Seòmar agus comataidhean

On the place point, are you looking to declutter the landscape? There used to be a couple of hundred public bodies, whereas now you are responsible for about 125 or 130 non-departmental public bodies, and there are also local authorities, health boards, integration joint boards, community planning partnerships and city and regional deals. I wonder how many people in Scotland know how all those things work together.

Given that Scotland has a population of 5.4 million across 75,000km², is there an argument to include that landscape in the reform agenda? Most people want a major decluttering of the public sector landscape to ensure that more money is spent on front-line public services.

I remember calling for a change more than 10 years ago, and we are still dipping our toes in the water.

You have talked about vision and about being dynamic, and the pace of change is important. I should say—and I have used this analogy before—that, when I was at university, I never once handed an essay in late; however, I never did the essay until the night before, because I had a deadline to work to. I always feel that, if there is no deadline, you will just do something else. I am one of those people who are very goal and task driven and who like to have something done by a certain date, so that they can move on to the next thing.

There seems to be a lot of passion and energy in what you are saying, but I like things to be pinned down whenever possible, so that everyone knows in what direction they are heading. Will there be—to use a United Kingdom phrase of the past year—milestones along the way?

Basically, what happens is that several hundred million pounds is moved from, say, the health and social care budget to the education budget. The same movements happen every year, but when we question the Government on it, it says, “Well, one thing is grounded in policy and the other is grounded in delivery.” It seems that, if we want the transparency that you talked about in your opening remarks, it is important that things are done as clearly as possible and that we do not have to go through the same process every year.

There appears to be considerable resistance from some civil servants to what the public would perceive to be a fairly modest proposal, which is that they come into the office at least two days a week, and many are incredulous that they do not already do so. After all, public service workers, from refuse collectors to teachers to nurses, all have to be at their work.

Is your ultimate aim to increase the number of office days? What assessment has been done of the performance of people who work at home compared to that of those who work at the office? Also, what is the wider picture regarding people being able to collaborate and all the social interactions that come from people working collectively together in one place?

It seems very modest. Before Covid, people turning up to work in their office was taken as read. People might have had flexitime, which has been around for decades, but two days a week in the office generally seems a limited amount. I am glad that you will not stop there and will consider pushing further forward than that.

Ultimately, it is about public services.

Some injustice might have happened five or 10 years ago, but that should not necessarily mean that people in my constituency cannot call on a police officer because a resource has been dedicated to an inquiry. There will always be a cost, even if you take it out of the central budget—it means that it cannot be spent anywhere else—but there seems to be a particular unfairness there.

In your introduction, you talked about using place to full effect, which I found intriguing. Can you expand a wee bit on what you meant by that?

Ministers might wish to set a target, but surely that would be based on the advice that you and your colleagues would give them about what is deliverable. I use the word “optimal” because people do not just want to see a reduction in the number of people if that has an adverse impact on the delivery of services. People want to see what is perceived to be more efficient and more effective delivery of those services.

One of the issues with the national performance framework is that, when the programme for government comes out, it does not seem to connect directly to it. That is one issue.

Another issue is that many organisations and the wider population do not really have much understanding of what the national performance framework is. It seems to bubble around in the background, but it is not as prominent as perhaps it was intended to be. Is that a fair comment?

We have all seen ministers stand up in the chamber and say that they will bring out a certain plan, strategy, document, refresh or whatever it happens to be—you name it—in the spring. We then find ourselves in the summer and it has not happened. Such documents never seem to come out, say, a week early; indeed, they are very rarely on time.

From experience, I expect there to be more battening down of the hatches. Ministers are ultimately held to account, but there appears to be a sense of drift across the whole Parliament when that does not happen, which does not help anybody. I just wonder whether there will be a bit more emphasis on ensuring that, when a deadline is set, it is met. After all, it would inspire a lot more confidence not only in the Government but in the Parliament and its institutions.