Chamber and committees

My difficulty with that is that, although, obviously, we are delighted when we see an increase in it, economic growth has been incredibly stagnant across the UK for a long time. Child poverty figures have increased and we have had huge pressures on our public services.

I see no conflict between the four aims that the programme for government sets out. I see no way of tackling child poverty, meeting our climate change objectives—which is also an aim in the programme for government—or protecting and supporting our public services without an increase in economic growth. The four aims in the programme for government are mutually dependent. If we were to take out economic growth as one of those four legs, the stool would topple over. It just could not stand.

I am not suggesting that we would necessarily mirror every decision that the Irish Government has taken, but who can look at the most recent Irish Government budget’s support for people in fuel poverty, families with kids, and infrastructure, without being envious of what it has been able to achieve with considerably higher economic growth?

There is an argument as to how Scotland can achieve its aims and ambitions. I just do not think that there is a route to that without economic growth.

That has been considered in the past, with quite extensive work to look at the opportunities that you identify for efficiencies and so on. There are significant legal issues with any amalgamation of the three organisations that you mentioned. The Cabinet Secretary for Transport is probably better suited to answering the technical elements of why they have different forms of governance and ownership.

Certainly, the aim for Ferguson Marine has been to get the boats built then return the company to a private sector buyer who believes in continuing to build boats on the Clyde.

There have been extensive reviews of what might be possible through amalgamation. However, some options have been dismissed because they are not possible under the current governance arrangements of each of the three parts.

If the committee is interested, I am sure that the transport secretary could write with an update on the progress on that question, because it is a very fair one and the Government has been very interested in it in the past. No official wishes to add to what I have said, but the Government will be happy to respond.

The aim in the green industrial strategy is to make things as simple and straightforward as possible in order to deliver on our objectives. Below the strategy’s five opportunity areas are a number of targeted actions that the Government will do to create a successful enabling environment for investment and growth. Those targeted actions include things such as skills, research investment, supply chains, planning and consenting, and housing.

Clearly, a lot of that relies on access to land and facilities. Every week, I have conversations with potential investors who are looking for scale and size. In and around the Cromarty green freeport area, there is talk of a need for 25,000 new homes. By extension, that will require land.

I do not know whether my officials have anything to add on the specifics on compulsory purchase, but I imagine that it is part of the toolbox to enable us to meet the growing requirements for land access and to deliver thousands of homes.

Since coming into post, I have had two meetings with the new deal for business group, and I have been very enthusiastic about the progress that has been made. There was equal enthusiasm at the most recent meeting, because we worked closely with the group in shaping the programme for government. The organisations that are represented on the new deal for business group were very encouraged by the extent to which their asks were reflected in the programme for government, and some of them said that publicly. We have made substantial progress.

The next area of focus will be the budget. The Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government has met some stakeholders, including stakeholders in hospitality businesses, to talk about what they want to see being reflected in the budget. I want there to be tangible evidence that the new deal for business is shaping Government policy, because that promise was made to the group when it was convened.

An obvious example of where that is having an impact is through the regulatory review group, which is headed up by Russel Griggs. He and his team review policy commitments that have been made by the Scottish Government across all parts of Government, including the health service and the environmental brief, and the impact that those will have on our economy. That evidence is then fed into the new deal for business group.

In a number of the conversations that we had in the lead-up to the announcement of the programme for government, evidence from that process was actively taken into consideration. Members of the Parliament will never know what did not make it into the programme, but they will see the final version. I know that, throughout the twists and turns of all the conversations, a lot of feedback was given by the new deal for business group and the regulatory review group, which, if I remember correctly, was reconvened as a result of the new deal for business.

In some circumstances, we can switch. However, revenue is basically spent on people: it is spent on the wages bill for our nurses, doctors and front-line workers. The Government has clearly set out its prioritisation of our people because they serve the public. Therefore, to switch is really challenging.

Now that we are coming through the cost of living crisis, high costs and the erosion of our spending power, although we are not quite out of that situation it is the time to inject capital into major infrastructure projects, to get the economy growing and to create the hive of activity that we know is attractive to other international organisations and enterprises that might want to be part of what we are doing in Scotland.

I think that we are, but I note that there are two big drivers of the short-term decision making. The first is the nature of the funding. We need, once and for all, to get beyond the year-to-year annual budget setting; I am hopeful that the UK Government might help us in that. Our local authorities need it, and we in Government need it. If we could get a really decent spending review from the UK Government—I think that the review is coming next spring—that could give us long-term certainty on funding and it would be much easier to plan for the longer term.

The second driver has been the number of short-term challenges with which we have been grappling. Emerging from the Covid pandemic, which in itself was a short-term emergency shock, we have then had the cost of living emergency shock and a number of additional pressures that are driven by the inflationary environment, and which have meant that we have had to take immediate decisions.

We have the inputs, which is the funding position, and the outputs, which is the demand. If we can get an element of stability and get through the challenges, and if we can work collaboratively with the UK Government—as we are doing right now—on the longer-term points, that starts to set us up to make those decisions.

I will make another brief point. Shona Robison has had to make very difficult choices, and I know that Michael Marra has been scrutinising those decisions and holding us all to account for them. However, if we can make some of those difficult decisions now, that sets us up to be able to think about funding for the longer term on some of the biggest and most impactful changes that are required to give others longer-term stability with regard to what actually works.

No, because I think that we are making those decisions. That resource spending review was published in 2022, and I still stand by it; I know the amount of work that went into producing it. Nevertheless, it was published immediately prior to the emergence of double-digit levels of inflation and pay deals that mirrored the rocketing cost of living. Good grown-up Governments do not simply make plans and then stick their fingers in their ears and ignore what is happening around them. Good Governments are conscious of what is happening while sticking to the long-term ambitions of their plan.

In the past few months in particular, Shona Robison has made difficult choices to set us up for the long term, which is actually very much in the spirit of the spending review that I published in spring 2022.

Let me take on board the first half of your question, which was on how committed we are. I will come on to that.

I challenge again the idea that the consultation should have been broader—in other words, about our doing more things. That is what sits uncomfortably with me. We should have a streamlined and focused approach, which is ultimately much easier to embed and much easier to measure. The proposed revisions that we have made will enable us to streamline and focus the work that we are doing.

On the consultation itself, we have made changes where there was a strong evidence base of the need for change. We have introduced new outcomes—you will know that there are new outcomes on care, housing and climate—in areas where we had significant support to make changes. On the flipside, some stakeholders have cautioned against increasing the total number of outcomes, which goes back to my point about having a streamlined and focused approach.

You asked at the beginning about the extent to which the NPF is embedded in the Government. In any sort of political cycle, in the tidal waves of politics coming and going, there will always be pressure to lift our eyes off the outcomes that we have set out in the national performance framework. During my time in government I have seen an increasing awareness of the national performance framework and an increasing desire to align our policy work with it.

That has been most visible in finance and is most visible when it comes to the budget. It has meant that there has been very stark conversations about where the national performance framework outcomes clash with one another, because at times they do. At times Government, and indeed Parliament, has to make a conscious choice about what it is going to focus on, and sometimes you see that.

I just talked about two new outcomes on housing and climate. I am in Shetland, so I will use this example. I was told yesterday that the council here has a choice to make. Should it decarbonise the houses that it already has with the money that it has, or should it build more houses? Let us not pretend that all these decisions are easy, and let us not pretend that there are not still further questions to answer when it comes to embedding all the national performance framework in our policy work, because I do not think anyone would disagree with the picture that we are painting with the national performance framework. We would all like to live in a Scotland where all those outcomes are met, but the business of Government requires us to start with those outcomes and then figure out the most effective way of delivering them through policy.

To my mind, economic growth it is not an end in itself. The end is the outcomes that are captured in the national performance framework. When we talk about economic growth, that is about making Scotland more prosperous and fairer, and it is a means of delivering against our environmental ambitions. It is a means to an end.

I would be reluctant to embed economic growth as a national outcome in and of itself, as that would be confusing means and ends. We do not celebrate economic growth as an end in itself. I want to live in communities where there is fairness, where everybody is paid a fair wage, where there is no fuel poverty, where there are better health outcomes and so on. I could go through the whole list, but I will not.

That is what the UN sustainable development goals are about—ensuring that there is fairness and equality across the board. I would far rather that that fairness was a result of people having high-level incomes, and that is where we need more economic growth. However, that is not an end in itself; it is a means to the ends that are captured in the national performance framework.

The general theme of all my comments this morning is that I am not minded to make changes for their own sake. I will make changes that mean that we are better at delivering the national outcomes. To my mind, changing names does not help anybody, so changing the name of the framework, as has been requested, would not be one of my top priorities.

We have got strong branding around the framework, which has been built up since 2007. It is a key part of some of our international work. The engagement that we have had with other Governments, in terms of how we have developed the national performance framework and how we use it for policy work, is aligned with the name as it stands. If I thought that changing the name would deliver more fairness to somebody in the country, I would be more persuaded, but I am not.