Chamber and committees

Thank you very much. We will be sorry to see you go. I am sure that you said that just so that we would go easy on you for the next hour, but that is not going to happen—I am sorry. [Laughter.]

You touched on key issues that the committee will ask about. The first is inflation. One of the concerns about inflation is that the gross domestic product deflator of about 2.4 per cent is not realistic relative to the retail prices index. I see Professor Breedon nodding.

Understandably, we face a lot of public sector pay demands. There will be a real reduction in disposable incomes—in fact, we should note that there will be a reduction in nominal earnings before we think about taxation and disposable income. The overall figure for the economy is a 2.7 per cent reduction, but is there a difference between the private and public sectors?

Of course.

We will finish on that point. I thank the Deputy First Minister for his frank and detailed responses to our questions, and I also thank him and his officials for attending. That concludes the evidence-gathering part of our national performance framework inquiry, and we will consider a draft report after the summer recess.

We will take a short break before we move to our next item of business.

From your response, it seems that you are saying that the strategy is based on a lot of the work that Skills Development Scotland is doing in the area—would that be right? That was not really what I was asking about; I was asking what you were going to change or do differently as a result of the strategy. You talked about what is being done around, for example, the green jobs programme from last August. Has the strategy been built on some of your work as opposed to the other way round?

The unemployment rate is about 3.7 per cent in the UK, and in Scotland it is a record low of 3.2 per cent. However, is that a realistic figure? For example, we understand that the percentage of people who are economically active in Scotland is more or less the same as the percentage for the UK—it is 75.6 per cent, which is 1.1 per cent lower than the UK—but is that a realistic figure for full-time involvement in the economy? What percentage of those people are less than fully economically active and are working part time? Is there hidden unemployment? I understand that Sheffield Hallam University produced a study that showed that there are more than 1 million people who should be included in the unemployment figures but are not. What is the real picture? I think that, on paper, the picture looks rosier than is really the case. A lot of that is possibly because it is a time of huge vacancies in certain skills and there is a geographical mismatch of jobs and skilled people.

Thank you. Michelle Thomson is next, to be followed by Daniel Johnson.

Thank you very much for that opening statement. You hit the nail on the head, because the most significant issues that have come out of the evidence sessions so far have been accountability and budgeting for outcomes. That has certainly been what I have been hearing. In the round-table session and in others, a number of witnesses made those points. The Scottish Leaders Forum said:

“typically, the NPF is not actively used to shape scrutiny, provide sponsorship, undertake commissioning of work or shape the allocation of funding.”

Witnesses have said that the national performance framework could be more closely linked to budget planning. Questions have been asked about that, but no real answers have been forthcoming. How can we make the national performance framework more responsive to those concerns?

I feel somewhat frustrated, because there is so much else that we could ask questions about, from the rural and islands productivity lag to research and development and the core growth sectors. However, I will finish by asking a couple of quick questions.

First, people at school often assume that, whether they get an apprenticeship or go to university or whatever, they will get a job working for someone. I do not know that enough is being done to try to teach what we might call entrepreneurial skills. It is accepted across the Parliament that Scotland has a low rate of new business start-ups relative to the rest of the UK and beyond. What is Skills Development Scotland doing to address that? At what level should it be addressed? Should it be addressed in schools, for example?

I will ask my second question now as well. It is about people with disabilities, which we have not touched on. I remember that, when I was a councillor way back in the 1990s, there was a policy that, if possible, 3 per cent of all employees should be people with disabilities. Interestingly enough, the public sector lagged behind the private sector in that regard. There have been a number of initiatives over the years to try to increase the number of people with disabilities in the workforce, in order to improve productivity and those people’s quality of life.

My questions are on those two issues: entrepreneurial skills and people with disabilities.

That is interesting.

A number of people said that one of the difficulties with the national performance framework for the wider population—most of whom, I believe, will probably not even have heard of it—is its remarkably dull name. The title “national performance framework” brings to mind the national planning framework, which has the same acronym—NPF. People have suggested calling it the national wellbeing framework, although “ambitions for Scotland” sounds like a better title to me.

If the framework is going to be reviewed, could the title be reviewed? Could it be something that people feel has a bit more vitality? Somebody said last week the one way to ensure that a document is not read is to put the words “framework” and “performance” in the title. That was not a flippant comment; it was a serious comment about trying to ensure that we get buy-in from more people. I ask the Deputy First Minister to take that issue away and consider it as we review the framework. The Parliament is much more enthusiastic about, and has much more knowledge of, wellbeing—as do the public—than the two-dimensional gross domestic product measure that we used to use in the past. The framework talks about that.

I have one final question to cover a couple of issues that some of our witnesses really struggled with, about how we use the national performance framework—or whatever they call it in future—to declutter the public sector landscape and to share best practice. There is a plethora of documents and it seems that whenever the Government wants to do something new, it brings out an additional document rather than replacing existing documents and strategies.

I asked one of our witnesses directly about best practice and how they share it and they talked about sharing it internally. What I was clearly asking about was how they share best practice with other organisations. For example, if a local authority has an excellent way of working and is delivering on poverty outcomes, how can that be shared with other local authorities? One would assume that would happen through COSLA, but it does not seem to be working in the way that it should.

How we can use the NPF to underpin those aims of decluttering and sharing best practice?