 Fy enw i wneud â pwynt y ddechrau 14 yn 2023 ddatunedd y Ffinans a Pwyllwr Fyethion Yn Aelodau. Fel f mae wedi'u rhaid i ddweud, rwy'n teimlo dedig i ddechrau ystod hynny. Aelodau ystod yn lywodd Menynau Gwleinrwy Nigwyrraedd. Fy hoffen yna rydyn ni'n gweithio i g yr thalwy ddweud o'u dim bynnag maen nhw. Cabinet Secretary for Finance, John Paul Marks, permanent secretary, who is joined by Scottish Government officials Leslie Fraser, director of General Corporate and Dominic Monroe, director for strategy. I welcome you all to the meeting today. I look forward to your evidence. I would invite Ms Robison to make a short opening statement. Thank you very much, convener. It is a pleasure to be here today to talk about effective decision making. I am conscious that this is a very broad subject area. The Scottish Government takes many decisions of different types on a daily basis. Consequently, I will focus my opening remarks on the areas that I think may be most helpful. The types of Government decision making range from decisions on public investment to decisions on taxation, service delivery and legislation. In recent times, key decisions have been made on urgent issues such as receiving refugees from Ukraine or responding to the pandemic and on long-term programmes such as the roll-out of social security in Scotland. As those examples illustrate, Government decisions cover complex issues, often of national importance and often with a degree of political contention. Understandably, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to such fadded decisions, but there are principles and governance that support effective decision making. In terms of principles, the policy prospectus published at the end of April sets out both the three defining missions of this Government, equality, opportunity and community and the outcomes that we want to deliver over the next three years. As a Government, we have developed a distinctive Scottish approach to delivering policy and public services based on four priorities. First, a shift towards prevention. Secondly, improving performance. Third, working in partnership. Fourthly, engaging and developing our people. In terms of governance, the Scottish Cabinet sits on the top level of decision making supported by Cabinet sub-committees on certain key areas such as legislation. In supporting this, there is a range of official governance under the corporate board and executive team. This is reinforced by official guidance, including the Scottish Public Finance Manual and the Civil Service Code. We recognise the importance of external advice, challenge and scrutiny, including by this Parliament. We integrate external views into our decision making in various ways, including through consultations and stakeholder engagement and through groups such as the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls and the delivery board for the national strategy for economic transformation. We also recognise the importance of transparency, which is why we are delivering Scotland's third open government national action plan in partnership with civil society. It is why we will set out our financial fiscal assumptions in our medium-term financial strategy later this month, and it is why we routinely publish impact assessments relating to policy decisions. The quality of advice supporting decision making depends upon the skills, the capability and the professionalism of civil servants. The Scottish Government is implementing its people strategy to support the continuous improvement and updating of skills and capability and has introduced measures to improve record keeping as part of its information governance programme. Effective decision making often requires evidence on what works and the Scottish Government is supported in this by professional analysts, scientists and other specialists within the civil service and by expert advisory groups such as the Covid advisory group that played a significant role during the pandemic. In conclusion, given the varied nature and complexity of decision making, as a Government, we do not claim to always get everything right, but our decisions are supported by professional advice and formal processes. We have made many decisions that we can be proud of over the years, decisions that have made Scotland a better place and improved outcomes for people living here, but we are always willing to learn lessons and to improve, which is why the work of this committee is so important. We look forward to considering its recommendations. I was expecting the tradition to operate at the community going first. We will go in with a heavy brog. I have a question that may well be for your cabinet secretary. I was interested in exploring, do any third sector groups obtain more than 50 per cent of their funding from the Scottish Government? Well, third sector groups are varied in that we tend— I should say quangos as well, I have not been clear, quangos, or third sector groups. Okay, well let's take third sector groups first of all. We tend to give the funding through what we call intermediaries who would then give the funding to third sector organisations, some of which are quite small, that will apply to those intermediaries. That helps the Scottish Government, as you can imagine, the plethora of small third sector organisations. It makes more sense to do it in that way. I do not have the breakdown of who gets what in terms of percentages in front of me, but I am certainly happy to furnish the committee with that information. We would encourage third sector organisations to not become wholly reliant on any single source of funding because, for sustainability reasons, clearly the more there is a spread of funding sources, the more sustainable that organisation becomes. With the best will in the world, and you will understand this, sometimes policy priorities can change within Government, and that means that difficult decisions have to be taken, which can include the ceasing of funding. If an organisation is wholly dependent, that becomes difficult. In terms of quangos, we have 129 public bodies in Scotland, and many of those will be reliant on Scottish Government funding, and some will be able to raise commercial funding. If you look at, for example, the forestry and land sector, they have been quite successful in generating commercial money, which is good. We are reviewing and want to reform the landscape around 129 bodies. That is a piece of work that I am happy to furnish again, the committee, as we take that forward. I suppose that the general question is, and in fairness, I do not expect you to be able to answer that today, but is there a possibility that some of the types of bodies that receive Scottish Government funding get more than 50 per cent of their income stream? That is the general question, and in fairness to you, I do not expect you to know that data for every single organisation. I suppose that my next question is, where would that be declared by the Scottish Government and or the civil service? You may want to come in here, permanent secretary, as a risk in terms of your decision making. I fully accept that it is a risk for the organisation themselves, because of exactly what you highlight, but it also represents a risk both to the civil servant and to the Scottish Government if there are a number of bodies that are receiving more than 50 per cent of their funding. So perhaps you would like to come in, permanent secretary, and say where would that be, where in the institutional memory, if you like, is that declared and understood and assessed? First of all, for each of the budget lines or grants, it is understood by the sponsor body, the sponsor team, that sits within the Scottish Government and then it is declared in the annual report and accounts. It may be that there are certain levels of grants that are not above the threshold that are visible through that process, and we can take that away. As the Deputy First Minister says, I furnished the committee with a bit more detail, but if I take something like Social Security Scotland, it is a major organisation funded by the Scottish Government to deliver social security, and that funding line is visible in our annual report and accounts. To an extent that we understand that liability, we plan for it and we make sure that it is funded at a level to deliver the service that we wish. As the Deputy First Minister set out, in terms of public bodies more generally, voluntary sector, where we can encourage revenue raising and that opportunity to create revenue, that can be positive. When we have seen that in different sectors, we want to encourage that empowerment. What I am trying to get here is that you quite correctly say that you will understand from a funding line where it represents a liability. What I am trying to explore is where it represents a risk to quality decision making and how you examine and assess that risk on an upfront basis and, therefore, critically, how you guard against policy capture. I see where you are getting to here. First of all, clearly we need to guard against that, that any organisation that we fund is an organisation that we fund to carry out particular tasks, so it would have applied for funding on the basis of meeting the Scottish Government objectives as set out. Where the Scottish Government is taking policy decisions and consulting, I would not expect organisations that respond to that consultation and we would be looking at what they are saying in the round alongside all the other organisations, whether we fund them or not. My expectation would be that there is no hierarchy of importance of their views on a subject that in any way correlates to whether or not they are being funded. I think that it is important that we make that distinction. Organisations are, as I say, funded to carry out particular tasks, so I think that that would be important to make that distinction, if you see what I mean. Do you agree that it represents a risk in decision making if an organisation—indeed, we had confirmation of that a couple of weeks ago from the SCVO that there is a potential risk where an organisation is receiving its funding from the Scottish Government that it will tell the Government what it wants to hear, because it appears about its line of funding? That is what we need to guard against. What I would say is that there are many organisations, and I am sure that we could come back with a number of examples, if we would find it helpful, where organisations will not hold back in criticising Government policy even when they receive funding. That is how it should be, incidentally. There should be no guard against criticising the Scottish Government just because an organisation receives funding. That would be a problem if that was the case. If you look back, there are many organisations that have been quite paciferous about aspects of Government policy, things that we have brought forward, that they do not agree with and that they receive Government funding and continue to receive Government funding. I hope that that gives you some reassurance. Permanent Secretary, I will give you the chance. My question specifically is, how do you guard in process terms, in decision making terms, cognisance of risk against policy capture? As the Deputy First Minister set it out, we deliberately set up external scrutiny to provide that challenge. Scottish Fiscal Commission, Audit Scotland itself, but if I think about the promise that I was at their board last week, they provide significant independent scrutiny challenge analysis on our care system, the promise itself and how that has been delivered. Funded by the Scottish Government, it is certainly not still empowered to challenge and that is deliberate. It is not in house within the system. It is out with transparent, accountable and very visible for everyone to see. I think that your general point is absolutely right. We need to ensure that the evidence, transparency and healthy challenge is applied to public debates around the most contentious issues. No more do we see that transparently in Parliament every week, where there are complex debates going on around justice reform, national care service, marine protected areas, deposit return schemes. Those are debates that are supported by evidence and data that represent a significant amount of stakeholder engagement. My teams will try and capture that, provide impartial and objective advice to ministers and make sure that we are listening and getting all the inputs into that policy advisory process as best we can. We will do that through consultations, published impact assessments, structured governance that includes non-executives and independent advisory boards. We will use that to try and give our ministers the best possible advice to inform decisions. Parliament subjects that to significant scrutiny as well. You are right that we always have a guard against the risk of policy capture, but I think that what I observe is a very healthy level of scrutiny in debate in Scotland around the difficult decisions that the country is trying to take. My final question, then. There were concerns expressed previously in the gender reform recognition bill, in which the term was used particularly as a policy. I am very mindful that it is quite contentious. I am not trying to make any political points here, merely using it as an example of what I am driving at. The point was made during that in the EQIA, the Equalities Impact Assessments, that during the period of the six years during which this was assessed, no cognisance was given to the impact of women and girls who had been sexually assaulted or raped of having fully intact men in terms of genitalia. I mean setting aside their right to be referred to in their chosen gender, but no consideration was given to the impact on those women of having women in their safe places. I asked in gender whether they had done any assessment and their reply was no, we did no assessment and anyway we wouldn't do the EQIA. In terms of this concept around avoiding policy capture and critical friends and robust decision making, how did we in policy terms get to the position where nobody thought about that for six years? As you pointed out yourself, there was six years of debate and scrutiny of a policy. Probably to the extent of a few others have been through that level of long-term debate and scrutiny. Was everything done perfectly? Probably not. There are always lessons to be learned around all of that. What I would say is that the EQIA did look at the impact on women and girls generally except what you're saying about the specific and that's something maybe we need to reflect upon, but I think that if you think about the general terms at the level of consultation, of scrutiny, of engagement, I personally engaged with a whole range of organisations diametrically opposed, in favour of many absolutely against. If you're talking about organisations that receive government funding and which side of the debate they were on during this process, I accept that there are a number of women's organisations that receive Scottish Government funding who were in favour of that reform, but those same organisations have been very critical of the Scottish Government in other policy areas and have not held back in saying so many in the justice field. My conclusion from all of that is that we need to guard against any perception, whether it's real or not, but any perception of organisations receiving Government funding therefore taking a particular stance on issues. We have to guard against that, but what I would say to you is that I think that the evidence shows that organisations are very robust in their criticism of Government, even when they receive funding, and that's how it should be. Permanent Secretary, any last comments on that? Were you surprised about my comment? No, I understand the level of contention around the bill and the debate in the country. I was just checking the data. In November 2017, the first consultation, 15,500 responses received that informed development of the draft bill, detailed impact assessments, equality impact assessment, children's rights and wellbeing impact assessment, a further consultation, 17,000 responses received, and we all observed the level of debate until the lights went out before Christmas. You just made a comment about volume and quality. The point that I'm making is that if during that significant volume, which I absolutely don't doubt, nobody at any point thought it was appropriate to look at it from an impact perspective for women who have been sexually assaulted, which is incidentally a huge percentage of women, as you will know, or raped, of having fully intact men in their safe spaces, that says to me from a process and risk assessment perspective from decision making that something wasn't right. Do you accept that or am I missing something? Do you accept that clearly something hadn't been quite right in the processes? It's not about volume, it's about quality. I can come back in a minute, but I think that just to be clear on two points, EQIA did in terms of the top level look at the impact on women and girls, but during the consultation and my discussions with a range of organisations, those issues were raised and they were recorded as issues that were raised during those discussions. The debate that then sued that was clearly a matter that was raised during the process of that debate and Parliament tried to navigate its way through all of these really difficult issues to come to a consensus and conclusion around some of those matters, none of which was easy and obviously we've had long discussions. In fact, when I met with yourself there were many issues raised at that stage and trying to bring all of that and marshal all of that to a point where Parliament could make a decision was quite a difficult process. I would say Parliament made the right decision, I know that you would disagree with that, but ultimately Parliament had to make the decision based on all of the evidence in front of it in the round and that's where Parliament landed. I feel as though I've taken a great deal of time in this, so I want to let other colleagues come in. I have a couple of questions in this area on lessons to be learned. You mentioned, Deputy First Minister, that you said on this area, lessons are to be learned, rather than speaking more about the specifics. How do you go about learning lessons? What are the things that you have changed or done differently or would do differently given the experience that you've just recounted with Michelle Thomson? I guess one of my reflections is, was there a way of trying to build more of a consensus around the issue that I felt very strongly was important to try and do? Could we have done that at an earlier stage? Was it possible? I think the difficulty was that trying to bring people together to coalesce around compromises. I don't know what that would have looked like because the debate became so polarised, not least around social media, far more so than it was initially back six years ago. When you're the minister in charge of a piece of legislation where you can see the public discourse being so polarised, the room for compromise becomes quite difficult. I'm the first to reflect on whether things could have been done to try and do that more effectively. It's a useful recount of that, but it's something that we hear regularly from Government ministers, lessons will be learned. Ferry's scandal, 29 March 2022, Kate Forbes said, we recognise where things have gone wrong and we are learning lessons for the future. The First Minister at the time said that lessons have been, are being and will be learned. Audit Scotland's report on £5 billion lack of transparency in the Covid business arrangements, Kate Forbes said that any lessons highlighted by the report would be learned. This is about decision making and I'm keen to understand where we're being told lessons are being learned. What are those lessons? Well, let me come on to some of those. Obviously, the Covid inquiry will very much look at and scrutinise all aspects of how the Government responded. Bearing in mind, Government's responding to something that's never happened before is quite challenging. There's no blueprint that you can take off a shelf to navigate through a global pandemic, so inevitably things were done at speed in a way that looking in hindsight and having the ability to look back in hindsight, would you do those in normal time or would you do things differently? I absolutely accept lessons that need to be learned because if we have another global pandemic, we will have the experience of what worked and perhaps what didn't work. The full public inquiry will come up with recommendations around some of that, which all Governments need to do. Maybe a couple of other examples then are for the ferry scandal, which I've mentioned. Huge amounts of public expenditure. The census, the shambolic approach to the census, Nicola Sturgeon said on 1 June 2022, of course we'll review the experience and ensure that any lessons that are required to be learned are learned. What lessons have we learned about how those pretty poor decisions made by this Government were made? Let's come back to ferries before we move on to the census. The section 22 report was a hugely important report and a number of changes flowed from that, not least the Governance arrangements at Ferguson's itself. Huge difference in terms of what more detail is required. A complete overhaul of the Governance arrangements that flowed from that. It was important that that happened at speed and it did happen at speed. In terms of lessons learned, it wasn't just a kind of at some point in the future lessons of learning. It was a very rapid response and with improved Governance arrangements in rapid time. In terms of the census, again Scotland was obviously choosing to take forward a Scottish Government-making decision to carry out the census in a different way that then did lead to some challenges around the participation rate. Again, the work that was undertaken at speed to address some of that in order to get that figure up actually worked and the figure became one that could then be relied upon in terms of the census return. I guess that it would be a strange situation for a Government not to learn lessons even when things go well and it's not on the list of what about this and what about that. Even when things go well and delivery is good, there are always lessons to be learned around how things might be improved going forward. For instance, on the census, we will not do that again, will we? We will keep the census at the same time as the rest of the UK. Is that the case? Is that a lesson that's been learned? I think that there were advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages around the content of the census and being able to carry out the census according to when we felt that that was the best time has some advantages. The disadvantage was the UK-wide publicity around the census. Those judgments, and I'll bring the perm second on some of the detail around that, will be made. Absolutely looking at the pros and cons of whether that is the best thing to do. Clearly, the most important thing with the census is having a return at a level that's reliable. That's the top thing. That was a big failure in that regard. On that point, on the idea of the census, is that something that you and your officials have reflected on? We've been told that lessons have been learned. What's the central lesson that you learned? We start with the census. Deputy First Minister is right. We're confident. We've worked with Office for National Statistics that the census process will provide reliable data and output to serve our needs. National Records Scotland worked very hard in a difficult context with the pandemic. There are still high Covid infection rates through the spring of last year to get that done. Clearly, I think that there is the opportunity for us to provide advice for ministers on what happens next time. Hopefully, we won't be trying to do the census in a period that is still very much behaviour-impacted by the pandemic. There has already been significant learning derived through the process of delivering the census in Scotland around how we use different data models to get to the right confidence interval for the outputs. We can certainly take away a request if the committee would like us to set out precisely what the lessons are for next time around how we would take this on again. Just to come back to your more general question of how do you learn and how do we know the learning is driving improvements, I think that one of the critical things that we want to continue to do is to publish the changes for transparency where we deliver improvements. If we take private investments—last time I was before this committee last year—the challenge was, are you going to get that published? We have published that private investment framework. That is an important benchmark from the learning from Ferguson's but also from the Carver, Presswick and other private asset investments. That is now the consistent standard that we want to follow for the future. It is about how we use independent expert commercial advisers, how we ensure that that informs decision making, how we ensure that—back to the original question—the decisions are subject to scrutiny and diverse input and advice. Your main point is whether you are learning or improving. We need to prove that, set it out openly and then make progress accordingly. First Minister, as you know, we took evidence from 15 former ministers and former civil servants, and the former ministers represented three different political parties who had obviously been in government over recent times. They were quite unequivocal in their views that, at times, too much decision making is seen to be, I quote, Russia's unclear and unstructured. Do you agree with that? That has not been my experience, I have to say. Sometimes it can feel the opposite. Sometimes decisions can be frustratingly long to make. Sometimes you will get advice that you will go through a number of times. You will have lots of discussion around the various options that are being put in front of you, and that can take some time, even when there is an eagerness to get on and do what is in front of you. In terms of where you have a situation that requires a very quick turnaround—in my opening remarks, I mentioned the response to Ukraine and the Covid pandemic—that sometimes rapid decision making is required when you are facing out-of-the-ordinary situations. That does not mean that it should not still be good decision making, but it means that you have to do that in quick time and rely on the best evidence, the best advice that can be brought to you. Some of it, you can rely on experience, previous decisions that have been made, what were the outcomes to those, but sometimes it is new and there is nothing to draw upon. Therefore, that requires judgment to be brought. Sometimes that judgment will be the right judgment, but with hindsight and some decision making, clearly it was not, but it will be the best judgment made on the best evidence at the time. I have been a minister in government on and off for more or less 15 years. When you gain confidence and experience as a minister, that enables you to make decisions, perhaps, more quickly and to be able to challenge some of the advice that comes in front of you, a bit more readily than a minister that perhaps does not have that experience and might therefore quite rightly take longer. I do not recognise that and I can only go, I am afraid, by my own experience in government over that time. Ironically, when it comes to current civil servants, they were making the case that on issues such as Covid and Ukraine, decision making was actually quite good because it was so desperately urgent and so serious that things actually worked out pretty well. However, former ministers and former civil servants who were pre-Covid and pre-Ukraine were arguing very forcibly that there are far too many decisions that were seen as not particularly good because they were so unstructured. I think that this morning we have already had the gender recognition situation flagged up. We have had issues about ferries, we have had BiFab, we have had Presswick, we have had the census. Add on to that the DRS, HPMAs and the national care service. The list goes on for the Scottish Government of concerns about effective decision making because, in all those cases, I am sure that the Scottish Government would argue that it could have done things better. Our concern as a committee is that the Scottish Government is perhaps not listening carefully enough to the stakeholders who are on the front line of delivering these policies because, as I say, the Scottish Government's record on a lot of these issues has not been very good. Could you accept that? Let me take a few of those issues. I do not think that anyone could say that the decision making around GRR was rushed. It was a prolonged policy over a long period of time. I would not accept that it was unstructured, either. We have got to make a distinction between things that are politically contentious and that people disagree with and decision making that is made on the best available evidence at the time. If we take DRS when the DRS scheme was first mooted and introduced, that predated the issue of the internal market act coming into being as a factor. A process was set in place, and then an external factor came in to being that became very fundamental to the scheme. Nobody could have predicted that that was going to be the case at the start of taking forward DRS. Some things are within your influence and your power, but sometimes there will be things that come that are not. In terms of your point about stakeholders, that is a fair point. DRS is quite an interesting example where you look at the larger businesses who were able, maybe because of their capacity, to get things in place quite rapidly. What became apparent was that small businesses were struggling with that, probably because they did not have the same capacity to be able to put in place the arrangements that the larger ones had. If I reflect on my own decision making, if you take the short-term licensing scheme, again politically contentious, some people disagreed with the principle and some agreed with it. In terms of the implementation, on the basis of the very same thing that businesses were saying, they needed more time for some of the practicalities, in that case things like getting tradespeople in to the property to do some of the assessments. As soon as I became aware of the extent of that, that is when we made the decision to extend the deadline to October. Is that a failure of decision making in the first place? I would say that it is not. I would say that it is being able to respond to something and a movable situation that evidence has come in front of you that that was the right decision to take to delay. I would say that that was an example of listening and changing the scheme in response to listening to those concerns, rather than it being a weakness and a poor decision making. I am not sure that I would accept that, but let us try to keep the politics aside of that. When it comes to the national care service, there are four committees of this Parliament who have raised very serious concerns about the national care service because they do not feel that the evidence has reflected the views of people on the front line. Certainly, this committee has had very serious issues about the lack of a financial memorandum. We still have very considerable concerns about that. Does that not flag up to you that there are serious issues for the Government because it has not consulted effectively with all stakeholders? As I say, it has resulted in—it is very unusual—and certainly in my time in this Parliament—it is very unusual for four committees to have serious concerns. We still do not have an accurate financial memorandum. The national care service is a hugely complex piece of reform. In terms of the stakeholder views, there are quite different stakeholder views on the national care service. Some stakeholders, whom you might describe as being those representing service user interests, are very much in favour of the progress of the national care service at pace because they do not feel that the current arrangements for delivering social care meet their needs. If you speak to them as a group of stakeholders, they will urge the Government—and actually were expressed some disappointment due to the delay—that the Government was not getting on and making those reforms. The other group of stakeholders, local Government in particular, have a differing view for all the reasons that we understand. They believe that local decision making and local control is important. One of the key reasons that we have taken a step back is that trying to do and take this forward in the face of those local Government concerns would be very challenging indeed. I am a big fan of the national care service, having been a former home care organiser. I could speak for the rest of the committee session about that and why I think that national standards and a national framework are really important to have the same quality and standards everywhere, but I will just leave that for the moment. However, taking and agreeing a way forward with local Government has become the primary consideration here for all the reasons that we understand that trying to move this big reform forward without trying to reach a consensus and compromise with local Government would be difficult. That is why the decision has been made to create that space over the summer to try and reach an agreement and compromise with local Government. The financial memorandum that will be brought back will reflect what that decision making looks like in terms of how we take it forward. There will of course need to be changes to the plan, the way that it will be delivered and the way that it will be rolled out. That is going to be inevitable. I hope that that helps to explain that it is not through the lack of intent and firm belief that a national care service can actually make things better for people, but the implementation of it is crucial that it is done in the right way and taking local Government with us is important. There was another comment made by the former ministers and former civil servants who said that for some financial rules, which normally we would have a standard practice for decision making, have found on some occasions to be optional. That is a concern for this committee that some proper practice of the financial management of policies is sometimes not adhered to properly. Is that a concern for the Scottish Government? I will bring in a second. The financial decision making is crucial and the transparency of that is absolutely crucial. At the end of the day, that is public money and the decision making around that. That could not be more important. In my experience, the decision making around financial matters is robust. Sometimes there are clearly options around which financial option you would take in terms of the level of investment, the profiling of funding and all of those. There is a judgment to be applied there around the best outcomes and the best value for money. On some of the improvements that have been made around the issue, there has been extensive work done. If the permanent set, I think that we would be happy just to give a bit of detail on that. I am happy to write to the committee with a bit more detail on that because it is not optional. If there is evidence that it was in the past or an example can be shared, we would look into that for sure. All expenditure above £1 million, I personally sign off and so is the Deputy First Minister at the moment because of the fiscal position. We call those our accountable officer templates. For all expenditure, I am checking to be confident that its proper, regular, lawful parliamentary authority is in place and that the commercial considerations have been properly taken account of and that those inputs go into those templates. The chief finance officer and I provide assurance to the Deputy First Minister that spending is optimal and the right thing to do, given the context that we are in. We try to take that discipline through the organisation and through our finance business partner networks to ensure that we are clear in understanding where our expenditure is happening and that we are confident that it is optimal. It always matters, but it particularly matters given the tight fiscal position that we have been in since inflation has been so high. Thank you for that. I urge you to reflect on what the auditor general has said about public finance and the need for additional scrutiny and transparency because, as you know, he has not been very comfortable about that. When Liz Smith raised the issue with you in the chamber, you said that the advice that we commission and receive is the best advice that is available to ministers. That would include legal advice. What are the circumstances when making a decision that you would decide to disregard legal advice that you have received? Legal advice is hugely important. I do not think that I have ever disregarded legal advice because of its importance. I would say that legal advice is often around options. It is not always black and white. It quite often says that there is this, there is this, there is this, there is this and these are the various scenarios in terms of the legal advice that is being given. As a minister, I have never set aside legal advice. There is advice in relation to the case surrounding the former First Minister, Alex Salmond. It was discounted by the Scottish Government. The advice stated that the advice was to concede in the case and said that they were unable to see the benefits and proceeding come close to meeting the potential detriments in doing so. At some point, the cabinet has made a decision to disregard that legal advice. I am concerned about and want to understand how you would have that conversation in cabinet and come to a decision to set aside that advice and do something else. I was not partied to any discussion in cabinet. It is before my time, but let us stick with the principle of your question. We would never disregard legal advice. Of course, it is imperative that we understand is it proper or is it regular or is it lawful. Lesley's legal team does an incredible job and is very integrated with the senior leadership of our executive team in all the work that we are doing. As the Deputy First Minister says, it is an always binary, so it is lawful to do this and not to do that. It is a judgment and a balance of risk. Ultimately, ministers are quite entitled to look at wider strategic considerations, whether that be about economic benefits, formal, informal, reputational risks or whatever. However, as an accountable officer, particularly when it comes back to the point around public expenditure, it has to be proper and regular for me to be confident and to authorise it. Otherwise, I cannot. That is what the Public Duty under the Scottish Public Finance Act requires me to do. Their same would be true in terms of expenditure, for example, on the legal case. It would not be feasible or it would not be proper and regular, sorry, to pursue that if there was no authority to do so or source of public funds or whatever. John Mason. Continuing on the theme of a speed of decision making, to be frank, we have had very mixed views from different witnesses that we have had here. For example, if we take Covid, we had some witnesses who said that it was great, it was quick and decisive and all that kind of thing, but others, especially from some women's groups, said that it was too fast and there was not enough consultation. I have to share your experience generally that decision making can be quite slow. We also had evidence from business that they make a decision when they are 80 per cent certain about something and their suggestion was that the Government waits until it is 1995 or 99 per cent certain before making a decision. Is it that it has to be a different speed for different decisions or are there principles in there? How do you get the balance? It is a difficult balance and you are then looking at the carrying of risk. You have the advice in front of you and it is the best advice, but nothing is ever 100 per cent certain and everything carries a risk. If you have three options in front of you, those relative risks will be set out to you. A recommendation, not always but quite often, will be made by civil servants who have drawn on the experience that they will have brought in in order to present that to ministers in terms of the relative risks of all those options. Ultimately, again, you have to apply some judgment to that. In terms of the speech of, and you are right, you will hear quite differing views, some criticism of things taken too long and other times an accusation of too rapid a decision making and not looking at the... I think that the truth of it is that differing decisions will require differing timeframes and analysis. Personally, and again I'm having to draw on some of my personal experience here, if I look at something and I'm just not sure around the relative risks and it just doesn't clear to me, then I wouldn't make a decision on the basis of the submission in front of me. I would firstly probably call all the officials into a meeting so I can probe more fully what lies behind some of the assumptions, some of the risk analysis and that way you can really get in behind what inevitable lies behind a six-page submission and that takes time, but it's better to take that time so that you can make a decision with the full facts in front of you and understanding all of that. So that is how I go about decision making and all of the frameworks and the standards that the perm set mentioned earlier on are there to ensure the quality of the advice that's coming up. I think just one final point. I mean, civil servants can't... Nobody can be an expert on everything so inevitably you're drawing on business community, on other stakeholders that have a level of knowledge experience view and you're trying to draw all of that in to try and make the best decision on the information in front of you. Okay, that's helpful, thank you. It's been good that we've had evidence from such a wide range of witnesses and can I particularly say we appreciated meeting existing civil servants up at St Andrew's house which was, I think, a slightly unusual experience for all of us but was actually very good and they were very helpful. On the issue of transparency, about how transparent advice should be, you mentioned transparency yourself in your opening remarks and most of us would say transparency is a great thing. We did have some previous civil servants and ministers saying you can have a bit too much because if everything's written down, if all the advice is written down for transparency then it'd be very difficult for a civil servant to give confidential advice or options or that kind of thing in a more general sense and I just wonder how again you feel we get the balance in that space. Well I think the presumption is on transparency and that you know that anything that is influencing your decision should be part of that submission. Now you know clearly in discussions with civil servants they will bring all those inherent risks alive by telling you what lies behind the submission that that group of stakeholders are vehemently opposed because of X, Y and Z or this group of stakeholders will be fully in favour of that because of A, B and C and that sometimes that's where judgments are quite difficult to make because you know that none of the options are going to please everybody and you're going to have a group of stakeholders who think absolutely that's a wrong decision and in trying to come to a conclusion you know well what's the objective what is it that you're trying to achieve and that the submission is trying to give you advice on taking forward a particular policy and you've got to try and navigate through that and ultimately sometimes you need to make a decision in the full knowledge that it's not going to please a particular group of stakeholders. Yeah I do understand that but I just wondered do you think sometimes civil servants are reluctant to give advice or frank advice because it's all going to be written down and it might come back and haunt them? I mean I've actually drawn perm sec in a minute I would I would hope not because you know if it's critical advice that could sway a decision it really ought to be in there. Now I guess that thing about what you're getting at is full and frank and free advice from civil servants. Does it become compromised if civil servants think that they're going to be held in front of a committee and made to answer for it you know a couple of years down the line because it didn't work out as had been planned. I would hope that's not the case because as ministers ultimately we rely on a kind of honest picture in all it works and all rather than something that that is refined because they think it'll sit easier with minister so I would prefer the works and all and I think that would be my starting point. No you know we hold dear the values of honesty, objectivity and partiality. Our job is to provide ministers with the very best advice so we expect that to be robust evidence led and needs to have all the right inputs to it whether it be finance, legal, commercial or whatever. We talked about the importance of listening so we were just having a look on the way down here in terms of public consultations you know we've got a dozen live at the minute we undertake around 80 to 90 public consultations a year and then in terms of being transparent around the impacts of decisions being taken you know if I take business regulatory impact assessments we've done around 10 of those since January this year in April alone. We've done a quality impact assessments around carers, procurement, justice reform, fair work, health and social care. So I think our job is to ensure that the advice is as robust and as objective and as impartial as possible to give ministers the options and the understanding of the risks and benefits of the choices available to them but I do also understand the point that you heard from colleagues in that private discussion you know politics is you guys know better than anyone is an intense business social media has added to all of that and the level of public scrutiny on some of the issues we've discussed today whether it be gender recognition reform or deposit return scheme or social care reform they are all contentious and so part of our job is to build a culture where people feel safe and supported to have those honest conversations and to also do their jobs in a safe and secure way where we look after their wellbeing and Leslie can say a bit more if you're interested in regards to that in terms of harassment reviews and continuous improvement programme the work we're trying to do to build wellbeing and to build that professionalism so that colleagues feel absolutely supported to provide advice even if it's not what people want to hear necessarily because as DFM says it's much better to hear it early hear it with full honesty waltz and all than pretend we're all fine and then derail later so we're trying to really encourage transparency within the organisation the escalation of risk early and absolutely that objective advice for ministers to make optimal choices okay I can maybe ask something else and then maybe miss Fraser could come in if she wants does the relationship between the minister and the civil servants matter and does it vary a lot because we have got the impression that in some cases a minister can be quite overpowering let's say and forces the civil servants to do what they might not want to do and on the other hand sometimes the minister is quite weak and just follows what the civil servants want so I mean is is is there a big is that something we should worry about that there's a big variety in views and tied in with that sorry to put it all together but that's right the whole thing about churn both churn of civil servants changing quite often so the minister doesn't know who they're speaking to but also churn of ministers sometimes quite often and the civil servant doesn't know who they're speaking to okay can I just come in first wow this is in my head the relationship doesn't matter so you'll have and it's just human nature being human nature you will build up a particular relationship with key officials who you become you become to rely upon and who you human nature being that again that you will be be your go to civil servants because you've had good advice clear sound advice previously so you know that and in every ministerial role I've had that's how it's it's panned out there's an important thing in what you've said said about ministers behaviour so we cannot have a position where civil servants would be wary about putting difficult advice in front of a minister because of the reaction they might get because that then can lead to poor decision making so it's critically important that ministerial behaviour is such that ministers have to accept that sometimes they will get information that's something they've absolutely wanted to do and it's just not doable for all the good reasons that are set out in front of you and sometimes you just have to accept that because it's the best advice being provided to you so that that is important and you know the civil service support of you know particularly senior civil servants so the ones who are interacting with ministers more often it's important that there's absolutely a respect and culture that respects you know that that that relationship is not always one of equals and that you know ministers have to recognise that in the way that they respond sometimes to news that they're not that happy about and you know we've all had that but it's important that you know civil servants at the end of the day are only providing you with the the best advice that they possibly can. The members just have a few more members to get around so if we can ask for brevity in answers a little bit before I understand it's a broad subject but if we can try and narrow it down a little bit apologies. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you just to pick up that point about the wider culture and values and I think this is a point of lessons that the organisation has very much learned so our vision and values that we introduced as an organisation in the service of Scotland in 2021 was really recognising that for our diverse colleagues in the organisation to be able to bring their whole selves to work we need to create that safe environment so as well as our civil service values that builds on collaboration, innovation, inclusion and kindness and that's now taken through into the way that we train civil servants into the skills and expertise and behaviours that we're looking for in our senior civil servants. For example, I'm very happy to provide a bit more information on that if that would be useful. Thank you. Can I ask on this, we've talked about awards in all policy. I think too often I hear in conversations of particularly the most controversial decisions that have been made in instances of minutes not being taken in meetings so we had that in relation to both the Ferguson Marine scandal, we've had several occasions in relation to again that the instance of the former First Minister and minutes not being taken between Scottish Government officials and lawyers and others. What action is the permanent secretary taking to ensure that never happens again? Well, we set out quite a lot of actions that we need to take convener and Leslie, maybe we can just briefly do a bit more on the detail because as you say those historic examples are regrettable. I've said that before and we want to make sure that absolutely safe space for all that challenge and level of honest debate but then also a clear record of the decision. Leslie has been leading a lot of significant work on record keeping. We've revised our guidance for our private office for our ministers around the level of decisions, changing our systems on retrievals for documents as well and then we're sharing all of that for transparency. We have set in place a whole information governance programme in response to the issues that were identified and the improvements that we wanted to make and of course we are not alone as an organisation in wrestling with enormous amounts of data and information at the moments of critical that we get this right. The information management board, which I now chair, has been meeting for the last 18 months. We've trained lots of our colleagues across the organisation, almost two and a half thousand, increased their skills. We have put in place new systems in government as well so that we can more quickly and accurately locate information when we need to find it and ensure that our colleagues are properly trained in terms of how that should be securely put in place. There's a whole culture systems in practice that's absolutely essential here and just linking this back with everyone's core civil service craft. It's the very essence of being a really good public servant. Deputy First Minister, does the cabinet recognise that culture and that it has to be adopted? For instance, on May 2017, the meeting between Nicola Sturgeon and Jim McCall to discuss issues at Ferguson Marine was a very significant issue in terms of huge public expenditure and waste, no minute taken. Do you and your colleagues recognise that it's completely unacceptable for that practice to be undertaken for no records to be taken and recognised in what your colleagues have said? Of course, ministers have supported all of the improvements that have been made that you've just heard the detail of. Regularly in my inbox, I will have minutes that have come through very rapidly of not just meetings with external organisations but with officials around decision making all recorded in terms of the minute of that meeting. Everything is minited and that's how it should be. If you're asking me, is that always been the case? You've just heard why those improvements were put in place because of concerns that you've just highlighted. Having those minutes is extremely helpful for ministers apart from any of the Nelson being able to refer back. Do you think that the colleagues won't undertake those kinds of practices again in the cabinet? The processes are the processes, so minutes are now part of the ... To be fair, First Minister, there were processes in place beforehand as well. Well, not to the extent that they are now that you've heard about the changes that have been made, so minutes are now required and are taken in every single one of those circumstances. As I say, my inbox regularly, every minute of every meeting that I've had for the previous day pops up. You seem reluctant to say that that would be your expectation of cabinet colleagues. Of course, it's the expectation of every minister and every cabinet secretary, absolutely. The Auditor General's recent reports around the gap between policy ambition and deliver, I think, would resonate with all of us. It also relates to the issue of fiscal sustainability that this committee has been wrestling with and that I know that the Government has been wrestling with. I think that it comes into relevance for this inquiry, when we talk particularly about, as has been mentioned, churn in the civil service. Part of that is civil servants being spread increasingly thin, being moved from one team to another because new initiatives, new policies have been adopted. That creates not just a lack of capacity but a lack of expertise and, in some cases, a lack of the depth of robust advice that ministers might want to have. If I could round all that up into one question, is the Scottish Government over-committed? Are we trying to do too much for the resources that we have and that is resulting in the gap between ambition and what is being delivered? There are a number of factors pressing on our public finances. One is that we have a huge number of programmes that need to be supported and a financial position that has come under increasing pressure. The position of the level of inflation, for example, has squeezed the budget and meant that the value and purchasing power of every pound of Scottish public finances has significantly reduced. If you add on to that the pay deals, which, of course, nobody would deny any public servant a reasonable pay deal, but we have had to fund that by and large through the resources that are available to us. That has meant some difficult decisions. We saw that in terms of teachers' pay and the decision that had to be made around the £46 million for universities and colleges. We said at the time that that money had to come from somewhere. Those are real decisions and real issues that have to be navigated. The medium-term financial strategy that I will be bringing to Parliament soon will set out the horizon scan of what the public finances are looking like and some of the difficult decisions that will require to be made. Ultimately, one of the reasons that the First Minister set out the missions is that we need to look at everything that we do and everything that we spend money on through that lens to really ask ourselves some quite difficult questions, perhaps. Does it deliver those key missions? That will have to guide us through some of the quite difficult decisions that will inevitably have to be made in order to balance the budget. The Scottish Government has to balance the budget. It is a legal requirement. We have no option. Therefore, my job is to make sure that my colleagues are doing what they can to address all those issues, including the programming. The point about civil servants, of course, is that it is difficult for civil servants that one minute they are working on this and the next they are working on that. However, the skill of the civil service, what I have seen in my experience, is that they are very quick to adapt. They are agile. They are able to get to grips with new policy areas. I think that there is a recognition that we have to keep a close eye on head count and we cannot have exponential growth. That means that it has to be an agile organisation and that civil servants will have to pivot, like they did on Ukraine, for example. No one knew how to set up a Ukraine resettlement programme. It was an amazing insight into how the civil service is agile, is experienced and is able to deal with something that no one could have predicted in a very efficient and professional manner that has delivered a good scheme. I will drill down on that a little bit. I will try to be brief here. Would the outcomes be better if the Scottish Government was doing less but doing each of those initiatives with more resources available to it? At the moment, a huge number of priorities spread across a range of initiatives and we know that there is a gap between ambition and outcome. Would the outcomes across the board, particularly in terms of child poverty and net zero, be better if there were fewer programmes but those programmes were being resourced better? That is one of the pieces of work that is absolutely critical. We are taking that forward. Just to reiterate my plea for brevity. Finally, the resource spending review last year was supposed to get us towards the point of fiscal sustainability. Obviously, that happened during a period in which inflation was continuing to rise. Reflecting on the fact that we had the RSR in the summer and then in the autumn in emergency budget review, a second round of additional savings appeared to me that quite a lot of what was in the EBR probably could have been in the resource spending review. Has there been any lessons learned exercise into why the RSR did not generate some of the kind of savings in the EBR that, certainly when I was looking at it, felt relatively obvious? Some of what was in the EBR was painful and difficult, but not all of it. There is a fair point, but I think that the pay deals were something that came at us due to the rise of inflation. Those pay demands and therefore the pay deals that ultimately were trying to avoid industrial action quite rightly were beyond perhaps what had been envisaged in terms of the RSR. That put additional pressure on the budget and the money has got to come from somewhere. Part of the EBR process was to help, and the former DfFM laid that out, that one of the driving forces where the pay deals were driven by inflation. That is quite hard to predict, to be honest, but we absolutely want to avoid being in EBR territory again this year, and that is why I am undertaking the work that I am with cabinet colleagues to manage those in your pressures. My point on the EBR is more that it appears that certainly some of the decisions that were made in the EBR to withdraw and cut services have not had a negative impact in terms of outcomes, which begs the question of whether that is the right thing to be spending money on in the first place. The RSR was the kind of exercise that should have been identifying, should have been asking those value for money questions, but certainly in the case of quite a lot of what was on the EBR list, clearly the RSR hadn't done that or had done that and had taken the decision that it was value for money, then, through the EBR, we decided that it wasn't or it wasn't enough value to justify continuing it. Does that not indicate that the RSR exercise didn't achieve all of its objectives? You may have a fair point there. The exercise that we are going through at the moment is very much looking at value for money impact. Does it deliver on outcomes? We are really trying to land that in the right place for short-term fiscal balance, but on the longer term, some of the points that you were making earlier about what is it that's absolutely critical, what are the things that maybe don't deliver on those outcomes that we need to take a hard look at, and that's the work that's under way at the moment. Just to say that I'm a new member of the committee and, when Liz Smith says that her concerns as a committee, I'm not included in that. I just associate myself from the remarks that Liz Smith made. However, I was a bit surprised that we've gone down the route of the GRR, but let's stick to that for a second. If you have a policy, which is in not just the Government's manifesto, but everybody's manifesto, if you have two consultations, if you amend, if you have more parliamentary scrutiny than any other measure that I can remember in my time in this Parliament, if you have all those things, and at the end of that process, you have a situation where another Government says, we're going to nullify that. What kind of effect, to me, is the biggest development we've seen in public administration of decision making in this Parliament, certainly in my time, in fact, since its inception? If another Government just steps in without saying what it thinks is wrong with it and says, we're going to strike this down, apart from that, and incredibly, some people in this Parliament support that Government doing that to this Parliament. What is the effect on the civil service and on ministers when considering further policy initiatives of that threat, which has been raised again in relation now to a couple of other things, the GRS, for example? What is the effect on policy making in the Scottish Government of that kind of interference in the Scottish Parliament? I think that you raised an important point. I'm not going to stray into live legal proceedings, but obviously one of the reasons that we felt it was important to challenge the section 35 order was that issue of precedence and the chilling effect, potentially, on other policies, because it's such a wide-ranging power that essentially it could be brought to bear on any policy decision making of the Scottish Government that is not liked and not agreed with by the UK Government. That goes very much against the memorandum of understanding that had been in place where section 35 order was to be seen as a last resort if everything else had failed position, and that's not what happened in that case. It was a kind of go-to first salvo, and that completely blows out of the water the memorandum of understanding. Where does that leave us? I think that we have to be very guarded against the chilling effect of not wanting to take forward policies in case the UK Government would disagree with. We have to guard ourselves against that because there will continue to be policies that we want to take forward that the UK Government may fundamentally disagree with. If we believe that it's in the interests of the people of Scotland and it's areas that we've set out a commitment to take forward, then we should. I would raise the question if we were sitting putting through minimum unit pricing at the moment. That would be a good example of where you would have the UK Government who did not agree with minimum unit pricing. You could see how they could use either section 35 or indeed the internal market act to say that this would be a disrupter to the drinks industry, and therefore we are not going to allow it. We're in territory which is new. It is a huge concern. We need to get a different relationship where I would say the memorandum of understanding territory would be very helpful. That is something that we will continue to pursue with the UK Government to try and get away from the threats of not granting the exemption under the IMA or the section 35 order. It's not a good place and it gets in the way of the good day-to-day working relationship that civil servants have with their UK counterparts and indeed that we have with some ministers. I would finish on this point that I have a good relationship with a lot of the departmental ministers in the UK Government. A lot of the problem emanates from the Scotland office, and I'll just leave that there. I may be for the current secretary in relation to this. In addition, it may well have been the case in the inquiry that the committee has held up to now. To me, which is by far the biggest impact on decision making in the Scottish Parliament, has been covered already. Aside from a capricious Government deciding for political reasons to try and supersede a decision of this Parliament gratuitously, there are various instances of LCMs being or the soul convention being ignored now, which was not the case not too long ago. Does that not have, especially in the early stages of policy development among the civil service, a chilling effect such that you have to take into account, as well as all the other factors, the likelihood that some minister is going to do something that completely ignores the interests of this Parliament or that's going to increase the likelihood to have legal conflict between the two administrations. Is that something that's part of your thinking or, as the洩�chwxfor acáff, as Nickless said, you're going to try and zone that out of your thinking at the start? That's a complexity. I can't pretend that we're zoning out from it. It's the reality that we're operating in terms of section 35 being used for the first time, and navigating, for example, an exemption from the UK Internal Market Act, with regards to implementation of the deposit return sgid, which is top priority conversation at the moment with the UK Governmentweithio ond y iawn, i hefyd yn cydwylliannol, i ddim yn ydw i gael o'r Sinoein, ond mae'n gael i'n gwneud, pan i ddim yn gyffργiwr unsuccessful o'r rwyf i dweud, ond rwy'n gwneud ddim yn ei fodarl i'w ddim yn ddigonio'n y cwestiynau o'n mewn camau, oherwydd wrth gael i'w teimlo chi'n gwneud yn cyfnod lleol yng nghyddiadau a'u dwyth. Mae Gnasol mewn rôl diolio bobl wedi syrau pan blaid o gweldol ar bwynt gynn examineun ymddangos y ffordd. Felly, mae'n gwybod Wei Mleiteol gennym gan ddimyn tunn 부탁u Unrhyw Gael감 Genedlaeth i'r will minaängol egyu g cohlaeth i'r amlwg a mlhaid yn canblo a'r unconscious, ac balod ond y cyfnodau sydd wedi eu gwneud o'r ffordd, a'r byw wedi eu gwneud o'r pethau, ac yn unig iawn i'ch bynnag o'r byw o'r ffordd, gwyllgor ac yr busig, byddwn yn cyfnod â'r parlymyn. Rydw i'n ddysgu'r byw o'r byw o'r byw o'r byw. Degws Samson.Thanks, Ymmru. Ac rwy'n gwybod i'n greadig, ein ffawr, ond hynny'n dyfodol. impressive. How can we get a assurance that the them that is in place—is it visible for people to see what those lessons are—and that we can go back and check that it has been done and not just a tick-box exercise? There will be limits. In fact, the была there. That what the issue was. In terms of the governance arrangements around Ferguson's example, visibility is that there's a completely different governance structure. through to the minutes that we talked about earlier on, and everything is recorded in a proper, punctual, accurate way. That is there, for the record. I guess that that is visibility of lessons learned. I suppose that in terms of decision around judgments will always have to end up being judgments around policy decisions. Hopefully most of the time that will be the right judgment, but occasionally it will not. Is there a document that happens after a project or a piece of work has taken place? These are the lessons we learn. I can understand what you are saying that changes were made, but is there actually a captured list of things that went wrong and lessons to be learned? Some of that will be on a more formal basis than others, so if you look at Covid, obviously, by public inquiry around that, very high profile, very in depth. If you look at Ferguson's, there has been a commitment that, in terms of once 8-1 and 8-2 are delivered, that there would be a further inquiry looking back, even on top of what is already being done around Audit Scotland in section 22. There is still work to be done there that will generate further information and lessons learned in a very in-depth way. In other areas, there will be a rapid analysis of whether that work, and the permset can say a little bit more about that, that it will be shorter and sharper. In Ukraine, again, there will be an in-depth analysis of what has gone well, where there are lessons learned, partly because it is a new thing. How did the civil service and ministers respond? All of that will be captured. You covered it, DFM. A lot of it, we will take on either recommendations or inputs around learning, evaluate those and publish our response. If there is a particular tangible area where the committee in recommendations wants to see us go further, we are happy to do that. Then, of course, we have significant programme of structured evaluation of policies. We mentioned minimum unit pricing, recent evaluation, both independent analysis, and good impact that that has had in terms of saving lives. We will keep trying to make sure that whether it will be record keeping or private investments or our approach on freedom of information with the information commissioner that we are transparent about what we are doing and how we are trying to improve it. I understand when there is an official inquiry or something, there will be lessons probably published by an external body. Things like the census, for example. Where are the lessons? Where can I go and see what lessons were learned there and what actions were put in place to try and make sure that it does not happen again? I covered that a bit earlier. I am happy to take away the process of where we have got to with the lessons learned exercise that has been on-going, because we have not yet concluded all the analysis of the data and the timetable for when we can publish that. Like you, I would want that to be open and transparent for scrutiny from Parliament, from committees and on the record for the future. Is the process in place for that to happen, or is that something that is going to be put in place? I have seen various iterations of lessons learned census-related documents already. The thing I do not have is the timetable for when it will become published, but we can provide that to the committee. Can I go on now to the critical challenge that Michelle Thomson mentioned earlier about SCVON? It said that there is a risk, and they feel that their members felt that there is a risk. If they are critical of the Government, their funding may stop. I understand organisations such as SFC and Audit Scotland that their funding is safe. On hearing that, what can we do to change that? That is an issue. I am concerned to hear that, and maybe we have got work to do to reassure that that is not the case. What I would say to organisations such as SCVO or any others is to look at the evidence that, where organisations are funded by the Scottish Government, there are many examples of them being critical of policy decisions, of legislative options. There is no shortage of that. I would have thought that that might have given some confidence to organisations that, if they disagree with the Scottish Government, there should be no question about looking at their funding arrangements in terms of whether they articulate that or not. Maybe we have got a job of work to do to make that more explicit, but SCVO meet with them regularly. They do a hugely important job in terms of representing third sector interests, and I would want them to say that, if they were concerned, they are very forthcoming at arguing for more investment in third sector organisations, certainly in the meetings that I have with them. I do not know whether it is a fear of funding being removed or a fear that, if they apply for extra funding, that will be taken into consideration. I think that that is something that needs to be addressed. If that is the case, we have got some work to do because that should not be the case. I want to move on to the lines of communication between ministers and civil servants. Ms Fraser, you mentioned that. Is there a clear instructions of how a minister and civil servants should be communicating? Yes. It is very clearly set out both in the ministerial code and the civil service code, so we expect to work together professionally and offering dignity and respect in the workplace, and that is very clear. This is an area where we have made much clearer our expectations on both sides. It is obviously a new procedure in terms of whether civil servants feel the need to raise a complaint about the behaviours of a minister, but it is also equally a new grievance procedure within the Scottish Government, as well as making it really clear where colleagues can go if they have any concerns, for example, about senior colleagues in the way that we behave or any other concerns that they have. We are making it clear and transparent, creating a safe environment where people know and understand that it is safe to challenge. The reason that I asked is—I think that there was one witness who explained that the more transparency that you have, the greater risk of decisions being driven away to it. Government by WhatsApp was the term used. Is that something that is recognised by the Scottish Government? Can we get a assurance that that is not happening, that we do not have ministers and civil servants communicating by WhatsApp just to avoid any FOIs or anything else? That is certainly not my experience and not the practice that is in place that I see at all, and I think that you have heard some of the detail around why it is important and the improvements that have been made around recording, particularly decisions and how decisions have been reached and the recording of that is very important. I hope that what you have heard here today will give you some reassurance about that. Is there WhatsApp messages between top civil servants and ministers? Does that happen? I have a WhatsApp on-call group with my private office, so if I put someone in the system at 8 o'clock at night, somebody in my private office picks it up quickly and responds to it. It is a convenient tool around, can I get, first thing in the morning, can I get, blah blah blah, rather than having to go on and send an email that may or may not be picked up, but that is not about avoiding scrutiny, it is just about quick communication to a range of people one of whom will pick it up. That is the example. Last question I had was around, you mentioned prevention to start, and that is something that we have been talking about as a committee for quite a while. We have often heard it mentioned, but we are often here that it is quite difficult to find a funding for prevention because all the money is going into the immediate effects. How are you going to change that? It goes back to the Christie commission, does it not? Early intervention prevention is always better than going back and trying to fix issues that appear further down the track. Of course, we all agree with that, but as you have pointed out in your opening comments about it, it is quite a difficult thing to achieve. If you look at the health service, for example, and drawing on my time as health secretary, clearly in order to reduce pressure on acute care, you need to try and avoid people going into hospital by improving people's health through public health measures, through trying to create a healthier population, but you still need to have that funding for the acute sector, so you have to try and do both. Some of the work that we are undertaking at the moment in the child poverty plan is a good example of trying to understand the drivers of child poverty and to really get underneath that around the ways of addressing it. The up-front Scottish child payment, money in people's pockets helps to alleviate the problems in the here and now, but some of the work around parental employment and improving the life chances of children from an early age, so good quality early years, education, childcare begin to move it further upstream, which can then reduce—perm set, which you just told me earlier on—about some of the statistics around reduced teenage pregnancy, better attainment. Those are the results that you would expect to see later in life from good early years intervention. Do we need to get better at it? Yes, we do. Christy still has a lot within the Christy report for us to draw upon, and some of the work that we are undertaking at the moment is really trying to hone in on what makes the difference in terms of some of that work. Is there a specific that you want? No, it was really just to make sure that the Government were focused on prevention, because I don't really see it to be honest. Thank you to the Deputy First Minister and Permanent Secretary and the officials for coming today. This was our last evidence session in our far inquiry into effective Scottish Government decision making, and we will consider our next steps in our inquiry, our meeting next Tuesday. So we will now take a short break before our next item in the agenda, which is an evidence session with the Permanent Secretary. If we can add by quarter past, please. The next item on our agenda is an evidence session with John Paul Marks, Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government on issues relating to public administration and government. Mr Marks is joined by Leslie Fraser, director general corporate, Louise MacDonald, director general communities and Jackie McAllister, chief financial officer of the Scottish Government. I welcome you all to the meeting today. Thanks for taking the time to come and see us. I would invite Mr Marks to make a short opening statement. Thanks, convener. I thought I'd start with three areas of focus, first being our policy advice, particularly the revised policy prospectus, which we have recently published for a new First Minister and a new cabinet. Secondly, just briefly touch on financial control, given inflation and the fiscal position, and thirdly touch on leadership of the civil service and how we're trying to build new capabilities for the long term. First of all, through February and March, new First Minister, new Deputy First Minister, new cabinet and a new policy prospectus credit the team a lot of hard work to get that published and manage what is a significant reshuffle in Government. As we heard a bit more this morning, three missions that respond to the context that we're in but also set out concrete deliverables for each cabinet secretary to make progress to the national performance framework around equality, to tackle poverty, opportunity to transfer our economy and realise at zero and around community to recover from this pandemic and secure, sustainable public services. In terms of key drivers in the last 12 to 18 months since I've taken up posts of course, tragic events in Ukraine and then what that did to inflation and the cost of living crisis that followed and as I say that compounding the impact and the risks that the pandemic had created. We went through last year ministers quite rightly prioritising fair and affordable pay awards to manage down the risk of industrial action and, as we heard this morning, also delivering a warm Scots welcome to a super sponsor programme. Just a few things to call out which were top of the list, balancing the budget of course but also protecting the things that make the biggest difference to our top priority outcomes, example being the Scottish child payment expansion of its eligibility enabling child poverty in Scotland to be lower than the UK average, a revised budget tax package, an emergency budget review to balance the budget and then also establishing new capabilities within our workforce to respond to new challenges. Ukraine's social care improvement and new Scotland's directorate to reap the benefits from renewables as examples. A lot of focus on partnership and system leadership so if I take justice where we've seen a good reduction in our courts backlog keeping crime low, the prison population eight per cent lower than pre-pandemic levels with more criminal justice reform before Parliament now as well. We're in the process hopefully of finalising a new deal with local governments and also with business as we try and establish the ecosystem for improving startup and scale-ups in Scotland's economy with tech scalers, code-based, CivTech and pushing on with our national strategy for economic transformation. I would also just say that collaborative approach shone out for me in relation to operation unicorn where the country came together and provided a fitting tribute to Her Majesty the late Queen. Just as principal accountable officer, key points I would make is the balancing of the budget, 21-22 consolidated accounts and then again in 2022-23, the committee will see the provisional outturn shortly and the need to affect in-year adjustments of over a billion pounds to achieve that in 2022-23. We've been focusing on some core capabilities to improve value for money in the Scottish Government around governance, investment scrutiny and financial control, multi-year workforce planning and estates, right sizing, improving public body sponsorship, record keeping, FOI and correspondence management. We've embedded a private investment framework that is now published and we're applying that every day. We're improving our data and we'll be setting out later in May our medium-term fiscal strategy as well, so that is all transparent. Final point, always it's about building the team from my perspective. A lot of focus on professions and going deeper on HR finance, legal risk, project management and that core competence, but also across Scotland in terms of public service reform and digital transformation. I think our values are genuine. We are embedding a values-based approach to our workplace culture all the time and I think we've learned good lessons from the harassment reviews. Leslie's led a ton of work on embedding new procedures and controls around propriety and ethics and I could just share a couple of statistics. For example, the proportion of disabled people working in the Scottish Government has doubled from 6.4 per cent in 2013 to just under 15 per cent today. We have very healthy gender balance across the Scottish Government at all levels and all grades, which is encouraging. Our people survey for 22 had record numbers of staff identifying as disabled, female, ethnic minority, LGBT and our budding and harassment levels remain at historic lows. We're always vigilant to this culture and improving it, but we're also proud of the diverse and inclusive culture that we are leading. Finally, for me, building my own senior team, Louise, this is her first committee appearance. I know all will be kind, but Louise has joined us as we've been with us now for over a year from the voluntary and private sector. My new DG economy has recently come in again from the private sector and another DG leading our work on net zero who has significant deep major project expertise. Although we talked about churn this morning and we want to manage against that risk, we also want to bring in fresh talents, diversify the capabilities at the top and throughout the organisation and make sure that it reflects the country we serve. We're working hard on our relationships with the UK Government, good dialogue every week with civil servants in the UK and we keep working hard on that as well. Lots of strengths to build on and important work ahead. I look forward to your questions. I start with the Lord Mod's review into governance and accountability that the UK Government established. That's to recommend ways to make the Government more efficient in their view, looking at efficiency and effectiveness of the UK civil service. Can I ask how you would input into that review, given that you'll be charged in part with delivering its outcomes in Scotland? There's a number of touch points that we have on a regular basis, so I attend Simon Case's leadership team meeting every Wednesday morning. Leslie is a member of the chief operating officers group across the UK civil service. Those will be two touch points where we will regularly talk about efficiency, governance and transparency. In fact, was it only last month? There was a four nations team meeting to discuss our learning and experience on propriety and ethics, given the experience that colleagues in Whitehall are also stepping through and applying best practice to their own procedures too. We're sharing all the time. I'm also a member of the civil service board and that is the most senior leadership group which the chief executive of the civil service chairs, which is all about workforce, estate, digital transformation, everything about trying to ensure that we're building and developing a world-class civil service that can deliver the best outcomes and advice for ministers. The resource spending review, which the previous finance secretary indicated, said that she wanted to see a return to pre-Covid levels of the size of the public sector headcount and the size of the civil service as well. Can you tell us the status of that work and those policy commitments to reduce headcount? So, in terms of workforce control for the civil service, we established those last year after the resource spending review, both for the first year but we've also started to try and set that out multi-year in terms of plans by DG portfolio area and directorates so that we can try and understand what the trajectory looks like and the choices that can be made. If I take the first year on an overall basis, we still wait for the final reconciliation of the data. We've seen quite a significant reduction in our contracted resourcing and we've managed our permanent resourcing to a small increase so the net effect is that we're marginally smaller after the first year but we need the final data to flow through on that and then we need to keep developing workforce plans multi-year as well to the end of the Parliament as you say. I think some things will naturally unwind so we have a Ukraine supersponsor programme that will at some point come to an end, one hopes, a social security programme that is sizeable that will move towards business as usual as we conclude the Parliament but similarly as Mr Greer was alluding to earlier, some significant major programmes that we want to gear up around heat and buildings, around renewables, Scotland and others as well. First year, we've made progress with it but I can't pretend that getting back to pre-pandemic levels doesn't have a level of challenge and stretch about it so we're going to have to work carefully on that. It doesn't sound like, given the scale of the ambition that cabinet secretary Forbes set out, that you're on course to meet those levels given what you're saying about additional work that has to be taken on. I think that it's still doable genuinely so we, in terms of natural attrition, will have around six to seven hundred levers a year so it would be feasible to still return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the Parliament but, as I say, I think there's a careful balance that needs to be struck and obviously we've got new First Minister, new Deputy First Minister and a new cabinet and what I want us to make sure that we do through this year is agree the programme, the budget and the capacity necessary so it's a kind of aligned fair challenge to deliver the programme. Just for the sake of clarity, it remains the policy of the Government. That hasn't changed given the new administration that's come in. You're taking the same approach that was set out in the resource spending review and the First Minister has asked you to do that, is that correct? I don't think that that has been publicly stated by this new Government. But you are continuing on that basis. There's no change of policy in the one that you're working to by the sounds of that. In terms of workforce strategy and workforce management, it is deliverable if that's what ministers still want us to achieve by the end of the Parliament. But it has not given you any clarity as to what that might be? We've got lots of clarity for the prospectus and for 23-24. We have not yet agreed workforce plans with the new set of ministers for 25-26. We have choices available still for ministers around that for them to make. The fifth of May and the Secretary of State of Scotland, Alasdair Jack, was questioning the appropriateness of UK civil servants working for the new minister for independence. You've talked about the new regime, the new ministers. I think that the Secretary of State wrote to Simon Case at that point and essentially it was bumped to you, I think. As I said, I understand that this is a matter for the Scottish Government permanent secretary in the first instance. So your response to those issues please. I've responded to a number of pieces of correspondence regarding this. So it is for the First Minister to appoint his ministerial team, given his priorities, and that ministerial team is then voted on by this Parliament. And then it is for the civil service to serve that ministerial team with impartiality. So we serve the Government of the day. That includes, with regard to constitutional reform, and it has been well understood under devolution for many years. The civil service in the Scottish Government serves the Scottish Government and their priorities. We provide policy advice, including the development of prospectus paper series, for this Government to set out its constitutional objectives. As we alluded to earlier, that is not just a theoretical debate or a strategic long-term debate. It is a here-and-now reality, whether that be regarding the use of section 35 or the interaction with the UK Internal Market Act or the fiscal framework review. From my perspective, there is very clear, proper and regular grounds for the First Minister to appoint his ministerial team. It is necessary for the civil service to serve that ministerial team with impartiality, and there is a clear set of constitutional priorities here and now that need advising on and tackling. If we are going to deliver this Government's programme, whether it be on Scotland's deposit return scheme or a number of other energy reforms and equality reforms, we need to continue to influence and engage with the UK Government with regard to the devolution settlement and the constitution. The final point that I wanted to make is that Kieran Martin, a professor at Oxford University, talks a lot about the history of devolution and the history of change. It is not a history of stagnation. To an extent, it is important that I have a capability in the civil service in Scotland to equip to serve ministers in this Government, not just now, but to recognise that things can change in the future. We will continue to seek a section 30 order so that any referendum would always be on lawful grounds, as per the last referendum in Scotland, but to recognise the UK general election in 24-25. Clearly, the future of the constitution of the UK could change again, and we need to have a capability ready to respond. I want to move on to the issue around the harassment reviews that you mentioned in your opening statements and the issue that the committee has taken previous interest in. I wonder if we can have an update on the kind of changes that have been made if we can afford to have an opportunity to do that. I am very happy to. As the committee is aware, we have introduced a new complaints procedure that should a member of staff have a concern about the behaviour of ministers. That has been updated in the course of this year to ensure that we can now report transparently on the number of complaints that we might receive. We confirmed our first update in December that we have no complaints currently being considered. We will also publish the name and the outcome in the event that there is a complaint. As I mentioned in the previous committee, we have also updated our grievance procedure that, similarly, draws on industry-wide best practice in terms of giving our staff confidence about the way in which complaints would be addressed. That sits within a much wider set of activity under way to address culture and behaviour and about how people feel being civil servants in the organisation. That takes its roots from our civil service code but also in the service of Scotland, which is our vision and values for the Scottish Government. That includes inclusion, integrity and kindness, for example. That manifests itself in a whole different set of ways. The new propriety and ethics function. Colleagues are regularly made aware that if they have concerns, whether that is a formal concern or if they have anxiety and feel that they are not quite sure what to do with it, they can go and get advice. That will be treated confidentially and they will be well supported through that process. We are also ensuring that, in terms of how we train our own senior civil servants and all our staff, colleagues are absolutely aware of what our expectations are of them and that people understand what to do if a concern is raised and how they should respond to that. We are also going to the point of how we can prevent that as well. Those issues are rising in the future. We are actively looking and having structured conversations in areas in which we might consider that might be a greater level of risk. We are looking actively at our people survey results. If there are cohorts of our staff who are saying that they feel less safe or less able to report, we will have structured conversations in a safe space with them to find out how we can take action and improve that. We are drawing all that together and that is forming our on-going activities. In May of 2022, the then First Minister said that she was unable to release details around an investigation of bullying by a minister of civil servants. A matter of days ago, the current First Minister said that he was happy to check if he could reveal details of that. That is a matter of public record that was reported, but I think that you will be widely in the press and you will be aware of that. I think that there was some consternation around that because the former minister in question had made a very critical speech about the Government the previous day. I think that there is a worry more generally that there may be a threatening behaviour around the use of some of the information that has previously been refused to be disclosed. I suppose that I looked for the permanent secretary's reaction to that in terms of what is proper and what he believes that the current processes are in relation to that case. As is routine, the new First Minister will be given the opportunity to set out any changes that he wishes to make to the ministerial code. We will provide advice accordingly. As Lesley said, we have already published a revised procedure that would regard complaints that are brought forward against ministers, but that is not retrospective. The understanding for historic cases where there was already a clear understanding of the confidentiality and the procedure that was in place then the revised procedure does not change that. We have provided advice to the previous First Minister on that and will do so again for the new First Minister. I will be consistent with the previous advice, given what the First Minister said on the 3rd May, that he was happy to check. If he checks, he will find the same advice. Has the First Minister requested revision of the ministerial code? We were already in the process of updating the ministerial code before Mr Jim's resignation. There were a series of changes, some of which relate to the procedure, which we wanted to make sure were up-to-date, some related a little bit with regards ministerial business abroad as well. Those changes have been complete. We will be shared with the new First Minister and can be published in due course subject to any amendment that he wishes to make. He has not requested any specific amendments in the form of areas that may be permitted to reveal issues or to have further disclosure. On the point that was raised previously in relation to the ministerial code and the interference in the civil service in Scotland by the Secretary of State, I had a letter recently from a guy called Lord Pickles telling me various things that I couldn't do and referring continuously to the ministerial code of conduct and the Government's position. I think that he was referring to the UK Government, I think that he is ignorant of what the situation is here in Scotland, but there in that confusion is surely a matter of concern when it comes to the situation where the Secretary of State for Scotland is trying to instruct or countermand some of the things that the Scottish Government is trying to do. Given that this Parliament, I don't think, would settle for its staff being told what to do by the Government or somebody else, given that there is no local authority that would accept that its officials should be directed by somebody else, is it not probably just a better idea to have a Scottish civil service? Well, that's quite a question. There's a lot of complexity in there. I do think that our relationships with UK civil servants is very good. For example, if I take colleagues in Defra, Tamara Finkelstein, who is the permanent secretary there, she and I talk regularly around deposit return schemes, around Scotland. She and her senior team have come to Scotland to meet with me and my senior team, because Defra colleagues understand that, for them to achieve their net zero targets, Scotland has got to plant a lot of trees, restore a lot of peatlands, and deliver a lot of renewables transformation to name but a few of the things that we discussed when we met. Similarly, if I take colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions, Peter Scofield, the permanent secretary there, came to Glasgow for the day with his senior team to sit down and talk about devolution of social security, where we have a joint programme working together to ensure that we safely and securely transfer cases across. I think that we get a lot of benefit from, if I take social security, the collaboration that we undertake around use of data, fraud and error management, and building our capability there. Similarly, I think that we get a lot of value through the exchange of ideas and capabilities with Defra with regard to our mission on net zero. Personally, I find the dialogue at official level productive, and I certainly get a lot of insight from being a member of the civil service board and being able to draw on that network of colleagues and the capabilities that it offers. I completely understand the point that you have made in the value of those good relationships, which I think. If it is the case, that is very distinct from the experience of ministerial collaboration, such that, for example, if we have various cul-de-sacs placed in the way of this Parliament in relation to section 30, for example, where the Parliament is voted for a referendum and it is just ignored out of hand, or the application of the section 35, or even, compared now with, say, 10 years ago, when you had the respect agenda, which did lead to, I think, an improvement in relations between different Governments and ministers within Governments. Nowadays, I know that I have arranged meetings with the UK Government and they refuse to give you entry to the MOD to hold a meeting or just refuse continuously to answer correspondence. If the relationship between the civil servants is generally productive and yet the relationship between the Administrations, that would tend to—we did not argue for—a civil service, which, to go back to your previous point that was made in the last discussion, where people can accuse organisations of policy capture where they are funded by the Scottish Government. Well, interestingly, this Parliament is funded by the Scottish Government, nobody argues that it has been subject to policy capture, but wouldn't the perception be very important, as much as anything else, to say, as with councils, as with the Parliament, that the civil servants that serve the Scottish Government and the public are independent and that is who the answer to. I think that that was the point that I was trying to make with regards to my first answer and constitutional reforms. I am the permanent secretary of the civil service in the Scottish Government, which is answerable to the First Minister, the Cabinet of the Scottish Government and this Parliament are not answerable to the Cabinet in Westminster or the Parliament in Westminster in that way, in the way that a permanent secretary working in a Whitehall department is. So I think that my first responsibility is to make sure that I am serving this First Minister and his Cabinet well with regards to delivering that strategic policy advice and building the team with the capability to do it and then discharging the duties with regard to being a principal accountable officer in the right way. Public money, Scottish Public Finance manual, Scottish Public Finance Act and delivering optimal outcomes in Scotland and then finally leaving the civil service in Scotland in a way that is right for this country. We are doing our best with that all the time. I do not feel that either UK Government ministers or civil servants in Whitehall are telling me what to do with regards to that at any stage and I think that the collaboration and the partnership adds significant benefit that we are able to draw on to be at our best. Mr Brown, I recognise the political context that you are referencing and the level of contention and it clearly is more acute and more complex today than it was two, three, five years ago. And there's a risk to that in terms of the UK's constitution long term. And as I say, we'll see what the future brings with regards how that might settle down. Just finally to say that nothing has to do with you personally, of course, the permanent secretary. Although I do note that the permanent secretary here in Scotland is appointed jointly by the principal adviser to the UK Government and the cabinet secretary and the First Minister. I think that it is just a question of perception and it probably is less of a question when relationships are productive and constructive but probably, as you say, given the constitutional situation and the stand-off, it probably becomes more interview for people. Right, thanks very much, convener. When we were reading the papers for today, there were a number of terms that I wasn't familiar with, so I was hoping that you could maybe explain some of them to us. There's the Civil Service Commission, the Civil Service Board and the Civil Service Shadow Board. Are you able to explain what they all do? Civil Service Commission, Civil Service Board, Civil Service Shadow Board. I'm sure there's more, but obviously we're time constrained. So, Civil Service Commission, in terms of civil service appointments, so we have a civil service commissioner in Scotland, so I'm looking at Leslie, keep nodding until I get this wrong. Civil Service Commissioner in Scotland, who's Neil Gray, so Paul Gray. Neil Gray is the minister for the economy. Paul Gray, so he will sit on panels, for example, for appointments of director general and as part of the Civil Service Commission. Civil Service Board is a UK entity that leads the civil service overall of which I'm a member and the chief executive of civil service chairs and I think it has a shadow board and occasionally members of that shadow board attend the civil service board. I'll pursue that, but I'll not. I'll get out of my depth, I think, quite quickly. Some of this is kind of touching on the decision-making, we were sure, making earlier, so forgive me if that's overlapping a bit. But one of the issues that came up was about bill teams within the civil service and they are generally kept together, as I understand it, through the progress of a bill but may then be disbanded after that, which can impact on the actual putting into practice of the new policies or the new legislation and things. Can you just explain how that works around that area? I'll bring Lesley in, if I may as well, because this is all part of building this deep professional capability in the organisation. Ultimately, once the bill concludes, the team that is providing briefing on amendments, committee stage, impact assessments and the like may find that the work is concluded and we don't want them to not have anything to do, so absolutely it's right that they are then given the next opportunity that they want to take on. However, your point of the end-to-end implementation of change, clearly there's a lot of advantage having people who understand the detail of the legislation going through into the major change programme or even into the delivery of that change over time. If I think about social security as an example, some of the senior leaders who are in there have tracked right through from legislation and development of devolution of social security through the power finding, the setting up of the agency and then the delivery. That continuity of capability clearly has a lot of advantages as well, but is there anything else we want to add? I think it's a really good point and I think it's important for us to strike the right balance and very often bill teams will be made up of experts who thrive on often the cut and thrust of the legislative process together with the subject matter experts. Very often the subject matter experts will stay as part of the implementation. We recognise the value of building up that expertise in legislation and understanding how to work with stakeholders and this Parliament in terms of that process, but also the subject matter expertise, that knowledge, that deep embedded understanding of a policy area and the impact on people and then taking that through is absolutely vital as well, so building that well is when the system works at its best. One of that is related to the suggestion that, as I understand it, the HR system is now going to be that all civil servants will be categorised into professions. Is that connected there somehow? It is. Part of our people strategy development of a workforce plan is introducing a new system that will give us much-augmented capabilities. We'll give everybody job families first of all, so that's understanding of your policy expert or legislative expert or a lawyer and so on. Then we have 21 different professional groupings within the civil service in Scotland already. Some of those are quite mature, I think, about the data and digital profession or the legal profession, for example. Others, the change management profession is a growing area for us in the Scottish Government. The way in which we are seeking to augment professions is to take that holistic look across the way that we manage professions right the way across the organisation and, indeed, with a number of our public bodies as well. We're a great deal of professional expertise sits. The new system will help us with that, but also sharing expertise in that career development and how we look after people and offer them attractive career pathways through Scottish Government and public service in Scotland is an area that we see offering really rich potential for the future. I was a little unclear what we can cover today. Can we cover consolidated accounts? Is that something that I can raise? My first question is just quite general. Why are some bodies included in the consolidated accounts and other bodies that are not included? That is determined by the classification of the body and the accounting boundaries. If it's a ministerial body, for example, it will be within the consolidated accounts, but each will have its own classification and that will determine whether it sits within or out with the consolidated accounting boundary. Is that fixed like forever or is that something that changes over time? It's based on the classification of the public bodies. That can be reviewed at any time by the ONS and they do routinely review them, but they would need to be a trigger for a change of classification. That's the ONS that decided that, so it's very consistent throughout the UK. I think that some people had expected to see in the consolidated accounts what the reserve balance was that we've got the limit of £700 million, but I don't think that's a figure that actually appears. Is that correct? Yes and no. The Scotland reserve is linked to our treasury budget, our HMT budget, which is driven by the fiscal framework. You're absolutely right that we have a limit of £700 million. It's not the same thing as the consolidated accounts. The consolidated accounts, as you pointed out, are statutory accounts for the bodies within the consolidated accounting boundary. We report in the accounts against the budgets that are set by the Scottish Parliament in the parliamentary budget and then adjusted at the spring budget revision, so they're not exactly the same things. However, what we do have in the front of the accounts in pages 9 to 11 of the accounts is an explanation of why they're different and what we do have in the accounts as well is the provisional outturn. Again, you'll see in pages 9 to 11 that we have, for 2021-22, the provisional outturn of £650 million against the headroom of £700 million. In April of this year, we voted to the committee with the final outturn information. We were only able to do that after the final accounts that are linked to the HMT budget, so that goes beyond the consolidated accounts that were complete. That was the SPPA pension accounts that we were waiting for to be completed. I think that this is quite a complex area. I think that we need a meeting at all of its own, but if I could just try one other thing. If I'm reading it correctly, there's resource borrowing of £319 million, but there's also an underspend. I wonder why we need to borrow if there's an underspend. We set out our borrowing plans in the medium-term financial strategy and we set them out within our budget and then we review those as we move through the year. There are different reasons as to why we can borrow, particularly on resource, and those are around reconciliation movements in year. For 2021-22, of course, we would have built our borrowing plans on the basis of our funding and our spending plans as we move through the year. As you will recall, we were still quite well within the pandemic at that point in time. In 2021-22, we got some very late notifications from Treasury of some very significant consequentials, so that subsequently changed our carry-forward assumptions and our funding for that year. On that point of the underspend, Jack, I'm interested in whether the Government thinks that there's an issue in presentation here, because the single biggest chunk of the underspend was variation in the student loan market, not a pot of cash that didn't go on and spend, but we regularly have stakeholders engage with us who are frustrated that their priority didn't get the spending that they believe it deserved. They see reports that £2 billion was not spent. Is there a basic presentational issue of the terminology here when we're talking about the underspend? That's a really good point. We're going to continue to look at this. We're going to continue to look at how we can improve the transparency around this. I hope that you noted in the final outturn report that we've tried to make that connection between the reserve and the outturn and cash and non-cash a little bit more than we've done in the past. You're absolutely right that almost half of the underspend for 2021-22 was non-cash. On the point about treasury budgets, there's about £500 million of adjustments that we would have made to the Scottish budget through the SBR had the HMT supplementary estimate process being concluded, so there were late adjustments because of the timing of that. We had a significantly larger underspend than we otherwise would in any other year. As you say, some of that was about valuations, which were index-linked. RPI was a significant movement. I think that some of those went from plus 13 to minus 4, so you can imagine what that did to the calculation on those valuations. We did think that it was quite unprecedented, but we will certainly look at how we present that and we'll look to improve the transparency if it goes forward. Audit Scotland has made a range of observations, criticisms and constructive suggestions around transparency in this set of accounts and others. The permanent city will be well aware of those. The committee would appreciate a response to those issues raised. If we can, that would help to deal with some of the issues that Mr Mason and Mr Greer are raising. We have concern regarding that on trans-barns issues, so if you could perhaps set that out to us in a letter from the permanent secretary, I think that would be appreciated. I move to Douglas Lumsden. A quick question on the underspends. Obviously, it's down there as £2 billion, but it's not, as Ross Greer pointed out, there's student loans in there as well that you can't really take out. How much money was handed back to the UK Government at the end of the year, if any? There was no loss of spending power to the Scottish Government, so the final outturn, which again is something that you received in April, showed that we came in just below the £700 million cap for the Scotland reserve, so there was no loss of spending power. I guess that's back to a reporting thing. It maybe looks like there's £2 billion, but when you actually dig a bit deeper, it's not as bad as it seems. So the consolidated accounts and the budgets that we spend within aren't just about our day-to-day spending, they're about our valuations of our assets, our liabilities, our provisions, and we need budget for all of those movements, and the £2 billion underspend is a variance against all of those budgets. We're always going to have underspends, we're simply not allowed to overspend against any of our budget categories, and a lot of the non-cash budgets can be quite volatile, and as I mentioned earlier, linked to inflation, which is completely out with our control. For those types of budgets, particularly the non-cash, we're always going to make sure that we've got enough budget to avoid any unforeseen movements that would lead us to a breach of the budget and a qualification of our accounts. That's good to hear. I move on now to the next thing that I was going to ask about, that's okay, was record keeping. Obviously, we had issues around 801 and 802 when it was difficult to actually find out who'd approved the spend on those vessels. So, permanent secretary, can you maybe explain what's changed around that and whether we can now be comfortable as a committee that the proper processes are in place so that it doesn't happen again? I'm going to bring Leslie in because she can just take you through the detail of the approach, but I think, as I said earlier, those incidents that are in the past are regrettable. We want to make sure that we've learned from them and put the fundamentals right so that they can't happen again. There is obviously a raft of engagement that goes on with the Scottish Government all the time, so we're working very hard to get the consistency right, so I can't provide a cast-iron guarantee that it will never trip up in the future, but we are absolutely determined to ensure, of course, that all mysterial decisions are documented for the record and certainly for something like your referencing a commercial procurement decision we've published, as I alluded to last year, our private investment framework, which sets out really clearly the due diligence that you'd expect to see from us with regards to those investments or future investments, and that needs to be consistently applied. Leslie, can you just step us through progress on record keeping? Yes, such a fundamental point for the civil service, we must be able to account for and track decisions that are made and the way in which those decisions are made as well, and that goes to the culture systems and practice changes that we have made. I'm leading a new information governance programme that's been running for the last 18 months. I chair a board on a quarterly basis. We're looking at all of the changes across staff training, across our systems, across the procedures that we put in place in order to be able to increase the consistency with which we can see best practice being carried out in the organisation. That includes training for our colleagues, it includes changes to some of the practices, so the way in which we record decisions coming out of ministerial offices and then tracking those and checking that the decisions have been acted on, for example. We've also changed some of the system storage arrangements as well, so that we're much more up-to-date and much easier for us to track and retrieve information in a logical way. I'm underpinning through our service of Scotland work with colleagues that this is fundamental to good civil service craft here in Scotland. It's how we expect people to work. It's not a boring bit of what you do. It's absolutely essential and you must do it well, so it's all of those elements really coming together, but being overseen by a senior group in the organisation on a regular basis. The past failures of each of 1 and each of 2, was that a failure in the process? Was there no process in place or were people not following the process that we're meant to? We can't remember the total quantum of documents instead of 200 or documents that we've published with regards 801 and 802, and there's been two inquiries, which have set out recommendations, which you have accepted, and we've put in place a whole new programme on information record keeping set out, a whole new approach on private investment due diligence, the framework that we will apply, and we're building new capabilities as well within the organisation, including using external commercial forensic capabilities where we need to, to inform advice. Mr Lumsons has been quite specific about what happened at the time, and if you have a reason for that, not happening, not what's going to happen in the future. I guess you're asking me to describe what happened in 2015 when I arrived here in 2022, so it was seven years before I got here. The honest truth is that all I can do is read those inquiry reports, the recommendations and the response, and get that right. I'm not really able to provide further insight to what those inquiries have already offered to what occurred seven years ago. We've talked today about lessons learned around that. Truly, in reflecting backwards, there must be lessons learned about this and why it arose. Yes, I've derived the learning from the inquiries, the recommendations that they've offered and then the processes and the capabilities that we've put in place to respond. I think you're asking me specifically about why it was a particular decision not recorded seven years ago, in regards to the procurement of those vessels to which I can't offer a great deal of insight beyond what the inquiries have already I'm trying to work on whether there was a process missing, a process not followed, or whether there was just a, I think we've heard culture mentioned a good few times today, whether there was just a culture in the organisation that didn't give two hoots about the process that was meant to be followed? I don't know what more to say, really. I joined the organisation in 2022. You're asking me about events from seven years preceding that, to which there's been two inquiries, a lot of deep learning done and a lot of change being put in place. I can't provide a very accurate evidence-based description of what went on in 2015 with the procurement of 801 and 802. I can understand why you might be keen to get me drawn in on offering an opinion on it, but my opinion is derived from the recommendations from the inquiries. I don't have any other insight to it. Sorry, Mr Lumsden-Grasse was sick around it then. The meeting in May 2017 that took place between Nicola Sturgeon and Jim McCall, which I mentioned earlier on, so there was no civil servant present at that meeting, but it was a special adviser that attended when we were talking about a very significant issue public expenditure. As an example of what's there, is that a practice? Would that have been a loud practice at the time, Ms Fraser? Or was that a decision that was taken by the minister? Don't we have anything further that I can add in relation to that specific meeting or that specific point? I'm sorry, I can't help the convener. We'd heard before that there were three harassment reviews that were taking place in session five. I think that we've heard earlier that the First Minister was asking whether one of them could be looked at again. What were the other two? Was it just that one in particular? I think that the First Minister was specifically asking for advice about whether the legal considerations around complaints made against former ministers could be revisited, so that's advice that we've been able to provide to the First Minister. All three harassment ones are just one in particular, that's really my question. The three harassment reports that this committee has been monitoring the results of were the harassment committee's own report of the Parliament, and a report undertaken by Lord and Lop, on behalf of the then Permanent Secretary, Leslie Evans, and the report by James Hamilton into Ms Sturgeon's self-referral under the ministerial code. Those were, I think, the three reports that all produced recommendations, which we have reported with the former deputy First Minister to this committee over the course of the last 18 months. When the First Minister said that he was happy to check that he could legally reveal findings of a previous investigation, was it just on one of those investigations, or was it all three, and who did he ask? That was a different matter relating to a complaint against a former minister, a specific matter, so not directly relating to those three reports, as I understand it. I'm sorry, who did he ask? That was the last question. He asked civil servants in my area for advice. Just a couple of quick questions, because I know we're coming to you there at the end. Obviously, as you point out, you've been here since 2022, and you've been able to make a pretty fair assessment of what you noticed at the start. Given that, what now keeps you awake at night, and why? That's a good question. I suppose that I reflected it in my opening remarks. The context for the last year has been really tough for the country, for partners, voluntary sector, business, and when I think about one minute you're delivering Operation Unicorn and responding to that, the next minute it's standing up a super sponsor programme, which, credit the team, has been a remarkable effort, but it was obviously not what we were planning for when we did the resource spending review and then just the impact of inflation on fixed budgets for everybody. Councils, public bodies, the Scottish Government has been really hard. That overall impact on the wellbeing of not just our teams but partners and the systems that we serve certainly gives me a lot of concern. A lot of resilience has been drained first from the pandemic, then by the cost of living crisis, and everything that is associated with it. Success, I think, for me. If I'm still here at the end of this Parliament before this committee, I hope that, for reference to earlier, those long-term capabilities and resilience rights so that our courts backlog has come down and we are delivering a timely experience in our justice system. We keep crime low, we keep our prison population low, and we're able to make progress on those long-term missions that Scotland can rightly be very proud of because, unlike others, we have statutory targets to tackle child poverty, to accelerate progress to net zero. We understand what we need to do, but double digit inflation and spending a significant additional amount on areas that we weren't otherwise planning to clearly makes those challenges harder. It's the resilience of the system to deliver reform and our capability to hopefully create a more stable operating environment so that people can focus on the day job and focus on delivering better outcomes. Clearly, there's also a lot of change ahead in the UK election. We'll clearly talk to the experience of devolution one way or the other, and a lot of my engagement with the UK Government, I'm sure, next year will be as part of whatever that transition is and how we respond well to whatever the future brings as well. Is it just a couple of quick questions off the back of that? You talked to the speed of change that everyone recognises is just accelerating. How well equipped do you think, since you've joined, that the civil service is now to deal with the speed of change that isn't going to stop anytime soon? We all know that. Everybody keeps stepping up and getting the job done. Delivering a new policy prospectus in 10 days—a version a day for 10 days—was going to be a recess period. It was a remarkable effort. The way in which the team handled the reshuffle has been exceptional. I've been through a lot of reshuffles in my life—the end of the new Labour Government, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition down south. What we went through in terms of Deputy First Minister leaving at the same time in Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney and all that experience was a significant change. The team stepped up and did an incredible job, but that part of my responsibility is to keep bringing new capabilities in, refreshing the team, building those new capabilities on things like Scotland and hydrogen and heat and buildings and deposit return schemes so that we've got the programme capabilities to execute reform. However, we are doing it in a fiscal environment that is very, very tight, so every pound really matters. It's contested because everybody wants to do more, quite reasonably, so prioritisation becomes essential. I have good confidence in the capability of civil service here. The values are excellent and there are some deep capabilities, but we have to look after wellbeing. My last question on that was mentioned earlier. I read in the stats that over 55 per cent of your employees are female, which is great. You yourself said that there is a very healthy gender balance at all levels. Could you supply the committee the breakdown at all levels? I am particularly interested in the most senior levels. The last wee point is that a wellbeing economy, which is now, of course, a priority in the Scottish Government, has a so-called gendered lens at its focus. I am aware of time. It may be that you want to give us some more flavour of how you are able to apply that, because, obviously, it is so much more than just percentage of gender split. You start to look at procurement and so on, but you might, depending on the time, convener. Can I take you back, permanent secretary, to the start of your short statement this morning when you said that the third aspect was leadership of the civil servants? It was put to us by former members of the civil service that one of the problems about the current civil service is that too few people have the ability to know about commercial expertise. Do you agree with that? All feedback matters. If that was the view of a colleague or former colleague, we need to reflect on that. We have a fabulous director of our commercial team, works for Leslie, and we are doing a lot of work on building that profession and a commercial value for money programme. It is one of the core capabilities that we are building, and, hopefully, it will respond to that experience from that individual. Ultimately, all teams can access commercial experts when they need them, because they do not always need to make a procurement or issue a grant or whatever, but that is a shared capability, shared service in our corporate team that we are developing. Is there anything more you want to add? No, I think that that covers it very well. It is a small team, but they are very good at building that capability and capacity and offering that, not just within Scottish Government, but across public bodies as well. The frameworks and support that they provide already generate savings of, in excess of £100 million per annum, and we are looking always at different ways in which we can extend and expand that. I am sure that we would be happy to do that. It was put to us in the context that, when it came to various procurement issues, whether that was BiFab or Prestwick Airport or various other things, it would have helped if there had been more civil servants who had experience of the necessary decision making. One of the things that we have changed in responding to the learning of the past is to pull together a strategic assets unit that manages all those strategic capabilities. If there was an interest in undertaking such a future investment, then we would apply what is now a published framework for undertaking that due diligence, that procurement and that investment. We have absolutely sought to establish that capability is something that Louise has worked with me on last year and has been taking forward this year further. Part of that is using external advisers where we want to get additional due diligence or capability in source to undertake a value for money assessment or help developer business case. I think that that is work in progress and improving, but obviously always want to remain vigilant. You do not disagree that there has been an issue there? I think that one of the lessons from the Ferguson experience is the need to establish experts commercial private asset management capabilities in the Scottish Government that draws on independent advisers. That is what we have now done and I think that that would stand us in good stead for the future. Thank you to you all for your evidence today for all of our questions. That concludes the public part of today's meeting. Next item on our agenda will be discussed in private as consideration of our work programme. We now move into private session.