Chamber and committees

That is why the scheme is designed in the way that it is. It was a bit of a culture shock for some people, because they expected us to say, “Here’s some money—go and do your thing.” The funding is an investment that is supposed to save money, so there must be a return on it, with money getting clawed back through the process. The scheme institutionalises improvements, because people work differently in order to realise benefits, which continue into the future. If some money goes back into the scheme in, say, years 3, 4 and 5, people will clearly be getting all the benefits in the future.

Yes, consultation will follow on from that. We will not ask people what they think should be in a PSR bill unless we have identified cases where legislative change is required to remove a specific barrier.

That is absolutely the case. If proposals are made on how we might reshape statutory responsibilities, they will be part of the scope of the conversation. Clearly, it depends on what those proposals are, because they might not be possible, desirable or whatever, but they will be part of the conversation because it is all about figuring out what is done best at a national level, a regional level, an existing local authority level or a more local community level, and where best to design, deliver and make decisions on those services. If proposals are made as part of the conversation in that space, I am absolutely up for looking at them.

We will have a PSR bill, which is to address any legislative changes that it might be decided that we should progress.

When it comes to public bodies, I think that there will be very little reform that requires primary legislation. There might be some that does—we are working through that at the moment—in which case, that would be introduced. In the local government space, there would clearly be the requirement for primary legislation, but that will depend on how the timeline develops.

There could well be other things such as data sharing. If we wanted to do more centralised management of certain resources, for example, there are barriers that prevent us from doing that, yet doing so would allow us to leverage cost savings. There might be examples, and we will flush them out. However, any bill will, of course, go through the normal process.

We have been clear that there is to be a reshaping of the public sector workforce. As I said, we anticipate that there should be more people working in many of the front-line areas. As technology moves, it will move at different paces in different aspects, and different opportunities will present themselves in different parts of the public sector. Therefore, I would not want to express that in raw numbers at this stage.

The best way to describe that is that it is a toolkit for leaders who are engaged in the transformation process, and others, to use to navigate their way through some of the challenges that might present. The document walks through each stage of the workforce management processes and lays out what best practice looks like as well as signposting to other guidance that exists. The intention is that leaders in public sector organisations or people who are engaged as a partner in the process can understand what best practice looks like, how they go about various stages of the transformation programme and how they work with others to ensure that that is delivered most effectively.

Indeed.

Yes, it has. We started to roll out recruitment controls on the core civil service just over three years ago, which are showing the results to which I referred.

We have been engaging with other public bodies on the scope to roll out similar recruitment control processes across the wider public sector. Indeed, how best to do that forms one of the chapters in the workforce management governance framework that we talked about earlier.

10:00

A budget cycle is coming up, and the Deputy First Minister leads the budget process. She is seized of the need to make progress on reform and, through the budget, to rewire the way that money flows through the system, just as we need to rewire everything else. I am confident that we will take steps to move that forward in short order.

There are various parts to that. Participatory budgeting is done at a very small scale, and that plays very much into the community empowerment agenda. As we move forward and look at how we dramatically increase the amount of empowerment that goes to local communities, how we line budgets up to support that is important. The third sector has, frankly, been a victim of a lot of the ways that we do this stuff, because we have umpteen bits of Government, all with different wee pots of money that they have got through their budget process, all cascading down. They then go to the third sector with different grant-funding schemes to do different things, and the third sector has to re-engineer itself on a shoestring and on a dime to be able to tap into different bits of Government funding to satisfy different criteria for very siloed objectives, rather than looking at the whole system.

We need a whole-system approach to working with the third sector on how we re-engineer the funding streams that go to the third sector so that they support, effectively, the whole family support mechanism. The third sector does that naturally. Government stops the sector doing it naturally, because we get in the way. That is central. That is part of how money flows through the system, and it is really important to get that right, too.