project and was given the information that it would go over more than one year.

As other members have just pointed out, if you had come back to the Finance and Constitution Committee in year 2 and it had said no, because money was tight, I presume that that would have meant that all the year 1 money would have been wasted. It is important for a finance committee—whoever is on it—to know what it is committing to. Correct me if I am wrong, but the committee is committing to a five-year project, when normally we commit budgets for only one year at a time. There is a risk to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body that your budgets for the second, third, fourth and fifth years might get knocked back if the finance committee does not understand that it is making a commitment for five years. Have I understood that correctly?

I think that Ms Wallace mentioned how the budget and the NPF tie together in relation to budgeting for children’s wellbeing.

On a separate subject, can you say anything about workforce diversity in the civil service? I have heard the accusation—not about the civil service as such—that, because some parts of the public sector are so risk averse about favouring one group, sometimes there is not representation across the board. What is your feeling about the civil service in that regard?

The figure on gender sounded quite good, but what about the gender pay gap? Do men still hold more senior positions?

I will build on questions that have been asked. I am interested in the point about communicating with the public, on not just the Fiscal Commission’s work but wider issues of tax and so on, in which it is difficult to get the public involved. I fully accept that you are a good communicator. Susan Rice, for whom I have a huge amount of respect, is also a good communicator. However, it is difficult. Should everyone in Scotland know about the Scottish Fiscal Commission? I do not think that that is the case at the moment. Should they know what it does? Where can we go with that?

I think that you accept that there is a big problem. I get frustrated, because so many people—intelligent people in trade unions, business and elsewhere—keep demanding that we spend more on something while saying, “Where the money comes from is nothing to do with us.” I hope that you can play a part in getting people to think about both sides of the balance sheet.

You made the point that you are well connected in Scotland. You have been a civil servant. Some people might say that that means that you will not be as independent as someone who comes in from outside. How do you answer that?

I am interested in the concept of information, particularly fiscal information, being more understandable rather than us getting more of it. You wrote to the Public Audit Committee on the need to improve the accessibility of information about public finances more broadly. Will you say a little more about the way that you see that going?