Chamber and committees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There will be some.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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