Official Report 565KB pdf
Good morning, and welcome to the seventh meeting in 2026 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. We will continue taking evidence on legacy issues in order to inform a report to our successor committee. Today, we will focus specifically on the public administration part of our remit. We will hear from the following witnesses in round-table format: Sarah Davidson, chief executive of Carnegie UK; Alison Payne, research director at Enlighten; Dr Ian Elliott, senior lecturer in public administration at the University of Glasgow; and Professor Paul Cairney, who we will soon be joined by and who is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Stirling.
We have apologies from Michelle Thomson, who is unwell, and Michael Marra will be joining us soon. I welcome everyone to the meeting and thank the witnesses for their written submissions.
I intend to allow around 90 minutes for this session. If you would like to be brought into the discussion at any point, please indicate that to the clerks and I can call you—I see that Liz Smith is fired up already, but we will start with Sarah Davidson.
Your written submission says:
“A Scottish Parliament committee should continue to have an explicit remit to scrutinise public administration over the next parliamentary term”.
As you know, that statement is hitting the wires this morning, and there is a lot of coverage of it. Will you discuss what you said in your submission, why you feel that this is important and where specifically in the Parliament it should be embedded?
Thank you for the invitation to give evidence. As I indicated in that submission, it has been hugely valuable to have a committee during this parliamentary session with the role of looking at public administration.
Inevitably, individual committees that are aligned to the portfolios that ministers have in the Scottish Government will tend to focus on policy proposals or the delivery of things in those portfolios. For committees to be able to look across the work of Government as a whole and to ask questions about how the Government has done things, rather than what it has done, has huge value.
It has been particularly helpful when this committee has looked at questions that were connected to public service reform or the national performance framework—which are, in essence, about how the Government arranges and organises the delivery of policy across the whole Administration—and when it has been able to ask questions about whether things are being done as efficiently or as effectively as they might be and to build up a degree of expertise in that area, because some of those things are quite complex.
As I noted in our submission, the question that you asked about where finance should be in the Parliament is really significant. Finance has sometimes been seen as a bit separate from other things, and we at Carnegie UK are really interested in the connection between the resources that the Government has and how it deploys those resources in order to achieve outcomes. The ability of a committee of the Parliament to look not only at the resources but at how they are deployed in pursuit of strategic goals is really significant.
As we have described it, we think that there are mutually reinforcing benefits of having scrutiny of budgets, resources and administration sitting in the same place. The committee has started to demonstrate the benefit of that. Not only do we think that a committee in the future should have responsibility for looking at public administration, but we feel that allying that committee to the one that has responsibility for budgets has real potential.
I am very interested in what you have said about that. I assume that you would prefer the committee that takes on that role to have finance and public administration within it, rather than having separate committees. What should happen in the Parliament is that all committees hold the Government to account on everything, but you are quite right that people tend to look in their silos and do not always see that broader picture. Is it your recommendation that the next Parliament should have a finance and public administration committee? Am I right to say that you are not trying to separate those remits?
Yes, that is the case. I was interested that the note that the clerk prepared for this meeting referred to the committee’s interest in the model of a committee for the future. We might go on to speak about that later. That is a separate question—it would potentially be possible to have a committee that did that and had a slightly different remit from finance and public administration. However, you could also potentially build into a finance and public administration committee a particular responsibility for scrutinising the Government for its ability to take a long-term view and to embed data into decision making.
You mentioned that this committee has taken on quite a large role when it comes to the scrutiny of public administration, particularly of things such as public sector reform. If the next Parliament were to have a committee with the same remit—finance and public administration—would you like to see anything else in that scrutiny role in relation to public administration?
“Public administration” is a broad term—I am sure that some of my colleagues who are academic experts in public administration will have more to say about that—and, as a result, there is quite a lot of scope for embracing things in that remit without having to specify them at the outset.
From my perspective, finance and public administration is a sufficiently broad remit to allow a future committee to examine aspects of how Government is organised and conducted in Scotland, which would help the Parliament with its accountability and scrutiny role more generally.
That is an important area. The situation with one of this committee’s predecessors was that finance went with the constitution, which was seen to be far too big and cumbersome a remit. It did not have the adequate scrutiny that was required—although I must say that that committee did pretty well in difficult circumstances.
I have been here for 20 years and I have seen that, in some areas, the scrutiny—the holding of the Government to account—is not particularly strong. That is not a party-political comment; I just do not think that it is strong enough. When it comes to the future of the Parliament, do you feel that we should be doing anything else?
It would be interesting for a successor committee to think carefully about where the public administration will need to be strong in order to meet the challenges of the next five to 10 years. I wonder whether that is the starting point. It is evident that there will be significant fiscal challenges for the next Administration to manage. Therefore, the choices that the Administration makes about how it deploys its resources, how it organises itself and how it uses data to support decisions—all those kinds of things—seem to be the most important issues to ask the next Administration questions about. There is a little bit of form following function.
Thank you—that is helpful.
It is quite interesting that you say that you feel that the Finance and Public Administration Committee remit that we have now should more or less continue, because the Finance Committee that I chaired from 2011 to 2016 was just a finance committee. It then evolved into the Finance and Constitution Committee, which, as Liz Smith pointed out, was something of a shotgun marriage. Do you feel that the right structure is for the finance committee to be interlinked with public administration? I would be keen to hear others’ views on that.
I think so. There is a bit of thinking to do about whether public administration could sit any more obviously with any other committee, although I do not think that that is necessarily the most helpful way to think about it. There is no doubt, particularly given the way in which the Scottish Government structures itself and the way in which it tries to govern policy, that it makes a very strong connection—at least in theory—between the outcomes that it is trying to achieve, the way in which it organises itself to achieve those and how it spends its money to that end.
Not only this committee but other committees have made comments in reports over the past few years about the lack of a clear connection between money being invested and the long-term goals that the Government has committed itself to. There is therefore a potentially strong synergy that this committee can hold around the scrutiny of the way in which the Government decides to spend its money, the outcomes that it is trying to achieve and the way in which it governs that.
There is also an argument, which others might raise, that it should be an independent committee. All the committees need to be covered effectively with members, so I suppose that it is about trying to get the optimum balance.
Good morning. In your submission, you seem to place a lot of strategic importance on the national performance framework, which is subject to review at this point. We expect the new framework and outcomes to emerge early in the next session of Parliament. If that is going to be the centrepiece of how we hold the public administration to account in Scotland, or one of the central pillars of that, what does that framework need to look like?
The criticism that has been made on a cross-party basis, including from ministers, is that the framework has not been fit for purpose and has been far too woolly. If it is going to be a fundamental pillar of the way in which we hold the public administration to account, what does it need to look like and what should be the outcomes? By common consent, they are too nebulous at the moment.
I declare an interest as I have been a member of the advisory committee that is working with the Scottish Government on its review of the national performance framework, but I will not say here anything that I have not said in private there, too.
Two important things have been missing in how the national performance framework has operated in recent years, which I will be looking for the review to address. The first is a lack of a clear articulation or connection between the priorities of the Government of the day and the long-term goals for Scotland. If you look at the national performance framework in its international context of the way in which so-called wellbeing frameworks are developed, you see that such frameworks are designed to set long-term goals that the population at large and, ideally, all political parties recognise as being a vision for the country; they are not something against which you measure your progress every six months or whatever.
It is therefore important that the Government of the day is able to articulate how its priorities—the things in its manifesto and the things that it puts in its programme for government every year—will make progress towards those long-term goals. Different parties will have different views about the best means of doing that and, for me, that is where the democratic legitimacy sits.
To date, there has been an insufficiently clear connection, with the result that, understandably, Parliament and others try to draw a direct line between small programme bits of work and the long-term goals, which does not work, because they are too ill-defined for that. I would want to see a much clearer description of how the work of Government connects to the long-term goals.
The second thing that I would like to see, which came through clearly in the committee’s report on the NPF, is a much clearer articulation of the ways of working in administration that are more likely to lead towards positive long-term outcomes. Embedded in the Welsh example, which takes a similar approach to policy governance, are stipulated ways of working that Government and public bodies need to adopt, including collaboration and a focus on prevention and long-termism. There is also support in the system for individuals and organisations to learn how to work better in that way.
09:15
Part of our critique of the national performance framework is that insufficient attention has been given to how individuals and organisations would work differently if they were working within such a policy governance model. That aspect was much stronger when the NPF was first put in place in 2007, and it has become a bit lost since. It is interesting that the public service reform strategy starts to articulate some ways of working like that, but it is unclear on how those ways of working will be embedded across systems.
My view is that a restatement of the value of the NPF as a shared national set of goals, clarity about how an individual Administration will contribute to that, and support for and focus on the ways of working that are likely to deliver outcomes—rather than simply focusing on inputs and outputs—would at least be a significant step forward.
You have referred to—and the Scottish Government repeatedly refers to—the importance of preventative spend. In other words, prevention—whether of social or healthcare ills—is better than cure, and it is significantly cheaper than cure. To what extent does the Government need to get smarter at identifying actual elements of preventative spend, rather than just badging the latest project of the day as preventative when it could still lead to greater expenditure and acuity of problems further down the line?
Professor Cairney made the point in his evidence to the committee that there has been an aspiration to invest more in and shift systems towards prevention for a long time. All Governments find that difficult to do, and it does not get any easier as money becomes more constrained.
However, there is no doubt that the only hope for tackling some of the big problems—which have big costs, not just in a fiscal sense but for individuals and communities—is to find ways to encourage services to collaborate with each other far more effectively in order to support people and to address and tackle issues much earlier. The 10-year health plan and the recent strategy published by Public Health Scotland are good examples of parts of the public service trying hard to do that, but a degree of honesty about how difficult that is and support for services in making the transition are probably needed.
I agree that performative badging is not helpful, because it risks simplifying something that is very complex. I go back to the convener’s earlier question. A committee with a public administration remit can play a really helpful role of getting under the skin of that complexity; understanding the relationship between how money is allocated now and what long-term outcomes we will get for that; and understanding how different bits of the system have to work together across budgets, which is one of the challenges. Where investment in preventative systems and services takes place is not necessarily where the savings will fall in due course, if the systems are successful.
Good morning. I only recently rejoined the committee, so I have not spent a huge amount of time on it in the current session, when its remit has included public administration. I was previously on the Finance and Constitution Committee, and I agree that the current remit is an improvement. However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, is there a danger of the public administration framing of the committee’s remit feeling a bit like the Department of Administrative Affairs that the writers of “Yes Minister” created so that their principal character could have a role in pretty much any issue that was happening? Is there a danger of there being almost a blurring of the distinction between this committee’s remit and the subject committees’ remits, particularly if we are talking about potentially challenging public service reform proposals and looking through a principally finance lens at stakeholders and organisations that are experts in their particular remits and subject areas? Is there a danger of conflicts between portfolio remits and the overarching concept of public administration, or of stepping on toes?
Before Sarah Davidson answers, I should say that our other guests can also answer these questions if they so wish. They are not all directed at Sarah.
I imagine that committees, particularly those with remits that touch on the work of the subject committees, have to attend to that risk all the time. However, from my perspective, that would not be a reason not to go down that route. There is also something in the way that the finance committee, in all its guises, has probably played a role in raising awareness across the Parliament as a whole of how budgets work, how they are allocated and how to do effective scrutiny of budgets, which is carried out in different ways by all committees. A committee with a public administration remit can play a role in raising the level of awareness and conscious competence and confidence in scrutinising how things are done by all committees.
It is helpful to have a committee with that title and specific remit, but I do not think that that should exclude other committees from taking an interest in how effectively Government is discharging the bit of policy that they are scrutinising. The current committee has gone about fulfilling that part of its remit by choosing quite specific things to look at, and has chosen things that I do not think other committees would have come at in the same way. For me, that is a demonstration of the value that the committee can add by having public administration very explicitly in its remit.
Would anyone like to comment on the implicit meanings that can be drawn from the phrase “public service reform”? There are a great many people working in public services who know that the way that their jobs are delivered needs to change—that things are not ideal and not everything that they could be. However, there are times when the phrase “public service reform” is received as code for cuts or for a retreat of the state from people’s lives, which would be the opposite of what the Government says is its intention, which is to better deliver for people.
Do the witnesses feel that those who are most expert in delivering public services—the workforce that is doing it right now—have the opportunity to properly shape the concept of public service reform, in order to ensure that it enables them to do their jobs better and provide better public services, rather than its becoming a proxy for the retreat of the state from people’s lives?
I will bring in John Mason while folk think about that—we can come back to it if we so wish.
Ms Davidson mentioned the question of outcomes as against inputs and outputs. That also appeared in your paper, Ms Payne, so I will ask you to expand on that.
Your paper says that you were concerned about a lack of data to evaluate outcomes and about a
“focus more on inputs over outcomes.”
We have raised this issue often over the years, but is it not inevitable that a Parliament such as this one focuses on inputs—how much money we are spending on things—or have other people got it right?
The problem, though, is that, if we focus on the inputs, particularly against the backdrop of shrinking budgets, how do we ensure that that money is delivering value for money and helping those most in need? We use the example of free bus passes, but too many communities do not have access to public transport. It is about an overview of how we ensure that we are making the most of the resources that we have. That is our concern in relation to the data that we use.
We need to look at both the short term and the long term. One of our concerns is how we measure over the long term and how we shift the discussion so that if we properly invest in prevention, we actually see the output. That seems to be one of the issues that has come up at different committees. If we properly invest in prevention and prevent the issues from coming up in the first place, where will the data be? It will be two or three parliamentary sessions later before we have that data, but that does not mean that a policy is not working.
I turn to Patrick Harvie’s question about involving people on the front line. One of our concerns is how we involve local government in this discussion. A lot of the people on the front line are in the local government space. In the recent budget, there was an awful lot more money for the national health service, but a reduction for local authorities. That will hit prevention.
When it comes to the broader discussion about public administration, there is an important role for the local government committee—and for local government voices—because otherwise it becomes a sort of centralisation and asking what we can do from the centre. There is an issue about what the relationship is between central and local government in Scotland, 30 years on from reorganisation. It has been one of the difficult conversations that we have not wanted to have—a bit like council tax—but, if you are looking at public administration, you have to look at what that role is, and what that relationship is, and at how we then ensure that those on the front line have a role in public service reform. We cannot deliver public service reform unless we do it in our communities and with those individuals.
I will follow up on the point about data and outcomes. Often, the way in which the Scottish Government puts it to the committee in relation to, for example, the Scottish child payment, is to ask, “Who could argue with seeking to eradicate child poverty?”. Huge amounts of money are being spent on concessionary travel, for example, but, as you have rightly identified, that does not mean that somebody in Dumfriesshire has any greater access to a bus, despite the fact they would have the freedom to travel without paying if they had a bus service. What needs to be done to pivot away from chasing the headlines with national developments and towards pointing out to the public and the Parliament that there is always an opportunity cost—often, a significant one—in pursuing free bus travel but disinvesting in rural bus services. Another example would be extolling the virtues of the Scottish child payment without pointing out that that £500 million could be spent on reducing child poverty in other ways, such as through employment or better housing for families. What needs to be done to re-engineer that conversation, not only internally but externally, with the public?
There is a role for Government and Opposition parties to accept that there are no easy answers. I accept that we are a few months out from an election, so nobody is going to say, “Oh, by the way, we’ve got no money left, so promising freebies for this, that and the next thing is a little bit harder.” The reality of—
It is a £60 billion budget, so to say that no money is left is a slight exaggeration.
I am thinking of the problems that we face, such as how on earth we deliver social care.
What you mean is that there is not enough money in certain areas, rather than there being no money.
Yes. It is about choices.
If the under-22s are subsidised on buses, that involves a cash transfer to the bus companies, which enables them to be more likely to run a service because more people will use it. The bus companies will get an allocation of funding for that.
The data does not support that. We have been digging around. In a number of areas, a freedom of information request is needed and the information has to be conglomerated and pulled together. Alternatively, the issue comes up in news stories. Even in urban areas, some kids cannot get a public transport bus to get them to school on time. That should not involve digging around to find information.
It is also about how we work with local authorities—we have to send 32 freedom of information requests to draw the data together to compare and ask how we can learn. For example, there is a difference between Edinburgh and Glasgow bus services. There might be lessons to learn, but something that works in one area might not work in others. Instead of having a national concessionary bus scheme, could the money be devolved to local authorities to decide how they target and support individuals or families that need that money the most?
It is about choices and having that conversation with the public. In the press today, there is discussion over how we fund our universities. I do not think that we should implement the English system in Scotland. That would not be the right decision. However, London Economics has estimated that, if we did, that would free up £1 billion for the Scottish exchequer. That is a choice, and a discussion that we should be having on what the best use of resources is: is it £1 billion for tuition fees, or is it radically fixing our social care system?
It is about having that kind of discussion and getting into the nitty-gritty of what choices and decisions we want to make—and their impact.
09:30
Recently, it was put to the committee that not everything can be a priority. The Government makes great virtue of the fact that it is prioritising eradicating and reducing child poverty at the same time that it is potentially making real-terms cuts to councils. Is the Government being honest enough with the country and saying that, if it has a major policy priority, it has to deprioritise something else when it has a fixed budget?
Of course it has to do that. There are other issues where we have mixed money. For example, the NHS is a priority and social care does not seem to be, but if we want to fix our NHS, we need to fix social care—there is that kind of understanding. We did some polling that we have referenced in our evidence that shows that the public do not understand how social care is funded. They also do not necessarily understand the relationship between central and local government. It is easy to say, “We have provided 1,140 hours of childcare”, but, in practice, how do you find that childcare when you cannot get access to a nursery or there is an issue with how your local authority manages its partnership agreements. That also touches on the points that were made in the committee’s report about public expectations. The disconnect between what is said by the Government and how things are delivered in practice is contributing to the feeling of disenchantment with politics.
I want to ask Professor Cairney about choices. I am interested in something that you wrote. Your submission says:
“the NPF often gives the impression that a government does not need to make these hard choices”,
and then there is the point about engaging the public. Can you expand on how we do that?
The NPF is a happy document; it is very aspirational. One of the things that came out of the United Kingdom Covid inquiry was that people were describing things under oath; it is useful to put people under oath so that they tell the truth about what they are doing.
The then Deputy First Minister used the word “aspirational”. A normal description of the NPF would be that it is a tool for decision making, but it has been described more vaguely than that. You see that with a lot of high-level decision making at the United Nations and so on, in that the only way that agreement can be achieved is to make it vague and the hard choices are put away for later. I think that that is what the NPF represents: it is a way of saying, “This is the level at which this all makes sense when it is all combined.” However, every choice will challenge that. It comes down to something as basic as the first priority that you pursue, such as economic growth, which would underpin it. You cannot look at the NPF for that, because there are a million and one priorities. It then becomes a confused exercise. The Government could look at how it is delivering economic growth in its manifesto commitments relating to the NPF, but they do not really fit; I do not think that there is a thought process around that.
When I was part of one of the inquiries, we went to visit civil servants and they described having the NPF on their wall; they said, “We are always referring to this thing.” I have a picture on my wall of a cat saying, “Hang in there, baby”, which I think is just as useful.
When we were discussing our guests for this meeting, I said to the clerking team, “We need to invite Paul Cairney, because he has a healthy cynical approach that will be good for the session.”
I will add one thing, before I hand back to John Mason. Your submission says that the national performance framework
“struggles to translate this high-level thinking into detailed deliverable action.”
My impression is that it is not there to do that. I think that it is there to project the sense that it is coherent, but it is coherence at a certain level. It is at the level of, “We want health to inform education and education to inform health. Healthy people can get the benefit of more education and more educated people can be healthier.” However, that does not help us to determine how much we should spend on either priority and which outcomes we should pursue, and whether we should get more doctors and nurses. It does not do any of that.
I will build on that a little. If we were to speak to our successor committee, should we be saying, “You need to be a bit more blunt with people?” Should politicians be more blunt and say, “We’ve got hard choices to make”, or are politicians just victims of what is happening in society?
Politicians as victims?
Maybe I should have said “pawns”.
I do not know the answer to that. My other stock joke is that I am completely unelectable. My description of what I would do would not fly with anyone. I would be the one saying, “If you think about it, I’m not really going to achieve anything here.” With some of this, politicians have to perform. They have to say, “This is what I want to do, and I’ll put my energy into it. Here are my values, and I will use them to make choices, using my judgment.” It is useful when people express aspirations for what they are doing, instead of going straight to saying, “Well, that didn’t work out.” You need a nice balance.
Sarah Davidson talked about building consensus around the target, but is there not an unavoidable tension between consensus and intent? Things become too woolly and aspirational. Instead of very bland language, we need what you are describing, Professor Cairney, which is for people to set out what they want to do to get there.
It is important for elected policy makers to say in some detail what they want to do and how they would prioritise. That is the bit that is missing. You are facing a trade-off. What do you do at the expense of something else? A manifesto does not really do that; it is just a wish list. The NPF is similar.
It is about priorities, but it also brings in the importance of public administration. Let us think back to the broader principles of the Parliament. It was about recruiting people from a wide range of society with lots of different skills. Very few people will come in with public administration skills. That is okay; the important thing is to have a skilful civil service and public sector that are able to translate those aims into something manageable. Ian Elliott and I are on a journey of being much more positive about things.
It has been an uphill struggle.
I translated all my gripes into five positive messages. One of them would be that we need a skilful Scottish Government civil service that is well trained and constantly improving its policy analysis and cross-sectoral collaborations.
That is a nice segue to Ian Elliott’s submission. Ian said:
“The FPAC should consider how best to ensure that the Scottish Parliament has the knowledge and skills to fulfil its duties in scrutinising legislation and holding the Scottish Government to account.”
That sounds quite good, doesn’t it?
Do you want to expand on how best we can do that?
First, a lot of the discussion that has happened so far emphasises why it is important to have a committee that combines finance and public administration. I do not agree with everything that Paul Cairney said about the NPF. It is still quite helpful to have a strategic vision for the country and an idea of the outcomes that you are trying to achieve as a country. However, you need to align your resources to those outcomes and that vision. It is essential to have finance and public administration together because you cannot do anything without having the resources in the right place at the right time. That is absolutely key.
On public administration, I would not accept a caricature drawing on a 40-year-old comedy show. If that is our reference point for what public administration is, we are in trouble. For me, public administration is about protecting the democratic institutions that underpin our system of government. Across the world, many of those institutions are under significant threat, and I do not think that any of us should take it for granted that similar forces will not come here, too. Having strong institutions is absolutely essential to having a democratic system of government, and that involves having a well-trained professional workforce. Again, it is a question of resources—having the right resources in the right place at the right time to enable the Government’s mandated role to be achieved. That is why having a skilled and professional workforce is essential.
It has been noted that the public service reform strategy includes plans for cuts to the workforce due to the budgetary constraints that everyone has touched on. If we cut the workforce, two things will come out of that. First, if we are to lose 0.5 per cent of the workforce every year for five years, who will we lose? Will we lose the most experienced staff, or will we find ways of mitigating that to ensure that we retain institutional knowledge, experience and skills in the workforce? The second question is how we protect and invest in the people who will be left, who will be charged with making the significant changes that will need to be made to implement the public service reform strategy.
Those are two significant questions for the successor committee to ask in the next parliamentary session. Thought needs to be given to how we support the civil service and the wider public sector workforce, how we maintain strong institutions of government and how we allocate resources to ensure that the national outcomes are achieved.
This question is for Paul Cairney. Recently, the Scottish Government has made great play of co-creation in policy making and working closely with those with lived experience. In your submission, you say:
“Avoid power hoarding at the ‘centre’. Co-produce policy with citizens.”
That was meant to happen with the national care service, the establishment of which was meant to be a collaborative effort involving all stakeholders, including those with lived experience. However, basically, that crashed against a wall.
I am mindful of the old Henry Ford adage that, if you asked your customers what they wanted, they would say, “Faster horses.” Could the result of such co-production be policy inertia, because it involves outsourcing difficult decision making to citizens? Ultimately, people want their Government to come up with solutions, not to keep asking them question after question in order to avoid taking tough decisions on—in the case of the example that I mentioned—social care.
I was determined to be positive. The positive version of the answer to that question is that the Scottish Government is responsible for ensuring that citizens and stakeholders have a meaningful say in everyday policy making. That is the good part. The process does not have to involve delegating responsibility for creating policy; the Scottish Government should take responsibility for making the choices on what comes out of that process.
To make a mildly negative point, it is very difficult to know how sincere any of those processes are, because it is possible for a Government to go through a process simply to be able to say, “You have been consulted. We have done this with you. Therefore, you should be satisfied with the result.”
Some of those tensions have emerged in some of the ministerial responses that have been given over the years. Essentially, they have tried to strike a balance between consulting people and telling them that they cannot expect to get what they want out of the process. That is fine, but I am not sure about how we know what it is doing and why. I do not think that much of that process is written down. The Government will say, “There was a consultation. We spoke to this number of people. It went well. We made this decision.” That contrasts with the feedback from lots of groups, which say, “We were kind of consulted, but we have no real clue whether it went anywhere.”
More than 30 years ago, when I was a Glasgow city councillor, the council decided to consult on the closure of seven of its 36 secondary schools. After a very long consultation, the decision was taken—remarkably—to close those seven secondary schools. Rather than deciding to close five or six of them, or even to close different ones, the council decided to close those seven specific schools. The decision had already been made. The council went out to consultation, but there was really no intention of taking any cognisance of it. Of course, everybody who responded to the consultation said, “Please don’t shut my school”—blah, blah, blah.
There is an issue with consultation. I consider that “participation” is a better word than “consultation” if people are directly involved and participating in decision making. That example was from three decades ago, and a lot of cynicism has built up since then about how impactful consultation is. To many, it often seems to be a box‑ticking exercise.
09:45
If you want to go full cynicism, you would simply track the words that the Scottish Government uses for the people who are involved. I forget what term it is using now, but it has previously used “stakeholders”, “partners” and “co-producers”—that sort of thing. The Government cycles through language that does not reflect what people are actually doing.
One way to approach it would be to do it properly; the other would be not to pretend. There is an honesty about consultation: you can say that you will put an issue out formally to people, that you will gather views and that you will then make a decision. I would appreciate candour, rather than being told by Government that it wants to co‑create something with you when you do not quite believe it.
I was wondering whether we need to consider what we are specifically saying to the next session of Parliament—not just because it follows this one, but because of the characteristics that we expect it to have. Dr Elliott talked about the forces that are undermining democratic institutions elsewhere, and I would like to share the hope that that will not happen here, but, if the polls are right, there will be a cohort from that part of the political spectrum.
Given the number of MSPs who are not seeking re-election, the expectation is that about half of those who will be elected to Parliament will be new. That means that we will have a Parliament that is the least experienced since 1999. Political parties could put more experienced members on a committee dealing with public administration, but, if we are trying to improve scrutiny more generally across the Parliament, how should we advise the next committee to inculcate that culture when the Parliament as a whole is relatively inexperienced? I am thinking about some of the councils down south, where Reform has won control. They said that they had expected to find lots of waste and frivolous spending, but there was none of that. Those are the kind of false expectations that could arise.
I should say that three members of this committee are retiring. We do not know whether there will even be the same clerking team in the next session of Parliament. There will be fundamental changes to the committee, even if the remit stays the same. That is before we have an election—not all of us might get back in.
Do you want to respond to that, Ian Elliott?
It is an important issue to think about and discuss. Page 7 of the committee paper that was prepared in advance of this session states:
“The Committee found it difficult to identify how key aspects of the decision-making process and civil service governance work in practice”.
That a public administration committee is saying such a thing is a problem. It highlights and stresses the need for this committee to continue into the next parliamentary session and for it to be properly resourced. I hope that whoever sits on this committee—assuming that it continues—will have the experience and capability to scrutinise the next Government, whoever that happens to be. What sort of institutions is the Government leaving behind? Has it strengthened the institutions of government during its time in power, or has it weakened them? Those are important questions for any Government to ask.
Undoubtedly, more work is needed to develop an understanding, both in the Parliament and in the Government, of how public administration operates and how the governance of the civil service functions in principle and in practice.
There are also issues of intergovernmental relations here, which it is important to highlight. One of the things that we have been doing in the centre for public policy is looking at poverty as an example of a policy issue that does not fit neatly within one particular part of Government but cuts across all parts and levels of government. Alison Payne made the point earlier about the importance of local government to these discussions, and it is absolutely essential to have local government take part in this conversation. You need intergovernmental working and a collaborative approach that underpins how Governments work. Again, it is for the future committee to hold to account the future Government on whether it is doing that.
Professor Cairney, on your point about consultation, do you feel that there is a problem in that regard in the Parliament? In this session, we have seen a very considerable increase in the number of framework bills, by which we mean bills that are not complete when they are presented to the Parliament, with the consultation happening after scrutiny by the Parliament. That has raised concerns for us as a finance committee because of the financial—
Sorry, but it is not consultation; it is co-design.
Sorry, convener. Of course, it is co-design.
That has been a problem for this committee. In about five or six cases that I can think of, there has been a huge issue with the financial memorandum accompanying a bill because it has not been accurate. Craig Hoy mentioned the social care policy, and it was a huge issue there.
The second problem is that it is very difficult to scrutinise effectively if some of the co-design does not happen until after the parliamentary process. Do you think that that is a major problem, and what do you think we should do about it?
That is an issue for the Parliament, because it relies on the Scottish Government telling the Parliament what it is doing, as the Parliament does not really have the resources to investigate too much. A lot of the time, it is a case of the Parliament saying, “Tell us what you’re doing, and we’ll give you an assessment.” That would be fine if there was a procedure whereby the Government had to return after a certain point in time to tell the Parliament how it went, maybe as part of a statutory commitment.
As I have found to my cost, co-design, participation and working together require an incredible level of skill in facilitation and conversation. People think that you just turn up with your sticky notes and you can get it sorted, but it is difficult. Part of the difficulty is in trying to document and learn from how something went. Therefore, the role of the Parliament could be to say, “After a certain amount of time, tell us what you did and how and why you did it, and whether it improved the legislation.” You could then think about—
Excuse me, but is that not the problem with not having effective post-legislative scrutiny?
Yes. I am now conscious of my age, because I feel as though we have talked—
It is not as bad as mine.
I feel as though we have talked about the lack of post-legislative scrutiny for 20 years or something like that, and the point that I used to make was that it has to connect to pre-legislative scrutiny. To carry out proper post-legislative scrutiny, you must have a pre-legislative process that sets out the exact aims that the Government is seeking to achieve and how you can hold it to account later. The problem is that, when you go through the process, the aims are a little bit vague and then it just becomes a contest to determine success and failure, which does not go anywhere.
I want to respond to Patrick Harvie’s question about the potential growth in populism, the need to strengthen institutions and what could potentially be done. We mentioned in our evidence the committee system and the work that was done by the commission on parliamentary reform about strengthening the committees, which was published 10 years ago. In the next parliamentary session, there will be an awful lot of new individuals, particularly from a new party, one of whom could be convening the finance committee. What would that mean for this discussion?
The current Finance and Public Administration Committee has a very good reputation—it is award winning and it carries weight. That will not necessarily be the case in the next parliamentary session, so the question is about what can be done now to protect and strengthen our committees. That is why measures such as directly electing committee conveners, instead of convenerships being party political posts, must be considered now. After May, the difference in what happens could really transform the impact of the committees and undermine the good that they can do. Having a conversation about how that could be shifted—
I was going to come on to that particular issue, because I do not see directly elected conveners as being a solution whatsoever. For example, you might have 60 new MSPs. Will we even know who those folk are, by and large? People will know who their party colleagues are, of course, but how will we—those of us who are re-elected, if we get re-elected—know who to vote for? We need 16 conveners. After you have taken the ministers out, you will not have many people left who want to be a convener—I will not be a convener in the next Parliament if I am re-elected, for example—so you might have a pool of only 20 folk who are even interested in doing it, and you have to elect 16 conveners out of those. How do you avoid the party whip being used to say, “Okay, it’s a free vote, but we’d really like you to vote for Mr X or Ms Y”? I do not see that that will somehow be the magic bullet that improves committees.
You are right. It is not a silver bullet, but it would certainly be a way to improve things, because it would remove party control over the committee system. The secret ballot has been a success down at Westminster.
Westminster has a huge pool of 650 MPs, whereas there are only 129 MSPs here.
Indeed. The same number of posts would need to be filled, but, instead of the decisions being made by the party leaderships, the decisions would be made by the collective of 129. People can make a case—this has ended up happening at Westminster—for relatively new MPs chairing committees because of their experience outside the House of Commons. There is a way to do it.
Ken Macintosh’s commission looked at the idea 10 years ago. It is about trying to take the party politics out of the decision, and I think that it brings a bit of public buy-in to it, because there is transparency and accountability. The committee works for the betterment of policy instead of it being a whipped decision. Over the years, some committees have worked better than others; some have been chaired by independent-minded individuals while others have very much followed what the parties have said and done. There have been inquiries and reports on legislation in which what has been said in investigations by a committee has been entirely different from the committee’s final say.
I cannot speak for other parties, but there are people in my party who, whether or not they are elected to be a convener by the Parliament, will still be either independently minded or a party hack, as the case may be, because that is just what they are. I am sure that that is the same in other parties. I do not necessarily see that the Parliament electing them as convener will make any difference to individuals. If you are someone who follows the line all the way, how will you change just because you are convener of a committee? People who are independently minded are independently minded, regardless of the whips. I never have any discussion with whips about the work of this committee or with ministers before they attend committee. We do not have pre-meetings or any of that kind of stuff; everything is done completely autonomously. It is really a matter for the individual.
You talked about a new party coming in—we all know that we are talking about Reform. People could say, “We want a democratically elected convener, but we do not want one from that party,” or perhaps they will say that they do not want one from the SNP or Labour. I am just not convinced that it will provide party balance in committee convenerships.
I think that I am right in saying that, in the system at Westminster, it is still the party—
I know what you mean. Labour is guaranteed two chairs and the SNP is guaranteed four or whatever, so the chairs have to be elected from that group.
Yes. I think that that encourages independent mindedness. If there is a committee position to be filled and it is a choice between somebody who is independently minded and somebody who is more likely to just follow what the party says, the more independently minded person is more likely to get elected. It makes it more of a career path, as well. In other Parliaments, we have seen that, if a member has perhaps fallen out with the leadership of their party, there is still a role for their expertise.
By “career path”, you mean “dead end”. It is not a career path, because it does not lead on to anything.
If you look at somebody such as Yvette Cooper, and others, who fell out with the previous leadership—
Yes, but has that happened here?
It is in the gift of the party here.
Yes, but it is not a gift to those who are independently minded. It is the opposite of what you are suggesting: if conveners are independently minded, they are less likely to have a career path into ministerial office, whereas those who keep in with the ministers and follow the party line are much more likely to have that. That is what I would suggest from 30-odd years of experience as an elected representative.
Indeed. It is clear that a discussion is had, and that is obviously part of the reason why Ken Macintosh’s committee has not been implemented. However, there have been calls across the Parliament. There are things that we can do to strengthen our institutions, and I think that Dr Elliott is right about that. We should be looking at that, and if there are things that we can do, they should be considered.
10:00
I shall let our guests speak and speak less myself.
I want to pick up on the exchange between Patrick Harvie and Dr Elliott about what we can do to reinforce the current understanding. There are two things that would be helpful. One is for the Parliament to think about induction, not just for members of a future committee that has public administration in its remit, but for all MSPs. I understand that the Parliament has invested a lot in that in recent parliamentary sessions, particularly when it has anticipated quite a changeover. It would be interesting to know to what extent helping MSPs to understand how public administration works is part of that, and I suggest that it should be.
Allied to that, there is a role for this committee or its successor committee in pressing Government to be more transparent about the way that it works, and decision making is a good example of that. It would be interesting to know to what extent the English councils that you alluded to might now be rueing the fact that they were not as open in the past about where their money went and how decisions were made, because that may have meant that fewer assumptions were made about what you could cut.
As the committee knows, I worked in Government for a long time and I have been really struck, since I left, by what a black box it is when I look back at it. Even people with a high degree of expertise in public administration often find it hard to work out what is going on inside that box. It would be really helpful if both sides could collaborate more in making that clearer, for the public good and for trust in institutions.
I was going to come in on what you were saying about committees, convener, because I am also inclined to think that it is more about the individual. I do not know whether I can press Alison Payne any more on the importance of the individuals. You also mentioned that new MSPs can come in with certain skills, but some of the conveners who I feel have struggled most in here have been new MSPs who have never been on a committee before. Yes, they have been on a board of something outside, but they do not know how it works and they do not know the relationship with the clerks. On the one hand, I have seen a convener who saw the clerks as basically part of his staff, and on the other hand, I have seen a convener who was basically controlled by the clerks.
I am just making a comment in a sense—you can have all sorts of structures, but is it not the individual that matters most?
Absolutely. I totally agree that the individual matters most. What I am saying is that who that individual is should be decided by a vote of the Parliament rather than the party leadership.
Hear, hear.
We heard comments in last week’s evidence session about the good work that the committee has done over the past parliamentary session. I think that we have to capture that, but not just the compliments; we need to think about what that culture is. I say that as somebody who has been on a couple of different committees. It is not just about the people; it is about the working practices.
I was a short-term member of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee, and it was utterly abysmal, and I will put that on the record. There were questions written by clerks that were, frankly, in my view, unidirectional—how can we spend more money on this one thing—rather than any kind of intelligent examination of it. The fact that we do not have any of that in this committee is incredibly important and should be part of what we reflect. There are structural things that we can do, as Alison Payne has reflected on. We can try to build the culture that is required for better committees, but it will always come down to people in the end.
I also worry a bit about the discourse around barbarians at the gate and how we defend the status quo. In essence, that just gives more power to the people who want the status quo to break. Some of us want the status quo to break, too, so let us not be defensive about it.
Sarah Davidson’s point about transparency being the antidote to some of that is important: “This is how it works and if you want to change how it works, show us.” What could we do more of, or what could our successor committee do, to pursue that angle of transparency and openness and ways of working in public administration? We have dealt with some of the finance aspects of the issue, such as the publication of numbers, but in terms of exploring institutions and some of the inherent biases and issues, what more could we or our successor committee explore?
That is an important question. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has done interesting work on the drivers of trust in public institutions. One such driver is openness and transparency about how decisions are made.
It goes back to what colleagues were saying earlier about confidence in prioritisation. If the Government were more confident in owning its choices, it would be far easier for it to set out the decision-making process that sits behind them, because, in reality, Governments rarely have straightforward binary choices. There is always an element of trade-off, due to perfectly legitimate political, ideological, resource and implementability considerations. The type of conversation that we envisage would be far easier if the Government were confident about laying all those considerations out and if it were comfortable with being held to account on those in the parliamentary arena and elsewhere.
A committee with this remit could have a role in encouraging the Government to be explicit about those things. That is where this committee could add value beyond that provided by the subject committees. This committee does not necessarily look to litigate as to whether the right decision was taken, but it can be interested in the process that led to that judgment. What data was used? What analysis was done? Who was consulted and involved? What happened with that consultation? Did all that then just go into a black box, with something popping out at the other end, or can ministers and officials clearly track the decision-making process?
That role would be hugely helpful; it would help other committees that litigate as to whether the decision that was taken was the right one to understand how things got from A to B. Not only would that be helpful in exposing the decision-making process, but in building confidence outside the Parliament.
I just want to clarify that I was not suggesting that there are barbarians at the gate. It is more a case of the next parliamentary session being the unknown. It is the status quo that is causing the problem, and we definitely do not want to maintain it.
It goes back to the issues of public expectation, transparency and accountability. The best thing that we can do to stop the rise of populism is to be honest, to be more open and to have greater conversations. We cannot maintain the status quo. If we do, we will end up, after another five years of nothing changing, saying, “It’s 20 years since the Christie Commission, and we are still talking about prevention.”
The only thing that will change that is implementing reform—that means accepting that we will have to start investing in prevention to see those changes. The rise in populism is partly our own fault, because we have been having the same conversations for so long. What can this committee and the successor committee do to see implementation and delivery?
How independent are some of the ministers, if we take them as an example? It sometimes seems to me that it is the civil service that is speaking through the ministers. The civil service often has more in-depth knowledge and ministers rely on it, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. It sometimes seems to me that the position of that establishment is one of inertia. In other words, even when ministers are keen to change things, they are met with a wall of, “You shouldn’t do that,” and the changes just do not seem to get implemented. How many times have we seen ministers make decisions and say that such and such will happen in March, but it doesnae happen until June, or that it will happen in June, but it doesnae happen until December, and so on? There is a fundamental issue of delivery there. How can that be resolved and improved?
I wish that I had the answer to that. It is a long-standing problem and it involves elements of honesty and party politics. You cannot get away from the fact that nobody wants to go into an election saying, “What we are going to do will take 15 years, so, if you trust us for the next 15 years, we will totally transform our education system.” That will not get voters to turn out. There is a need for people to work together and to ensure that there are good, effective ministers.
On the point about ministers, I note that we will have an entirely different Cabinet after the election. A third of the current Cabinet are standing down, including the Deputy First Minister. There are a lot of unknowns, not just in the Parliament but across those ministerial roles.
Of course, if a different party wins the election, there will be a 100 per cent change in Cabinet members.
I apologise for making an assumption. You are quite right.
Never assume in politics.
I was just saying what would happen if the polls are to be believed.
You are right to say that there is definitely a feeling that some ministers are more effective than others and that some are more guided by their civil servants than others.
At the end of the day, it is all about leadership, is it not?
There is also a question about how we train our ministers and MSPs. There was talk about the induction process for MSPs, but what is the route that allows ministers and cabinet secretaries to hear what is going on and not be guided? From our experience, interactions with different cabinet secretaries can be like chalk and cheese or night and day.
We need greater leadership. There is a role for the civil service to issue warnings about proposals—to say, “That is very brave, minister,” as it were. However, if a minister sets out a clear direction of travel and the Government has been clear with the public about the difficulties that will be involved, that will go a long way towards getting people on board.
If you never want to upset anybody, you will never get anything done. We have been stuck in a place where, because any decision will have negative consequences for one group, there has been a decision not to do anything. There has to be an ability to look beyond an approach that involves speaking to individual groups and saying, “We will do what you want.”
The silos are not just across the different portfolio areas but within them. For example, with regard to the balance of care in the NHS, we see primary care versus secondary care versus general practitioners versus social care versus local government, and everything gets distorted and the overall vision of how we can fix things gets lost in the weeds.
There is also an issue about the degree to which the MSPs who come in after the election are risk averse.
I agree with everything that Alison Payne said in response to Michael Marra’s earlier comment. I stress that I am not advocating for the status quo either.
The role of the civil service is to serve ministers. Officials can advise, but it is up to ministers to make decisions. If there is delay or inaction, it is up to the Parliament to ask ministers why they are not making those decisions and why they are not getting things to happen, because, ultimately, it is up to ministers to make things happen. I do not want to bash the civil service for causing delays. It is not up to the civil service; it is up to ministers. That is why we have elections and democracy. It is up to the Parliament to hold the Government to account for the decisions that it makes or does not make.
From previous evidence that you have taken, I understand that there is a sense of frustration about the lack of decisions and progress. There is only one place to assign the blame for that, and it is not the civil service. Again, there is a role for this committee and the wider Parliament to hold the Government to account in that regard.
I would just say that the issue is not about the Parliament not holding ministers to account—everybody agrees that ministers should be held to account. The issue is that the relationship that ministers have with civil servants makes it difficult for them to be held to account, if you know what I mean. I am not articulating this very well, frankly, but the point is that ministers feel loyalty to the group of people with whom they work every day, and they believe that what they are being told is correct and is how things should happen, and that, if there are delays, there are really good reasons for that, which others might not see or agree with.
There is a degree to which ministers are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. There is an issue about how far ministers are able to push their civil servants before they are accused of bullying or whatever. There is always a balance to be struck in terms of how that is done.
I am also not going to advocate bullying the civil service in order to get things done.
I am just saying that, if you said to someone, “Make sure that’s on my desk tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock,” you could be accused of that.
Sure.
10:15
Twenty years ago, when I was a councillor, the council leader might ask for something at 9 o’clock in the morning. I was on committees where I heard, at a public committee meeting, “If it’s no on my desk at 9 o’clock in the morning, find yourself another job.” We are not talking about going back to those days, but what do you do if you ask the people who work for you to provide information by a certain date and that information is not forthcoming? The politician is the one who has to go into the public domain and get the brickbats, but they are not necessarily able to drag their staff kicking and screaming into delivering the outcome when they want it to be delivered.
Sometimes it is the other way around.
Of course.
Instead of kicking and bashing, there is a general point that the Government can only ever be as effective and efficient as the institutions that support it. The question is, how are we developing an effective civil service? How are we developing staff who can deliver? There was an important point in what you said about delivery. How are we facilitating, for example, exchanges and secondments between local government and the Scottish Government, between the Scottish Government and public bodies, and indeed between the Scottish Government and UK Government departments? How are we facilitating professionalisation and making the civil service better? If you do not feel that it is good enough or delivering what it should be delivering, the question for the Government is: how can you make it better? How can you improve the effectiveness and skills of the civil service and its capacity to support ministers?
We had an inquiry on that, with some very direct recommendations. Our successor committee might want to consider how many of those have been implemented.
For all the excellent reports that this committee has produced in this parliamentary session, how many recommendations have been taken up by the Government? That is an important question for all committees to ask, not just this committee. There is lots of excellent work. As we see in the committee papers, lots of really important inquiries have been done. How many recommendations from those inquiries have been taken on board?
I will let Craig Hoy in, followed by Paul Cairney. In order to stick to time, I will then give our guests an opportunity to wind up. Sarah Davidson started, so she will be the last to speak. You will each have a couple of minutes to cover any issue that you want to emphasise or that we have not yet touched on.
I want to get a view from around the table, and particularly from Dr Elliott. We get the impression that, sometimes, civil servants hide behind ministers and ministers hide behind civil servants. Let us bear in mind that there are accountable officers in the civil service and that the permanent secretary is the principal accountable officer. I served on the Public Audit Committee, and when civil servants came before us, there was sometimes exasperation that a number of civil servants seem to move around between interim posts, particularly in sponsored agencies and departments such as Transport Scotland. When we dug into problems around, let us say, ferry procurement, there had been quite clear failures by civil servants. Ministers—let us not let them off the hook—often take the flak for that and, on occasion, try to blame civil servants, when it might have been a political decision that has gone wrong.
Civil servants are accountable to Parliament through the principal accountable officer model. To what extent do we need to raise awareness of civil servants’ accountability to Parliament? Do we need to look at the model again, so that, ultimately, ministers are responsible for what is done in their name in the civil service?
Those are excellent points. It is really important to raise awareness and, as Sarah Davidson mentioned, invest in induction processes for new MSPs and in training of committee clerks. We have not really touched on resourcing of committees. The resources that are provided here are radically different from those that are provided to UK Parliament committees. There are really important questions to be asked, and I completely agree with your point.
For all the problems and challenges that we face, the Scottish Government and the civil service have implemented many successful policies. The vast majority of members of the civil service work very hard to deliver for and serve ministers, so it is important to recognise the efforts that individual civil servants make daily to serve ministers and ensure that manifestos are enacted. We can learn from the many successes that there have been as well as from the failures that have been highlighted. It is important to get the balance right. As I said in my submission, we can learn as much from success as we can from failure, so it is important not to diminish the successes when we highlight some of the failures.
No end of committees have probably recommended more transparency from the Government—it is one of those things that people keep saying while not expecting any change. It is tempting to say that the problem is simply the practices of bad actors who are trying to hide something. However, it is key to work out why non-transparency is a good idea, and then we can think through how to make things more transparent without losing those benefits.
The classic example is that ministers assure civil servants that they will receive their advice in confidence. That is part of the deal. For a civil servant to give a minister full and frank advice, they have to trust the minister and know that they will keep that advice in confidence. That is a good deal in some respects.
The same applies when working with groups. For trust to be built up among groups, they need to make themselves vulnerable in that collaboration, with the level of trust being maintained because what is said is kept behind closed doors.
The same applies with parties. Parties work only when people can have frank discussions and know that those conversations will not be reported somewhere else.
In that context, if we are asking people to be more transparent, it comes down more to the transparency of judgments that are made after that process. Confidences can still be maintained, but people can document the procedures that they went through when taking advice and the ways in which they made choices. Part of the problem with the black box relates to what exactly ministerial judgment means. A minister could say, “I considered these factors and was swayed by this evidence.” I guess that it would be a bit like a court judgment.
That is probably the best that we can do on transparency. If there was a more radical approach in which everything was kept out in the open, the unintended consequence is that it would change people’s behaviour. They would give less frank information because they would anticipate it being read out in court or in a committee at some point. They would think, “Why should I make myself vulnerable by doing that?” It is probably worth thinking about that. You might call it pragmatic transparency—I do not know; I will work on the branding. It would involve a thoughtful level of transparency, rather than people just saying, “Be more transparent.”
We move to wind-up comments.
I thank the committee for inviting us to be part of today’s important discussion. I hope that, in the next parliamentary session, we will start to see things being implemented. I think that I have made all the points that I wanted to make. The discussion about committee conveners illustrated that we need to try lots of different things, because the status quo has not been working.
A big part of the problem is party politics. I think that the committees, and particularly the one that has public administration in its remit, can have a big role in thinking about how we manage the issues with electoral cycles, party politics and short-term thinking.
After the coming election, it will be only a few years until the local government elections. There is a short-term approach in which we always look to the next election rather than thinking, “Right, let’s get together and focus on the long term.” Some things will not work and might not be right but, as Ian Elliott said, it is important to learn from failure. However, in politics we are reluctant to do that.
That is partly because, if the Government fails on something, the Opposition will jump on that. The Opposition parties have an important role to behave responsibly and engage and work with Government. That does not mean agreeing with the policies, but there is an element of thinking about how we have a bit more grown-up politics.
In reflecting on the conversation about the link with the civil service, I was remembering the time when Shona Robison was health secretary and a civil servant left some files on a train, and there were calls for her to resign. That was ridiculous. When anything happens, people think, “How do we make the most party-political gain out of this situation?” If we keep playing the political game rather than delivering for Scotland, we will be stuck in that cycle.
Quite right.
I am grateful to the convener and the clerks for giving me the opportunity to speak today and the other times that I have spoken during this parliamentary session.
First and foremost, it is important to have a Finance and Public Administration Committee and to have the national performance framework. That long-term aspirational vision for what Scotland should be is a valuable tool to help shape decision making, to help us to think about preventative policy making and to have long-term decision making that goes beyond one parliamentary session. It is hugely valuable to have a Finance and Public Administration Committee that holds the Government to account on that and thinks about how resources are allocated and how public administration is functioning to achieve long-term ambitions.
We have touched on matters relating to how the committee is resourced, how conveners are appointed and how to ensure that the very good practice of the committee continues into the next parliamentary session. Those are absolutely crucial questions to ask at this point. I hope that measures will be put in place to ensure that the new MSPs get induction and training, and that clerks and so on get the support that they need to continue that work.
Given that there will be a new committee and a new convener, do you feel that the clerking team should remain in post, at least for the first year perhaps, after the election?
This is a personal view, but I have found the clerking team to provide excellent support to the committee.
So have we. For continuity purposes, do you agree that they should continue?
Yes, I agree with that.
I am sorry to have put you on the spot there.
It is important to think about succession planning for all committees and for all aspects of the Parliament, which is now well established. A lot of people who have been here since the start are moving on. It is really important that we retain some of the institutional knowledge as time moves on.
I feel under pressure to thank the committee for being here, so thank you very much.
Maybe I will turn this into a blog. I have written down a list of things that I would do if I was in charge of the committee. I will break it down into those essential—
No one is in charge of this committee. It is all done through consultation.
I am ambitious. Imagine that I ruled the world—here is my list for the committee.
How do we make sure that the Scottish Government is skilful, strategic, transparent, future thinking, citizen centred and power sharing? We have covered that.
There will be a positive end to my next comment. People do not really read any more or have the ability to do so. I reckon that it would be reasonable to expect a new MSP in the next committee not to have read a word that was produced by the previous committees or know what has or has not been done. My recommendation for the first piece of work is simply to say what the committee has learned over the long term, given that it is a long-term committee.
10:30
I do not want to make work for the clerking team, but that would involve the report saying, “We have produced this many reports on this many topics. Let’s not reinvent the wheel. Let’s first check what themes are emerging so that, the next time we do an inquiry, it builds on that work.” The problem with all organisations is that they constantly start again with new people without having any memory. Simply trying to work out what has been done can be a powerful way of focusing the mind and setting the agenda.
It would be good if our successor committee built on our foundations. It can go in whatever direction it sees fit, of course, but that is good advice.
Sarah Davidson has the last word.
Thank you. With an eye to your timekeeping, convener, I will not repeat at length what I have said before, but the three key points that I came here to say were, first, that it is really valuable to have a public administration remit in a committee and that that should be kept; secondly, that having finance and public administration together makes a lot of sense and that that should be kept as well; and thirdly, to touch on your point about continuity of knowledge, convener, the subject is actually quite complex and, therefore, developing expertise in it and holding that expertise really matter.
One thing that I did not come here to say but that I will add relates to what Michael Marra said about the culture of the committee. That really struck me, because culture really matters, too. The committee has a reputation that extends beyond the Parliament for being what we might call a good committee, which is down to the culture that has been developed. A successor committee should not regard remit as the answer to all its questions. It is at the intersection of the culture of a committee and how it enacts its remit and what the remit is that the really powerful accountability and scrutiny can happen. I look forward to seeing what happens.
Thank you very much to all our guests. The discussion has been very helpful to our deliberations.
We will have a five-minute break to allow for a changeover of witnesses.
10:32
Meeting suspended.
10:37
On resuming—
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Budget (Scotland) (No 5) Bill: Stage 2