I would say yes, and that is clearly indicated by a lot of the evidence. If we look at business gateway as a Scotland-based service, as Lynne Cadenhead indicated, what are the quality standards? What are we trying to achieve for Scotland? All areas are very different, so what can each of our local areas and communities contribute to economic growth?
That is one of the strengths of having a business gateway-type service. It should be driven by local business opportunities and the needs of the local business community. Although there are strengths in having a national focus, that national focus must be clear about what we are trying to achieve. As you can see in the surveys, we are all quite clear about that.
In the work that we were doing through the Enterprise and Skills Strategic Board I picked up that the key performance indicators and targets are completely out of date. In the targets that we are looking at, we are playing with numbers, and that is not quality. I suggest that we have been measuring a lot of our economic performance on the wrong data. Data drives human behaviour. If I am getting paid according to how many start-up businesses I am responsible for in Lanarkshire, that is what I will go for.
We have to have some measurement, but we have inadvertently driven that in the direction of the number of start-ups and growth companies. That is where the national focus should come in. We should be asking what we want to achieve here, economically. Is it more jobs? Is it a special type of job? That will vary from area to area. We are all saying that we need to revisit what it is that we are trying to achieve. We need to revisit the KPIs, as we call them in the submission.
One suggestion in our submission is a measurement of partnership. I am talking about true partnership between the public and private sectors. We will all face reduced funding—that goes for the private sector, too. Can we look closely at that? Let us say that we are measuring workshops. In the past year, business gateway has held 25,000 workshops. That is a hell of a lot of workshops. If that is how we are measuring partnership, business gateway has done a good job. However, if we are measuring economic impact for Scotland, that is not the right measurement. It drives behaviour and, at a national level, inconsistency of approach.
We should consider and compare the services that are being provided in the local authorities that are running the contracts—in particular the Elevator programme—with the services that are provided in the local authorities that are not running the contracts. We are looking at new models now, and I am not sure whether we can take the knowledge and expertise, and the lessons learned from what is happening—particularly in Ireland—and reshape business gateway at a local level, while continuing to have a national focus, so that we do not have a postcode lottery in which, if I happen to be in Moray, I do not get the same service that I would get in Dumfries and Galloway.