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I agree with that, and I think that we need to see that work being taken forward.

I wonder whether our approach to skills is too detached from our approach to enterprise support. More than 90 per cent of businesses are small businesses that have seen zero productivity growth over the past decade or more. Those are small businesses—a handful of people work in them—and you cannot divorce the employee from the business, because they are one and the same. It makes no sense to have an approach that looks at business investment and support separately from skills. Indeed, that approach forces us to shoehorn apprenticeships into businesses that cannot support or sustain them. There has been a lot of talk about apprenticeship sharing. However, as someone who has run a small business, I know that small business owners do not want to share their employees with their competitors, so that is a non-starter.

Do we need to think about small businesses more holistically instead of separating out investment in skills? Should we take a holistic approach to supporting the business skills of small businesses by treating the employee and the business as one and the same, in order to get productivity going in that sector?

Thank you. That was very helpful.

Ultimately, the success of that approach is largely reliant on that quality of the data that sits underneath it. It has always struck me that when you click through the national performance framework on the website, you get presented with lots of bullet points—probably more words than numbers—and that it is not very digestible.

There is a broader point around how to approach the data. However, on a simple presentational point, do you not think that we need to do better at presenting it? I became a real addict of the Public Health Scotland dashboard through the pandemic, which was incredibly helpful for seeing what was going on. Do you think that we need a bit of a refresh and something similar for the national performance framework in order to bring the data to life?

That is an interesting point that probably—to be blunt—brings to life why, essentially, the NPF is withering on the vine, if we are being honest. It is interesting because you are saying that to make it work you need almost a translation of what your organisation’s contribution does. Unless—this is the point that I was making in the previous session—the overarching strategy for how the Government seeks to influence and advance measures and outcomes is holistic, it becomes incredibly difficult for individual agencies or partners to demonstrate how they are contributing to it.

I wonder whether what Neil Ferguson just outlined is what the Government as a whole needs to be doing, by saying, “Here is the national performance framework as a whole, and here is how Government and the public sector are seeking to influence it and deliver against it.”

My first point is on that subject and is not what I originally wanted to speak about. At the risk of contradicting you, convener, coming from a private sector background, I should point out that not knowing what revenue you are going to generate in the coming year does not prevent you from formulating a business plan. You do it on the basis of a high expectation and a pessimistic outcome. It is not set in stone, but the fact that you do not know precisely what your budget is going to be in the following year does not prevent you from setting parameters. Something could be done around that.

The key point that I want to return to is the timeliness point. Having some broad projections and broad plans would be sensible, but do we just need some simple things? For example, on climate change and carbon emissions, everything needs an environmental impact assessment. Whether it is a bit of legislation or a Government strategy, it requires a constant reference back to that. Do we need to do something as simple as requiring all new legislation, strategies, initiatives and programmes to state how they contribute towards achieving the outcomes in the national performance framework—both the primary outcomes that they seek to influence and the secondary ones that they hope to affect in broader terms? Would something as simple as that be useful?

It might just have been a typo. [Laughter.]

On that point, as we brought up in other discussions, in some ways the SDGs seem to have a bit more purchase and currency. Do we even need the national performance framework? Should we just be focused on SDGs, because they are better understood and they are more comparable, because they are used internationally? I would encourage other people to pile in. Do not wait for one of us to ask you to speak.

Finally, and briefly, when you look at the framework, you see the high-level outcomes and then you are straight into a sea of words and numbers being referenced. Do we just need to present this stuff a bit better so that, when people look at it, they get a sense of what is going on?

Definitely not. The problem is that, all too often, when the national performance framework is referenced, you just see that diagram, but it is about the numbers. In this day and age, we have all seen wonderful infographics that bring data to life. However, my humble suggestion is that this data is not being brought to life.

As a follow-up to that, should we be putting these things into much plainer language?

I also have a substantive question. Another observation has been that, frankly, the framework is not used as much as it was when it was first conceived of in 2007. Critically, one of the other observations that I found interesting was that it was part and parcel of the concordat—