Chamber and committees

Thank you very much for your contributions—they have been extremely helpful. I also thank you for travelling to Scotland, which makes a huge difference to the quality of the evidence that we take. I say that as someone who is quite averse to virtual meetings in the first place; on top of that, the committee has recently faced some difficult situations, involving all sorts of snarl-ups, in virtual meetings. Your attendance in person is much appreciated.

We will have a five-minute break while we change witnesses.

Exactly. Take as much time as you need.

One of the things that you mentioned in your submission was churn. You said:

“Churn among civil servants is an issue across the civil service in both Whitehall and across the devolved administrations, which is encouraged for the development of generalist civil servants ... Researchers have also commented adversely about churn among politicians”.

I had a wee look. Apparently, in the year to September 2022, the UK Government had five education secretaries and, from 2000 to 2022, it had 22 housing ministers. Here at Holyrood, we have had four transport ministers in two years. How much does the churn in ministers, as well as in civil servants, militate against good decision making?

Yes, that has come through strongly in evidence. I am now going to open up the session.

In theory, everyone agrees with the national performance framework and the outcomes that it seeks to achieve, but sometimes it contradicts some of the things that people want to make public announcements on. For example, it might contradict numbers. Someone might say that, for example, we want to achieve a certain health outcome by reducing the number of beds, but when it comes to reducing the number of beds, it causes political kickback. That was touched on earlier.

I want to finish off with a couple of questions, but before I do that, I will let Jamie Halcro Johnston in because I think that he has a couple of things he wants to ask.

We are talking about how to improve Government decision making, whereas that is more about the choice of decisions, but Paul Sheerin made those points extremely well, and it was a good question from Douglas Lumsden. I have raised that issue with the previous First Minister in the Conveners Group, as well as in many other forums, including the chamber, so I am certainly on board with what is being said.

To follow on from that and finish off our questions, I will ask how decision making relationships with ministers can be improved. We have heard about how the private sector takes decisions and, before that, we had a session about how we can improve decision making in the public sector. How can that interaction with ministers be improved?

Rebecca Rigg, would you like to add anything?

Thank you very much.

Good morning, and welcome to the 10th meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Our first agenda item is a virtual evidence session with Diane Owenga, programme director of the Policy Project at the New Zealand Government’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, to inform our inquiry into effective Scottish Government decision making.

Good evening, Ms Owenga, and welcome to the meeting. I understand that you will provide a short presentation on the New Zealand approach.

I am delighted that Diane Owenga is back with us. You had not been—