Chamber and committees

Good morning, and welcome to the 11th meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee.

We have received apologies from Liz Smith and Michelle Thomson, who cannot attend today’s meeting. Jamie Halcro Johnston is attending as Liz Smith’s substitute. I welcome him to the meeting and invite him to declare any relevant interests.

The structure of civil servants at Whitehall—much of the civil service structure that we have here is more or less based on that—has been in place since 1854, when generalism was seen as the be-all and end-all. We are now in a much more sophisticated, high-tech society, and we have a lot of differences from previous generations. For example, contracts and procurement are complex and need specialist skills. Are we in a situation now in which we cannot deliver government without an increase in specialism and the generalism idea will just not cut it any more?

I do not think that anyone would want to replace generalists entirely. It is about the balance, is it not, Dr Foster? There is a concern about that. There is also a concern that people develop a level of expertise but, in order to get promoted, they get transferred into other areas of the civil service, and the skill is kind of lost.

There is also an issue about how some specialisms are valued. I read in The Economist a few weeks ago that the head of cybersecurity job at Westminster was advertised with a salary of less than £56,000 a year. That will not attract top-notch recruits in that kind of area—no offence to whoever gets the job in the end. If we are to get optimum decision making, where should the balance be struck between specialists and generalists?

Of course, consultants are often hired because the Parliament does not have the specialist capacity.

That is an important point. The Scottish Government has done better than the UK Government when there has been consistency in policy, with the private sector knowing that a policy is, in as much as it can be in politics, on tablets of stone so that long-term investment decisions can be made. However, the Scottish Government has not done as well as Westminster when there has been turmoil and changes of direction in policy.

We will continue with our evidence taking on effective Scottish Government decision making. I am delighted to welcome to the meeting Paul Sheerin, chief executive officer, and Rebecca Rigg, commercial director, at Scottish Engineering; and Sandy Begbie CBE, chief executive officer at Scottish Financial Enterprise.

As members may recall, this evidence session is intended to focus not only on the witnesses’ experience of Scottish Government decision making, but also provide an opportunity to explore how their sectors approach effective decision making.

With that in mind, we will move straight to questions and I will begin by asking Paul Sheerin, how do you approach effective decision making?

Yes.

I thank our witnesses for coming along. The session has been very helpful and has given us another dimension to the inquiry that we are undertaking. We will continue to take evidence on effective Scottish Government decision making at future meetings.

That concludes the public part of the meeting. Our next agenda item is a discussion in private on our work programme.

Leadership is important there. In the private sector, people tend to have a strong knowledge of their company that they have perhaps built over many years. One of the differences in the public sector if you are a minister, for example, is that you can be minister for justice one week and minister for health the next week, if that is what the First Minister, or down south, the Prime Minister, decides to do. Ministers have to rely on the advice of civil servants, special advisers and so on. Companies come in all different shapes and sizes and sectors, but what kind of structure would a small to medium-sized company—that is, the majority of companies in Scotland—expect to have, if any?

In politics, when the challenge function goes, that is when you know that a politician’s time is up. They get to a stage when they want to surround themselves with people who agree with them and they eventually hit the buffers. What you emphasise in relation to the challenge function is important.

Paul Sheerin, what about the dichotomy between the long term and the short term? The emphasis in politics is on five-year cycles or perhaps even shorter ones if you are a new minister who wants to make an impact. When I studied economics at university, a lot of people thought that companies were there only to make a profit, but one of the first things that we studied was the theory of the firm, which is about long-term survivability and growth rather than just making a quick buck this year and possibly next. Generally speaking, how do companies see that? Again, we know that they are different across a huge range of sectors. For example, if the economy is buoyant, how do companies decide on short-term versus long-term decision making?