Chamber and committees

You mentioned the learner interest committee. Will there definitely be a parent voice on that committee?

Okay, but the legislation sets out that there should be a qualifications Scotland staff member on the committee. Why is that?

Thank you.

If monitoring or measuring progress is important, is it a problem that so many organisations and parts of the Government and the public sector are responsible for it? Does that make it difficult to pin down who has delivered and who has not delivered, whether that is in the Government, local government or the NHS?

I do not know what else Ross Greer was going to ask you earlier about the national performance framework, but can you tell us how that impacts the budget?

I understand that it has a general impact, but would the national performance framework have an impact when there is limited capital spending and you have to make choices—if you have to prioritise between housing and roads, say?

We will be going into this with Kate Forbes later, but, yes, it would be an issue. However, I do not think that the programme for government referred to the national performance framework.

I will build on what the previous two questioners asked.

From listening to the evidence, I think that one issue seems to be that the national performance framework is so general. We are going up from 11 to 13 outcomes and, as you said, cabinet secretary, there can be clashes between different outcomes. I wonder whether that is part of the problem.

Does the national performance framework help us in making day-to-day decisions? I asked Shona Robison a similar question in the previous evidence session. If we have a limited capital budget and if we have to choose between roads and houses, or anything else, does the national performance framework help us to make that kind of decision? Alternatively, is it just a question of saying, “Houses are good, roads are good—so whatever”?

“Cognisant” is an interesting word. There is also the phrase “having regard to”. Some people feel that those phrases are too weak and that we should really have something that is a bit stronger. It has also been said that, so far, the approach has been more carrot than stick. Should we have a bit more stick or apply a bit more pressure on people?

I will begin by picking up on a couple of points that have been made already. Liz Smith said a lot about the competitiveness of the tax strategy. When we talk about that, can we look at tax on its own or do we also have to look at the spending side and at the things that that tax enables us to do, such as providing free university tuition, having no prescription charge, providing bus passes and so on? I presume that we are also competing with countries such as Denmark, which have higher taxation and better public services.