Chamber and committees

Most of my questions were angled at persuading the Government to move in that direction, but you are clearly already doing so. In the interests of time, therefore, I will ask only one more question. In principle, does the Government think that there is ever a situation in which the use of handcuffs in a transport setting would be appropriate?

I welcome those answers.

I want to pick up on what Judith Turbyne said about the Christie commission and the wider question of policy ambition versus delivery. It feels as though there is a tension there. If we are to improve policy delivery and review an analysis of that it will require additional capacity. Civil service capacity will not get any bigger, certainly for the remainder of the current parliamentary session. The civil service in Scotland is bigger than it has ever been. We know roughly what our finances will be until 2026, and the civil service head count will probably go down.

At the same time as rightly advocating for improvements in policy delivery, your organisations all also legitimately advocate for lots of new policies. There are lots of really good ideas for policies that would improve people’s lives if we delivered them. However, there is a clear tension there. If we are to put more resources into improving the quality of how we do what we have already committed to doing, the resources will not be there for the new policy ideas.

Instead of adopting new policies and putting constant pressure on Government to come up with something new and flashy for every budget and every programme for government, should we be doing less better? Have we hit the point in devolution at which the capacity will not increase? We recognise that, as the Auditor General has pointed out, there is a gap between policy ambition and delivery. Should we focus on doing what we have already committed to doing at a much higher level of quality, instead of adopting new policies, regardless of what the merits of those new policies might be?

Thank you very much. I have one more question. Is there time, convener?

I will jump in on that point. The Government’s main consultation portal—consult.gov.scot—has the “We Asked, You Said, We Did” page on it. From a lot of the feedback from stakeholders, it sounds as though, for the direct stakeholder consultation, such as the kind that your organisation has been involved with—as opposed to the general public consultation that is done through the portal—that follow-through is not happening as much. Is that the case? Do you feel that the “We Asked, You Said, We Did” approach is not really your experience of Government consultation?

I am trying to knit them together into something much shorter, to be honest, rather than just waffling at you.

The core point was about the tension between consultation and the length of time taken for delivery. A lot of the time, the Government legitimately comes under criticism for not moving with the urgency that organisations believe is required in those areas. However, when there is urgency, people feel that they have not been able to buy into the process.

I want to pick up on what was in the SCVO’s written submission about the length of time for consultations. You did some analysis around comparing the 2004 commitment, which I think was for a 90-day consultation, to more recent commitments.

There is a tension between two types of criticism that the Scottish Government comes under—as well as the Parliament, often. One is that there is not enough consultation, co-design, or co-development to get buy-in from key stakeholders; the other is that it takes far, far too long to deliver anything in Scottish politics—the legislative process takes too long and policy change takes too long.

There is an obvious tension between those two criticisms, so how would you suggest we wrestle with that? If we are to do more consultation and more co-design, we might end up with better outcomes, but it will take longer, and if we are talking about child poverty, for example, or about a lot of the issues in our justice system, there is an obvious and urgent pressure to do something right now.

How would your organisation suggest that the Government wrestles with that tension? This is probably simplifying it far too much, but if you had to pick between the two—between a lack of consultation to get buy-in or taking far too long—what is a greater challenge for Government at the moment?

Thanks. I am going to ask Lucy Hughes a follow-up question, but it applies to all of the witnesses, so they should feel free to chip in.

I am going to be a bit challenging. I cannot remember a time that Engender advocated for a new policy that I disagreed with. However, I want to go back to the question of whether we should do less but do it better or if we should do more. If the Scottish Government followed through on previous commitments that it has made and improved policy delivery in areas that you have already worked to secure commitments on, would your organisation put less pressure on it to commit to new policies?

Ultimately, there is a political trade-off. The reality of politics means that the Government feels pressure to constantly commit to new policies, but if the organisations that are able to put pressure on the Government directed that pressure towards asking the Government to follow through on delivering commitments that it has already made, perhaps there would be a shift in political focus, and then there would be the resource and public sector capacity that comes with that. However, that requires give and take on both sides.

On the question of follow-through from consultation feedback, it sounds—certainly from your written submission—as though the national planning framework 4 process was perhaps quite a good example of that. Did you feel that you were getting some kind of direct response to what you were feeding in that said, “Yes, that has now been adopted,” or that explained why it had not been adopted?

I welcome your reading that out and putting it on the record. Bearing in mind the evidence that has been submitted to all of us in various guises at various points, how confident are you that the present reality reflects that?