Finance and Public Administration Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Official Report 697KB pdf

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Effective Scottish Government Decision Making

Good morning, and welcome to the 14th meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. We have received apologies from the convener, so I will convene the meeting in his place. We are joined by Keith Brown, who is attending the meeting as a substitute member in the convener’s absence.

Our first agenda item is our final evidence session as part of our inquiry into effective Scottish Government decision making. We will hear from Shona Robison, the Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Finance, and John-Paul Marks, permanent secretary, who are joined by Scottish Government officials Lesley Fraser, director general corporate, and Dominic Munro, director for strategy. I welcome you all to the meeting and look forward to your evidence.

I invite Ms Robison to make a short opening statement.

Thank you, convener. It is a pleasure to be here to talk about effective decision making.

I am conscious that the subject area is very broad. The Scottish Government takes many decisions of different types on a daily basis. Consequently, my opening remarks will focus on the areas that I think might be most helpful.

The types of decisions that the Government makes range from decisions on public investment to decisions on taxation, service delivery and, of course, legislation. In recent times, key decisions have been made on urgent issues, such as receiving refugees from Ukraine and responding to the pandemic, and on long-term programmes, such as the roll-out of social security in Scotland. As those examples illustrate, Government decisions cover complex issues that are often of national importance and often involve a degree of political contention.

Understandably, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to such varied decisions, but there are principles and governance that support effective decision making. In relation to principles, the policy prospectus that was published at the end of April sets out the Government’s three defining missions—equality, opportunity and community—and the outcomes that we want to deliver over the next three years. As a Government, we have developed a distinctive Scottish approach to delivering policy and public services, which is based on four priorities—first, a shift towards prevention; secondly, improving performance; thirdly, working in partnership; and, fourthly, engaging and developing our people.

In relation to governance, the Scottish Cabinet sits at the top level of decision making. It is supported by Cabinet sub-committees on certain key areas, such as legislation, and by a range of official governance under the corporate board and executive team, which is reinforced by official guidance, including the Scottish public finance manual and the civil service code.

We recognise the importance of external advice, challenge and scrutiny, including, of course, by the Parliament. We integrate external views into our decision making in various ways, including through consultations and stakeholder engagement and through groups such as the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls and the delivery board for the national strategy for economic transformation.

We also recognise the importance of transparency. That is why we are delivering Scotland’s third open government national action plan in partnership with civil society; it is why we will set out our financial and fiscal assumptions in our medium-term financial strategy later this month; and it is why we routinely publish impact assessments relating to policy decisions.

The quality of advice that supports decision making depends on the skills, capability and professionalism of civil servants. The Scottish Government is implementing its people strategy to support continuous improvement and the updating of skills and capability, and it has introduced measures to improve record keeping as part of its information governance programme. Effective decision making often requires evidence on what works, and the Scottish Government is supported in that regard by professional analysts, scientists and other specialists in the civil service and by expert advisory groups such as the Covid-19 advisory group, which played a significant role during the pandemic.

Given the varied nature and complexity of decision making, the Government does not claim to always get everything right, but our decisions are supported by professional advice and formal processes, and we have made many decisions that we can be proud of over the years—decisions that have made Scotland a better place and have led to improved outcomes for people living here. However, we are always willing to learn lessons and to improve, which is why the work of this committee is so important. We look forward to considering its recommendations.

Michelle Thomson will start the questions.

I was expecting the tradition of the convener going first to be in operation, but okay. We will just go in with the heavy brogues, then.

My question might well be for the cabinet secretary. I am interested in exploring whether any third sector groups obtain more than 50 per cent of their funding from the Scottish Government.

Well, third sector groups are varied in that we tend—

I am sorry—I have not been clear. I should have said quangos or third sector groups.

Okay. Let us take third sector groups first. We tend to give funding to them through what we call intermediaries, which then give the funding to third sector organisations—some of which are quite small—that apply to the intermediaries. That helps the Scottish Government, because, as you can imagine, with the plethora of small third sector organisations, it makes more sense to do it in that way. I do not have in front of me the breakdown of who gets what in terms of percentages, but I am certainly happy to furnish the committee with that information.

We encourage third sector organisations not to become wholly reliant on any single source of funding, because, for sustainability reasons, the wider a spread of funding sources, the more sustainable an organisation becomes. You will understand that, with the best will in the world, policy priorities can change within Government, which means that difficult decisions have to be taken that, sometimes, include the ceasing of funding. If an organisation is wholly dependent, that becomes difficult.

On quangos, we have 129 public bodies in Scotland, many of which—most of which, in fact—are reliant on Scottish Government funding. Some are able to raise commercial funding. For example, Forestry and Land Scotland has been quite successful in generating commercial money, which is good.

My final point is that we are reviewing and want to reform the landscape around those 129 bodies. Again, I am happy to furnish the committee with information about that piece of work as we take it forward.

Thank you. The general question—which, in fairness, I do not expect you to be able to answer today—is whether there is a possibility that some of those types of bodies that receive Scottish Government funding get more than 50 per cent of their income stream that way. In fairness to you, I do not expect you to know that data for every single organisation.

There will be some.

Okay, so my next question is where that would be declared by the Scottish Government and/or the civil service as a risk in terms of your decision making. I fully accept that it is a risk for the organisations, because of exactly what you highlighted, but it also represents a risk to both the civil service and the Scottish Government, if a number of bodies are receiving more than 50 per cent of their funding from you. Perhaps the permanent secretary would like to come in and say where in the institutional memory, if you like, that would be declared, understood and assessed.

For each of the budget lines for grants, it is first understood by the sponsor body—the sponsor team that sits within the Scottish Government—and then declared in the annual report and accounts. There may be certain levels of grants that are not above the threshold that are visible through that process. We can take that away and, as the Deputy First Minister says, furnish the committee with a bit more detail. However, Social Security Scotland, for example, is a major organisation that is funded by the Scottish Government to deliver social security and that funding line is visible in our annual report and accounts. Therefore, we understand that liability, we plan for it and we make sure that it is funded at a level to deliver the service that we wish.

As the Deputy First Minister set out, in terms of public bodies more generally and the voluntary sector, where we can encourage revenue raising and that opportunity to create revenue, that can be positive. We have seen that in different sectors and we want to encourage that empowerment—

I have got that point. You correctly say that you will understand from a funding line where that represents a liability, but I am trying to explore where that represents a risk to quality decision making. How do you examine and assess that risk up front and therefore, critically, guard against policy capture?

I see where you are getting to. Clearly, we need to guard against that, but any organisation that we fund is funded in order to carry out particular tasks. It would have applied for funding on the basis of meeting Scottish Government objectives that were set out. Where the Scottish Government is taking policy decisions and consulting, we would look at what organisations were saying in the round, alongside all the other organisations, whether we fund them or not. My expectation would be that there is no hierarchy of importance of an organisation’s views on a subject that in any way correlates to whether it is being funded. It is important that we make that distinction. Organisations are, as I say, funded to carry out particular tasks, so that distinction is important.

But do you agree that it could represent a risk to decision making? If an organisation is receiving its funding from the Scottish Government, there is a risk that it will tell the Government what it wants to hear because the organisation fears for its funding line. Indeed, we had confirmation a couple of weeks ago from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations that that can happen.

That is what we need to guard against, although there are many organisations—I am sure that we could give a number of examples if you would find that helpful—that do not hold back on criticising Government policy, even when they receive funding. That is how it should be. An organisation should not guard against criticising the Scottish Government just because it receives funding. It would be a problem if that were the case.

09:45  

If you look back, you will see that there are many organisations that have been quite vociferous about aspects of Government policy or things that we have brought forward that they do not agree with, but which continue to receive Government funding. I hope that that gives you some reassurance.

Permanent secretary, I will give you the opportunity to answer. During the decision-making process, how do you guard against the risk of policy capture?

As the Deputy First Minister said, we deliberately set up external scrutiny from bodies such as the Scottish Fiscal Commission or Audit Scotland to provide that challenge. I was at the Promise oversight board meeting last week. It provides significant independent scrutiny, challenge and analysis of our care system and of how the Promise itself is being delivered. It is funded by the Scottish Government but is certainly still empowered to challenge it. That is deliberate. The challenge is not in-house and within the system; it is outwith the system, transparent, accountable and visible to everyone.

Your more general point is absolutely right. We must ensure that evidence, transparency and healthy challenge are applied to public debate about the most contentious issues. We see that transparency every week in the Parliament, where there are complex debates about justice reform, the national care service, highly protected marine areas and the bottle deposit and return scheme. Those debates are supported by evidence and data and there is significant stakeholder engagement.

My teams try to capture that. They provide impartial, objective advice to ministers and ensure that we are listening and are getting all the input into the policy advisory process as best we can. We do that through consultations, published impact assessments and structured governance—including by non-executives and independent advisory boards—and we use that to give our ministers the best possible advice to inform their decisions. The Parliament then subjects those decisions to significant scrutiny.

You are right that we have to guard against the risk of policy capture, but I observe a healthy level of scrutiny and debate in Scotland about the difficult decisions that the country is trying to take.

This is my final question. Concern was expressed about the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill. I am mindful that that is a contentious policy and I am not trying to make a political point; I am merely using it as an example of what I am driving at. During the bill process, a point was made about the equality impact assessments that were carried out over a six-year period. No cognisance was given to the impact on women and girls who had been sexually assaulted or raped of having men with fully intact genitalia—setting to one side their right to be referred to in line with their chosen gender—in those women’s safe places.

I asked Engender whether it had carried out any assessments. The reply was that it had not and that it would not have carried out the EQIA anyway.

There are ideas about avoiding policy capture, having critical friends and making robust decisions. So, how did we get to a position where nobody thought about that impact on women and girls for six years?

As you point out, there was six years of scrutiny of and debate about that policy, which is a level of long-term debate and scrutiny that few other policies have been through. Was everything done perfectly? Probably not. There are always lessons to be learned around all that. What I would say is that the EQIA did look at the impact on women and girls generally, although I accept what you say about the specifics and we might need to reflect upon that. However, if we think in general terms about the level of consultation, scrutiny and engagement, I personally engaged with a range of diametrically opposed organisations, many of which were in favour of the bill and many of which were against it.

If you are talking about organisations that receive Government funding and which side of the debate they were on during the process, I accept that a number of women’s organisations that receive Scottish Government funding were in favour of the reform, but those same organisations have been very critical of the Scottish Government in other policy areas and they have not held back in saying so, including in the justice field.

My conclusion from all that is that we need to guard against any perception, real or not, of organisations that receive Government funding taking a particular stance on issues, because the evidence shows that organisations are robust in their criticism of the Government, even when they receive Government funding, and that is how it should be.

Permanent Secretary, do you have any final comments on that? Were you surprised at my comment?

No. I understand the level of contention around the bill and the debate in the country. I was just checking the data and saw that, in the first consultation in November 2017, 15,500 responses were received and that informed the development of the draft bill. There were detailed impact assessments, equality impact assessments and a children’s rights and wellbeing impact assessment. A further consultation received 17,000 responses and we all observed the level of debate until the lights went out before Christmas.

You have just commented on the volume of responses, rather than the quality. My point is that, in that significant volume, which I absolutely do not doubt, nobody at any point thought it that was appropriate to look at the impact on women who have been sexually assaulted—a huge percentage of women, as you will know—or raped, of having fully intact men in their safe spaces. That says to me that something was not right with the process, risk assessment and decision making. Do you accept that or am I missing something? Do you accept that, clearly, something was not quite right with the processes? It is not about volume of responses, it is about quality.

The permanent secretary can come back in in a minute, but I want to be clear about two points. At the top level, the EQIA looked at the impact on women and girls. During the consultation and my discussions with a range of organisations, that issue was raised and was recorded as having been raised. The matter was clearly raised during the debate that then ensued. The Parliament tried to navigate its way through all those difficult issues to come to a consensus and conclusion. None of that was easy and, when I met you, Michelle, we had long discussions and many issues were raised at that stage. Trying to bring all that together and marshal it to a point at which the Parliament could make a decision was quite difficult. I would say that the Parliament made the right decision. I know that you disagree with that, but ultimately, the Parliament had to make the decision based on all the evidence that was in front of it and that is where the Parliament landed.

I feel as though I have taken a great deal of time on this topic, so I want to let other colleagues in. Thank you both.

Deputy First Minister, you said that there are lessons to be learned in this area. Rather than speaking more about the specifics, will you say how you go about learning lessons? What have you changed or done differently, or what would you do differently, given the experience that you have just recounted in response to Michelle Thompson?

One of my reflections is on whether there was a way of building more of a consensus around the issue. I felt very strongly that it was important to try to do that. Could we have done that at an earlier stage? Was it possible? The difficulty is that I do not know what trying to bring people together to coalesce around compromises would have looked like, because the debate had become so polarised, not least on social media—far more than it was initially, six years ago. For a minister in charge of a piece of legislation who can see the public discourse being so polarised, the room for compromise becomes quite difficult. However, I am the first to reflect on whether things could have been done more effectively.

That is a useful recounting, but we regularly hear from Government ministers that lessons will be learned. For example, on the ferries scandal, Kate Forbes said on 29 March 2022:

“We recognise where things have gone wrong and we are learning lessons for the future.”—[Official Report, 29 March 2022; c 4.]

The First Minister at the time said:

“Lessons have been, are being, and will be learned.”—[Official Report, 31 March 2022; c 11.]

On the Audit Scotland report about the £5 billion lack of transparency in the Covid business arrangements, Kate Forbes said that any lessons that were highlighted by the report would be learned.

This is about decision making. We are told that lessons are being learned, but I am keen to understand what those lessons are.

Let me come on to some of those. Obviously, the Covid inquiry will look at and scrutinise all aspects of how the Government responded. You should bear in mind that, when Governments respond to something that has never happened before, it is quite challenging. There is no blueprint that can be taken off a shelf to navigate through a global pandemic. Inevitably, therefore, things were done at speed in a way that, in hindsight, leaves us asking whether we would have done such things in normal times and whether we could have done them differently.

I absolutely accept that lessons need to be learned. If we have another global pandemic, we will have the experience of what worked and what, perhaps, did not work. The full public inquiry will come up with recommendations on some of that, which all Governments need to—

Other examples include the ferries scandal, which I have mentioned and which has involved huge public expenditure, and the shambolic approach to the census. On 1 June 2022, Nicola Sturgeon said:

“Of course we will review the experience and ensure that any lessons that require to be learned are learned.”—[Official Report, 1 June 2022; c 25.]

What lessons have we learned about how those pretty poor decisions by the Government were made?

Let me comment on the ferries, before we move on to the census. The section 22 report was hugely important and a number of changes flowed from it, not least to do with the governance arrangements at Ferguson Marine. There has been a huge difference. The permanent secretary can go into more detail if required, but there has been a complete overhaul of the governance arrangements, which flowed from that report. It was important that that happened at speed—as it did. It was not a case of saying that lessons would be learned at some point in the future. It was a very rapid response with improved governance arrangements in rapid time.

The Scottish Government made the decision to carry out the census in a different way, which led to some challenges around the participation rate. The work that was undertaken—at speed—to address some of that in order to get the figure up worked, and the figure became one that could then be relied on in terms of the census return.

It would be a strange situation if a Government did not learn lessons. Even when things go well and they are not on a list about which people say, “What about this and what about that?”—even when delivery is good—there are always lessons to be learned about how things might be improved.

10:00  

So, for instance, will we not do what we did with the census again? Will we carry out the census at the same time as the rest of the United Kingdom? Has that lesson been learned?

There were advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages was around the content of the census and being able to carry it out according to when we felt was the best time. The disadvantage was the UK-wide publicity around the census. I will bring the permanent secretary in on some of the detail around that, but such judgments will be made by looking at the pros and cons and whether it is the best thing to do. Clearly, the most important thing with the census is to have a return at a level that is reliable. That is the top thing.

There was a big failure in that regard. Permanent secretary, have you and your officials reflected on that? We are told that lessons have been learned. What is the central lesson that you learned?

I will start with the census. The Deputy First Minister is right. We are confident that the census process will provide reliable data and output to serve our needs—we have worked with the Office for National Statistics on that. National Records of Scotland worked very hard to get that done in a difficult context—with the pandemic and still-high Covid infection rates—through the spring of last year.

There is clearly an opportunity for us to provide advice for ministers on what happens next time. Hopefully, we will not be trying to do the census in a period in which behaviour is still impacted by the pandemic. Significant learning has already been derived through the process of delivering the census in Scotland around how we use different data models to get to the right confidence interval for the outputs. If the committee would like us to set out precisely what the lessons are for next time around how we would take that on again, we will certainly take away that request.

Coming back to your more general question about how we learn and how we know that the learning is driving improvement, I note that one of the critical things that we want to continue to do is to publish the changes where we deliver improvements, for the sake of transparency.

For example, last time I was before the committee, which was last year, there was a challenge about whether we would publish the private investment framework. We have published the framework, which is an important benchmark on the learning from Ferguson’s and also from the Lochaber smelter, Prestwick airport and other private asset investments. That is the standard that we want to follow consistently for the future. It is about how we use independent expert commercial advisers, how we ensure that that informs decision making and, to go back to the original question, how we ensure that decisions are subject to scrutiny and diverse input and advice.

On your main point about whether we are learning and improving, we need to prove that we are, set it out openly and then make progress accordingly.

Good morning. Deputy First Minister, as you know, we took evidence from 15 former ministers and former civil servants. The former ministers represented three different political parties who have been in Government over recent times. They were unequivocal in their views that, at times, too much decision making is rushed, unclear and unstructured. Do you agree?

That has not been my experience. It can sometimes feel that the opposite is the case and that it can take a frustratingly long time to make decisions. Sometimes, you get advice, go through it a number of times and have lots of discussion on the various options that are put in front of you, which can take time, even when there is an eagerness to get on and do what is in front of you.

In some situations, a very quick turnaround is required. For example, I mentioned in my opening remarks the responses to Ukraine and the Covid pandemic. Rapid decision making is required in out-of-the-ordinary situations, but that does not mean that it should not still be good decision making; it means that decisions have to be taken quickly and that the best evidence and advice that has been brought to you has to be relied on. You can rely on experience and on previous decisions and their outcomes, but sometimes the situation is new and there is nothing to draw on. That requires judgment. Sometimes, that will be the right judgment. With hindsight, some decision making is clearly not right, but the best judgment will be made on the best evidence at the time.

I have been a minister in Government, on and off, for more or less 15 years. When you gain confidence and experience as a minister, it enables you to make decisions more quickly and be able to challenge some of the advice that comes to you more readily than a minister who perhaps does not have that experience, who might, quite rightly, take longer to make a decision.

I do not recognise the comments that Liz Smith refers to. I can go only by my experience in Government over that time.

Ironically, current civil servants made the case that, on issues such as Covid and Ukraine, decision making was actually quite good because those situations were so desperately urgent and serious that things worked out pretty well. The pre-Covid and pre-Ukraine former ministers and former civil servants argued very forcefully that far too many decisions were not good because they were so unstructured.

This morning, the gender recognition situation and issues around ferries, BiFab, Prestwick airport and the census have been flagged up. We can add to that the deposit return scheme, highly protected marine areas and the national care service—the list of concerns about effective decision making by the Scottish Government goes on. In all those cases, I am sure that the Scottish Government argues that it could have done things better. Our concern as a committee is that the Scottish Government is perhaps not listening carefully enough to stakeholders who are on the front line of delivering those policies.

As I say, the Scottish Government’s record on a lot of those issues has not been very good. Do you accept that?

I will comment on a few of those issues. I do not think that anyone could say that decision making around GRR was rushed. It was a prolonged policy process over a long period of time.

It was unstructured.

I do not accept that it was unstructured. We have to make a distinction between things that are politically contentious and that people disagree with and decision making on the best available evidence at the time. For example, when the DRS was first mooted and introduced, that predated the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 coming into being. A process was set in place and then an external factor came into being that became fundamental to the scheme. However, nobody could have predicted that that was going to happen when the DRS started to be taken forward. Some things are within your influence and power, but sometimes things will happen that are not.

Your point about stakeholders is fair. The DRS is an interesting example in that respect. Larger businesses, perhaps because of their capacity, were able to get things in place quite rapidly, whereas it became apparent that small businesses were struggling with that, probably because they did not have capacity to put in place the arrangements that the larger ones had put in place.

To reflect on my decision making, the short-term licensing scheme was another politically contentious issue—some people disagreed with the principle and some agreed with it. However, with the implementation, we had the very same thing, in that businesses said that they needed more time for some of the practicalities. In that case, it was things such as getting tradespeople into properties to do assessments. As soon as I became aware of the extent of that, we decided to extend the deadline to October.

Was that a failure of decision making in the first place? I would say that it was not. I would say that it shows the ability to respond to something in a moving situation. Evidence came in front of us that it was right to delay. I would say that that is an example of listening to concerns and changing a scheme in response, rather than an example of weakness and poor decision making.

I am not sure that I accept that, but let us try to keep the politics to one side.

Four committees of the Parliament have raised serious concerns about the proposals for a national care service, because they do not feel that the evidence has reflected the views of people on the front line. Certainly, this committee heard serious concerns about the lack of information in the financial memorandum, and we still have considerable concerns about that. Does that not flag up to you that serious issues have arisen for the Government because it has not consulted all stakeholders effectively? As I say, that has resulted in the very unusual situation—certainly in my time in the Parliament—in which four committees have serious concerns. We still do not have an accurate financial memorandum.

The national care service is a hugely complex piece of reform and there are differing stakeholder views on the proposals. Some stakeholders, whom we might describe as those representing service user interests, are very much in favour of progress on the national care service at pace, because they feel that the current arrangements for delivering social care do not meet their needs. Those stakeholders are urging the Government to proceed; indeed, they have expressed disappointment about the delay and the fact that the Government is not getting on with the reforms. The other group of stakeholders, who are from local government in particular, have a different view, for reasons that we all understand. They believe that local decision making and local control are important.

One of the key reasons for our taking a step back is that trying to take the work forward while those local government concerns exist would be challenging. As a former home care organiser, I am a big fan of the national care service, and I could speak for the rest of the meeting about why I think that having national standards and a national framework in order to have the same quality in standards everywhere is really important, but I will leave that for the moment.

10:15  

Agreeing a way forward with local government has become the primary consideration here, for all the reasons that we understand. Trying to move that big reform forward without trying to reach a consensus and compromise with local government would be really difficult, which is why the decision has been made to create that space over the summer. The financial memorandum will reflect what that decision making will look like in relation to how we take the work forward. There will inevitably need to be changes to the plan and to the way in which it will be delivered and rolled out.

I hope that that helps to explain that the reason for the delay is not a lack of intent or firm belief that a national care service can make things better for people, but that it is crucial that the implementation of the bill is done in the right way. Taking local government with us is important.

Deputy First Minister, former ministers and former civil servants said that some financial rules that we have as standard practice for decision making have been found, on occasion, to be “optional”. It is a concern for the committee that proper practice for the financial management of policies is sometimes not adhered to. Is that a concern for the Scottish Government?

I will bring the perm sec in shortly. Both the financial decision making and its transparency are crucial because, at the end of the day, it is about public money. In my experience, the decision making around financial matters is robust. Sometimes, you might take different financial options depending on the level of investment or the profiling of funding; judgments need to be applied around best outcomes and best value for money. Extensive work has been done to improve the issue.

The perm sec will, I think, be happy to give a bit of detail on that point.

I am happy to write to the committee with a bit more detail on that point, because financial rules are not “optional”. If there was evidence that they were optional in the past and an example thereof could be shared, we would look into the matter for sure.

I personally sign off all expenditure above £1 million, and so does the Deputy First Minister at the moment because of the fiscal position. We call those papers our accountable officer templates. I check to be confident that all expenditure is proper, regular and lawful; that parliamentary authority is in place; and that the commercial considerations have been properly taken account of. Those inputs then go into the templates and the chief financial officer and I provide assurance to the Deputy First Minister that spending is optimal and the right thing to do given the context that we are in.

We try to take that discipline through the organisation and through our finance business partner networks to ensure that we are clear in understanding where our expenditure is happening and that we are confident that it is optimal. Although it always matters, it particularly matters now, given the tight fiscal position that we have been in since inflation has been so high.

Thank you for that. I urge you to reflect on what the Auditor General has said about public finance and the need for additional scrutiny and transparency, because, as you know, he has not been very comfortable about that.

When Liz Smith raised this issue with you in the chamber, Deputy First Minister, you said:

“the advice that we commission and receive is the best advice available to ministers.”—[Official Report, 3 May 2023; c 14.]

That would include legal advice. When you are making a decision, in what circumstances would you decide to disregard legal advice that you had received?

Legal advice is hugely important. I do not think that I have ever disregarded legal advice, because of its importance.

What I would say is that legal advice is often around options; it is not always black and white. Quite often, the legal advice being given will include a list of various possible scenarios. However, as a minister, I have never set aside legal advice.

There was advice in relation to the case surrounding the former First Minister, Alex Salmond, which was discounted by the Scottish Government. The advice was to concede the case as the benefits from proceeding did not appear to come close to meeting the potential detriments from doing so.

At some point, the Cabinet made a decision to disregard that legal advice. I am concerned about that and I want to understand how you would have that conversation in the Cabinet and come to a decision to set aside that advice and do something else.

I was not party to any discussion in the Cabinet.

Permanent secretary?

The permanent secretary would not have been in post—

Was it before your time?

It was before my time. However, let us stick with the principle of your question. We would never disregard legal advice. It is imperative that we understand whether something is proper, regular, and lawful. Lesley Fraser’s legal team do an incredible job and they are very integrated with the senior leadership of our executive team in all the work that we are doing.

As the Deputy First Minister says, it is not always binary—it is not always about saying that it is lawful to do this but not to do that. It is a judgment and a balance of risk. Ultimately, ministers are quite entitled to look at wider strategic considerations, whether that be about economic benefits, formal and informal reputational risks, or whatever.

However, to come back to the point about public expenditure in particular, it has to be proper and regular for me as an accountable officer to be confident about it and to authorise it. Otherwise, I cannot authorise it. That is what the public duty under the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Act 2000 requires me to do.

The same would be true in terms of expenditure, for example, on a legal case. It would not be proper and regular to pursue that if there was no authority to do so or no source of public funds, for example.

Continuing on the theme of the speed of decision making, we have, to be frank, had mixed views from different committee witnesses. For example, if we take Covid, some witnesses said that the speed was great—it was quick and decisive and so on—but others, especially from women’s groups, said that it was too fast and that there was not enough consultation. I have to say that I share your experience that, generally, decision making can be quite slow.

We also had evidence from businesses that they make a decision when they are 80 per cent certain about something, while their suggestion was that Government waits until it is 90 per cent, 95 per cent or 99 per cent certain before making a decision. Is it that there has to be a different speed for different decisions or are there principles to follow? How do you get the balance?

It is a difficult balance and you are then looking at how much risk you will be carrying. You will have the best advice in front of you but nothing is ever 100 per cent certain; everything carries a risk. If you have three options in front of you, the relative risks of each option will be set out and—not always but quite often—a recommendation will be made by civil servants, who will have drawn on their experience in order to present the relative risks of all those options to ministers. Ultimately, again, you have to apply some judgment to that.

On speed, you are right that you will hear quite differing views. Some are criticisms of things taking too long, and at other times there is an accusation of too-rapid decision making. The truth is that differing decisions require different time frames and time for analysis. Drawing again on my personal experience, if I look at something and I am not sure about the relative risks and it just is not clear to me, I will not make a decision on the basis of the submission in front of me. In such cases, I call all the officials into a meeting so that I can probe more fully what lies behind some of the assumptions and the risk analysis. In that way, I can get at what inevitably lies behind, for example, a six-page submission. That takes time, but it is better to take that time so that I make a decision with the full facts in front of me and an understanding of all that.

That is how I go about decision making. All the frameworks, standards and steps that were mentioned earlier are there to ensure the quality of the advice that comes out.

I have a final point. Nobody, including civil servants, can be an expert on everything. Inevitably, you have to draw on other stakeholders such as the business community, who have a level of knowledge and experience, and a view. You draw all of that in to try to make the best decision on the information that is in front of you.

That is helpful, thank you. It is good that we have had evidence from such a wide range of witnesses. We particularly appreciated meeting civil servants at St Andrew’s house, which was a slightly unusual experience for all of us but a very good one. They were very helpful.

On the issue of how transparent advice should be, you mentioned transparency in your opening remarks, and most of us would say that transparency is a great thing. However, some previous civil servants and ministers have said that there can be a bit too much of it. If all the advice is written down, for the sake of transparency, it is very difficult for a civil servant to give confidential advice or to give options in a more general sense. How do you feel that we can get the balance on that?

The presumption is for transparency, in that anything that influences your decision should be part of the submission.

In my discussions with civil servants, they bring all the inherent risks alive by telling me what lies behind the submission—for example, that one group of stakeholders is vehemently opposed to something because of X, Y and Z, or another group of stakeholders will be fully in favour of it because of A, B and C. Those are situations where judgments can be quite difficult to make, because you know that none of the options will please everybody and that a group of stakeholders will think that a certain decision is absolutely wrong.

In trying to come to a conclusion, you have to ask what the objective is. What are you trying to achieve? The submission is meant to give you advice on taking forward a particular policy, and you have to navigate through that. Ultimately, sometimes you make a decision in the full knowledge that it is not going to please a particular group of stakeholders.

I understand that bit, but do you think that civil servants are sometimes reluctant to give frank advice because it will be written down and might come back to haunt them?

10:30  

I will bring in the permanent secretary in a minute. I would hope that they are not reluctant to do so, because critical advice that could sway a decision really ought to be in there. I guess that you are getting at the question of whether full, frank and free advice becomes compromised if civil servants think that they will be hauled in front of a committee and made to answer for it a couple of years down the line, because the advice did not work out as had been planned. I hope that that is not the case because, ultimately, ministers rely on an honest picture, warts and all, rather than something that is refined because the civil servants think that it will sit easier with ministers. My starting point is that I would prefer the warts-and-all advice.

We hold dear the values of honesty, objectivity and impartiality. Our job is to provide ministers with the very best advice. We expect that to be robust and evidence led and it needs to have all the right inputs, whether they be financial, legal or commercial. We have talked about the importance of listening and, on the way down here, we were having a look at public consultations. At the moment, a dozen are live and we undertake around 80 to 90 public consultations a year.

With regard to transparency around the impact of decisions that are being made, we have done about 10 business regulatory impact assessments since January this year and, in April alone, we have done equality impact assessments around carers, procurement, justice reform, fair work and health and social care. Our job is to ensure that the advice is as robust, objective and impartial as possible, to give ministers the options and understanding of the risks and benefits of the choices that are available to them. However, I also understand the point that you heard from colleagues in that private discussion. As you guys know better than anyone, politics is an intense business. Social media has added to all of that and, because of the level of public scrutiny on some of the issues that we have discussed today, whether that be gender recognition reform, the deposit return scheme or social care reform, they are all contentious.

Part of our job is to build a culture in which people feel safe and supported to have those honest conversations and do their jobs in a safe and secure way, and where we look after their wellbeing. If you are interested in that, Lesley Fraser can say a bit more about harassment reviews, the continuous improvement programme and the work that we are doing to build wellbeing and professionalism, so that colleagues feel absolutely supported to provide advice, even if it is not necessarily what people want to hear. As the DFM says, it is much better to hear that early, with full honesty—warts and all—than to pretend that we are all fine and then derail later. We are trying to encourage transparency within the organisation, including the early escalation of risk and that objective advice for ministers, so that they can make optimal choices.

I will ask something else and then Ms Fraser can come in if she wants to. Does the relationship between the minister and the civil servants matter? Does it vary a lot? We get the impression that, in some cases, a minister can be quite overpowering, let us say, so they force the civil servants to do what they might not want to do. On the other hand, sometimes, the minister is quite weak and just follows what the civil servants want. Is that big variety of views something that we should worry about? I am sorry to put it all together—

That is all right.

Tied in with that is the issue of churn. Civil servants change quite often, so the minister does not know who they are speaking to, but so do ministers, so the civil servant does not know who they are speaking to.

I will come in first while this thought is in my head. The relationship does matter. Human nature being human nature, ministers build up a particular relationship with key officials, whom we come to rely on and who are our go-to civil servants, because we have had good, clear, sound advice from them previously. In every ministerial job that I have had, that is how it has panned out.

There is something important in what you have said about ministers’ behaviour. We cannot have a position where civil servants would be wary about putting difficult advice in front of a minister because of the reaction that they might get. That can lead to poor decision making. Therefore, with regard to ministerial behaviour, it is critical that ministers accept that, sometimes, they will get information about something that they have absolutely wanted to do that shows that it is just not doable, for all the good reasons that are set out in front of them. Sometimes, you just have to accept that, because it is the best advice that is being provided to you.

With regard to civil service support—particularly senior civil servants, who interact with ministers more often—it is important that there is absolutely that respect and a culture that respects the fact that the relationship is not always one of equals. Ministers have to recognise that in the way in which they respond to news that they are not so happy about—we have all experienced that—and recognise that, at the end of the day, civil servants are only providing the best advice that they possibly can.

Before anyone else comes in, we have a few more members to get round, so I ask for brevity in the answers—I would like them to be just a little bit briefer. I understand that it is a broad subject, but please can we narrow it down a bit? My apologies for that.

Yes, sure. Thank you, convener. I will pick up that point about the wider culture and values. These are lessons that the organisation has very much learned. Our vision and values, “In the service of Scotland”, which we introduced as an organisation in 2021 recognises that, for our diverse colleagues in the organisation to be able to bring their whole selves to work, we need to create that safe environment. Therefore, as well as our civil service values, that vision builds on collaboration, innovation, inclusion and kindness.

That is now taken through into the way that we train civil servants in the skills, expertise and behaviours that we are looking for in our senior civil servants. I am happy to provide more information on that, if that would be useful.

On that point, we have talked about a warts and all policy. Too often, I hear about conversations, particularly on the most controversial decisions that are made, where meeting minutes have not been taken. We heard that in relation to both the Ferguson Marine scandal and, on several occasions, in relation to the former First Minister, with minutes not being taken of meetings between Scottish Government officials and lawyers and others. What action is the permanent secretary taking to ensure that that never happens again?

We have set out quite a lot of actions that we need to take. Lesley Fraser might be able to provide a bit more on the detail. As you say, those historical examples are regrettable. We have said that before, and we want to ensure that there is absolutely a safe space for that challenge and level of honest debate but also a clear record of the decision. Lesley has been leading a lot of significant work on record keeping. We have revised our guidance for our private office and our ministers around the level of decisions and changed our systems on document retrieval, and we are sharing all that for transparency.

We have put in place an information governance programme in response to the issues that were identified and the improvements that we wanted to make. Of course, we are not alone as an organisation in wrestling with enormous amounts of data and information at the moment, so it is critical that we get that right.

The information management board, which I now chair, has been meeting for the past 18 months. We have trained lots of our colleagues—almost 2,500—across the organisation and increased their skills. We have put in place new systems in Government so that we can more quickly and accurately locate information when we need to find it. We ensure that colleagues are properly trained on how that should be securely put in place. The culture, systems and practice are absolutely essential here. That approach links back with everyone’s core civil service craft—it is the very essence of being a good public servant.

Deputy First Minister, does the Cabinet recognise that culture and accept that it has to be adopted? In May 2017, there was a meeting between Nicola Sturgeon and Jim McColl to discuss issues at Ferguson Marine. Those were significant issues involving huge public expenditure and waste, but no minute was taken of the meeting. Given what has just been said, do you and your colleagues recognise that it is completely unacceptable that no records were taken?

Of course, ministers have supported all the improvements that have been made and that you have just heard the detail of. In my inbox, I regularly have minutes that have come through rapidly, not just of meetings with external organisations but of meetings with officials around decision making, all of which have been recorded. Everything is minuted, which is how it should be. If you are asking me whether that has always been the case, the answer is no. You have just heard why the improvements were put in place—it was because of concerns such as the one that you have just highlighted. Apart from anything else, it is extremely helpful for ministers to have those minutes, because it enables them to refer back.

So you think that your Cabinet colleagues will not undertake such practices again.

The processes are the processes, and the minutes are now part of—

To be fair, there were processes in place before that, and there was—

They were not in place to the extent that they are now. We have heard about the changes that have been made. Minutes are now required and are taken in every single one of those circumstances. As I say, the minutes of every meeting that I have had pop up in my inbox—

You seem reluctant to say that that is your expectation of Cabinet colleagues.

Of course it is our expectation of every minister and every cabinet secretary—absolutely.

Excellent. I am glad to hear it.

The Auditor General’s recent reports on the gap between policy ambition and delivery will, I think, resonate with us all. Those reports also relate to the issue of fiscal sustainability that the committee has been wrestling with, as has the Government.

The issue is relevant to this inquiry, because it relates to the issue of churn in the civil service. Part of that is about civil servants being spread increasingly thinly and being moved from one team to another because new initiatives and policies are adopted. That creates not just a lack of capacity but a lack of expertise and, potentially, in some cases, a lack of the robust advice that ministers might want.

I will round all that up into one question. Is the Scottish Government overcommitted? Are we trying to do too much with the resources that we have, which is resulting in the gap between ambition and what is being delivered?

A number of factors are pressing on our public finances. One is that we have a huge number of programmes, all of which need to be supported, and the financial position has come under increasing pressure. For example, the level of inflation has squeezed the budget and resulted in a significant reduction in the value and purchasing power of every £1 in the Scottish public finances.

Added to that are pay deals. Nobody would deny any public servant a reasonable pay deal, but we have, by and large, had to fund those through the resources that are available to us, which has meant difficult decisions. We saw that with teachers’ pay and the decision that had to be made on the £46 million for universities and colleges. We said at the time that the money had to come from somewhere. Those are real decisions and real issues that have to be navigated.

10:45  

The medium-term financial strategy that I will soon bring to Parliament will set out the horizon scan of what the public finances are looking like and some of the difficult decisions that will require to be made. Ultimately, one of the reasons that the First Minister set out the missions was that we need to look at everything that we do and spend money on through that lens and ask ourselves some perhaps quite difficult questions around whether each thing delivers those key missions. That will have to guide us through some of the quite difficult decisions that will inevitably have to be made in order to balance the budget. The Scottish Government has to balance the budget. It is a legal requirement; we have no option. My job is therefore to make sure that my colleagues are doing what they can to address all those issues, including the programming.

It is difficult for civil servants that one minute they are working on this and the next they are working on that. However, based on what I have seen and experienced, the skill of the civil service is that they are very quick to adapt; they are agile and able to get to grips with new policy areas.

There is a recognition that we have to keep a close eye on head count. We cannot have exponential growth. That means that it has to be an agile organisation and that civil servants will have to pivot, such as they did on Ukraine, for example. Nobody knew how to set up a Ukraine resettlement programme and its being set up was an amazing insight into how the civil service is agile, experienced and able to deal with things that nobody could have predicted in a very efficient and professional manner that delivered a good scheme.

I will drill down on that a little bit. I will try to be brief. Would the outcomes be better if the Scottish Government was doing less, but doing each of those initiatives with more resources available to it? At the moment, there is a huge number of priorities spread across a range of initiatives, and we know that there is a gap between ambition and outcome. Would the outcomes across the board, particularly in relation to child poverty and net zero, be better if there were fewer but better resourced programmes?

I reiterate my plea for brevity.

That is an absolutely critical piece of work. We are taking that forward.

The resource spending review last year was supposed to get us towards a point of fiscal sustainability. Obviously, that happened during a period where inflation continued to rise. Nonetheless, reflecting on the fact that we had the RSR in the summer and then an emergency budget review and a second round of additional savings in the autumn, it appears that quite a lot of what was in the EBR probably could have been in the resource spending review. Has there been any lessons learned exercise around why the RSR did not generate some of the savings in the EBR that, certainly when I was looking at them, felt very obvious? Some of what was in the EBR was painful and difficult, but not all of it was.

There is maybe a fair point there, but the pay deals came at us due to the rise in inflation. Those pay demands and therefore the pay deals to try—quite rightly—to avoid industrial action were perhaps beyond what had been envisaged in the RSR. That put additional pressure on the budget and the money had to come from somewhere. Part of the EBR process was to help with that.

The former DFM laid out that one of the driving forces was the pay deals, driven by inflation. That would have been quite hard to predict, to be honest. We absolutely want to avoid being in EBR territory again this year, which is why I am undertaking the work that I am with cabinet colleagues to manage those in-year pressures.

My point is more that it appears that some of the decisions that were made in the EBR to withdraw and cut services have not had a negative impact on outcomes, which begs the question as to whether those services were the right thing to be spending money on in the first place. The RSR was the kind of exercise that should have identified that and that should have been asking those value-for-money questions. In relation to quite a lot of the services that were on the EBR list, that had not been done in the RSR, or it had been done and the decision had been taken that each service was value for money. Then, through the EBR, we decided that the services were not value for money or that they did not have enough value for money to justify continuing them. Does that not indicate that the RSR exercise did not achieve all its objectives?

You might have a fair point. The exercise that we are going through at the moment is very much looking at value for money, impact and whether something delivers on outcomes. We are really trying to land that in the right place for short-term fiscal balance. On the longer-term position, you spoke about what is critical, highlighting that there are things that maybe do not deliver on the intended outcomes that we need to take a hard look at. That work is under way at the moment.

I am a new member of the committee, so I am not included in what Liz Smith said about the concerns of the committee. I disassociate myself from those remarks.

I am a bit surprised that we have gone down the route of gender recognition reform, but let us stick with that for a second. That policy is in not just the Scottish Government’s manifesto but everybody’s manifesto. Two consultations were undertaken, and the proposals have been subject to more parliamentary scrutiny than any other measure that I can remember in my time in this Parliament. Despite that, at the end of that process we are in a situation in which another Government has said that it will nullify the bill. That is the biggest development that we have seen in public administration or in decision making in the Parliament, certainly since my time here and I think since its inception.

If another Government just steps in, without saying what it thinks is wrong with the bill and says that it will strike it down—incredibly, some members in this Parliament support the UK Government doing that to this Parliament—what is the effect on the civil service and ministers when considering further policy initiatives? That threat has been raised again in relation to a couple of other measures, such as the deposit return scheme. What is the effect on policy making in the Scottish Government of that interference with the Scottish Parliament?

You raise an important point. Obviously, I will not stray into commenting on live legal proceedings. However, one of the reasons why we felt it important to challenge the section 35 order was the issue of precedence and the potential chilling effect on other policies.

A section 35 order is a wide-ranging power—essentially, it could be brought to bear on any policy decision making by the Scottish Government that the UK Government does not like or agree with. That approach very much goes against the memorandum of understanding that was in place, in which a section 35 order was to be seen as a last resort and only to be used if everything else had failed. That did not happen in the case of GRR. The UK Government used the order as a go-to first salvo. That action completely blows the memorandum of understanding out of the water.

Where does that leave us? We must be guarded against that chilling effect of not wanting to take forward policies that the UK Government might disagree with. There will continue to be policies that we want to progress with which the UK Government might fundamentally disagree. If we believe that it is in the interests of the people of Scotland to act on an issue, and we have set out a commitment to do so, we should take the matter forward.

Say that we were putting through legislation on minimum unit pricing for alcohol. That is a good example of a policy that the UK Government did not agree with. You can now see how it could use either a section 35 order or the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 to say that that policy would be a disrupter to the drinks industry and that it would therefore not allow it.

We are in new territory. The situation is of huge concern. We need to get a different relationship. Getting into the territory of the memorandum of understanding would be very helpful. We will continue to pursue that with the UK Government, to get away from the threats of not granting an exemption under the internal market act or of using a section 35 order. That is not a good place to be in—and it gets in the way of the good day-to-day working relationships that civil servants have with their UK counterparts and, indeed, that we in Government have with some ministers.

I finish on this point: I have a good relationship with many of the departmental ministers in the UK Government. Much of the problem emanates from the Scotland Office. I will just leave that there.

This question might be for the permanent secretary. It may be, from what the committee has heard so far in the inquiry, that these issues, which in my view have by far the biggest impact on decision making in the Scottish Parliament, have been covered already.

Aside from a capricious Government deciding, for political reasons, to try to gratuitously supersede a decision of this Parliament, there are now various instances of legislative consent motions, or the Sewel convention, being ignored, which was not the case not too long ago.

In the early stages of policy development in the civil service in particular, does that have a chilling effect? Do you have to take into account, in addition to all the other factors, the likelihood that some minister in the Westminster Government is going to do something that completely ignores the interests of this Parliament, or is going to increase the likelihood of legal conflict between the two Administrations? Is that part of your thinking, or do you—as the DFM just said—try to zone that out of your thinking at the start?

It is complex, so I cannot pretend that we are zoning out from it. The reality in which we are operating is that section 35 is being used for the first time and we are navigating an exemption from the internal market act to implement the deposit return scheme—that is our top-priority conversation with the UK Government.

Going back to the policy development process, we will always endeavour to ensure that we give ministers the very best, frank advice that we can. Five years ago, that would not have included the risk of a section 35 order being used or an exemption not being granted under the internal market act. Those are two new things that have occurred recently.

There is quite a premium on me and my team managing those relationships in order to ensure that we have the best possible understanding between both Governments. As the Deputy First Minister said, the four-nations dialogue that she has had with the chief secretary, for example, and with Michael Gove and others, is very helpful. We collaborate on many things, such as green freeports, Ukraine, Covid and energy reform. However, there are points of contention and we need to navigate them with care, in particular given that both those bits of legislation—GRR and the DRS—were considered within the competence of this Parliament and that that was not disputed by anybody.

I want to go over a few things again. The first concerns a point that the convener raised about lessons learned. As a committee, how can we get assurance that the lessons learned process is in place? Is it visible so that people can see what those lessons were, and so that we can go back and check whether that has been done, rather than just having a tick-box exercise?

Lessons learned will be visible in different ways, depending on what the issue was. With regard to some of the governance arrangements around Ferguson’s, for example, lessons are visible in that there is now a completely different governance structure for how decisions are made there. We talked earlier about minutes, which mean that everything is recorded in a proper, punctual and accurate way, and is there for the record. That is how lessons learned are visible.

Policy decisions will always end up involving judgments. We would hope that, most of the time, that would be the right judgment, but occasionally it will not.

Is a document produced after a project or piece of work has taken place to say, “These are the lessons we learned”? I understand that you are saying that changes were made, but is there a list that captures the things that went wrong and the lessons to be learned?

Some of that will be done on a more formal basis than it might be in other areas. For example, there is a big, high-profile and in-depth public inquiry around Covid.

There has also been a commitment to a further inquiry on Ferguson’s—on top of what has already been done in Audit Scotland’s section 22 report—once 801 and 802 are delivered. Work still needs to be done there that will generate further information and lessons learned in depth.

In other areas, a more rapid, shorter and sharper analysis will take place around whether things have worked. The perm sec can say a bit more about that.

On Ukraine, an in-depth analysis will take place of what has gone well, what the lessons learned are and how the civil service and ministers responded—all that will be captured.

11:00  

I think that the DFM has covered it. We will take on either recommendations or inputs around learning, evaluate them and publish our response. If the committee recommends that we go further in a particular, tangible area, we are happy to do so.

We also have a significant programme of structured evaluation of policy. We mentioned minimum unit pricing: a recent evaluation and independent analysis confirmed the policy’s good impact in relation to saving lives.

We will keep trying to ensure that we are transparent about what we are doing and how we are trying to improve it, whether that be record keeping, private investments or our approach on freedom of information with the Information Commissioner.

I understand that, when an official inquiry takes place, an external body publishes the lessons, but where are the lessons about the census, for example? Where can I go to see the lessons that we have learned and the actions that we have put in place to try to ensure that the same thing does not happen again?

We covered that point a bit, earlier. I am happy to take away that point and consider the process of where we have got to with the on-going lessons-learned exercise—we have not yet concluded all the data analysis—and the timetable for when we can publish it. Like you, I want that to be open and transparent for scrutiny from the Parliament and its committees, and on the record for the future.

Is the process already in place for that scrutiny to happen, or will it be put in place?

Yes. I have seen various iterations of census-related lessons learned documents already; the thing that I do not have is the timetable for when it will be published. However, we can provide that information to the committee.

I go on to critical challenge. I understand that the funding for organisations such as the SFC or Audit Scotland is safe; however, as Michelle Thomson mentioned earlier, we had the SCVO in, which said that its members felt that there was a risk that their funding might stop if they were critical of the Government. That is an issue. What can we do to change that situation?

I am concerned to hear that. We might have work to do to reassure organisations that that is not the case. I ask organisations such as SCVO or any others to look at the evidence: many examples exist of organisations that are funded by the Scottish Government and are critical of policy decisions or legislative options—there is no shortage of them. I would have thought that that might have given some confidence to organisations that there are no questions about looking at funding arrangements if they disagree with the Scottish Government, whether or not they articulate that. We might have a job of work to do to make that more explicit.

I meet SCVO regularly. It does a hugely important job in representing third sector interests and I would want it to say if it were concerned. It is very forthcoming in arguing for more investment in third sector organisations—certainly in the meetings that I have had with it.

I do not know whether it is a fear of funding being removed or a fear that that disagreement will be taken into consideration if they apply for extra funding.

If that is so, we have some work to do because that should not be the case.

I want to move on to lines of communication between ministers and civil servants. Ms Fraser, are there clear instructions on how a minister and civil servants should be communicating?

Yes, that is clearly set out in the ministerial code and indeed in the civil service code. We expect to work together professionally, offering dignity and respect in the workplace, and that is very clear.

We have made our expectations on both sides much clearer in this area. If civil servants feel the need to raise a complaint about the behaviours of a minister, there is a new procedure. Also, equally, there is a new grievance procedure within the Scottish Government, which makes it really clear where colleagues can go if they have any concerns—for example, about senior colleagues and the way in which we behave. It is about making that as clear and transparent as possible and creating that safe environment where people know and understand that it is safe to challenge.

The reason why I ask is that a witness at a previous meeting explained that the more transparency you have, the greater the risk of “government by WhatsApp”. Is that recognised by the Scottish Government? Can we get an assurance that that is not happening and that we do not have ministers and civil servants communicating by WhatsApp to avoid freedom of information requests or anything else?

That is certainly not my experience and it is not the practice that I see in place at all.

You have heard some of the detail around why it is important to record decisions and improvements are being made in the recording of decisions and how they have been reached. I hope that what you have heard here today gives you some reassurance around that.

Are there WhatsApp messages between civil servants and ministers? Does that happen?

I have a WhatsApp on-call group with my private office so that if I put something in the system at 8 o’clock at night, somebody in my private office picks it up quickly and responds to it. It is a convenient tool because someone will see that I have asked, “First thing in the morning, can I get blah blah?” rather than my having to send an email that may or may not be picked up. However, that is not about avoiding scrutiny; it is just about quick communication to a range of people, one of whom will pick it up. That is the example that I would give.

You mentioned prevention right at the start and the committee has been talking about the subject for quite a while. We often hear it mentioned, but we also often hear that it is quite difficult to find the funding for prevention because all the money is going into dealing with immediate effects. How will you change that?

That goes back to the Christie commission and the point that early intervention and prevention are always better than going back and trying to fix issues that appear further down the track. Of course, we all agree with that. However, as you pointed out, it is quite difficult to achieve.

I will draw on my time as health secretary and use an example from the health service. In order to reduce pressure on acute care, you need to try and avoid people having to go into hospital by improving their health through public health measures and trying to create a healthier population. However, you still need to fund the acute sector, so you have to try and do both.

The child poverty plan is a good example of work that we are undertaking now. We are trying to understand the drivers of child poverty and to really get underneath them and look at ways of addressing child poverty. The up-front Scottish child payment money in people’s pockets helps to alleviate problems in the here and now, but it is also about work around parental employment and improving the life chances of children from an early age in relation to good-quality early years education and childcare, to begin to move it further upstream.

The permanent secretary was telling me earlier about some of the statistics around reduced teenage pregnancy and better attainment. Those are the results that you would expect to see later in life from good early years intervention. Do we need to get better at it? Yes, we do. There is a lot within the Christie report for us to draw upon and some of the work that we are undertaking is really about trying to home in on what makes a difference.

Is there a specific point that you want to establish, Douglas?

No, I just wanted to make sure that the Government is focused on prevention, because I do not see it, to be honest.

Thank you to the Deputy First Minister, the permanent secretary and officials for coming today. This was the last evidence session of our inquiry into effective Scottish Government decision making. We will consider our next steps at our meeting next Tuesday.

We will take a short break before the next item on our agenda, which is an evidence session with the permanent secretary.

11:10 Meeting suspended.  

11:16 On resuming—