Chamber and committees

I want to go back to some of the points that the convener raised because, ultimately, success—and continued success—comes down to accountability and responsibility for taking the process forward.

It has struck me throughout our conversations that a great deal of enthusiasm for the national performance framework is coming from agencies, and particularly from the third sector. However, that is not necessarily being reflected in what they are being asked to do. You gave North Ayrshire Council as an example, and we have heard multiple accounts of organisations saying that they have found it useful to consult the national performance framework. However, they are also saying that they are not necessarily being asked by the Government to frame their plans.

I wonder whether there is a need to reexamine sponsorship and ownership at a Government level. Do we need to ask your colleagues around the Cabinet table to take specific actions with regard to their portfolios? One observation that has been made is that, when you held responsibility for both the national performance framework and the finance portfolio, that glued the NPF, as a priority, to the money, which is what ultimately tends to drive things. That does not necessarily happen when things are split from the money. Does there need to be a rethinking of responsibility at ministerial level and about where the performance framework is owned within the responsibilities across Government?

I really recommend the Scottish Leaders Forum’s work on how to apply the national performance framework. It has done work that goes beyond the level of the work that the Government has done.

On that note, I want to put to the cabinet secretary three suggestions that have been made and which I think make a lot of sense. First, although the point that John Mason was getting at with regard to responsibilities is important, I do not think it wise to ascribe particular measures to particular organisations, simply because of their very nature. However—and you could ask individual departments to do this—when strategies are published, it might be sensible to have, say, a policy of explaining in greater detail how they fit with and contribute towards the national performance framework. It would not need to be a statutory requirement, but could be just a matter of policy. It would make a lot of sense if we were to make explicit—front and centre—almost the first and last things that we are asking people in Government to do and report against, much as we do with sustainability targets.

Another suggestion, which seeks to eliminate the situation in which everyone broadly agrees that the national performance framework is good and no one takes responsibility for specific things, is to have agreements between the Government and agencies that make who contributes what a lot more explicit. That would not necessarily mean putting hard targets in place—a lot of it could be qualitative description—but it would be very much about putting in black and white some of the interdependencies and relationships with third sector organisations that the cabinet secretary has just alluded to. Could those sorts of agreements, which wrap around or sit on top of formal contractual agreements, be an idea to pursue?

Moving on to the third suggestion that was made, as has been pointed out a lot to us, no one is going to disagree with any of the outcomes. They are all good things—they are pretty unobjectionable and unarguable. However, the difficult bit is trying to come up with plans to influence them. Instead of just picking individual targets, do we not need to have some medium-term plan for influencing certain things in the framework? The other two suggestions—on reporting and having agreements—would flow from the plan that would be implemented. After all, having metrics with no sense of how you might influence them is potentially a recipe for making no progress at all.

I agree with that, and I think that we need to see that work being taken forward.

I wonder whether our approach to skills is too detached from our approach to enterprise support. More than 90 per cent of businesses are small businesses that have seen zero productivity growth over the past decade or more. Those are small businesses—a handful of people work in them—and you cannot divorce the employee from the business, because they are one and the same. It makes no sense to have an approach that looks at business investment and support separately from skills. Indeed, that approach forces us to shoehorn apprenticeships into businesses that cannot support or sustain them. There has been a lot of talk about apprenticeship sharing. However, as someone who has run a small business, I know that small business owners do not want to share their employees with their competitors, so that is a non-starter.

Do we need to think about small businesses more holistically instead of separating out investment in skills? Should we take a holistic approach to supporting the business skills of small businesses by treating the employee and the business as one and the same, in order to get productivity going in that sector?

Thank you. That was very helpful.

Ultimately, the success of that approach is largely reliant on that quality of the data that sits underneath it. It has always struck me that when you click through the national performance framework on the website, you get presented with lots of bullet points—probably more words than numbers—and that it is not very digestible.

There is a broader point around how to approach the data. However, on a simple presentational point, do you not think that we need to do better at presenting it? I became a real addict of the Public Health Scotland dashboard through the pandemic, which was incredibly helpful for seeing what was going on. Do you think that we need a bit of a refresh and something similar for the national performance framework in order to bring the data to life?

That is an interesting point that probably—to be blunt—brings to life why, essentially, the NPF is withering on the vine, if we are being honest. It is interesting because you are saying that to make it work you need almost a translation of what your organisation’s contribution does. Unless—this is the point that I was making in the previous session—the overarching strategy for how the Government seeks to influence and advance measures and outcomes is holistic, it becomes incredibly difficult for individual agencies or partners to demonstrate how they are contributing to it.

I wonder whether what Neil Ferguson just outlined is what the Government as a whole needs to be doing, by saying, “Here is the national performance framework as a whole, and here is how Government and the public sector are seeking to influence it and deliver against it.”

My first point is on that subject and is not what I originally wanted to speak about. At the risk of contradicting you, convener, coming from a private sector background, I should point out that not knowing what revenue you are going to generate in the coming year does not prevent you from formulating a business plan. You do it on the basis of a high expectation and a pessimistic outcome. It is not set in stone, but the fact that you do not know precisely what your budget is going to be in the following year does not prevent you from setting parameters. Something could be done around that.

The key point that I want to return to is the timeliness point. Having some broad projections and broad plans would be sensible, but do we just need some simple things? For example, on climate change and carbon emissions, everything needs an environmental impact assessment. Whether it is a bit of legislation or a Government strategy, it requires a constant reference back to that. Do we need to do something as simple as requiring all new legislation, strategies, initiatives and programmes to state how they contribute towards achieving the outcomes in the national performance framework—both the primary outcomes that they seek to influence and the secondary ones that they hope to affect in broader terms? Would something as simple as that be useful?

It might just have been a typo. [Laughter.]

On that point, as we brought up in other discussions, in some ways the SDGs seem to have a bit more purchase and currency. Do we even need the national performance framework? Should we just be focused on SDGs, because they are better understood and they are more comparable, because they are used internationally? I would encourage other people to pile in. Do not wait for one of us to ask you to speak.

Finally, and briefly, when you look at the framework, you see the high-level outcomes and then you are straight into a sea of words and numbers being referenced. Do we just need to present this stuff a bit better so that, when people look at it, they get a sense of what is going on?