Chamber and committees

Bearing in mind what Mr Hughes said regarding the attempts of the OBR and the SFC to reconcile their methodologies, I note from your paper that it looks as though there will be a £380 million difference between what you and the SFC forecast for income tax receipts. Will you provide a summary of that difference of opinion? I assume that the SFC is looking at the same demographic figures.

In the interests of time, I will hand over the questioning, but I hope that one of my colleagues will pick up on that interesting insight.

I know that the convener wants to come in, but I have one more question.

I am tempted to ask you the same question in private and see what response I get.

I recognise your point that compartmentalisation is an issue, and part of it is about putting the right levers in the right places and ensuring that things are not split up. With that in mind, do we need a more fundamental reappraisal of what is under the control of local government? Douglas Lumsden alluded to the local governance review, which is about how local government engages with people and makes decisions, rather than what it actually does. You gave the example of the library, the sports centre, the primary school and the health centre all being in one place, and one of the best ways to make such things happen more often is to make sure that the decisions are all made in one place, rather than being split apart.

In line with my previous question, I will ask my next question in a slightly more impudent way. Why do we treat Douglas Lumsden’s and Liz Smith’s colleagues from 1994 with such respect and assume that Mr Lang’s local government reforms were perfectly formed and should remain unaltered by your Government—or, frankly, by the Labour Government? Should we not be asking much more fundamental questions? Is the solution not to push as much decision making as possible down to the local level and to give local government the powers that it needs to make those decisions properly?

Deputy First Minister, you have always struck me as someone who is frustrated with the pace of change. In your opening remarks, I think that you were hinting at something when you said that we should reflect on the fact that many of the things in Christie had not become as embedded, either institutionally or in policy terms, as we would have liked. Let me be expansive and ask you this question: if the 2007 John Swinney were able to travel here from the past, would he be pleased with what has happened or would he be frustrated with the lack of institutional change? Equally, if the 2021 John Swinney could provide that John Swinney with advice, what would it be?

I should have asked a bridging question, because there is an interesting point about the natural level in areas such as education and health, and whether it is the same.

Okay. I will challenge you on one point, Deputy First Minister. In response to Liz Smith—and you alluded to a similar point in your response to Ross Greer—you spoke about whether being accountable to ministers was a sufficient level of accountability for organisations, whether they are health boards or NDPBs. I would challenge you on whether accountability to ministers is the same as public accountability. With public accountability, there is an intermediary. We can hold ministers to account in Parliament, but we cannot hold health boards directly accountable. There is a difference there, and in some ways that is a frustration in our democracy.

To clarify, has that sum of money been allocated to those categories in advance? If so, do you have any indication of what the allocations are? Otherwise, are you implying that it is a contingency fund that is available for drawdown over the coming months?

Do you have that breakdown?

I am tempted to go off on a tangent and examine the aviation approach to risk, which I think is fascinating—it has lots of lessons. However, I will not do that.

I recognise that the answers have been expansive, but I will ask a second and final question, which I put to the whole panel. One thing that strikes me about Scotland in comparison with the rest of the UK is how little structural reform we have done over the past 20 years. Graeme Roy said that we have had 10 years to contemplate Christie and that, hopefully, we will get around to some change in the next 10 years. I know that I am paraphrasing you in an unfair way, Professor Roy, but there is a sense that that change has been very slow in coming.

I think that the UK has done too much structural change, but we have orphaned structures in the Scottish public policy landscape. For example, health boards are organised at a regional level of public administration that has not existed for 25 years, and that is odd. In fact, we are adding to that with health and social care partnerships. I do not think that Police Scotland was created for Christie reasons at all; it was purely about economies of scale. If we consider some of the handbrake turns that had to be done, that was about returning to community delivery because things had become very centralised.

There been very few examples of genuine public service reform, despite the changes that have taken place—devolution itself and societal changes. What is more, what has happened has not happened along Christie lines. Is that a fault? Is there a need to ask more searching questions about whether we have the right structures—whether they have adequate public accountability and whether they are delivering the outcomes that we have outlined? I would probably start with health—and, if you will forgive the pun, that comes with all the health warnings that come with discussing the NHS and health policy.

You are nodding your head most vigorously, Professor Mitchell, so I will go to you first.