Official Report 741KB pdf
The next item on our agenda is our first evidence session in the joint committee inquiry into the Scottish Government’s proposed national outcomes, which form part of the national performance framework. I welcome to the meeting: Sarah Davidson, chief executive of Carnegie UK; Dr Max French, assistant professor, Newcastle business school, Northumbria University; Dr Alison Hosie, research officer, Scottish Human Rights Commission; and Lukas Bunse, policy and engagement lead, Wellbeing Economy Alliance Scotland.
I intend to allow up to 90 minutes for this session. As with the previous panel, if our witnesses would like to be brought into the discussion at any point, please indicate that to the clerks and I will then call you. I thank you for your written submissions. We will move straight to questions.
One of the first things that I should ask about is the fact that none of you seems to be particularly impressed by the fact that the national performance framework is to continue to be called the national performance framework. Is that right?
I will take that one first. I thank the committee for its invitation to give evidence today.
As the national performance framework, as it is currently titled, has evolved in recent years, it has come more into line with our international comparators for what is called the wellbeing framework. That framework exists in many countries that are more local to us—in Wales and the North of Tyne here in the United Kingdom, and in places around the world such as Canada, New Zealand and some of the Scandinavian countries.
10:45When we talk to people about the concept of wellbeing in the sense of thriving and living well together, we find that they can understand it. Wellbeing can encapsulate many of the economic, environmental, democratic and social outcomes that the framework in Scotland aims to achieve. In our experience of talking to people about the national performance framework, it is much harder to communicate with them about that and get them excited about and engaged with it.
The title is misleading. In our view, a wellbeing framework should not be about measuring the performance of individual services or directorates of the Scottish Government; it should be a vision of how people would like their country to be in the long term, and one that can align them behind it.
Carnegie UK was unconvinced by the Scottish Government’s contention that changing the name now would result in brand dilution. In our experience, although the brand might be recognised within public services—always remembering that recognition and effective operation are two different things, as the committee recognised in its inquiry in 2022—there is a huge amount of untapped potential to engage people beyond public services in a wellbeing vision for Scotland. That is why we are disappointed that the Government has not accepted that recommendation.
Yes, I think that the name is a bit dull as well. I have to say, though, that I do not think that the inclusion of the word “framework” in any title is helpful.
Does anyone else want to comment on that before we move on to other stuff?
I have a quick comment. I agree wIth Sarah Davidson. If wellbeing is the key focus of what the framework is meant to do and work towards, it would have been a good opportunity to put that in the title while we are trying to rebrand it and reinvigorate people’s enthusiasm for it.
However, it is also key to remember that the difference is whether public bodies and decision makers use the NPF to guide policy and improve outcomes. The name is important, but what truly matters is how it is used and implemented. That all needs to be thought through. We have been buying into wellbeing, which is a good concept, and a global one, but the use of the term should still be thought through.
Max French, you were not impressed with the consultation exercise that the Scottish Government carried out.
Yes, among other things. There is emerging international consensus on how we should conduct consultations on setting national goals.
We started off with a single online survey as our baseline, but international practice has become much more ambitious. We see searching, large-scale participative processes and national dialogues that are set out over a long period of time to engage all sectors of society in setting national outcome goals. We recognise that the legitimacy of the framework and, ultimately, the political power that it commands, is due in large part to the quality of the consultation.
I was disappointed to see the levels of resourcing and attention that were given to the national outcomes consultation, particularly given the criticisms of the 2018 version. The most recent consultation seemed to be more or less a repetition of that, with some additions about community participation and workshops. I felt that it could and should have been more ambitious than it was.
Lukas Bunse, you also seem to feel that the Scottish Government paid lip service to the consultation. Your submission said that you were
“very disappointed with the Scottish Government’s lack of investment into a meaningful consultation process”.
Yes. I echo Max French’s comments. It shows how important this was to the Government when we consider how much money it was willing to spend on it; its approach seems to have been to spend as little as possible. As Max French said, if we want the wellbeing framework to be a vision for Scotland that people know about, through which we can hold decision makers to account, it should guide actions towards creating such a vision. It is a nice vision. Which of us would not want to live in the world that the current national outcomes, and perhaps the new ones, set out?
However, at the moment, it is just something at the sidelines that most people in Scotland probably do not know about. The consultation would have been a chance to increase awareness of it and its legitimacy. Instead, in some respects, we have gone backwards. I was not around the previous time but, as far as I am aware, there was more consultation, definitely on the community side, so that is disappointing.
With regard to policy priorities, in your submission, you said that there should be
“an emphasis to include the voices of those that are seldom heard”
and
“a recognition that a thriving democracy requires opportunities for participation to be accompanied with the sharing of power”.
Can you expand on that a wee bit for us?
The focus of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance is on redesigning our economy to serve the wellbeing of people and the planet now and in the future. That framework and vision is important as a guide for policy making, to ensure that it is coherent and linked up, and to put that different purpose at the heart of the economy.
For us, one of the important principles of a wellbeing economy is that participatory element. Decisions should not be made from the top down. They need to be inclusive, especially of the people who are most impacted by the failures of our current economic system, because they do not have enough money to buy essential food, or they are not able to access transport to the places that they need to go to. Often, those are not the people who respond to an online consultation form, so you have to go to them, because they have other things on their mind than responding to the latest Government consultation. That is where those priorities come from.
With regard to that inclusivity, in work that the commission has been doing recently in the Highlands and Islands to look at economic, social and cultural rights, one of the aspects that is coming through from that data, as well as from Audit Scotland’s recent report, is on digital connectivity and the large proportion of people, particularly in remote and rural Scotland, who do not have the right access to be able to participate. That is just one thing that highlights the digital divide in how people are able to participate.
If the NPF is to be our vision for Scotland, everybody’s views have to be part of it. The NPF team did its best with the data that was available, but the team should have been afforded better resources to show the Scottish Government’s commitment to the process, as was mentioned.
Max French, you are not particularly impressed with how the framework national outcomes are being implemented. When I was reading your submission, I sat with my yellow marker thinking, “Oh, that’s a really good point”, and I annotated loads of your points.
For example, you say:
“Scotland has lacked a credible—or even discernible—implementation strategy for the NPF since its founding in 2007.”
You said that the NPF is “internationally recognised”, but that
“even when organisations want to adopt and implement the NPF, they lack the tools, guidance and know-how to implement them operationally.”
You are of the view that the NPF is a good idea and that people outwith Scotland have recognised that, but that the framework is not having much impact on the ground. Obviously, I have your submission here, but I am keen for you to talk about that particular issue.
Thank you for going through the tome of that submission.
I always do.
The frustrating thing is that we are not far from being able to envision a national infrastructure that puts the framework into practice, and we do not have to look far afield to find one. We can look at Wales and see how its Government has riven its wellbeing goals, objectives and indicators into how it develops policy. We have practical examples of that in the report that I published with Carnegie UK, and we can go into detail on how, in planning, implementing and monitoring policy, the wellbeing framework has contained that process. There is nothing in its legislation that directs the Welsh Government to do that.
Northern Ireland has not had a Government, ministerial oversight or an Executive, and it has not had parliamentary scrutiny forums such as these, but it has still managed to use its framework to conduct Government business. Northern Ireland has a much stronger link with local government and community planning than we do.
The Republic of Ireland uses its wellbeing framework in budgeting. The framework has been in operation for a year or two, but it has got further down the road than we have. The solutions are there. The NPF has not been taken seriously as a fundamental principle and the national outcomes are not paid due attention. We have a legislative directive, but it is not strong enough and not clear enough about what it is. It says that if you are a public body or a body that is involved in carrying out significant public functions, you should have regard for the national outcomes.
If we look through the Government’s recent output, we see that the NPF is not mentioned in the green industrial strategy and there is no regard for the national outcomes. The NPF is mentioned in the transport strategy for 2020 but the national outcomes are not. There is no mention in the biodiversity strategy. If we look at the Welsh Government’s versions of the national planning strategy and the transport, recycling, net zero and marine strategies, we can see how the wellbeing framework has been used.
We are in a situation where the actions are in place and the directions forward are quite clear, but from my perspective, it is a matter of them not being followed.
On that point, irrespective of the debate about the nomenclature, do we need a national performance framework?
Cat straight among the pigeons.
I will answer that one first. The short answer is yes, and I will say why I think that is the case. Whatever you call it, the value of a framework is that it can set a long-term vision that sits above the day-to-day noise in the system. Since the framework was first put in place in 2007, the day-to-day challenges of Government have only become greater. Individual services understandably focus on dealing with the problems of today and they can consume everybody’s time and attention. Absent a long-term strategic framework that sets out longer-term goals for a population as a whole, that is a significant risk. Indeed, the reality pre-2007 was often a focus on short-term goals without an understanding of how they were going to lead to longer-term objectives for the population.
There is an issue about how you raise your eyes from what you have to do today to understand the long-term goal. The other critical thing that it should do is enable public services and, indeed, other agencies and actors to understand their respective contributions to the delivery of outcomes horizontally. Again, we know that, absent a coherent framework, there is a high risk of fragmentation across different agencies. As Dr French described, in places such as Wales, which have that coherent framework in place, individual agencies understand what their integrated contribution to long-term outcomes looks like, whether it is in health, environmental outcomes or educational outcomes. That seems to be an important part of good governance and good administration.
That is interesting.
The NPF is a high-level document, but it cannot sit up there and not be used in practice. In recent years, we have talked a lot with the finance committee in pre-budget scrutiny about the disconnect between the NPF, which states our national ambition, the budget, which is what provides the resource to deliver on our national ambition and, in between, the programme for government.
For me, the NPF sets out what kind of Scotland we want, and from that, the annual programme for government should answer to those national outcomes. How will it deliver on them, and how will the budget resource that? Those connections are just not there now. We cannot make those lines between the two.
This morning, in your earlier evidence session on scrutiny of the budget, issues around disinvestment were raised. How do you know when something is working or not working and what you should invest in or not invest in? Unless we look from an outcomes-based perspective at what is working and what is not, we will not invest in the right things. Those three policy documents, which are probably the three most critical documents that the Scottish Government produces, need to talk to each other.
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I will build on that briefly. That is really important in the sense that many of the challenges that we are facing, such as climate change and poverty and inequality, are long-term challenges. We are not going to get to grips with them over the course of one parliamentary session.
If we want to ensure that we create a better society, we need a long-term perspective and long-term goals. We also need all those perspectives and goals to talk to each other and to ensure that somebody who is working on one goal is not accidentally making the situation in relation to another goal worse—or, if they have to do that, we at least need a way to think that through. At the moment, that is not happening.
Some of my colleagues use the analogy of a Rubik’s cube, which I think is really good. When you are trying to solve it, you have to think about all the sides, because if you try only one side, you will make the other sides worse again. That is what the NPF is for. Ideally, as Sarah Davidson said, that should sit a bit above the political frame with regard to what we all agree on. We might disagree on how we get there and the specific policies, but at least we have a common destination. That sounds abstract, but it is perfectly possible to do that. An example is the wellbeing budgeting work that has been going on in New Zealand, and there are a few other examples. It is not easy, but you can do that kind of analysis when you set budget lines and policies to think about how they impact different outcomes at the same time.
Why do you think that the three documents are not talking to each other? Where does the problem of the lack of coherency lie?
In reading the budget in the past few years and trying to scrutinise whether it is delivering on economic, social and cultural rights, which is where my focus has been, it has been difficult to see the links between budget and delivery on outcomes. The equality and human rights budget advisory group has been doing a lot of work on trying to improve the synergy between those documents.
A lot of work has also been done in the past few years to try to improve the understanding of which national outcomes and which human rights frameworks are relevant to different Government departments and to reflect that in the budget—to think through, from the starting point of a budget, what impacts the decisions have on people. That bit is still missing. It feels as though we see what those impacts might be after the fact—after the decisions are made. I do not think that what we are trying to do in delivering the national outcomes is reflected in the budget.
So that we can be held accountable for our actions and outcomes, during the past six or seven months, the SHRC has been trying to better understand what contributions we make to impact. It is sometimes quite difficult to unpick something like the national performance framework. There are lots of actors—it is not just on the Scottish Government to deliver—so what is the Government’s contribution? I do not think that it is setting that out, and it cannot be accountable for it if it is not setting out what it is trying to achieve. It is about the theory of change. What are you trying to achieve, and how do you intend to do that and to resource that? That linkage is missing.
I will pick up on Alison Hosie’s final point about accountability. We should be clear that aligning budgets with national outcomes is not straightforward, and lots of countries that are trying to do that are wrestling with it. We believe that it is worth trying to do it, for the reasons that have been set out. However, one of the impediments to that in Scotland is the system of accountability. One of the most felt accountabilities for any public servant is their accountability for their expenditure of money, and accountabilities are quite narrowly aligned with organisational responsibilities. As members will know better than most, budgets are presented to Parliament in line with ministerial portfolio accountabilities, rather than cross-cutting outcomes. Although Audit Scotland and the Auditor General have gone further in recent years to provide a commentary on the extent to which that is supporting outcomes, there is still misalignment between what people feel held accountable for and the long-term vision.
Alison, I note that you have said that what is important is that we have
“a more streamlined, simple and bold statement”
of the national performance framework, and that
“Resources and support for capacity building across public bodies will be essential to align operations with the National Outcomes.”
What are we talking about, then, in terms of “resources and support”?
I am sorry—can you repeat that last bit?
Yes, sorry. One of the key points that you have set out in your submission is that
“Resources and support for capacity building across public bodies will be essential to align operations with the National Outcomes.”
What kind of “resources and support” do you think will be required to deliver that?
This is about capacity building. It brings us back to the points that were made earlier about the lack of prominence of the NPF across different parts of government—local government, public bodies and so on—with regard to its importance. We do not feel that it is being given due regard to in other areas at the moment.
I know from a recent session with the Government team on the history of the NPF, where it came from and how it has developed that it had much more prominence at the start. Local authorities were thinking about and asked to report on how they were making those connections, why the NPF was important and the national outcomes that their various areas and portfolios of work would be working towards. However, that has disappeared.
This is all about understanding the NPF’s importance and grounding the work that you do in what you are trying to deliver. That comes down to capacity building, which is where I think that there is resource—not just financial resource, but human resource and knowledge exchange. We need to build back the prominence of the NPF through the work that public bodies do.
I see that you want to comment, Sarah, but I was just about to bring you in anyway, because you have said in your submission that
“existing duties are too weak to establish the National Outcomes as key drivers of decision making”.
I just wanted to pick up where Alison Hosie ended. One of the things that we know from Max French’s work in Wales, and from what we have observed in Wales, too, is that specifying in legislation ways of working that will help to deliver these long-term outcomes has been really significant in bringing the capacity-building work in behind. In Wales, that happens to be located in the Office for the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales—it could be located in different places—but work done there helps public bodies understand what it means to work in those different ways. For example, people can be taught how to use foresight and horizon-scanning information in a way that helps them give good policy advice to ministers.
There has been some of that in Scotland; there was, for example, a Scottish Government team that supported collective leadership across the public services. However, it was always underresourced; it does not exist any more, and that capacity building has more or less disappeared.
That connects to the point that you just made, convener, about duties. One would hope that, if a public body felt that a duty mattered and that it had to do something about it, it would follow that duty by building up the competence in its own organisation to deliver and by holding people in the organisation to account for that delivery. Again, we can extrapolate from the fact that we are not seeing the national performance framework really driving alignment and activity in Scottish public bodies that the duty that exists at the moment to have regard to the national outcomes is not really worth the paper that it is written on.
It has been interesting to hear the Welsh story. Jane Davidson, the AM in Wales who was responsible for the introduction of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, was impelled to do so by her experience as a Welsh Government minister of very similar soft duties, if I can call them that. The legislation in Wales was designed to toughen up that duty and to make it meaningful for public bodies.
I agree with all of that. It is worth reflecting on where Wales has got to without its legislative duties, though. Nothing in the Welsh legislation requires the Welsh Government to run its wellbeing framework through its programme for government, but it does, and it has chosen to do so. It has made an active choice in that respect. It reports annually based on its wellbeing objectives, which are aligned with its wellbeing goals, and again, it has chosen to do so. The reason for that is that that is riven through the culture in the Welsh Government in a way that it never has been in the Scottish experience.
You cannot separate that from the real hard powers that Wales has in comparison to what Scotland has, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that the Scottish Government has removed the NPF and the national outcomes from its most recent programme for government. There is no mention of them. There was last year, and there was the year before, and the year before that; this year, though, they have disappeared. What do we conclude from that as a public body? Surely the message is this: do not pay too much attention when we tell you to have regard to the national outcomes.
So, the subliminal message is quite clear, in your view. Alison, did you want to comment on that?
No—I agree with that.
Sorry, I just saw you nodding and I was not sure whether you wanted to come in.
Max, in your written submission, you mention a number of areas where things can be improved. You talk about convening power—I am a big fan of that—framing power, leadership, hard powers, introducing innovation funds, reconfiguring current reporting, Scottish Government procurement and pursuing a performance budgeting approach. We have the written submission, but can you say a wee bit more about that, just for the Official Report?
To give you the context, I probably sat down for half an hour or 45 minutes dreaming up those mechanisms, but the lesson from that is that it is not too difficult. We could get in a room together and bash those out, and we would have a conceivable implementation plan that the Scottish Government could take forward. We would find parallels for most of those mechanisms in how other countries, regions and cities have thought about and used their outcomes framework, whether it is a wellbeing framework or it is positioned otherwise.
There are mechanisms, and there are things that we could do at zero cost. There are things that we could do with a future generations commissioner, at £1.5 million or £2 million per year, and there are things in between. However, following its commitment to develop an implementation plan and provide leadership for the NPF, the messaging from the Scottish Government has sort of gone quiet. The wellbeing and sustainable development bill was one such mechanism, and we spent a lot of time thinking about how that could be used, but that is no longer in the programme for government.
There are mechanisms that we can think about and use, but the question is: what is on the table and how can we start moving forward?
Lukas, Max has mentioned the C word—“commissioner”. You probably know that we have undertaken an extensive review on that issue and produced a 34-page report, which was published only yesterday, suggesting a moratorium on commissioners. Why is a future generations commissioner particularly important? Why does the work of a suggested commissioner have to be done via a commissioner?
To be clear, I think that a commissioner is the best way to do that work. It might not be the only way, but we think that it is the best way, for various reasons. We have just had a long discussion about the need for capacity building. If we want the NPF to work to its full extent, somebody needs to do the training and develop the resources. It would be useful to have that in one central place.
There is also a point about accountability, and somebody having that overview perspective. Sophie Howe, who spoke at the cross-party group on wellbeing economy a couple of weeks ago, said that you need somebody with a helicopter view who can see what is happening and who can also be the grit in the system. The process is not necessarily easy, so you need somebody to help but also to check whether things are actually working, what is working, what is not working and whether people are doing the things that they are supposed to be doing. There is that accountability aspect.
Another aspect is that maybe the proposal for a future generations commissioner is different from some other proposals. It is very much about long-term thinking and future generations, and at the moment no organisation in Scotland is doing that work. There was a discussion in the report that the committee published yesterday about whether it is the role of MSPs to do that championing and advocacy, but I do not think that future generations are represented by current MSPs very well because, obviously, they are not electing you. That is one of the big differences compared to some other proposals.
My last point is about the need for a long-term approach. That has been really important in Wales, where the Future Generations Commissioner is appointed for seven years. That means that local authorities and public bodies know where to go and who to talk to and can build a relationship that will help them implement the duties and ways of working. If the work is done anywhere else, you have the risk that arises from Governments and civil servants changing quite regularly. The personal relationships that the commissioner could build are probably not to be dismissed in that respect.
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An argument could be made for having a plethora of commissioners for a number of areas, in order to have a specific relationship or an overview of one specific area. However, it is surely the role of MSPs and parliamentary committees to scrutinise that, backed up by the huge number of civil servants that we have. It is more about emphasising the importance of the national performance framework within the Scottish Government to ensure that it gets the appropriate scrutiny and so on that it requires. Spending £1.5 million or £2 million on an extra commissioner with all the associated back office costs is £1.5 million or £2 million that you cannot spend on, for example, front-line public services.
There is a danger here. As I and Max French have said, there are things that we can do for free, but the national performance framework is just sitting at the side not having been used very much to actually change the whole culture of how we work in Scotland to a point where it is aligned. You cannot do that without investment. One way or another, we will have to have investment into capacity building. As I said, the best way to do it is through a commissioner, and the idea that by not having a commissioner you get it for free is very dangerous. At the moment, we do not have a body in Scotland that can do the capacity building. We can have a discussion about where else we can put that work, but it is dangerous to think that you can get it for free. It is an investment that is very much worth it, because it will save money in other places and in the long term.
In case you wonder why, apart from Liz Smith, I have asked all the questions so far, it is because members are not exactly tripping over themselves to indicate that they want to come in. Liz will come in in just a minute after one more question from me.
Sarah Davidson, you have expressed concern that the plethora of outcomes means that it is quite hard for the Government to align with them all. Should there be fewer outcomes and greater focus on those? If so, what should the priority outcomes be?
Max French and I talked about this earlier, and he reminded me that there is evidence that shows that most human beings are not capable of holding more than about seven things in their mind.
As many as that?
I worked in the Government with the national outcomes for a long time, but, to be honest, I could not remember what they all were. If we are asking all public bodies to understand the implications of the outcomes for their work, I note that it is challenging for them to hold all 11 outcomes in mind—it is 11 at the moment and, I think, will be up to 14 under the revised recommendations. It is interesting that Wales has seven wellbeing goals, which are the equivalent of our wellbeing outcomes.
There is a risk—which I think has happened almost by accident, but it has happened—that there are now so many outcomes that you can almost map them on to Scottish Government directorates; you can have one or two directorates for each outcome. That works against the ambition of these being outcomes that cohere people around them, because they almost end up creating new silos.
The reality is that, inevitably, if you ask lots of people whether they would like their particular issue to be reflected in an outcome, they say yes, and more outcomes are created. There is now a risk that there are so many that the challenge of using them to set a cohering long-term outcome is, in fact, greater rather than lesser.
That is part of the reason why we needed the participative process that we did not get. Asking lots of people questions in an online consultation meant that we got an expanded number of outcomes without any discussion about what that might actually mean, how we could do it better or how they do it in Wales. There was no discussion; outcomes were just added on. They are all important, but how you translate the specifics into, perhaps, higher-level global outcomes requires discussion and participation.
We will now open up the session. The first colleague to ask questions will be Jamie Halcro Johnston, followed by Liz Smith.
Thank you. Sorry, convener, I was just enjoying your questioning too much.
I suppose that my point is similar to the point that Liz Smith has already made. Over the next few years, we will see a tightening of budgets, perhaps a lack of sustainability in the public sector and some tough decisions made. Given the concerns over what has been delivered or which outcomes have been followed so far, the Government now has much harder decisions to make. What confidence do you have that it will be easier and more likely for it to follow the desired outcomes here? Will it just be a box-ticking exercise?
You rightly identify the risk, which is that short-term challenges and short-term budget pressures overtake a focus on long-term outcomes. I would argue that that makes using a framework all the more important at a time like this, particularly—to pick up Alison Hosie’s earlier points—when it comes to investment in prevention and disinvestment from things in order to shift the dial on inequalities and poverty. The existence of a framework that can help people to act in the short term but in the context of long-term outcomes is arguably more important in times of pressures such as those that are being faced currently.
Lukas Bunse mentioned understanding unintended consequences and trade-offs and being transparent about them. Again, it feels all the more important to have a framework when resources are tighter than they have been in more recent years and difficult choices have to be made and explained.
That is the point. You have all made a very good case for why you believe that the NPF is important. What evidence is there that the Scottish Government feels the same way?
With the few exceptions that we have already talked about, there is not a lot to argue with in the Government’s response to the consultation. The question that I and my colleagues are raising is about the extent to which that reflects the priorities that exist across Government and whether the NPF will be used in that way. If past action is an indication of future intent, we are saying that we lack confidence that it will be used.
In five years’ time, we will be back here and you will be saying—justifiably—the same things, which is that it is important that the Government, whatever colour of Government it happens to be, needs to look longer term but it is not doing so, and that there needs to be a refocus on that.
The committee made some trenchant criticisms and, in my view, good recommendations when it conducted its inquiry into the NPF in 2022, and we are here in 2024 saying very similar things.
We are discussing a particular framework, with a set of outcomes and indicators, but the issue also relates to the broader question of Government decision making, and, in the context of fiscal restraint, which Sarah Davidson has just spoken about, it is more important than ever to have a balanced and long-term view of strategy.
This committee also ran an inquiry into public administration and effective Government decision making. Professor Paul Kearney, in his role as adviser to the committee, wrote a report to inform the inquiry. He concluded that, when he read Scottish Government documents or accounts, he was struck by their emphasis on the Government’s aspirations, structures and strategies and the fact that they did not really emphasise the more fine-grained decisions or their impacts. The Government provides a general story about how something is supposed to work.
I suggest that that means of decision making does not equip us particularly well to confront the new fiscal reality. Through the decision-making process, we have seen—again, we can look at Wales—that we can provide that level of detail, consistency and policy coherence by taking seriously our wellbeing framework, our performance framework or whatever you would like to call it.
In addition, when we look at the status of public service reform, including in relation to prevention, which is a key part of the programme for government, we can see half-formed ideas littered through the past 10 or 15 years. We had the Christie principles, which everyone loved—they were a very galvanising force in Scottish public life. However, the Auditor General for Scotland, among many others, can find scant evidence of those principles being active parts of how we do public service reform. We had the “Scottish Approach to Service Design”, which was about seven or eight years after that. That seemed cobbled together, and now it is not really discussed in any cohesive manner.
There is an opportunity to link all of that together and to regalvanise a consistent approach to public service reform, with the NPF as the headlining act, but we are not seeing any such opportunity. Where can we find ways of working? Well, there are the Christie principles, but they are very separate to the NPF. There is much more that we could do to be strategic, and the NPF is a device that helps us in that respect.
One thing that I have always said about the NPF is that it has amazing transformational potential, but we are not using it. There are many things, both simple and more complex, that we could do to enhance that. I will not shy away from saying that the commission has always highlighted connections with regard to the framework’s human rights basis. They are there, and they could be really solid, but they are not being tapped into.
Another disappearing commitment is the proposed human rights bill, about which, along with the national outcomes, there was no mention in this year’s programme for government. That bill has the potential to link the NPF with legal obligations, but we are shying away from that, and again, it all comes back to the link with accountability. When we put more of a structure on how we deliver on the NPF, we put a spotlight on accountability, and I get the feeling that that is where the commitment is missing. The report contains many excellent ideas on how we can improve accountability, and the implementation of accountability should, I think, be the focus for the next stage.
Do you have anything to add, Lukas?
I will be very brief.
I agree with what has been said. As I have said, it is very frustrating; the pieces of the puzzle are there—as Max French has said, we have the Christie principles, the NPF and the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015—but we are just not putting them together. That was the idea behind the proposed wellbeing and sustainable development bill, but the Government has not included that in its programme for government.
However, Sarah Boyack’s member’s bill is still there. So, I suppose that, in response to your question about the Government’s commitment at the moment, I would say that it does not look particularly strong, but there is an opportunity for Parliament to say, “Actually, this is important to us. You better get your act together.” I think that Sarah Boyack’s member’s bill could do that.
I am not sensing a huge amount of confidence that the Scottish Government is committed to the NPF in delivering on the outcomes. Obviously, it is updating the framework, but I wonder whether there is much point in updating something that it is not going to follow anyway, on principle. With that, I will hand back to the convener.
Thank you for that.
I want to pursue the question of why, when the NPF was first introduced, there seemed to be considerable commitment to it. It was mentioned in different documents. Indeed, at our away day two years ago, I think, we spoke to Dundee councillors and people working in various local authorities who were very keen on the framework and were making quite a strong link between what they were delivering in local authorities and the framework itself. Why has it slid away from people’s interest? What has happened to take it from being very prominent to not being mentioned at all?
There are probably a number of answers to that question, but I will speak to just one, and others might have other things to say.
I would say that, not just in more recent years, but even from the introduction of the national performance framework right back in 2007—I recognise that it has gone through a number of iterations since then—its implementation has relied very heavily on what Max French termed soft power or soft levers. A lot of the work that was done was on building relationships—which is really important—on training and on building people’s understanding of what it takes to deliver long-term outcomes. In the early years, it was talked about a lot; people were brought together in, for example, the Scottish Leaders Forum, and it felt very present.
Over time, though, there has been quite a lot of change of personnel. That is part of the issue: different people choose to emphasise or talk about different things. There is no doubt that, in the most recent period of years within Government, there has been a very strong emphasis on the delivery of individual services and commitments. To be clear, the delivery of commitments and the improvement of services matter, but there is sometimes a tendency to talk and act as though the delivery of individual things, whether successful or not, is separate from an ambition to achieve a long-term outcome. It is almost a case of being either in the outcomes camp or in the delivery camp. That has been very unhelpful to the prominence and presence of the national performance framework.
Do you think that that is true in local government as well as in national Government?
11:30
Local government takes its cue from national Government in some respects. In recent years, the squeeze on local authority budgets has required many local authorities to focus on their statutory obligations, for reasons that one can understand. I have heard local authorities say that that means that the space, energy and resources for a conversation about long-term sustainability—particularly about investing in preventative measures as opposed to dealing with wounds that are bleeding right now—have been constrained. I also hear local authorities and people who work for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities say that there is less dialogue with the Government about the roles that different actors in the system have to play. That issue has certainly become more pronounced in recent years.
I presume that that relationship has to be mended if we are to move forward.
Yes. The clerk’s note, I think, mentions the Scottish Leaders Forum’s response to the consultation, and it is worth reminding us what the Scottish Leaders Forum is. It comprises senior executive leaders across health, local government, the Scottish Government and Scottish public bodies. It notes that the current system of accountability does nothing to promote national outcomes and that procedural, political, budget and audit processes make little use of them. If that is what the executive leadership group is saying, that is interesting and tells us quite a lot.
Thank you.
I see the purpose of this whole process as breaking the short-term view in politics and trying to put things in longer cycles. There has been quite a lot of talk about technocratic bureaucracy, setting targets and trying to bring the state behind a certain set of goals, which I understand, but, inherently, these are political questions. The reason why the system is not working—in the previous session, we took evidence from Oxfam, which said that it is not working at all—is that there is no political commitment to making it work. Is that not right?
Northern Ireland and Wales—the other devolved nations—have taken a risk. Before its Government collapsed, Northern Ireland took a risk when it tried to make its senior civil servants directly accountable for outcomes. They were told, “Here’s the outcome—expect to be held to account through ministerial oversight or parliamentary scrutiny.” We did not go down that route, for some valid reasons. I do not believe that that is the right way for a Government to embed outcomes, but the Northern Ireland Government took a risk in doing that and subjecting itself to scrutiny.
Wales took a risk when it established the role of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, because that leadership and championing role is outwith the Welsh Government. The Government did not optionally embody its performance framework. If the commissioner deems the Government’s transport strategy to be inconsistent with its stated wellbeing goals, they will knock on the Government’s door and say that they have review powers. That provides some leverage.
Scotland has not followed suit, in that the NPF, which includes our national goals and objectives, has been stewarded by the Government. The committee and all of us who are contributing evidence have spent a great deal of time scrutinising the state of affairs. Is it now time to consider whether the Scottish Government should be the effective custodian of the NPF? Is it possible to implement a wellbeing framework and a set of national outcomes solely from within the Government?
That ties in nicely to the issue of where the NPF started and where it perhaps went wrong or lost its way. It started off as a performance framework for the Government. In its next iteration, there was, rightly, a big emphasis on the NPF being Scotland’s goals, not just the Government’s goals, but there seemed to be a dilution in the link to whose responsibility it was to deliver. It is really helpful to understand the contributory theory of change in that regard. The Government, local authorities, public bodies, businesses and civil society all have a role—everybody has a role—in delivery, but we need to know what the Government’s role is. It needs to set out its stall by saying what it is delivering towards achieving the outcomes, so that it can be held accountable for that. That is where there is a gap.
That is useful. There is also a question about the political coherence of the goals. As much as we have had one governing party in Scotland for 17 years, I do not think that anybody would dispute that we have had a variety of different approaches and, frankly, core beliefs in that time. Some people in the Government do not believe that economic growth is a positive thing at all, while others think that it is the only thing that matters. We have people from the original Administration that was elected in 2007 and which set this out who are now First Minister, while others are saying in the press that Scotland is effectively a third-world nation. How can we put together a long-term process under one Government if it departs so radically in its understanding of the organising principles of its purpose?
Part of the answer to that is, as Alison Hosie has suggested, a really good, engaged process that arrives at the set of national outcomes, so that they do not feel like the Government’s outcomes. Indeed, they are not; this is in legislation. These are Scotland’s outcomes and they have certainly been agreed by the whole Parliament. It is also about the ownership of the outcomes, so that the Government is not setting the homework and marking it. That is part of the problem.
To go back to your original question, public administration does not necessarily set everyone’s boat on fire. It is encouraging that this committee has responsibility for public administration, because it is an incredibly important part of the overall picture of how outcomes are or are not achieved in Scotland. It is therefore incumbent on public bodies, including the Government, at an administrative level, to build the capacity to do things well and do them well.
Absent political leadership, it is hard to go on doing that. There is an interesting alchemy between what the Administration has to deliver—doing its job well—and the political leadership that is set to incentivise that delivery. When the two are in alignment, as we have perhaps seen in Wales in recent years, that is where most progress can be made.
We have had a comparatively stable Government in Wales for that long period of time—one party in government—but with ideological coherence across that period, which has not been the case here.
My final question is about whether, if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority and about some of the commentary about how bland the outcomes are. Is it not better to have these technocratic goals set in the non-contestable space? There are things that we know. Climate change is happening, adaptation has to occur and we have to transition. There are no voices in Parliament that disagree with those things. I understand that there are voices on the fringes of politics that disagree, but in the core those things are non-contestable.
Some of the issues that are within those things, particularly the role of economic growth and whether we should have a wellbeing approach versus something that is driven around GDP, is clearly contested around the Cabinet table, let alone within Parliament. How can we have a long-term goal that is based on an ideological framework that the Deputy First Minister, members of the Cabinet and the First Minister do not agree on?
I do not think that ours is the only party that has had ideological conflicts, given that we have gone from Corbynism to Starmerism in the space of the past three or four years.
To be fair, convener, we were not in power at that time. It is a recognisable point, but we are talking about the operation of the framework in Scotland under the Government.
You raise a good point. It goes back to Sarah Davidson’s and Max French’s points about how far it goes. There is a problem with the framework if the consultation process is so weak that it is essentially the Government setting the goals, which is in some ways where we got to with this consultation.
The point about the economy is very interesting, but the question about growth or not is not for today. That is about means to an end, not about the ends.
We were very happy to see the wellbeing economy terminology in the goal but, in some ways—and it might be surprising to hear this from me—I was worried about it, because it was just something that was popular with that Government at that time and did not come from the bottom up as something that society wanted. We can see what happens with that now: it is in there, but it does not have the legitimacy that it should have. That questions the legitimacy of the whole framework. The whole point is to find the common ground of what we agree on when it comes to long-term goals. Without that, we as a society will not be able to move forward.
Thank you, Lukas.
Good morning. What a great discussion so far. I am enjoying your contributions. I will pick up on a few points. Michael Marra came up with the interesting phrase “ideological adherence”—which, I am sure, we could debate—but that begs the question of accountability versus responsibility in a devolved setting. I fully accept what you said about Wales, but we all recognise that we are fairly early in our journey and that that is also the case with Northern Ireland. In this strange set-up, what challenges do you see from the difference between accountability and responsibility?
Max French, you are nodding, so you have to go first.
It is a great question. I hesitate to deviate from the accountability point, because we have been trucking with responsibility for a long while in Scotland and that has allowed us to dodge the question of who should be accountable for what and by when. I am under no delusion that holding people directly responsible for an outcome or indicator is the wrong approach, but there are real ways in which you can structure accountability relationships that make people feel accountable for the national goals and indicators but do not embody the simplistic logic of direct accountability for movement in those indicators. It is much more about the contribution that people are encouraged to make, and then holding to account a public body, for instance, for that stated contribution, while taking the whole context into account.
That is laborious work, but it involves real accountability, not feeding-the-beast performance reporting. It is about enabling people, then holding them to account for stretching contributions to our spectrum of national outcomes. That is the way in which we should engage with accountability, so that we can all feel responsible and be accountable.
You touch on a culture of delivery. I am also interested in commentary on that from anybody else.
It is also an important route to mending and developing relationships between national and local government. Among the local authorities that we have spoken to, certainly, there is a tendency to feel that the national priorities are put down to them local authorities to deliver with no resources, instead of involving a look at what the local priorities might be. That discussion—not just setting national-level indicators but looking at what the national outcomes mean at local level when it comes to developing relevant indicators for measuring progress—has not happened this time. What is relevant to delivering on one outcome might be different from one local area to another. It is about allowing local authorities that ability to look at where and how they can be held accountable, which may be different from what is at national level.
A big dialogue is to be had. For me, that goes back to the lack of dialogue in developing the outcomes. The outcomes and indicators are two separate processes, but they should really be part of the same discussion, because how you measure what is important is to measure what you treasure. Unless that is part of the discussion on setting out the outcomes, we lose the ability to develop accountability from the ground up.
To add to that, we have not yet touched on the even bigger picture of aligning to the SDGs. Sarah Davidson, you want to come in. I know that you will want to answer my first question, but perhaps you will reflect on that as well.
11:45
In a way, we could pull both issues together. An interesting thing about the SDGs in a Scottish context is that it is suggested in the Government’s report that alignment with the SDGs is, in itself, a good thing, but, of course, such alignment is a good thing only if it is meaningful. In the same way—to go back to what Alice Telfer said about other public bodies—if bodies such as local authorities simply have to demonstrate that they are aligning their policies with the NPF, that is another version of a tick-box exercise.
The question of what a much more sophisticated accountability environment looks like is really interesting. The issues that everybody is dealing with are complex and sophisticated, so I do not think that we should shy away from having a much more sophisticated and complex way of thinking about what accountability needs to look like. For example, I think that it would be interesting to talk to leaders about what it would feel like to be held accountable for creating the conditions for people in their organisations to collaborate better, or to understand what the long-term trends are and how they can apply those in their organisations. Those are not things on which you can just tick yes or no. They are things on which interesting conversations that build relationships start.
As I said, the Auditor General has started to move into that territory, but he does not have formal powers for auditing that, so the question of what people feel responsible for making happen and how that aligns with where their hard accountability sits feels to be absolutely germane to this conversation.
That sounds like much more of a pivot to a focus on outcomes, rather than the simple adopting of the measures that we have been talking about.
Yes.
Lukas, do you have anything final to add?
I echo what Sarah Davidson said. That is where the ways of working come in, which are really important in Wales. We talk a lot about their goals, but I would say that their ways of working are probably just as important. I think that they have four. Is that right? [Interruption.] Sorry, they have five. The ways of working are in the Welsh legislation as well, so they are accountable not only for the outcomes but for how they go about achieving them. There is a recognition that this is a complex area, so sometimes the best that you can do is look at how you do things, rather than at what the impact will be in 20 or 30 years’ time. There is an assumption that, if you go about it in the way that we are discussing, that is more likely to create better outcomes further down the line.
I have a final, quick-fire question to make sure that we have bottomed out a thread that a few people have asked about. It is fine to give a one-word answer. Do you genuinely see the Government having a demonstrable appetite for this work?
It is patchy and mixed, is it not? Everyone shares the aspiration, although we probably differ on our anticipation of how the NPF will be used. There are different levels of appetite on that point, certainly politically.
An interesting way of looking at that question is to look beyond Government at the level of appetite for the NPF that has emerged entirely organically and without any significant urging by the Scottish Government. A great deal of attention has been paid to the NPF by the third sector. Obviously, the third sector is only one area of society—very little attention has been paid to the NPF by the business community—but that speaks to the fact that there is a general level of support for the NPF that could be built on, enhanced and harnessed a lot more than it has been, which we can compare with the level of obscurity that has been evident in how the Scottish Government has used the NPF. Therefore, I would be tempted to ignore the last point.
I think that “level of obscurity” says a lot.
The past few meetings that we have had with the Government’s expert advisory group on the NPF have been encouraging. We were very sceptical when we began our work in this area, but the NPF team has been doing an awful lot of very good work.
However, that team has changed about eight times since I started working on the NPF. It was in about 2011-12 that I first started to engage with it. What happens is that you feel that you are really getting somewhere and that there is a good understanding of what the NPF is driving for, but then the team changes and the whole process starts again. There is no consistency, and a lack of consistency in who is driving the process from below makes it really difficult to get buy-in elsewhere in Government. I have concerns about the current leadership. The agenda of wellbeing is so important, and the connection with rights is so important, and I get the feeling that there is not a willingness to put that at the forefront of how we develop policy.
I will come back to a point that Lukas Bunse made about looking at what drives the change and the outcomes. We have done a lot of work on rights-based outcomes and indicators, which I think that I have brought up in every submission that I have made on the NPF. Instead of looking only at the results and what we are trying to achieve, rights-based outcomes and indicators help us to look at the structures that we have in place and to ask whether we have the right laws and policies in place, whether we are delivering on those policies and whether we are implementing and funding them properly in order to see what the outcomes are. That helps us to make the connections when the outcomes are not what we expect. For example, are the outcomes not what we expected because we have the wrong policies or because they are not funded properly? Having such outcomes and indicators allows us to make those connections and to look backwards and forwards, rather than just at the results at the other end.
That is a gap. I know that everyone pushes back against having even more indicators than the ones that we already have, but it is a question of having different types of indicators—a matrix of indicators. Rather than saying, “We’ll have four indicators for this outcome and four for that outcome,” and those indicators not talking to one another, we need to have—this was mentioned earlier—intersectionality with regard to what the outcomes are trying to achieve, so that they are not siloed.
I am impressed with these one-word answers. [Laughter.]
Given the additional complexity that Alison Hosie introduced, my question about whether you generally see an appetite for this work is even more moot.
Government is, in many ways, a multiheaded beast, and I absolutely endorse Alison Hosie’s comment about the small team that looks after the NPF, with regard to the chopping and changing and the degree of commitment that it has.
It is interesting that, in some of the parts of Government that are further from the centre, the NPF is given greater regard. Michael Kellet from Public Health Scotland was at the committee earlier. Public Health Scotland is an example of a body that absolutely sees how the NPF could and should drive its work and the work of Government more generally. When I talk to Public Health Scotland, I see that it starts with the outcomes of the national performance framework. That is partly because it is so impelled by the relationship between all the different parts of Government and good health outcomes. The rest of the Government could learn a lot from what is happening there.
Alison Hosie, on the comment that you made about the lack of appetite, or the idea that the Government is rolling back a bit on the principles around the wellbeing economy, was that a reflection on the Government right now—as in the Administration over the past six months—or is that a wider reflection?
That has been the case with the past couple of Governments, to be fair. For a number of years, we had a very strong commitment to developing human rights legislation, and to the importance of human rights, the SDGs and wellbeing. That was all very current in the work that we were doing, and, in lots of the work that I was doing, I was constantly referring to where the national outcomes and the SDGs were reflected in the things that we were doing. Over the past three or four years, that has disappeared. You are going to have changes in priorities and ideology—such changes come with a change in personnel—but that just leaves concern, because there are strong commitments, including manifesto commitments, that we are now seeing disappear.
I want to pick up the point about the danger of a tick-box exercise. I think that Sarah Davidson mentioned it most recently, but everybody has mentioned it at some point. I wonder whether a tick-box exercise would at least be better than where we are now. At the start of the evidence session, Max French listed various Government strategies and policy documents that have been published recently without so much as even a tick-box reference to the NPF. As much as I accept that the ideal situation would be something more like what happens in Wales, where such an approach is deeply culturally embedded in Government, if we at least took some mechanistic approaches, it would move us a little further on.
The Scottish Government has handbooks and protocols when it comes to the drafting of bills. I find it hard to see how it would not be possible to say that, if, for example, a strategy document is significant enough that it needs ministerial sign-off, the protocol for that would include a requirement that the relevant NPF outcomes are referenced. Yes, that would be a mechanistic exercise, but, given where we are now and the fact that we are not even doing that, would a mechanistic approach not at least represent progress?
There is something to be said for visibility here. If you were to scrutinise the Government on that—it is a good job that no one does so—it would not come out of it looking like a particularly joined-up, cohesive policy maker.
There is something to be said for branding in that context, and for saying, “This is the way that we do business in Scotland.” There is an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conference coming up next month, which will be on the subject of wellbeing in government. Five years ago, Scotland would probably have been seen as one of the forerunners on that, and we could have expected to see much of our work being celebrated. Now, it feels as though Scotland is a bit player in that broad international movement. Two thirds of OECD countries now have wellbeing frameworks. If they were to be ranked on integration, regardless of what standard was used, Scotland would probably not do particularly well.
If our stated way of doing government is not visible, that reflects badly on our broader decision making and strategic competency. The lack of an integrated approach means that we are losing influence. At the conference, Scotland should be front and centre on all the international delegates’ lists of things to learn about, but it is not.
For those reasons, I absolutely agree that a tick-box exercise is better than the patchy, piecemeal and ad hoc situation that we have now.
I agree with all of that. Of course, as always with such matters, it is what you are ticking that is relevant.
As Max French’s report illustrated, we have found that it is relatively easy to name-check the national outcomes, although even that is not always done as well as it might be. To have to tick a box and demonstrate that your policy or legislative proposal was developed through the lens of the national outcomes, and to argue the case for that, is a different thing. If there were to be boxes to be ticked, I would far rather see people being asked to tick that more sophisticated box than just the yes or the no boxes.
That is exactly the point. Over the past few years, budgetary documents have tried to improve the connections with the national outcomes. The simpler approach that is there now simply asks us to name the national outcomes or human rights that might be relevant to particular budget areas. However, there is no confidence that people really understand why they put an outcome in a particular box when it is quite clear that some obvious ones are missing. Capacity building and understanding have to accompany the process if it is to be worth doing.
I will build on that briefly. There is also a question about one of the reasons for people getting a bit resentful about tick-box exercises, which is that there are quite a lot of them already. I am not an expert on exactly who has to tick which boxes, but I imagine that the point of the NPF is to streamline that a bit. It would be helpful if you could use that approach to embed wellbeing more widely and to streamline and align the work that is already going on. I do not know whether anybody has looked into that in more detail.
Thank you very much.
That has exhausted the questions from committee members. I will put a further one to Lukas Bunse, but others can contribute if they wish.
You have said that one issue with the national outcomes is that the framework has the potential to reduce inequality, but that splitting inequality across different outcomes means that
“there is a risk that inequality is not given the prominence it deserves”.
12:00
Inequality is now mentioned in the title of one of the revised outcomes, which is good. Inequality is embedded in or related to each outcome, but in order for that approach to work, you really have to ensure that it is then embedded in all the other outcomes.
The Scottish Human Rights Commission has made some really good points in that respect. For example, in relation to the indicators, you might be interested in, say, gender inequalities; however, that is one of the big ones that has its own outcome in the SDGs but not in the national performance framework. As a result, you will need to be able to be clear about how it feeds into all the other outcomes, and you also need to have the indicators segregated by gender and in different ways so that you can check those outcomes.
Mainly, I am saying that there is a risk that if you just put inequality into all the outcomes, it will simply disappear. However, it does need to be there. That was the point that I wanted to make.
I agree with Lukas. With regard to human rights and equality as outcomes, I should say that, before the most recent outcome set was released, there were debates at the very last minute over whether human rights should be mainstreamed, just as equality had been in the purpose or value statement, and not be an outcome in and of itself. We argued really strongly—and still do—that yes, in an ideal world, human rights and equality would permeate the entire outcome set without the need for individual outcomes; however, we cannot mainstream what we do not understand. We have had 25 years of equality, and we still do not properly get it. I therefore think that we need the vertical and horizontal columns throughout the national outcomes.
The entire human rights framework underpins the national outcomes, but that is not apparent at all in the narrative that sits alongside the performance framework at the moment. We have been talking about capacity building in government; a lot of capacity building is going to be needed in relation to the development of the human rights bill. This is a perfect opportunity to bring those things—that understanding—together to see the connections that will link the outcomes and the rights and to see that inequality, too, has a role right the way through everything. Every single outcome will be able to be measured, depending on the data and the availability of disaggregated data, to allow us to really look in depth at whether we are delivering on that. Equality and human rights should feature throughout the outcomes set, but there should also be a really strong focus on delivering on that outcome in itself.
Thank you very much. Before we wind up, does any member of the panel wish to make any final points?
I reiterate that, since the Government published its report on the NPF consultation, the decision has been made not to include the wellbeing and sustainable development bill in the programme for government, and we should therefore assume that the Government is not going to introduce that bill in the course of this parliamentary session. That means that all the issues that were raised in the NPF consultation with regard to accountability, duties and ways of working are not going to be resolved through that mechanism.
Lukas Bunse has mentioned Sarah Boyack’s member’s bill on the issue, which is in development. We as an organisation—and, I am sure, my colleagues here, too—go on being interested in the range of ways in which those accountabilities and duties can be brought to bear, because our collective view is that, without something like that bill, it is going to be very hard to make the national performance framework, whatever we call it, meaningful.
I agree. I would also revisit some of the other recommendations that the committee made to the Scottish Government and to which it responded favourably, including the publication of an implementation plan, the leadership of which has chopped and changed within the Government. That document seems to be of primary importance now, with the recall of various legislative options, and getting clarity on what the Scottish Government intends to do with that plan—and how it intends to govern it as a continuous improvement process that provides a way of feeding into what the Government does on implementation—would seem to me to be particularly critical in the current situation.
Alison?
I will simply say, “What they both said.” Moreover, with the programme for government not mentioning the proposed human rights bill, we feel that another layer of accountability has potentially been missed. The implementation plan is therefore going to be critical to whether the NPF delivers what we hope it will.
I also do not want the NPF to lose its focus on the SDGs and that whole agenda. We are just over five years away from 2030, and we are nowhere near delivering on the sustainable development goals. Another set of outcomes is going to follow from the SDGs; Scotland really took the bull by the horns when the goals came out and made very strong commitments on what we as a country should be doing to deliver on them, and I would like to see Scotland back in that room, discussing what we are going to do when the next set comes. They should be tied into our national outcomes, too. I do not want to lose that in this discussion, as the SDGs have not had much of a mention today.
That is why I always give people a chance to wind up—so that they can fill in any gaps in our questioning. Do you wish to comment, Lukas?
I want to end by emphasising again what Max French has said. It feels very frustrating that, with wellbeing frameworks and future generations thinking, we have an agenda that the world is really moving on with and developing. We have the United Nations summit of the future coming up in a few days’ time; this is something that Scotland used to be a leader on, and at a time when everybody else is starting to develop it, we are turning away from it. Again, that is very frustrating.
I want to be explicit about the fact that, for us, the link between the wellbeing framework and the future generations thinking is absolutely crucial. After all, there is no point in thinking about wellbeing outcomes if we are not thinking about how we ensure that we meet them in 50 or 100 years’ time. That is why those two things are very much linked in our heads, and, indeed, why I found it a bit funny that one of the tables in the report that you published yesterday from the Scottish Parliament information centre listed a future generations commissioner and a wellbeing and sustainable development commissioner separately. I think that anybody who has ever thought about the issue seriously has never thought of them as two separate things—they have always been the same kind of commissioner. I just wanted to mention that.
Thank you very much. We will put a number of the issues that you have raised today directly to the Scottish Government in the weeks ahead. I thank you all for your contributions today and your excellent submissions.
We will now move into private session to discuss a contingent liability and our work programme. I call a two-minute break to allow our witnesses, the official report and broadcasting to leave.
12:06 Meeting continued in private until 12:25.Previous
Pre-budget Scrutiny 2025-26