Chamber and committees

To be honest, I feel as though I am living in a perpetual spending review, because we are wrestling constantly with all of the elements of challenge that you have put to me. When I talk about the public service reform agenda, which I spoke of extensively in the budget statement in December, that is us actively challenging the way in which public bodies are operating, with the objective of delivering greater efficiency.

I appeared before the Economy and Fair Work Committee yesterday, and I was challenged on some of the spending envelopes that are available to enterprise agencies, for example. Of their own volition, those spending envelopes challenge the existing way of working, as they require savings to be made to ensure that organisations can live within them. In the health service, the pressure of increased demand and increased pressure from pay settlements force a requirement to constantly review and challenge the efficiency of how we operate.

There is another fundamental element of thinking, which is the continuous work to deliver, for example, the Christie principles, with which Mr Mason will be familiar. In essence, those operate on the presumption that the earlier that we can make an intervention, the better it can be and the more it will help us to avoid acute interventions. However we badge them, acute interventions are expensive.

I do not think so. The numbers are increasing week by week. We are not at the end of the programme; we are in January and still have the best part of two and a half months to go. We are trying to make it as easy as possible for people to access opportunities, with clinics widely available across the country.

I accept that meeting the cost of travelling somewhere else is quite difficult for people in low-income situations. That is why we are taking all the practical steps that we can to support people in those circumstances.

I cannot give a definitive explanation. For example, the uptake rate for front-line social care workers is 63.2 per cent. There are other categories for which the figure is slightly lower.

Much of the reason for that can be about convenience of and access to services. Some of it can be because people performing those roles might have to take time to access those services when they are under pressure to fulfil their social care tasks, which is obviously quite a conundrum for individuals. Those people are on low pay and have difficult dilemmas about how they spend their time.

I am dealing with cash, and local authorities are getting £550 million more next year than they got this year. Whatever way you want to dress it up, that is an increase. That enables us to sustain our delivery of the type of interventions that Mr Whittle is raising with me.

I do not want to sour the atmosphere this morning, but we come back to hard choices here—

I assure Mr Whittle that we look constantly at how we can intervene early to proactively improve the health of the population. There are many different ways in which we are trying to do that. We encourage people to carefully manage their health, to exercise and to take all the necessary precautions that they can to maintain their physical fitness and their general health and wellbeing. There is a range of areas of activity and interventions across Government, local government and the third sector.

Mr Whittle raises an issue that is certainly important and that is not only pandemic-related. We should, in general, be attentive to and focused on how we can improve the health and wellbeing of the population. So many of the Government’s public messages and many of our policy interventions—whether on the minimum unit pricing of alcohol, the banning of smoking in public places, the exhortation to exercise or the daily mile—are all part of that agenda.

I will not sit here and say that there is no more that we could do. The Government is very open to dialogue with colleagues in Parliament about how we can maximise that work.

On the level of provision that we have here, I do not really think that that could be the case, to be honest. I would expect to undertake expenditure around PPE preparedness—the committee will be familiar with the importance of the PPE provision in general in all aspects of the health and social care system. I cannot be certain, but it is likely that we will have a booster vaccination programme, so that money will be spent. In addition, the testing arrangements are at a level of preparedness in that we maintain a capacity to undertake testing, which creates a platform for us to significantly increase it should we be required to do so.

The best answer that I can give is that I expect that expenditure to be required during the financial year. Of course, we monitor the situation regularly. The committee will appreciate from the updates that I have provided on the wider financial situation that, for the Government, demand and pressures on the budget in general can vary widely over the course of the financial year. Even if we do not have to spend the money in those areas, I imagine that something else could come along that would demand further expenditure.

There is a significant role for greater digital connectivity in our public services, which will enable us to better manage information about the way in which people interact with their public services. People of Mr Whittle’s and my generation have in their minds an image of IT systems as large and complex things but, of course, we all have phones with various apps on them that gather and use all sorts of flexible information. There are opportunities to better use that data—the apps on my phone tell me about my fitness, my health and wellbeing and how much I exercise, and sometimes they are reassuring and sometimes they are a wake-up call. A lot can be done to address these questions, and I am open to how we explore that.

We have access to and collect a lot of data. Whether those are the right data sets to help us address some of the questions that we face is a matter of debate, but I am generally open to the idea of using digital connectivity better. A critical part of our public service reform agenda is that, as we go through a really challenging spending period, we expect public bodies to be adept at using digital connectivity to support the finding of the solutions that we are looking for—that is what we are setting out to them.

If I may say so, we went from, “This is particularly disjointed,” to, “This is a series of sweeping generalisations”.

I am not dismissing Jackie Baillie’s points because I recognise the importance of that. What is the point of a national performance framework if we do not align our policy interventions with—this is crucial—a budget to support the outcomes that we are trying to achieve? There must be alignment.

I am very mindful of that point. My contention is that, in taking budget decisions, I am doing as much as I can to align our budget with the successful delivery of progress on the national outcomes in the NPF. However, I am open to a conversation on whether we could strike a better balance or put emphasis on particular areas. I assure the committee that the Government takes that endeavour seriously.

I will go and look at the data, so that I can complete my view of this.

As for the other sweeping generalisation—