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We have heard about the tools that are available to you and your colleagues throughout the different levels of local and central Government. The national outcomes are one of those key tools. However, the national outcomes and national performance framework do not always match up. We cannot always follow the thread through from the NPF, budgets or the programme for government to the delivery of outcomes. Will you, minister or cabinet secretary, say more about how the Government is trying to follow those things through more concretely? What is your assessment of the delay in refreshing some of the national outcomes?

Thank you very much.

I hear that frustration—it is expressed by lots of people across the social care sector, from service users to providers. Have other panel members seen similar frustration? The priorities to deliver our human rights outcomes are still there, but, given the shift in that piece of legislation and the loss of the human rights bill, do you think that the Government actually has the understanding, as well as the capacity and narrative that Angela O’Hagan spoke about, to connect those aspirations to delivery? Are we missing something?

Allan Faulds spoke about the territorial scrap between national and local government. I get the feeling that we know what we want to do but we just do not know how to do it, and other things get in the way. We focus on the territorial scrap because the other question is too hard to answer. Do you get a sense of that?

Good morning. Thank you for joining us.

My questions follow on from Karen Adam’s questions about understanding progress and how the Government is approaching areas where there has not been progress. An area that has come up in our discussions with stakeholders this morning, and previously, is the implementation gap between the positive narrative and vision that we have in social care and the lack of delivery on those. The specific example that we heard earlier from the ALLIANCE was that the legislation that was initially proposed to transform social care and to embed human rights in every element of its provision became the subject of a scrap about territory and powers between the Scottish Government and COSLA. How is the Scottish Government working on navigating those issues, where we have other structural tensions that impede the delivery of a powerful and admirable narrative about the drive for the delivery of human rights and equality for all in Scotland?

If there was one policy area that we could spend all day talking about, that would be it. There is a gap between our narrative and vision on one hand and the delivery and outcomes on the other.

One of the challenges that was put to us this morning was that, when we are making human rights assessments of budgetary decisions, across the board, there is not always the same level of quality assurance, or the same understanding of the degrees of tolerance or the need for outcomes to be assessed. Again, I will use a social care example: the Scottish Government’s commitment to raise funding by 20 per cent was well recognised, acknowledged and welcomed, but there has been no assessment of how the funding has been used or how it is delivering positive outcomes and securing people’s minimum core obligations. Could you say more about the Government’s work to ensure that, in every directorate across all levels of Government, right from the top and all the way down, there is a shared understanding that the thread from the narrative to the delivery of outcomes must be drawn together?

I have two final questions. Who took the decision to advertise for a rector’s assessor using a recruitment agency, rather than using the established practice whereby the appointment is in the gift of the rector, in discussion with the students association?

That is fine—I accept that. I just had to ask the question.

In April 2023, the Scottish Trades Union Congress called the university a “rogue employer”. Will you give us some indication of how, in your role as the university leader, you tried to foster good relations with campus trade unions, the broader staff community and students?

Did you ever suggest or think to suggest that it would be useful to have more direct involvement of staff and students in decision making at different levels of the university? Given the lack of trust and the concerns about transparency, openness and information flow—communication—about which the committee has heard and which are apparent from spending any time on campus, did you ever think that it might be better to have more people involved in the discussions, to share more information and to hear different ideas about different ways of navigating through difficult times?

There is a report that was produced following the restructuring, which had some pretty robust recommendations for university management about improving communications, openness, transparency and the flow of information. It appears that, over the past couple of years, none of those recommendations was implemented. I challenged the UEG on that previously. Do you recognise that more should have been done to improve some of that and that it might have led to some of the financial questions being raised and, possibly, dealt with earlier?

I begin my questions today as I did yesterday: I put on the record an interest, which is that I was elected as the rector of the University of Dundee in March and will take up the post in August.

Thank you for your comments so far, Ian Gillespie. You said earlier that you love the university and that you wanted to be part of its future. Why then, when the urgency of the situation came to light in November, when staff and the wider university community were told about the gaping black hole, did you not spend time on campus? Why did you not make yourself available to staff and students? You instead sent your deputy to the first town hall meeting, which was called by campus trade unions to bring staff together to discuss the situation.