 Welcome to the 12th meeting in 2020, one of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. The first item on our agenda is to date evidence from the Deputy First Minister on Public Service Reform and the Christie Commission. Members have received a background paper from the clerks. Mr Swinney is joined today by Scottish Government officials Laura Turnie and David Milne. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting and invite the Deputy First Minister to make a short opening statement. Thank you, convener. I welcome the committee's interest in the Christie commission and the issue of public service reform. In this 10th anniversary year of the commission's report, it is timely indeed to reflect on what has been achieved and its continued strategic, ethical and practical relevance. The Christie commission report in 2011 set out a clear approach about how we could address the long-standing challenges around aligning our budgets across outcomes and making real-world impacts on people's lives. The report set out some key and aspirational principles about how public services needed to be shaped and delivered in future in order to meet the expected financial demographic and other pressures. When our Government responded to the Christie report in the September of 2011, we worked with those principles and built a long-term commitment to public service reform underpinned by the pillars of preventing negative outcomes, working in partnership, outcomes-based performance, making the most of our people, including front-line staff and communities themselves, and more recently with an emphasis on place. A range of progress has been made since the report was published. The ambition, the commitment and the principles continue to live large in the minds and the actions of those of us in public services across national and local government, across our public services and across the third sector. Indeed, a decade on the term Christie remains the common language of reform and has been a cornerstone of our collective reflections on the experience of the pandemic, continuing to help to provide direction and inspiration for what we now need to do to address those issues. The ambition is huge and there are many examples of reform in action that we can point to. While that includes some structural reforms, the impact of Christie has been more evident in influencing and reshaping how both national policy and local service delivery have been built on improving outcomes, making a tangibly positive difference to people's lives. We regularly see some or all of the pillars of reform featuring as ingredients in how those policies and services are shaped and implemented. However, despite the many examples that we can point to, reform is not yet as deeply embedded at the heart of policy making and service delivery as it needs to be. It is not yet as systemic as I would like it to be. We have to ask ourselves the questions about why that is the case. As your committee's previous witnesses have said, making a concerted shift to reform is very challenging and there are many reasons for that. A key point, as we saw during the pandemic, is that there were places during the pandemic where those barriers were transcended and traditional and embedded ways of developing policies and delivering services were revised abruptly and swiftly. Perhaps we need to do more of that in the period ahead. The committee will have heard me say often, and this is critical, that we need our public services to wrap around what matters to people, to be person-centred, holistic, responsive to their needs, rather than to expect people to fit around what public services offer and navigate complicated systems from positions of vulnerability and need. That is not straightforward, it is difficult and time-consuming, but I am mindful of the observations and insights of your previous witnesses in tackling that issue. The challenge is, as pressing for us within the Scottish Government, it is for other public services. When I assume my current responsibilities after the election, the First Minister asked me to make sure that, as a Government, we work across policy boundaries to secure policy solutions that can transform lives. That requires us, as the Scottish Government, to shift our thinking from portfolio-based to people-based solutions and, in the process, work across the organisation on common challenges and break down traditional policy silos. In other words, we need to build bridges and not write walls in policy making. We need to respond to problems as they present to us rather than to reframe them to suit our structures and processes. Our approach to Covid recovery has aimed to embody the way of working. Our Covid recovery strategy is built on three priority themes, ensuring financial security for low-income households, good-green jobs and fair work, and wellbeing for children and young people. However, those themes cannot be pursued in isolation. Success is contingent on working across silos, policy ambitions and building on the interconnections between them. The kind of Covid recovery that we want to see goes beyond neutralising the negative impacts that the pandemic has caused and tackling complex and deep-rooted inequalities that too many communities in Scotland have experienced for generations. If we are to make that difference, our public services need to work fundamentally around what matters for those people and communities. In conclusion, the Government's commitment to Christie's vision and public service reform remains strong, but making Christie a reality requires a collective national endeavour, and I am committed to making that happen in the years to come. Thank you very much for that opening statement, which covered many of the areas and the actual fact that I was going to ask questions on. I will follow on from some of the areas that I was wishing to ask you about. In 2010, the Public Service Reform Act and Christie followed soon after. A decade has elapsed, and you said in your opening statement that there are many examples of reform that have made a tangible difference to people's lives. I am just wondering whether you can touch on just one or two of the most significant of those. There are a number to choose from, convener, but let me try to take some that reflect different elements of the reform programme. At an element of structural reform, my firm belief is that the reforms that we undertook in relation to the creation of a single police service and a single fire and rescue service were reforms that were necessary and which have provided significant additional resilience, capacity and effectiveness to both the police and fire and rescue services across the country. I think that the reforms that we undertook particularly in relation to policing have attracted international commendation as reforms that have been appropriate for the changing nature of the policing challenge that we face. That is an example of structural reform that has been undertaken. In relation to policy reforms, which I think have been consistent with the work of Christie, I would cite the two very significant developments and expansions of early learning and childcare that have been about recognising the importance of early intervention in the lives of children and young people to ensure that they have the best possible platform for success. The significant expansion on two occasions that have taken place of early learning and childcare, culminating in the move to 1,140 hours in August of this year, has been an example of where we have put into practice the principle of early intervention. To ensure that children are given the best platform for their lives. I would cite a reform such as the emergence of the young person's guarantee, where we essentially look at a whole range of different employment and training programmes and recognise that, I suppose, each one of them individually has got their justification and their arguments for. Fundamentally, what has been demonstrably proven to be the case is that if you give a commitment to young people of a route that enables them to progress from school into whatever field lies beyond school, whether it is in work or college or further training, you can provide a much clearer route for those individuals. Therefore, the outcome that is achieved is that we do not lose young people from the labour market or from positive participation in society. Again, that is a policy reform that is about improving outcomes as a consequence of the way in which we design programmes. Those are just three examples, convener. I could go through some more. Thank you very much. That is actually very helpful. You will have obviously read the Fisher report from the session that we had three weeks ago where I took evidence from three academics who did express some frustration at where progress was not being made. For example, one of those areas is the area of preventative spend to me. Christie's commission said that, in response to Christie's commission, the Scottish Government said that it would reform a public services through a decisive shift towards prevention and greater integration at a local level, driven by better partnership. Workforce development has shaped a more transparent focus on performance. It is of the view that that has not happened. There are strong reasons for that. It is very difficult, particularly in financially challenging circumstances, to encourage organisations to disinvest in one area in order to invest in another. However, it is of the view that there does not even seem to be a definition of what prevention even means in the public sector in Scotland at this time. How can we take that crucial area forward? How can we deliver the culture change, which, 10 years ago, we knew later on this particular issue, we all agreed, was very important in changing attitudes and ensuring that prevention actually differed from the people of Scotland? I do not agree with the point that prevention is not well understood or not well applied. I think that the principle of prevention is very clearly understood. Given the committee's example of early learning and childcare, it would be widely, if not universally accepted, that the earliest moment in which you can provide formal, engaged learning and childcare opportunities for children will be for the advantage of those children, which will give them the best start in life. As an example of a programme that has been delivered, our local authority partners have been 100 per cent joined at the hip with us on implementing that programme. We have agreed to financial arrangements for so-doing full-on. That has been a widely universally accepted policy approach. I think that another example that I would give is in the field of youth justice. If we go back to 10 years ago, we were seeing really high numbers of young people going through the youth justice system and being prosecuted and ending up with damaging criminal records. What our justice colleagues did, and this was not just within government, but a whole systems approach involving community justice authorities around the country, a range of third sector organisations, was essentially to deploy early intervention. The work of organisations such as the Violence Reduction Unit, for example, was supported to make sure that we made the earliest possible intervention where we saw young people proceeding in a direction that was going to be damaging to society and crucially to their own wellbeing. What we have seen over the period between 2008-09 and 2019-20 is an 85 per cent reduction in the number of 12 to 17-year-olds proceeded against in Scotland's courts. Why? Because we have put in place earlier intervention to avoid the situation becoming as aggravated as we would merit it going to court. That is probably one of the best examples, because among those young people will be young people who can make a contribution to our society, but at some stage they have faced some difficulties and potentially got themselves into trouble. Bluntly, a different approach from the state has resulted in those young people being able to make a more positive contribution to society than would have been the case in the past. That is about putting the principles of the Christie commission into practice in an operational way. I do not doubt for one minute that there has been remarkable successes and you have detailed those just now. What about areas where cultural change does not seem to be happening to the same extent? How uniform is the cultural change? You get remarkable examples, but there are other areas. One of the things that caused us some concern a decade or more ago was the high proportion of NHS spend on particularly older people being treated in hospitals who did not need to be talking at that time about £1.5 billion. Obviously, over a pandemic, things have been changed, but where are we in terms of trying to change the cultural approach in some areas, such as, for example, the NHS? That was a particular area where you may recall there was resistance from health boards who said, unless we get more money, we cannot change the way that we do things with the resources that we have at this time. I am aware that you allocated £500 million over three years specifically to preventative spend at the time. How can we ensure that some of those remarkably successful examples that you have illustrated can permeate the entire public sector in Scotland? In my last answer, I should have said for completeness, convener, that there will be areas that are much harder to penetrate than others. I have given you some examples of where it has happened. There are other areas that are more challenging. One of the problems is that I could sit here and give a litany of examples of good practice but I think that I would struggle in all of them to say that they were systemic approaches. They might be good examples, but I am not sure that they are happening everywhere, which in a sense brings me to responding to the question that you just put to me, convener, about the appropriate care for individuals. I think that we have made some very good progress on ensuring that people are receiving the care that is appropriate for their needs, but I live in the real world that today we have something like 14 to 1500 people who are experiencing delayed discharge in our hospitals. I do not think that because we are anybody in health and social care partnerships around the country, it is taking any view other than the fact that they are keen to make sure that people who are in hospital that could be accommodated at home with care packages are able to do so. I think that what they often face is practical challenges in so doing. Some of those practical challenges might be about the availability of money. There may not be enough money to afford all the social care packages that we would want to afford at a local level because resources may be tied up in, if I call it, the more acute hospital settings. I do not think that that is actually the problem that we have got just now. The problem that we have got just now, as I have explained to Parliament on a number of occasions, is the availability of staff to deliver social care packages in communities. There are just not enough people on the ground available to do so. In the mail at my house yesterday, we got a leaflet from a much respected local care provider inviting people to join their social care staff. I have never had a leaflet through or before, but it indicates the lengths to which those care providers are going to try to encourage people to join the labour market because of the acute challenges that have been faced. I come back to one of the points that I made a moment ago. There will not be a health and social care partnership in the land that believes anything other than that an individual should be accommodated in the most appropriate setting for them. If that is a care package in their home, they will want to provide that, but there will be practical impediments to them being able to deliver that. I think that the most important practical impediment just now is the availability of people to deliver social care in our communities. Demand is clearly increasing much faster than the ability to provide services. When people have to be trained apart from anything else, they can't imagine professional and caring staff from nowhere, so I appreciate that. Does that not make it even more important that we have the right conditions to support change and meaningful collaboration and innovation? How do we incentivise that in the public sector? I will find well how it was incentivising the private sector where I worked for many years, but how do we incentivise it? How do we actually make that happen? You touched on earlier learning, but earlier learning was supported by huge additional funding from the Scottish Government both in resource and in capital, so that makes change much easier. However, in areas where we are in this difficult situation, we find ourselves with the perfect storm of staff who are exhausted. Frankly, I do not think that it helps when the media recruitment and when the media continually focus on how exhausted and warned NHS staff. I do not know how that encourages people to want to go into that service particularly, but how do we deal with that in the circumstances that we are in at the moment and make this kind of change if we are not to be in a situation next year in subsequent years where we are just in exactly the same situation, really, if not worse? Philosophically, convener, we need to encourage organisations to follow one of the principles that was in the Christy commission, which is the principle of partnership and collaboration. There are various ways in which one could take forward an agenda of public service reform. There could be an approach taken that is about structural change, and we have used those options in certain circumstances. In other circumstances, there is a route that can be taken forward, which is around the theme of partnership and collaboration, where you establish the atmosphere and the motivations to encourage different public sector organisations that need to work together to do so effectively to meet the needs of individuals. As an example of that, some time ago, I visited the team at Perthroth infirmary, which obviously serves my local constituency. There is a team, which is a joint team of health and local authority staff who are working in from my recollection, a rather small room in Perthroth infirmary, very focused on the intelligence coming from the hospital about who was needing ready for discharge and working out between them what was the timescale and circumstances for discharge and, therefore, necessary support within the community. That, to me, was philosophically bringing to life what I am talking about here, whereby public servants from two different public bodies are working together in collaboration, focusing on individual cases and working out how best can we ensure that individual has a smooth journey out of hospital when it is required into their own home and to be well supported there to make their recovery. The route that was chosen there is collaboration. A different route could have been chosen, there could have been structural reform undertaken there, but I think the encouraging public servants to focus on the delivery of the best possible outcomes for members of the public is a really strong incentive for those individuals. How frustrating is it, Cabinet Secretary, that best practice is not shared as much as it should be? For example, in the Local Government Communities Committee in the last session, we looked at levels of sickness in local authorities and found that the best local authority had a level of sickness, only a quarter of that of the worst—both SNP-controlled councils, by the way, so it was—and you could not make a political argument on that. Surely, given the size and scale of Scotland, is it not frustrating that we are clearly strong methodologies are in place that they are perhaps not being looked at and copied and implemented elsewhere so that we can, in fact, for the limited resources that we have, take things forward in a much more positive way? It is a frustration, convener, and it is difficult to justify why that is the case. It is not just about some of the examples of innovation, but it can also be about examples of just service improvement, routine service improvement, where relatively straightforward steps can be taken to improve performance but are not widely taken forward by all public authorities. We take a number of steps to try to address that. Obviously, the work that we take forward, for example, through the Scottish Leaders Forum, is designed to bring together public authorities to learn lessons and to improve performance. There are specific organisations within the health service that are designed to deliver improvement across all boards, and local authorities have collaborated to establish the improvement service and to draw on the lessons from the improvement service. Indeed, one of the propositions that we funded as a Government was the WorkScotland venture, which was designed to apply academic analysis to some of the work that was undertaken to implement the Christie commission and therefore to share that learning on a more widespread basis across the public sector systems. That is obviously there for organisations to tap into. As you will appreciate, convener, understandably, there are some areas of policy and delivery where ministers have more or less influence. In local government, for example, ministers do not operationally control local government, so it is a matter for how does local government respond to some of the challenges for their undemocratic decision making. In other public bodies such as health boards, ministers have much more direct opportunities to apply obligations on health boards, for example, to deliver performance. Witnesses three weeks ago said that, in the wake of Covid-19, it does prevent and present an opportunity to empower better-resourced local communities. What does that mean to the Scottish Government? What does empowering local communities mean? Does it mean empowering small groups within communities that tend to be active in community councils and elsewhere? How do you involve people more widely? No participatory budgeting has been a step forward, for example, but what does community empowering mean to Scottish ministers? I think that what it means is about providing support to communities to be able to intervene and to act effectively in their own local communities. That will vary around the country. During Covid, an organisation, a local hotelier in my constituency, established an organisation called Fel de Roux. Interestingly, a local resident phoned them up one day and said, I have just had a leaflet from Deliveroo. I think that they have been doing something with your name, which was an interesting way of looking at it all. That was an orc. That did not exist before Covid. This was an individual, Gavin Price, who owns a couple of hotels and bars. He had kitchens, and there were people in Aberfeldy that needed hot meals, and they were facing vulnerability. He just got a squad of people together. With accessing some financial support from different bodies, he created a whole mechanism that went on throughout Covid, which involved delivering free meals to vulnerable individuals within free hot meals of good quality to individuals within the community. That is absolutely welcome. That is a level of fine-grain intervention that can come about because people feel that there is something that they can do to make a difference. He was not asked to do it by the local authority. He certainly encouraged and supported it. There are countless examples of that around the country in the space of Covid, but in other spaces, for example, the Scottish Flood Forum supports a lot of organisations at local level in providing some of the early intervention for householders in relation to flooding incidents that can take place in local communities. They work with local authorities and resilience partnerships, but they have decided to take the initiative to make sure that they can be active in support of their communities. The meaning of community empowerment for the Government is about making sure that people are enabled and supported to advance on propositions of that nature, rather than sitting and designing an elegant system of governance that I would venture to suggest designs in an elegant system of governance, but not much else in terms of the practical effect on people's lives. Community involvement is also important. I was at a public meeting a week past Saturday in La Crensa, a population of 120. There were 75 people at the meeting, so involvement is also important. We will open up to colleagues around the table. The first person to ask questions will be Liz, to be followed by John. Thank you very much. Good morning, Mr Swinney. I want to ask some questions around some of the answers that you have just provided to the convener. I am building on a comment that was made by Professor James Mitchell in the meeting that we had on 9 November, where he was very clear that there was a lot of strong goodwill across the political spectrum for the Christie commission, but 10 years on, we are still asking why it all has not come together. In that same session, the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle, said that he felt that, in some cases, the leadership in the public sector is not being sufficiently held accountable for some of the decisions. I just wondered whether you could comment on that. I certainly do not feel any lack of accountability, and I do not think that many other people feel the lack of accountability. I think that there are multiple accountability streams within our systems. Ministers are accountable to Parliament. Members of Parliament are accountable to their electorates, the electorate to make their choices. They just made one on 6 May. Public organisations and local authorities are accountable to their electorates. The health boards are accountable to ministers, they are accountable through annual public meetings and their localities. I do not think that there is any lack of accountability. One of the points that the Auditor General made, which is relevant on the question of accountability, is that some of the channels of accountability or the requirements of accountability or the accountability measurements that we have may not be helpful in trying to achieve some of the aspirations of the Christie commission. The convener asked me about a discernible shift of resources to support prevention. If accountability mechanisms are in place to monitor and assure performance on certain aspects of public service delivery, it is difficult for public servants to move away from that mechanism to something else because there will be continued pressure on those existing accountability mechanisms. If that is the case, the accountable mechanisms are there, do you think that they are working sufficiently well, or is there a need for reforming some of the processes of accountability? I think that there can be a conflict between some of the existing measures of accountability. I think that some of the issues around, for example, some of the targets in waiting times can dictate a particular performance, which, if they were not there, might lead to other opportunities. That is just one example of where that might be relevant. We have to be certain and satisfied that the accountability mechanisms that we have are appropriate to deliver the type of approach and performance that we want to achieve. That raises an interesting question about how appropriate setting national targets are. If a Government has made commitments on specific targets—and we have all been guilty of talking in terms of targets—does that take away from some of the ability to home in on other areas of measurement and improvement that might help the delivery of some of the aspects of what the Christy commission was recommending? I do not think that it stops the creation of a focus on performance in general. I do not think that that might be an obstacle to generating the necessary shift in activity or focus to enable that to be the case. There can be a mismatch between some of the things that we measure and some of the things that we want to achieve. Those are often two different things. One of the things that struck me very much in the first wave of Covid was how magnificently well our hospitals responded to the intense pressure that was on them. I heard more than once that that was down to the fact that doctors and nurses were taking the front-line decisions about the Covid wards and how they had to be organised, rather than some of the people who are normally associated with administration of health services. That is an area that is particularly relevant to the running of Scotland. To what extent do we need to move towards a system of accountability that is more in the hands of people who are running the front-line services rather than those people who are administering them? I think that there are a number of dimensions to that. One that we cannot ignore is Parliament and political debate. I cannot control what members of Parliament raise as the issues that are of concern to them and the things that they want to pursue, but I sit and I listen to questions and debates in Parliament on a daily basis. I hear members of Parliament frankly railing against what Liz Smith has just put to me as a question, because members of Parliament want ministers to be taking those decisions or accountable for those decisions. It is all very well for an argument to be put forward that says that we should empower the front-line professionals, but when it comes to parliamentary questions and debates, a completely opposite approach is taken by members of Parliament. If I give an example, I have completed five years as education secretary, one of my biggest priorities was to encourage and support a much greater empowerment of schools within our community and of headteachers, but it did not stop members of Parliament pressing me about the performance of the education system across the board, including if I may say so, the former Conservative education spokesperson whom I respect and admire deeply. There is a conundrum in there in which Parliament itself has to resolve as well about what Parliament wants to think is important and should be the subject of scrutiny. Just one final question for me. I think that this is really interesting argument, though, because one of the things that we had in that session on the 9th of November with Professor Mitchell and the Auditor General was this question of trust. Trust in politics these days is not a party political point. Trust is not easily found, and yet the public, I think, wants to have that level of trust in people who are delivering their public services, whether that's in education, health and transport, wherever it might be. At the moment, politics is not in a good place, partly because of the Covid situation, which obviously is nobody's fault at all, but I think it's quite hard to find a lot of the same degree of trust that we had in systems before in politicians. What I think is at the core of this debate is to what extent can we improve the level of trust if the lines of accountability are proven to be pretty watertight and people understand why decisions have been made and what can they do about it to make sure that those decisions are the right ones in order to deliver their public services? Do you think that that's a debate that we need to foster? I don't think that I really accept the premise of Liz Smith's question, because on the question of trust in our public services and trust in the political system, because long-standing reputable surveys of public opinion, principally the Scottish Social Attitude Survey, which some of the witnesses that you gave evidence to three weeks ago would be well familiar, essentially show very strong and high levels of public trust in public services and in the system of government in Scotland. I think that that's at very, very high levels, and much higher levels, compared to the situation in the rest of the United Kingdom. Where I think there is an important question is about making sure that there is clear understanding of the rationale for certain decision making in the delivery of public services. That's what we do get into difficult territory, because I've sat through over my years some tricky discussions about the delivery of healthcare, for example, where the rationale for making a particular change in the delivery of service is explained from a clinical perspective, and it can make very strong, rational sense, but then it conflicts perhaps with how it's been done in the past and how people feel about location services and all those questions, and that gets very, very difficult. I think that the answer to that is about good, clear, engaged processes. Last point, I should have added to the earlier question that Liz Smith asked me about the role of professionals. Any decent performing public sector organisation should be listening to its front-line professionals, and responding to them. If somebody who's running an accident emergency department says, look, I think it would be better if we organised it this way, rather than that way, as a public sector leader, I'd be hard pressed to say, well, I think I know better than you do. Any organisation should really be listening to its front-line people. Thank you. John, to be followed by Ross. Thanks very much, convener. Maybe to continue that theme, you gave the example yourself of, I think, Aberfeldy and good things that were happening there. This whole tension between local, which I think was a Christie principle, empowerment, that kind of thing, against this idea of uniformity and a criticism of a postcode lottery. Even your final example there, so the accident emergency people in Glasgow might suggest doing something and they do it one way, but in Edinburgh or Aberdeen it's done a different way. Can we really square that circle, or is it just inevitable that some people will always say it's too centralised and some people will say it's a postcode lottery? I think there's fundamental conundrums in there that are difficult to resolve. One person's local flexibility is another person's postcode lottery, and it's as blunt as that. I think some of that then comes back to the point that convener put to me, which was, if you're faced with good, robust evidence that what you are doing could be improved if you followed the example that is going on in another locality, I struggle to get my head around that, that you would resist that, where another locality is demonstrating we can get a better outcome by doing this in a particular way. I think to be fair to a lot of public sector organisations, there is a lot of learning that goes on in that respect, but if there is a discernible evidence of progress that we've made elsewhere and you're resistant to that, I think that that takes a wee bit of, that needs a bit of challenge. Yes, but presumably, while Shetland might learn some things from Greater Glasgow Health Board, they're not going to learn it, follow everything that Greater Glasgow Health Board does. No. Another area from Christie was working together effectively, and one of the things that came out of that was the IJBs, or health and social care partnerships. I did ask the witnesses this previously in the 9th of November. From my perspective, we've now got three bodies, whereas we're used to have two. I used to either go to the health board of the council with an issue or case, and now I can go to the health board or the council or the health and social care partnership. Is it a good example? Has it worked, or is it a bad example of working together in that we've created another organisation? I think that it's beneficial because I think what it's doing is creating the space for a very focused discussion on the needs of individuals. If Mr Mason has a constituency case, and I've had cases that don't fit neatly into the health board compartment or the local authority compartment, and one of the big lessons that I've learned in my political life, and especially in my life as a minister, is that nothing fits neatly into one single compartment, hardly ever. The health and social care partnerships, I think, have the structures and ethos to focus on the needs of individuals and to find solutions for those individuals. Now, there will be a lot of practical impediments in resolving that, but I think that that provides the necessary focus. You are positive about the health and social care partnerships. The third area that I wanted to touch on was—you've kind of touched on it yourself as well—as to getting Parliament and both committees and the chamber to sign up to the idea of preventative spend. I mean, there still seems to be an emphasis—and you can understand the emphasis on A and A waiting times or ambulance waiting times or some of these kind of things, but that is not going against. The temptation or the pressures on Government to put more money into A and A, whereas that is exactly the opposite of preventative spend, is Parliament partly responsible for the lack of movement towards preventative spend? There has got to be a balance in all those considerations that there is absolutely a necessary place in purpose for accident and emergency services and for them to be operating in a highly efficient fashion, because that will deliver the best patient outcomes. I suppose that the challenge is to make sure that, for that system, however, to work most effectively when somebody really, really needs accident and emergency, they've got to be able to get it and to get it quickly, which therefore makes the point that, whilst, yes, we support having vibrant and effective A and E services, we've also got to have effective social care packages to avoid unnecessary cases ending up in A and E because there isn't a social care package available in the home. I think that part of the lesson that I would deduce from all of this is that there is a need for us to look at these questions on a whole systems basis. It's part of the point that I've been making when I answered questions for the First Minister a few weeks ago and I was questioned about the Ambulance Service. All of my answers were about the fact that this was a whole systems challenge. It wasn't just about the compartment called the Ambulance Service. The compartment called the Ambulance Service was affected by what was going on in a whole range of other compartments within our public services, so the need for collaboration and co-operation of the style that the Christie commission argued for is central to resolving some of those. The more south high profile questions such as ambulance or A and E waiting times? I agree with a lot of that. I suppose that they're high profile because politicians make them high profile, but they're also easier to measure than what we're doing in the communities. We keep coming back to this disinvestment question that if we're going to try and put more into primary care or community care or whatever, where's the money going to come from? One of the witnesses said what could we use our tax or borrowing powers to have a one-off investment? One of my suggestions was can we take 1 per cent off the hospitals and put that into community care, but I suspect that that would not help accident and emergency waiting times. We had the case many years ago in America, one of the states. They just didn't build a prison and put the money into supporting youth and that kind of thing, but it did mean that in the short term the prisons were overcrowded and there was a problem with that. Those dilemmas are at the heart of every budget process, the Government, and if I may say so, Parliament has to go through. There are obviously a range of options that are available to ministers. The borrowing option is fairly limited in terms of what the Government is able to do, but there are financial options available to Government, but Parliament's got to endorse the budget. When it comes to what the finance secretary announces on 9 December, members of Parliament need to reflect on that. If members of Parliament believe, for example, that there is a need for us to be disinvesting in one area of policy to invest in another area of policy, the opportunities available for them to come forward with those amendments to the budget process. That option is available to members, but the Government makes a judgment based on what we think is a reasonable balance across all those factors, but it is up to any member of Parliament to come forward with an alternative proposition. Has any member or party or committee ever asked you to take money out of acute services and put it into preventative services? No. I would like to return to the point on accountability. I am interested in the Government's position on the role of the boards of the various public bodies and NDPBs. It seems that there are a variety of roles that the board of a public body could play. There is a bog-standard corporate governance issue where what they focus on are issues such as HR practice, etc., or they could look more at operational policy decisions of the body that they are responsible for. The example that I used with a previous session was that the board of Creative Scotland is largely made up of professionals from the creative industries who have an understanding of that area of public policy. Compared to an issue that you will be familiar with, Cabinet Secretary, the board of the SQA has a teacher on it, but it has three management consultants on it. That would be entirely legitimate if the purpose of the board of public bodies was to focus on corporate governance issues such as HR. However, it seems to me that there is an inconsistency across Scotland between how the boards of various public bodies understand their function and purpose. What is the Government's position on the purpose of those boards? I think that I would be deeply concerned if a public body struggled to understand its function and purpose, because that is absolutely fundamental to how any public body needs to operate. I would be deeply concerned about that. That should all be well set out to a board, either through statute or through a letter of direction. For example, if I go back to my days in not a letter of direction, that is their own term. I will not get the right term, but the one example that I want to cite is that, every year, I would send Scottish Enterprise a management letter. We will tell the committee what it is properly called. I just cannot remember what it has got. The letter of guidance is what I have been offered. I am not altogether sure that that is the right one, David, but we will get you the right terminology. However, it is essentially what I want you to focus on in your priorities, in policy priorities. I would send that to Scottish Enterprise and HIE on anio basis when I was the finance secretary. That is about general parameters of operation. The example that Mr Greer gives me about Creative Scotland is a slightly different one, because there are some very active funding decisions that Creative Scotland takes, which are designed by statute to be taken at arms length from Government without operational influence of Government to respect artistic freedom and decision making. There is quite a very specific type of arms length relationship with Creative Scotland. The function and purpose of a board should be absolutely clear if it is required by statute, it should be operating within that statute, and if it requires the letter of guidance from ministers then it should be operating within that letter of guidance. I think that there is a different and distinctive point that Mr Greer puts to me, which is about the composition of these boards. That is perhaps a different question about whether or not what are the selection criteria for boards. Essentially, to make sure that board appointments are made on the basis of capacity and capability, a lot of those boards will not have specifics about whether you must have X number of teachers or Y number of lecturers or whatever it happens to be. It will be about attributes, so there may be requirements about financial competence, legal competence, boards have to have a chair of an audit committee, for example, so somebody's got to have audit competence. There may be a wider debate that Parliament might want to have about some of the attributes of boards, which I think would more directly address the point that Mr Greer puts to me. That would certainly be the case in my view that Parliament hasn't been as effective as we could have been in the scrutiny of the boards of various public bodies. That being said, there's always more that Parliament could do than it's ever going to have the capacity to. Taking the example that you give of Scottish Enterprise and the letter of guidance, would it then be at core to the purpose of the board of Scottish Enterprise, separate from the senior management team, those who are actually delivering who operate in the organisation? Is it core to the purpose of the board to scrutinise how effectively the organisation and through its senior management team have delivered on what was in your letter of guidance in terms of strategic priorities? Or is the purpose of the board to scrutinise the internal governance of the organisation almost divorced from the purpose of the organisation in the same way that it would for any other public body? If I carry on my Scottish Enterprise example, if I sent a letter of guidance to the chair of Scottish Enterprise and then I saw Scottish Enterprise not delivering the direction that I wanted, the first conversation would be between me and the chair of Scottish Enterprise to say what's gone on. The board is as accountable for the direction of the organisation and the delivery of its purpose as a senior management team. The senior management team has to turn it into operation on reality, but the board is just as responsible and accountable for the direction and to address the issues that are set out from ministers entirely within the statutory right of ministers. From your experience of Government, do you think that all boards are held equally accountable by ministers? There's a very substantial number of public bodies. Some ministers are responsible for a very substantial proportion of them. Those like Scottish Enterprise, the SQA or Creative Scotland are very high profile public bodies that a large section of the population will have some interaction with. There's a number of others that perhaps fall into the background a little bit. From your experience of Government, at ministerial level, is there sufficiently consistent scrutiny of the performance of boards? Yes, but it will vary in intensity given the significance of the issues that are at stake. I think that it will inevitably depend on where the policy focus is and what the issues are rising out of the nature of events that are taking place. That will vary, but if statute requires ministers to interact with a public body in a particular way, then ministers should operate in that fashion. If statute says to ministers that they have to keep a distance from those boards, then ministers should keep a distance from those boards because that's what statute says, so it will vary depending on what statute requires. Do you believe that there is sufficient turnover on the boards of public bodies? By that I mean those who have active experience on a board or not. I'm aware that there's a number of individuals who move from the board of one public body to the board of another and for a continuous period of time will be involved in corporate governance of public sector bodies. Is there a high enough turnover within Scotland as a whole for us to be bringing in those who have perhaps direct experience of the industry that the board works with or some other relevant kind of experience, or could we do with a little bit more scrutiny of an individual's length of service across public sector governance rather than just the individual board that they might be serving on at any given time? I think that we could do with a broader range of people, expertise and capabilities coming forward for our public bodies. That's all for me, convener. Thank you very much. Douglas, have you followed by Michelle? In my mind, cabinet secretary, the local governance review is the opportunity to break down some of the silos that you spoke about earlier. Is that your view as well? When will we see the local governance review coming through and is there lessons learned from the pandemic that will feed into that review as well? There's definitely lessons to be learned from the pandemic because I think that the hard reality that we have to accept about the pandemic is that the degree of change in the delivery of services and approaches by a whole range of public bodies took place at a pace that I have never seen before in my life. Welcome change. I wish I had seen a bit more of it in my time, but it demonstrates that it can be done. I think that that's the crucial point. Why does it have to be done? Well, it has to be done. It had to be done because we had an absolute public health emergency to which countless organisations disrespected boundaries worked at pace, found solutions and, I think, generally did all they could to support citizens. They wrapped services around people. The question that arises for me out of that is that if we could do that because of the Covid emergency, what's stopping us about child poverty, for example, or the climate emergency, for another example? I think that it shows that it can be done, but we've also got to be open-eyed about the fact that we have to make sure that the conditions are right to make sure that it can happen in other circumstances. It happened in March 2020 because we faced a public health crisis. We have to make sure that the same thought conditions and processes enable us to do that. Lessons have to be learned there. I think that, in terms of the local governance review, there are a number of ideas that have emerged about how we might be able to respond to some of the issues raised by local authorities and local communities in that respect, which the Government is reflecting on. Out of that, we need to take forward dialogue with partners about how we can turn many of those propositions into practical reality. What often creates barriers and silos is money at the end of the day, and it's back to the shift in resources. During the pandemic, I think that there was a lot more flexibility about whatever the cash after. Let's just look after our communities. I'm just trying to think of our as a way going forward where almost as an SLA in place between, and I hate even thinking about that, between NHS and local authorities, for example. I was trying to think of some examples when you were talking about youth justice. If local authorities could spend more on that, there would be a savings for probably police and justice in the future, and then things like sports facilities. If local authorities could spend more on that, there could be a reduction in obesity and then savings to NHS going forward. I'm just trying to think of a way of sort of linking the outcome that would help an organisation back to who was actually doing that early intervention, spending the money, sort of as a balance there. I think that the answer to this question is that a variety of, I agree fundamentally with the point that Mr Lums and Poobs to me, but a variety of public sector organisations have to focus more on the collective interest than the silo interest in addressing some of these questions. Let me provide an example. I visited a primary school in Midlothian, and it was a new-build primary school, but what the local authority had decided to do in partnership with the health board, there was an existing sports centre, and essentially they kept the sports centre there, but in a combined procurement, having for friend, they built a GP practice on one end of the sports centre, they built a primary school on the other end, they built a library and a concourse in the middle, so there was a separate door for the primary school for security issues, but there was this general door that came in, which gave into a concourse area where there was a GP practice here, a sports facility here, a library there, and what emerged, a wee bit of a cafe in the foy, and GPs were saying to some patients, I'm going to, I think you need to go next door to the leisure class in there, and there's a wee bit of an exercise class going on, and once you've done that, you know, and then folk were then going into the library, and they were having a copy before they went home, so you had multiple benefits of access to GP services in the locality, access to non-pharmaceutical interventions, exercise arrangements, access to literary services, and some socialisation, so multiple benefits. Now, what I couldn't do is sit down here and say, now the savings to the NHS were as follows because there was fewer prescriptions or whatever, but I think we could all look at that and say, that feels like a good outcome, and members of the public said to me when I was there that there was a particular joy in seeing all the kids coming in and going to the library and the hubbub and the joy of all that noise, so I think the ethos of the Christie commission of Saintess, you must find common platforms for collaboration, is what resulted in that venture in Midlothian, but I think we need to have more of that systemic thinking across. And there'll be other examples, Mr Lums, if you will, there'll be Aberdeen examples of exactly the same thing, so to try to enhance and address that pattern of delivery. You're right, I was thinking of the Tilly drone hub in Aberdeen that was a great collaboration. I'm just trying to think how we, what's holding us back from having more of that, is that a finance thing, is it or is it more banging heads together, what's holding us back? I think undoubtedly compartmentalised budgeting will be a challenge, that's one issue. Another will be lining up procurement processes to make sure they can all arrive on the same day, that'll be a challenge, because different organisations will perhaps have different levels of financial security to be able to take forward. And then also there will be whether or not there is the necessary perspective and vision to imagine some of those concepts. I dare say, when the Midlothian example or the Tilly drone example were being conceived of, there might have been a wee bit of, oh really, I'm not sure we can pull this off type of thinking, but it needs vision and commitment to make sure that can happen. Perhaps there's been a process of osmosis because I was going to be asking about similar areas of view. I mean, I think what we've been exploring this morning is that, you know, over the past 10 years of Christie, we've tended to see evolution rather than revolution, and there's been comments made about the setting up of the social care elements that gave the opportunity to develop a new vision removed from both existing culture and existing processes, and that has regarded being successful. And that does then lead us on to where we are now with post-pandemic and the area that you highlight about how public sector bodies came together and rules were broken or pushed to get to the right outcomes. Perhaps that's the I don't mean rules were broken, but certainly a focus to get to bold outcomes. I suppose what I want to just explore a bit further is how culturally that can be continued, linking back to Christie principles in particular empowerment, how Government can enable that, and you've touched a wee bit earlier on the blockers around budgeting. But I'd like you to flesh that out a bit more about how we can continue this. I think that, frankly, that's the $64 million question. My response to Michelle Thompson's question is largely the thinking that's in the Covid recovery strategy, because we have been explicit in that strategy that the type of atmosphere and ethos and thinking that brought public servants together in the fashion that they did in the spring of 2020 to deliver those solutions is the type of ethos and thinking that we require to meet some of the wider challenges. Fundamentally, in the Government's programme, those are around child poverty and the climate emergency. Those two substantive themes will not be solved in neat little compartments. They will require the same collaboration, co-operation, ethos, transcending a boundaries to ensure that they can be achieved. At the heart of the Covid recovery strategy, we make the point that that is what we need to essentially encourage. I suppose that what I'm trying to do in the Covid recovery strategy is actually empower people to give them authorisation, encouragement, permission even, to say, well, this is welcome. I don't think that we can underestimate the degree to which people might feel the need to have permission. Maybe that's actually a point that I should have included in my answer to Mr Lumsons' questions, that the sense of needing to have permission might actually be an impediment to people making some of this progress. I remember a conversation that I had with a care worker in the Highlands. In the Highlands local authority area, they took a decision when it came to the integration of health and social care that the health board would take responsibility for either adult care or children's care. The local authority would take leadership for the other. I can't remember which way round it is. I had a conversation with a healthcare worker and I said, what's the biggest impact this has had on you? She said to me, it means that I can do what I need to do for the member of the public that I'm supporting without being bollocked or fearing being bollocked for spending health board money on a local authority priority. That's about permission and that lady was able to say to me that all this grandiose architecture for her meant that she could focus on the member of the public that she was supporting and do the right thing. As opposed to thinking, well, this is maybe going to involve me spending money that I'm not really that, it's not really my bailiwick, that should be the health board paying for that or whatever and I think we've got to get beyond some of that thinking. That licensed operate leads me on to the next area. You set out the sort of three themes that you were focusing on, one of which was good green jobs and I wanted to just explore how you see that emboldened licensed operate permission interfacing with private sector business who perhaps traditionally will have more of this kind of behavioural element. Have you actively considered that within whether you're revisiting NPF4 or so on, but that is worthy of merit and consideration just now, I think? How public sector organisations relate to and deal with private sector organisations is an element that is a relationship that public sector organisations have got to think about carefully. I think what the Covid recovery strategy aims to do is to, if you take, for example, the first theme of tackling the financial insecurity of low-income households, one of the ways to do that is by doing what the Government has said it's going to do of doubling the child payment, but another way is by making sure that parents, once you provide early learning and childcare, might be able to gain access to some of the good-green-fair jobs that are around. That will obviously help to strengthen financial, to address financial insecurity of low-income households. It's about making sure, I certainly hope, that out of the Covid recovery strategy, a private sector organisation would look at that and say, well, there's a place, there's a role for us to perform here. We can make a contribution here by taking forward our investment plans, collaborating with public organisations on training of members and staff and creating employment, and the virtuous circle carries on. Just a last wee question, you said in your opening remarks that it was the first time I'd heard the term referred to in terms of, Christy, was around ethical. There's often a dichotomy with ethics where organisations, rather than focusing on consequentialist outcomes, i.e., the end result, will focus on deontological process driven outcomes. I was just intrigued by your use of the word ethical. Is that something that you started to reflect further on, or has that always been there and I've missed it? I hadn't heard the use of the term in relation to that before. It's not a word that I've used often about this, but I felt that it was appropriate to use it. Fundamentally, when I think about the Christy commission report, I think that the Christy commission report is a highly ethically based report. I had a profound impact on me. At the moment that we commissioned that report, there was a great debate about what was the proper role of public services. Christy may not have used the word ethical, but Christy provided us with an ethical justification for the maintenance of public services. Is there a great debate about whether all of this should be privatised? What's the degree of private involvement? The reason why I thought it was appropriate to use the word now is that when I look at some of the issues that we've been wrestling with for some time around fair work, around the transition to a green economy, about the more sustainable use of resources, I think that that reinforces the ethical purpose of the Christy commission. The only way is ethics, Daniel. Deputy First Minister, you've always struck me as someone that has been frustrated about the pace of change. I was really interested in your opening remarks. You hinted at something. You said that on reflection or that we should reflect that many of the things in Christy had not become as bedded as much as we'd have liked, either institutionally or in terms of policy. Let me ask you this in an expansive way. If the 2007 John Swinney was to come forward in the future, would he be pleased or frustrated about the lack of institutional change? If the 2021 John Swinney could provide that John Swinney with some advice, what would it be? Well, I feel as if, to go back to Liz Smith's question about the apparent lack of accountability in the system, I feel as if I'm being invited to reflect on my term in office as a minister. I would freely concede that there are a lot of institutional barriers to making progress. We shouldn't underestimate the challenges that exist in any Government about compartmentalisation. It's not actually about any Government. I worked for a large private sector insurance company before I entered Parliament in the 1990s. It had its own compartments. Its leadership wrestled with the necessity to focus on, in their case, customers and to avoid the focus on process and structures. I don't think that it's a challenge that's unique to public sector organisations or to Governments. However, you need to have a universal approach or an agreed approach that enables you to overcome some of those barriers. I think that the Christy commission helps us by giving us an approach and a methodology and a set of principles that can be followed in whatever public sector organisation you're operating. In that respect, Christy has really stood the test of time, because, as I said in my opening remarks, the Christy approach remains fundamental to what we are doing today and what public sector organisations are doing today. If you look at the promise, the thinking behind the promise is essentially a development of the thinking that was in the Christy commission. I suppose that what the 2021 John Swinney would say to the 2007 John Swinney is that there is, don't underestimate the scale of the obstacles to be overcome. It would probably be the best advice that I could offer. I might ask that question in private and see what response I get. I recognise what you're saying. I think that compartmentalisation is an issue. Part of it is about putting the right levers in the right places and making sure that they're not split up. With that in mind, do we need to have a more fundamental reappraisal of what is under the control of local government? Douglas Levinson has alluded to that. That's very much about how local government engages with people and how it makes decisions, rather than what it is doing. If you take the example that you gave of the library and the sports centre and the primary school and the health centre being in one place, one of the best ways that you could make that sort of thing happen more is by making sure that those decisions were all coming together in one place rather than split apart. Again, in line with my previous question, my more impudent way of asking the question, why do we treat Douglas and Liz's colleagues from 1994 with such respect that we assume that Mr Lang's local government reforms were perfectly formed and should remain unaltered by his Government but, frankly, mine? Should we not be asking much more fundamental questions? Is the solution to that not pushing as much decision making down to a local level and giving local government the powers that they need to exercise them properly? There's a lot in there. The first point that I would make just to follow on my last answer is that the challenge of compartmentalisation is less acute in the Scottish Government than it is in Whitehall, for example. I don't say that to be critical. I think that it's an acknowledgement of the fact that the benefits of size and proximity enable us to go back to some of the issues that we talked about there about Covid. If I wanted to sort out the issues about compartmentalisation affecting our review of Covid, people were on a phone call within five minutes the necessary people, and it was getting aired and sorted and addressed. My colleagues in counterparts in the UK Government often say to me that it's much easier for you, you can just bang the heads together readily compared to us. It's much more complex and there's a fair amount of truth in that. There are opportunities for us in that respect. It's actually a topic that I'm discussing with our incoming permanent secretary about how we can advance some of those issues about overcoming boundaries and barriers. The second point that I'd make is that Mr Johnson put to me about the need for us to be focused on wider purposes. I think that we've tried to do that with the establishment of the national performance framework, which is designed to provide us with a sense of direction over a longer period of time, and that's designed to give public organisations a sense of where we're heading and what we might be achieving. There is, however, a natural conflict between some of the aspirations in the national performance framework and some of the accountability mechanisms that will be applied operationally and which Parliament might spend quite a bit of time scrutinising as well. Lastly, I come to the colossal question about the role of local government and whether the 1994 reforms were absolutely perfect or what's the best way through this. I think that there's a number of elements to that. One of them relates to the optimum level of delivery of services to individuals is that that's never a perfect question at local level. If you look at the health and social care reforms that we were talking about, we've essentially tried to recognise that although local government may have responsibility for social care or social work, but the health service has got responsibility for health, there's a thing called social care which doesn't neatly fall into local government or health. Every individual case can be at different stages than the spectrum, so the health and social care reforms are designed to address that need for collaboration between the health service and local government. You then get into other questions about the natural desire for communities to have more control over what happens in their locality, but sometimes I'm not sure that all of that is determined by how close they feel to their local authority. If I take citizens that I represent in the town of Blair-Gowry, where the councils are located in Perth or Dundee, they think that both of those places feel quite distant from them in terms of what really matters to them about their absolute locality. Finally, there's the question of Parliament because your local government, if I go back to my example about education, and I understand why this is the case, I'm not complaining about it, but fundamentally the levers to effect performance of the education system lie with local authorities. As Mr Johnson might have observed over the last five years, I'm held quite, and my successor has held quite closely accountable for the decisions, for the performance of education, a large proportion of which is not within the operational responsibility of ministers. In the health service it's different because there's ultimate ministerial control and appointments, but I think that Parliament would have to be involved in a discussion about where the right amount of accountability lies on some of those questions. There would be a bridging question because I think that there's an interesting point around the natural level for things like education, health and whether they're in the same place. I think that that is a legitimate question, and it's not just about that question. There's almost a philosophical debate that needs to be had if one is going down the route of exploring this question about where is the right level for a particular subject to be determined, because if I look at some of the issues that I still wrestle with around child protection, for example, some very sophisticated knowledge is required about the approaches to child protection, which you have to be certain about in all localities of the country. Clearly, we do not have a national system of child protection, but you have to be satisfied that the right level of child protection exists in every single locality in the country. We have local authorities that range from having populations of 25,000 to a million, and they can support different levels of expertise to enable us to be assured that that level of protection is available in all circumstances. I did one more question, but I think that the convener was wanting to come in at the end. Can I just challenge you on one point? In response to Liz Smith, and I think that this similar point was alluded to in response to Ross Greer, that being accountable to ministers, whether that is health boards or NDPBs, was sufficient accountability. I would just challenge whether accountability to ministers is the same as public accountability. In public accountability, there is an intermediary layer. We can hold ministers to account in Parliament, but we cannot hold health boards directly accountable. In some ways, there is a frustration within our democracy. I hope that I did not create the sense that the characterisation that Mr Johnson has put to me was how I answered that question. In formal statutory accountability, that might well be the relationship, but there are many other channels of accountability that must be performed by a range of different organisations. If you take a health board example, for example, the health ministers will undertake an annual public scrutiny of individual health boards, which will take place and can be seen by members of the public. They can be engaged in that process, so there is a variety of different accountability mechanisms that can be put in place in that respect. I think that John Swinney of 2021, if he went back to 2007, would tell his predecessor that he was yet to reach his prime. He should give shorter answers. It would only lead to more questions. We have 128 non-departmental public bodies in Scotland and 32 local authorities. We have health boards, health and social care partnerships, community planning partnerships, city and regional deals. My view is that the level of public understanding of how those work together is probably south of 1 per cent of the population. You talked about optimum service delivery in one of your answers to Daniel Johnson. I realise that there is vested interests and things are difficult to move structurally, but is there a case for decluttering the landscape? It is interesting when you recall going back to 2007 that we took steps to declutter and removed a range of public bodies. We passed the public bodies reform act and, as a consequence of that, some further rationalisation work was undertaken. I suppose that, over time, different reforms come forward that perhaps move in the opposite direction. I think that there is an argument for keeping those questions under review, as to whether further actions are required. I think that the other point that I would make is that there is always something that you have to be mindful of in relation to the question of structural reform. When you undertake structural reform, you have to be aware of the likelihood of disruption to service delivery that goes on at the same time. I was not a member of Parliament at the time of the local government reorganisation in 1995-96, but I remember the period feeling very much as if there was a lot of focus on that or more focus on that than perhaps was on some of the aspects of service delivery. You have to be mindful of those questions when you are undertaking structural reform. I appreciate that. I was a counciller at the time in Strathclyde. I went from one local authority to 12, which meant 12 new social work directors, 12 deputies social work directors, et cetera. All those structures had to be put in place. That is an area that we have to keep under review, because I think that there can be a disconnect between the people of Scotland and, indeed, the different structures. If they become impossible to understand, even for elected representatives it can be hazy if there are so many and they are overlapping. Anyway, I wish to thank the Deputy First Minister and his officials for their evidence today. The next item on our agenda is a private work programme. I would also like to update members on some areas of interest and importance. I will now close the public part of the meeting. We will be closing in a couple of minutes.