 Good morning and welcome to the fifth meeting in 2021 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. We have received apologies today from Liz Smith. Tess White is attending as a substitute from the Conservatives. I welcome her to the meeting. As this is the first time Tess has joined us and yet to declare any relevant interests. Thank you. We now turn to agenda item two, which is to take evidence on the national performance framework. We are joined for this session by John Swinney, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery. Of course, John is no stranger having attended myriad meetings of the pre-reserted committees over many years. He is accompanied by his officials, Barry Stocker, head of national performance framework unit and Tim Ellis, Deputy Director for performance and outcomes division. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting. Members have received a briefing paper from Clarks and I intend to allow up to 90 minutes for this session. Before we move to questions from the committee, I invite Mr Swinney to make a short opening statement. I welcome the opportunity to appear before the committee today. The national performance framework is Scotland's wellbeing framework. It explicitly includes increased wellbeing as part of its purpose and combines measurement of how well Scotland is doing in economic terms with a broader range of measures. The national performance framework is also the means to localise delivery of the United Nations sustainable development goals in Scotland. The NPF provides a framework for collaboration and for planning of policy and services across the whole spectrum of Scotland's civic society, including private and public sectors, voluntary organisations, businesses and communities. It is based on achieving outcomes that improve the quality of life of the people of Scotland. The NPF is also a reporting framework that helps us to understand publicly and transparently the progress that we are making as a nation towards realising our long-term vision. Its data helps us to understand the challenges that we all face in achieving better outcomes for the people of Scotland and to focus policy services and resources on tackling those challenges. The NPF promotes partnership working by making organisations jointly responsible for planning and spending to achieve shared outcomes. While Scottish ministers are accountable to the Parliament for the NPF's development and delivery, the Community Empowerment Act places a duty on public authorities to have regard to the national outcomes. Reflecting the partnership approach, the current NPF was launched jointly by the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and local government plays a key role in achieving the national outcomes. With my remit for Covid recovery, I am keen to see the NPF continue to guide our approach to recovery. During the early stages of the pandemic, the Scottish Government's approach looked to the national performance framework. The coronavirus framework for decision making explicitly reflected the core values of the national performance framework—kindness, dignity, compassion, respect for the rule of law, openness and transparency. Analysis has shown that the pandemic has had significant and wide-ranging impact across the national outcomes, as would be expected. Those are largely negative, particularly in terms of health, economy, fair work and business and culture. Covid-19 impacts have been and will continue to be borne unequally. Those impacts are expected to widen many existing inequalities and be borne disproportionately among some groups, including households on low income or in poverty, low-paid workers, children and young people, older people, disabled people, minority groups and women. However, analysis also shows that there may also be positive future developments, including the acceleration of the shift towards digital technologies and services, partnership between the public sector and other partners to improve outcomes for disadvantaged groups and potential shifts in the empowerment of communities to make decisions for themselves. Understanding those impacts will be important drivers for recovery and for achieving the national outcomes, as reflected in our recent programme for government. We are preparing now for the next stage to review of the national outcomes, which we will consult widely on across Scotland, including with Parliament. Following the outcome of the 2018 review, when the NPF received cross-party support, we will revisit the round table approach to further political engagement on Scotland's future wellbeing, building on the shared policy agreement that the Government has reached with the Scottish Green Party. The review will focus on how we can better achieve impact that is recognised and felt by the people living in Scotland. We strongly believe in our duty as a Government to protect the interests of future generations, including by restoring the natural environment and reducing our consumption in line with what the planet can sustain. This duty to future generations is spread across many policies and institutions. The national performance framework provides intergenerational wellbeing and improving opportunities for all, and means attending to the conditions that are required to ensure wellbeing into the future and for future generations and not only for the present. Thank you very much for that opening statement. In time of fashion, I will ask some opening questions and then members of the committee will join in with their questions. In your statement this morning, the Deputy First Minister said that outcome budgeting is about allocating resources based on the outcomes achieved for people. I am just wondering whether the national performance framework has helped to deliver that, and if so, if you can give us a couple of examples. There is always a challenge in any budgeting process. In your words of welcome this morning, convener, you made reference to the fact that I have been a regular attender at this committee over many years and I have great familiarity with the budget process. There is always a challenge in ensuring that budget priorities can be realigned to meet changing trends and demands within society, particularly to achieve different outcomes. One of the important points of consideration that has gone into budgeting, certainly in my view since 2007, which is reflected in the national performance framework, helps us in undertaking budgeting decisions that help us to align more closely with the achievement of national outcomes. One example that I would cite in that respect would be investment in early learning and childcare, where there is quite clearly a new amount of money that has to be found to ensure that we can have 1,140 hours of early learning and childcare for three and four-year-olds and for eligible two-year-olds. That clearly supports national outcomes, where we are trying to intervene at the earliest stage to provide the strongest foundations for children to achieve their potential, as is referenced in one of the national outcomes. We grow up loved, safe and respected, so we can realise our full potential. That involves financial decisions that have to be taken at an operational budget level to ensure that we can support such objectives. The national performance framework provides us with a sense of long-term policy direction of outcomes that we are aiming to achieve. In many respects, if we take the early learning and childcare example, it cannot be achieved without the willing and active participation of local government, which, of course, we have been able to rely on and take forward that policy objective. It enables us to take short-term decisions that support the achievement of a long-term outcome, which is the purpose and the influence of the national performance framework. In 2018, after the last review, all the time-purposed targets were removed as continuous improvement is the goal. If we look at the indicators, we can see exactly why that is the case. Do all the 81 indicators have milestones to help track improvements? That will vary from area to area. In some circumstances, yes, that will be the case. Again, going back to the early learning and childcare example, there would be indicators in place that would set a timescale for the implementation of such a policy and, as a consequence, determine the timescale within which decisions were required and practical actions needed to be taken. In other areas, there will be other areas of policy. For example, on eradicating child poverty, where there will be particular target dates that we are aiming to achieve and plans put in place to try to achieve those objectives. That will throw up challenges for Government and for public authorities, because the timescales may well be more demanding than we can achieve, but the availability of milestones to structure the way in which decision making requires to be taken will be present where that can be of assistance in achieving those outcomes. If we look at the 81 indicators, we see that, in 2017, the performance is improving, and 42 performances are maintaining and 11 performances are worsening, while there are four where performances have been confirmed and indicators are in development. We appreciate that this is an evolving situation. If we look at some of those that are worsening, some seem fairly obvious in relation to Covid places to interact, for example, social capital economic growth. In others, it is hard to see why there would be a worsening of performances. For example, if we look at the fair work and business section, we see that the number of high-growth businesses and innovative businesses are declining and also the employee voice. It should be said that economic participation of employees receiving the living wage and pay gap and gender balance is improved, so four of those indicators in that section have improved, but three have worsened. Why is it that those are worsening and what is the Scottish Government doing to respond to those indicators? Essentially, on the issues around high-growth businesses and innovative businesses, my assessment of that would be a combination of two factors. One is a historical trend, where this area of economic activity has been historically a challenge for Scotland for many, many years, although I think that in the period in the aftermath of the financial crash, there were significant enhancements in the development of high-growth businesses and, indeed, the Government put in place a range of different interventions to support the development of high-growth businesses. In particular, I am thinking about the Scottish Edge, which was a collaboration with the Hunter Foundation and other stakeholders, the support for women into enterprise, the converse challenge within the higher education sector to encourage the roll-out of a greater number of high-growth companies emerging out of the higher education sector, so a number of different interventions are put in place to try to address areas where there is a poorer performance. The indicator on employee voice is slightly more difficult. That is the first of those issues in relation to the high-growth businesses. The second is the effect of the more general economic conditions in which we have been operating as a consequence of Covid, which is referenced or evidenced by the situation in relation to economic growth. I think that there is a combination of the historic and the very much real-time issues that we face. The issue on employee voice is slightly more difficult to nail down because all of the policy interventions that we will take as a Government are all designed to support the acceleration and intensification of employee contribution towards the operation of organisations and businesses. From a business perspective, that is a very sound investment to take forward because of the added value that can be attracted by capturing the input and contribution of employees in the running and development of organisations. That indicator will be informed substantially by survey evidence from employees. Obviously, if that is reflected or if that lack of input is reflected in that survey evidence, then clearly the Government's fair work agenda has to be intensified and we will take that forward by the dialogue that we take forward with a range of organisations such as the business representative of organisations and the Scottish Trade Union Congress, with whom we collaborate closely on all aspects of the fair work agenda. Thank you for that. One final question for me is for colleagues who are keen to come in. Obviously, we have the 81 indicators and 11 national outcomes, and they are exactly that. When we look at the improvements that indicators are worsening and maintaining, we are looking at a national picture here. How do we assess what is happening in different parts of Scotland through the national performance framework? Clearly, in some areas where performance is maintaining, there may be some areas where the situation is improving quite consistently and others where it is deteriorating. The idea is that, if we just have an indicator that says that it is maintaining, it could mask quite a huge differential across the country. Obviously, we cannot have a situation where we have thousands of different indicators and that would be ridiculous, but how does the Government actually look beyond the figures of worsening, improving or maintaining to find out what is actually within the body of the curc, so to speak? On all of those different indicators, ministers and officials will be heavily engaged in assessing performance and patterns across the country. If I go back to the world that I used to occupy in the last Parliament of education policy, I was looking at all times at differential performance around the country. It was the subject of some frequently pretty robust discussion between myself and individual local authorities about performance in relation to educational attainment, for example, and the progress that I expected to see there. I would not want the committee to consider that this is the only stocktake or the only discussion of performance. There will be a lot of discussion that goes on in and around the territory of the national performance framework to make sure that we are doing all that we can to intervene to improve performance. Some of that performance, and this is where the national performance framework is designed to be a helpful and useful guide to all public bodies, private organisations, about what is the direction in which Government policy, supported by decisions made in Parliament, is heading and what can organisations contribute towards the achievement of that vision. Obviously, there will be a number of issues that are properly, statutorily, the responsibility of other public bodies and particular local authorities, so local decision making is crucial in that respect. We will not get to a strong position on performance at a national level if we do not, in terms of your question, convener, get to a strong position of local performance, so there has to be an interaction and a dialogue there. Now there are obviously political choices to be arrived at here. There can be more directional decision making taken forward. Parliament has particular views about that, sometimes it is in favour of it, sometimes it is not, but what ministers have to do in the current environment is operate within the statutory framework. The national performance framework, which is endorsed by local authority partners, is designed to give a clear and coherent approach to the delivery of policy to shape the decision making that can be taken forward at local level to then influence the contribution that is made in terms of achievement of the national outcomes. I will now open up the session to colleagues. The first questioner will be dipty, convener Daniel, to be followed by Michelle. Thank you very much, convener. Whenever I have looked at the national performance framework, I have been struck that it has a strong influence, or it seems to me, of the balanced scorecard approach that she sees in a lot of modern management thinking. I am looking at the Kaplan and Norton paper back from the early 90s, which instituted that. The fact that a balanced scorecard technique should highlight on four areas. One is customer perspective, internal perspective looking at what the organisation excels at. One is about innovation and learning. Finally, shareholder return. Not all of those apply to Government, but there are analogues such as citizens perspective, and the last one is essentially about how we generate revenue or economic perspective. The other critical thing that they do is say that those measures have to be explicitly linked to goals. My question is this. When I look at the national performance framework, it seems very broad. It does not appear to me to have that level of focus. Certainly when you look into the national performance goals, those perspectives are not necessarily preserved down to that level. I am just wondering whether, on reflection, as we look to improve the national performance framework, greater focus so that those measures can drive strategy rather than just being a broad basket of measures would be of some advantage. I think that there is undoubtedly a debate to be had there on this question, because what I have set out in my opening statement and in my responses to the convener so far is that the national performance framework is designed to give a clarity of purpose and direction to the country to which all relevant organisations, and I use that word in that term in its broadest sense, can look and say, how is this relevant to us and what can we contribute towards this journey that the country is on? That is one purpose. Another purpose is to discipline us, I suppose, to make tangible progress in achieving those objectives over time. That is where the issues that Mr Johnson raises are very relevant, because there could be greater signposting put into this exercise. There could be more definitive targets about what could or should be achieved over a given period of time. It is perfectly legitimate debate to be had. I think that what that would have to be understood to be would be an approach that would require probably much greater policy direction as to what was expected to be happening as a consequence. There is undoubtedly a debate to be had there, and the review that we undertake in 2023 will provide us with the opportunity to reflect on what has been a genuine approach that was taken in 2018, a genuine approach to engage with a variety of different interested parties, not least of which is Parliament, and to design a framework that is relevant and effective for policy making in Scotland. I thank you for that answer, and I do not disagree with it. I have to emphasise that, ultimately, the national performance framework is a useful thing. I wonder if it could be made more useful. To the points that you were just raising, is there not an alternative approach? It is not necessarily purely about setting targets, but there is perhaps emphasis that could be applied to certain measures. If you look at balance scorecards in particular, that is explicitly what you do. You attach weightings to particular measures. Is that potentially an approach that could be taken to strengthen the strategic value of the measurements that are included in the framework? Undoubtedly, decisions could be taken to essentially tilt the balance of that, to place more emphasis, for argument's sake, on that we live in communities that are inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe, as opposed to that we are creative and vibrant and have diverse cultures and are expressed and enjoyed widely. We could say that we think that there is much more importance in ensuring that we have greater progress on community empowerment that we do about cultural appreciation. I just randomly extract those two topics, but of course there is the scope for that balance to be tilted. Obviously, we would have to be aware of what the implications of that might well be, because what we are trying to achieve here is an approach that enables us to fulfil the purpose of policymaking in Scotland, but there is undoubtedly the scope for us to reshape the balance of that to address other and particular priorities. Again, one of my worries with the national performance framework is that it is very broad, both in terms of the way that the objectives are framed and the number of measures that sit below. I wonder if there is almost a missing layer. For example, if you were looking at children and young people, the national outcome is that we grow up, love, safe and respected so that we realise our full potential. I do not think that anyone anywhere would disagree with that as an objective. When you go through the national framework, you immediately descend into quite detailed statistics. I wonder if there is an intermediary layer that is required. That is how the overall objective will be achieved. Those are the measures that drive it, because ultimately you have to discriminate between different measures, because some measures will essentially be input measures, others will be output measures, some measures will trail and others will be early indicators. A, strategic emphasis on what is more important and differentiating between different types of measures, you have just got a sea of data, and it does not actually drive change or orient behaviour across Government. I think that it is a really good example to focus on. When you come down from the national outcomes, believe you me, there is no shortage of data beneath the aspiration of children growing up, love, safe and respected, there is no absence of data. That is highlighted in the national indicators and the national indicators are only a snapshot of the data that is available. What is required is for somebody who is immersed in that area of policy for five years, I would be looking at a whole range of data sets to establish trends of whether we were heading in a positive direction or a negative direction as a consequence of the experience of children and young people in our society and was intervening at an operational level to remedy instances where I thought that there was a need for us to have stronger performance. When, for example, we look at an indicator such as quality of children's services, that is an area that I would be looking at very closely. I would be looking at data identified by Care Inspectorate, Audit Scotland and the data that would emerge out of some of the wider collection of data about child protection and child wellbeing issues to determine, and to go back to the convener's point, the degree to which I needed to have more of a focus on area A versus area B in the country where there might be very different patterns emerging. What was driving, for example, good performance in area B versus poorer performance in area A and what we needed to do as a Government to enable us to be confident that we were doing all that we could to ensure that children were growing up love safe and respected to intervene to secure that better performance where it was required to be achieved. The question that Mr Johnson fairly puts to me is, can that be more visibly set out in the national performance framework as somewhere in the gap between we grow up love safe and respected and we have half a dozen indicators here? I think that there is a reasonable point to be considered there as to whether or not all of the information that we promote to reflect the achievement of those outcomes is, in fact, the most effective collection of data, because there is a whole host of data that we could select from to enable that to be the case. That is my final question. My reflection on what you have just said, Deputy First Minister, is about making explicit what you have just said about the way that you use the data. I think that that might be helpful. We all recognise that these are important measures. I wonder whether there is a need to report against them more explicitly. I cannot recall the last time that the minister made a statement explicitly about the national performance framework and, in particular, rather than about it as a tool, but about its outcomes and what it was saying in its portfolio. Do you think that there is a need to have more explicit reporting by ministers against the measures in the national performance framework? Yes. I was at the heart of the creation of the national performance framework back in 2007. I convene some discussions with representatives of all parties to consider how best we should develop some of this thinking and then responsibility passed on to my successors. At different times, we considered whether or not there was the need for an annual statement on progress in the national performance framework to Parliament. I think that that must have been an issue that was considered around some of the issues around statute. It does not need statute to require us to do that. We could choose that at any day of the week. If there was an aspiration to do that, the committee felt that that was something that would be beneficial as it reflects on those issues, and the Government would be very happy to consider that. Thank you. Good morning, Deputy First Minister. Perhaps following on from the point that Daniel has been making, I found that when I went through it, like you, we have all been aware of the history and development of the NPF, and I accord value into it while understanding how it started. I found it incredibly difficult to derive any meaning from the performance, maintaining or worsening. If I was reading anything, the first thing that I would be looking for is an outline of the methodology. You might not want to give every multitude of datasets away, but I had no sense of how you arrived at that. Therefore, from an academic perspective, if I read anything that has no sense of the methodology, I am inclined to ask the question how I know that it is true. In that respect, it follows on from what Daniel said, would you, as part of that consideration of its development, be prepared to set out some indication of methodology as an aid to arriving at that? I think that the national performance framework is a proposition that, frankly, the more you delve, the more you discover. It is all there, is essentially the point that I am making, that we have set out the rationale in the detailed documents about why we have arrived at this particular selection of datasets or information to inform and to determine progress. That is an approach that can stand up to scrutiny, but people are free to say, well, I do not think that you have arrived at the right half a dozen indicators that support a proposition on tackling poverty. We do not think that you are looking at the right things. Of course, there is scope for that debate to be had, but the rationale as to how we have arrived at that selection of information is all there, but it is subject to challenge and debate. The review that we go into in 2023 gives us the opportunity to have that discussion. Following on from that, given the undoubted complexities introduced by Covid, Brexit and the really challenging themes around net zero, just transition, human rights and equalities, as another wellbeing, what plans are you able to outline today, if any, as to your thinking of how you might develop the NPF? I would differentiate in some of the issues that Michelle Thomson has raised with me there about what would drive changes in the national performance framework. If we take, for example, Covid, I do not think that Covid should be a particular driver of change in the composition of the national performance framework, because it is something that has happened and challenges us, but in terms of what the national performance framework is seeking to encourage Government and other bodies to do, Covid is just another issue to wrestle with in trying to address that agenda. Net zero, however, might be an issue that forces a substantive reconsideration of the national performance framework, because that is a strategic policy direction, policy imperative, which, to go back to the points that Daniel Johnson was raising with me, might require us to reshape the balance of the national performance framework to say, well, because of the requirement to achieve net zero, we have to change the balance of the national performance framework to make that realisable. Yes, there is the scope to do that. That is what the purpose of the five-year review is designed to do, but it would be, I think, more about those aspirational elements of policy direction rather than addressing the consequences of an issue like Covid or Brexit that has forced us to do. Again, following on from that, it is almost like evaluating where we are at the moment. There has been lots of debate from the original starting point, which you recall, in terms of determining value add of public spend arriving at the national performance framework. Again, I appreciate the complexity, but do you see a further drift towards making that linkage again in terms of public spend to outcomes? Or do you largely conclude at the moment that that is incredibly complex, if you have a lot of sympathy with it and that we will carry on as we are with a very broad framework? Again, going back to a point that Daniel Johnson made. That link between public spend and outcomes is complex, but it is critical that it is properly understood. The national performance framework helps us in that endeavour, but there will be other things that help us in that endeavour. The process of audit and evaluation, and particularly policy audit evaluation, is critical in that journey. There will be other interventions. For example, the independent care review, which took about three years to look at its evidence base. I summarise thousands and thousands of hours' worth of analysis and research in the next couple of sentences. I do not do that to be in any way disrespectful, but we have got a limited time. It is essentially said that the money is not spent very well on delivering good outcomes for care-experienced young people. Therefore, you should reshape that, which is what we are now doing and which we set out by our acceptance of the promise report and by the steps that have been taken in the programme for government. That is a very good example of exactly the point that Michelle Thompson puts to me, which is that you are spending your money in one way, but it is not delivering good outcomes, so you need to think about shifting how you spend your money, which is what we are now doing, on that issue. There are other examples that I could cite in the field of youth justice over the course of about 10 years. We have substantively realigned the way in which we spend our resources to deliver better outcomes, so we have many fewer young people having their life chances influenced and affected by and undermined by interactions with the criminal justice system, by having diversionary routes available to those young people to enable them to achieve better outcomes when they have faced difficulty in their lives. That involves realignment of spend from how we were doing it before to how we are doing it now. There has to be a willingness to look at some of those questions and to be prepared to spend money differently, however complex deciding on those priorities and those challenges might actually be. The Justice Transition Committee has made the statement about moving beyond GDP as the only measure of Scotland's progress. I know that we have all wrestled with GDP being a crude measure but an internationally recognised one. I wonder about your thinking about how you might be able to do that and how that would play into other agencies such as the Scottish Fiscal Commission. I asked on this committee how they were fairly reflecting the risks of climate change in doing their forward forecast. Again, I appreciate that this is very complex but I would appreciate your latest thinking on that complexity, particularly in regard to GDP and other measures. What the national performance framework tries to do is to put a concept such as GDP, which is important, into a proper and full context. The national performance framework is trying to set out what factors we need to think of as a society, as a country, one of which will be GDP and there will be a whole range of others. However, it is to try to put that in a proper context so that we do not… Daniel Johnson raised the question with me of Balanced Scorecard. It is about trying to have a framework that enables people to judge, enables parliamentarians to judge where should the balance of our policymaking be when we see a whole range of different patterns of development in particular policy areas. How can we take decisions that better reflect a more rounded approach to policymaking than just saying that the one indicator that I am going to look at is GDP and to the expense of everything else? That is quite clearly the antithesis of the national performance framework and the NPF is our attempt to try to put concepts such as GDP into the proper context. I have three questions. One is about simplification, accountability and the impact of Covid-19. Ray Perman, who was representing the Royal Society of Edinburgh, told the committee last week when he was here that he was amazed by how many targets and desired outcomes there were in the performance framework and that it could be simplified. That was his view. He drew a parallel with the 17 UN sustainable development goals, which he suggested were more straightforward. Do you share Mr Perman's view that the framework could be simplified? Undoubtedly, it could be, yes. The judgment that the Parliament would have to come to a view about is whether, in so doing, it was losing any of the rounded nature of the national performance framework. There are fine judgments to be arrived at. I do not try to suggest that there is a perfect science here. There will be—some citizens will attach greater priority to the country being putting more emphasis on this area of policy than that area of policy, which wants to see this area of policy more predominant in shaping the future of our country than that area of policy. Those are all subjective considerations. It is a possibility that we might lose some of that rounded nature if we were to simplify. Equally, there is an upside that it might provide greater scope for sharper choices to be made about where we should place our emphasis and our interventions if we were to follow the route that has been put to me. You are open to looking at it again. I am very happy to do so. The second question relates to accountability. Professor Weiner, associate professor in public policy at the LSE, commented that the performance outcomes are typically long-term, and you mentioned that yourself. They are affected by a variety of factors, which often makes it very difficult—sometimes nigh on impossible—to attribute responsibility to specific government interventions. How do we know with certainty what is working and what is not? That is a fascinating and significant question. I think that there are different factors at play here. The national performance framework is one example of accountability in our country, but it is not the only one. There are loads of other ones, too. I mentioned audit, for example. I mentioned parliamentary accountability. There is statutory reporting. There is a whole variety of different other ways in which we can see very directly what is the consequence of an intervention or an item of expenditure on a particular outcome. That will be demonstrable in some aspects of the national performance framework. It will be demonstrable in various other settings in which that issue is tested. There has to be an acknowledgement and an acceptance that the national performance framework will tell us so much about the development of policy in Scotland, but there will be a whole variety of other areas in which that can be looked at. If I gave another example, we could go and look at the audit Scotland annual review of the national health service, for example. That feels to me to be quite a sharp piece of accountability in relation to a number of areas of policy, whereas the national performance framework is trying to structure how we take forward a journey that, on all of those questions, will inevitably be a long-term journey. We tackle poverty, but we will not tackle poverty in a year. There will be a longer period required to do that. We are trying to encourage the focus on long-term coherent areas of policy without losing the sharpness of our day-to-day interventions contributing towards that journey, or are they not? To go back to the example that I cited to Michelle Thomson, on the position of care experienced young people, we have had a piece of research that says to us that the current method of expenditure is not supporting good outcomes for those young people. We want to support better outcomes for those young people, so the Government has arrived at the conclusion that we should better change the way in which we spend the money. There is a very concrete example of how you have to change course because you are not delivering a satisfactory outcome, and that is an example of effective accountability. In summary, you are saying that it is a direction of travel, but are there other measures like Audit Scotland that test whether or not you are hitting those milestones? The final question is about the identification of continuous improvement in that direction of travel, but Covid-19, as we know, has prevented the collection and reporting of data. You talk about young people. For example, the educational attainment indicator states that data could not be collected from some of the sub-measures for 2019 and 2020 because of school closures during the pandemic, meaning that performance is to be confirmed. How would you see a reconciliation of performance to be confirmed with milestone measurement? That is a very vivid example of that. Essentially, we have a continuous data set up until 2019, and then we have two data sets on exam results, for example, on 2020 and 2021 that are constructed in a fundamentally different fashion. That is quite a challenge to reconcile one methodology for umpteen years to then a different methodology for two years. Obviously, there has to be some open dialogue about the analysis of that information to make sure that we can have a proper understanding of whether or not we are making progress towards the long-term objectives of whether we have, in fact, had a setback as a consequence of Covid. That requires that one data set is not going to do that. That is going to take a rounded piece of work—that is what the education recovery group looks at—as to what is all of this information in the round telling us about where young people are and their achievements, given the fact that the data sets that we would normally rely on have been interrupted by Covid. There is no easy answer to that, but I think that some considered research that we can discuss in debate, that Gowiddy's apparlament can analyse and air, is quite an effective way of doing that. Thank you. Douglas, to be followed by John. Deputy First Minister, in 2018, Derek Mackay said that a small number of the indicators were yet to be developed. Just now, we still have 11 indicators that are still to be developed, or no, or limited data, which is about 13 per cent. When could we expect to see those indicators being put in place? Obviously, the work to enable that to be the case is an early priority. Obviously, a lot of stuff has been interrupted or just rehearsed with Tess White as a consequence of Covid, and some of the—although there is a lot of data around in government, perhaps not all the data sets that enable us to get a complete picture are available, so we have to construct new data sets. Obviously, that takes time. Some of that has been interrupted by Covid, but I am certainly happy to write to the committee about where we might see particular points being achieved in relation to the collection of that data. That would be helpful. Following on from that, four of the missing indicators are in education. I have heard that the Government's top priority was education, so why have those indicators not been prioritised? For many of the reasons that I have just cited, we have had the interruption of Covid. I guess that that would interrupt the data that we have, but, according to the report, the indicators are still in development? No, but that is my point. In many respects, those will be new data sets that we are trying to create. We have been severely restricted in the collection of data during Covid for obvious reasons. When I was pressing the education system for information about participation, engagement and attendance, there was a fair amount of resistance from quite a number of public authorities, not least local authorities, about the data demands that I was placing on them. However, I wanted to be satisfied that online learning was happening, that there was adequate engagement, and I can only collect that from local authorities. You sometimes have to structure a balance about what you can reasonably and legitimately demand at any one time when there is a pandemic. You are confident that the indicators will be ready fairly soon? I will give the committee an update on where we are. I think that it has been mentioned already that we see performance worsening indicators around work and business, especially around economic growth, which we heard last week at the committee was key for us as a nation. Does that concern you, because the lack of economic growth surely will have an impact on many of the other indicators around poverty as we go forward? I obviously want to see improvements in economic performance and economic growth. I think that it is vital for us as a society, but there is, of course, a multitude of factors that are affecting economic performance. We are seeing the effects vividly just now of Brexit in relation to economic activity. We are seeing the impact of Covid on the economy. We have growth figures that show an improving recovery from the downturn that has taken place as a consequence of the pandemic. That is welcome, but the Government is focusing on a range of different interventions to ensure that we improve that performance. Part of my thinking around the Covid recovery strategy is the importance of tackling the financial security of families. The financial security of families is absolutely critical to eradicating child poverty, but to enable the financial security of families to be strengthened, we have to have better paying employment opportunities within our society. Stimulating that higher-quality economic environment is crucial. As a committee, should we expect some of those indicators to show a worse-than-position because of the economic situation that we are in? That might well be the case. I am very worried about the situation with Brexit and its impact on our society. We are now beginning to see the absolute sharp effects of that, so I am very worried about what that will do to our economic performance. I think that the data will speak for itself in due course and the indicators will speak for themselves in due course, but when you face economic threats of that magnitude, it will show up in the indicators. We will try our best to withstand that. We always do that. We will try our level best to put in place a performance on all aspects that overcome those difficulties, but I have to be candid with the committee that I have my anxieties about those points. The next question is about the 70 indicators that we have in place. Only 17 or 24 per cent are actually showing improving. Because those are long-term measures, should we be happy with that performance? I know that every Government would like to see 100 per cent improvement everywhere, but I guess that would not be realistic. Is 24 per cent a good figure? What I encourage the committee to do is to look at all of this in the round, because some of the performance maintaining that we have is a maintenance of a very high level of performance. It is not average, it is not pedestrian, it is actually a very high level of performance that is being sustained. That is no mean feat given the challenges that we face as a society. I assure the committee that there is a culture within Government and public authorities. I will go back to some of the examples that I cited in my discussions with Michelle Thomson, where there is a challenge to existing performance to improve further by a variety of different reports and analysis that comes forward. There certainly should be a culture across the public sector that is constantly seeking improvement in the way in which we are delivering public services. One last question, but before that I would like to refer the committee to my register of interest, where I am still a councillor. It is around linking budget outcomes. Obviously, there are link fence funds that go to local government to really prioritise some of the outcomes in the MPF, but there are other outcomes around culture economic development, where local authorities would probably do the right thing, but they do not feel that there is a budgetary benefit to them in the short term. Is that something that you think could be addressed going forward? I think that I have been around in this area of policy long enough to have frankly seen just about it all. One of the first things that I did as France Minister in 2007 was to remove hundreds of ring fence funds from local authorities to provide local authorities with much greater scope and flexibility about how they could operate. A lot of that removal of ring fence remains in place, so local authorities have a huge amount of scope to act. They have also got general powers in relation to wellbeing, which the convener has championed over many years in his parliamentary involvement. There is that scope for local authorities to act that will I suppose always be a demand for more money from local authorities. I do not suspect that that will really ever change, but I think that the Government does all that it can within the resources available to it to ensure that local authorities have the funding that they can rely on to support public services at local level. Of course, the Parliament has a budget process where it can shift that balance if it chooses to do so. Any calls from local government for more money really has to be tied to the outcomes that are based on them. What I am keen to encourage is the deployment of public expenditure very closely to achieve outcomes. That is what we should be doing at all times. In the examples that I have cited today, the policy shift to expand early learning and childcare was a quite deliberate financial choice to improve an outcome, which was about the quality of start that children got in their lives. That is a very good example of what we do with money to affect an outcome. The response to the care review is another example of that, where they have pointed out really quite bluntly to public authorities that we do not think that your current route for expenditure is delivering good outcomes. Here is a different way to do it, and we are accepting that. Thank you very much, convener. We have covered quite a lot of ground already. I think that the point was made by Daniel Johnson earlier on that ministers do not come very often to Parliament and talk about the national performance framework. It can also be argued that the rest of us in Parliament—backbenchers and opposition—do not ask questions about the national performance framework very much. Should we all be concerned about that, that it has not got that high profile, that the number of nurses, the number of police, the number of ambulances and such numbers that we all get very excited about? Do you think that we should be doing more to promote the national performance framework or is it not a problem? I think that there is an inevitability that there will be a much greater focus on some of the shorter term issues about service performance or service configuration. I think that that is essential, but I do think that in the process we need to be, we need to arise also in the long term as well as the short term, so greater focus on the national performance framework, looking at what are the trends that are taking place, are we satisfied that we are making enough progress on particular directions that I think we could be doing with strengthening that attention. If you take an issue such as child poverty, my social justice colleague will make statements to Parliament about progress on tackling child poverty, which is a constant and on-going priority. That is an example of a long-term focus that is being subject of an update to Parliament. My colleague, who is responsible for net zero, will have to make climate change statements to Parliament about how we are progressing towards a long-term policy direction. I think that there is always the scope for more focus on those issues, and the Government would be very happy to participate in that, wouldn't it? In one sense, the national performance framework is sitting in the background, even if it is not always specifically mentioned. Correct. The result is that a lot of the public do not know what it is or anything. That is correct, but I think that the audience for the national performance framework is a lot of the decision-making bodies. If a local authority or a public body takes decisions that are contrary to the direction of travel of what is hoped for in the national performance framework, that is a problem. The key audience, in my view, is the organisations who will be part of delivering on this journey, as Statute says, have due regard to what is in the national performance framework. A local authority is paying no attention to the national performance framework in its formulation of its policy, which would be an item of concern to me. You talked about making enough progress on climate change or child poverty. That brings back the question of whether there should be time-limited targets among all that. The convener mentioned earlier that we do not have that so much now because it is more continuous improvement, although, on climate change, we have quite a lot of time targets. Are you happy that that switch from more time targets to more continuous improvement? Has that been the right one or do we need to reshift? I think that we have always got to be mindful of the balance there, because the time-limited targets can provide greater focus and impetus to the making of progress. We just have to be absolutely certain that we are putting them in the right areas to make the greatest amount of progress that we can. We have time-limited targets on climate change and child poverty, which are fundamental issues in our society today. So, a lot of activity will be focused around ensuring that we can be in a position to achieve those measurable targets. Covid has been mentioned as well. In fact, that has made it more difficult to get the data to take all of that kind of point that has already been said. Going forward, if something worsens, my guess is that quite a few measurements will worsen because of Covid. Is it going to be possible to clearly split out how much of that is Covid and how much of that is other reasons? In fact, something might be improving for other reasons, but Covid has dragged it down. I think that the important point in looking at much of the data analysis that is configured around this point is about looking at trends rather than moments in time. The point that Mr Mason puts to me is best addressed by looking at the experience over time, because that will highlight whether there was any underlying sustained period of improvement that may have been worsened because of Covid, about which we might be optimistic about making a return to improved performance. However, it will be best detected by looking at the trend of performance in data. Douglas, you want to come in with a supplementary? Yes, I did. I was just thinking in my head about the local outcome improvement plans and how they map to the performance framework. Is there a check done to ensure that they are aligned? I suppose that that gets us into some of the issues about local discretion and decision making. There is certainly not a check, because I think that that would be a level of interference by central government in the legitimate scope for decision making by local authorities and community planning partnerships that would be inappropriate. There will be dialogue undoubtedly, but a check would be an exaggeration of what I think would be inappropriate given our current statutory framework. The way in which the statute is constructed is that public authorities have a duty to have regard to, and Mr Lumsam will be familiar with his local authority background. That is something that a local authority must properly and fully consider and reflect that. I could not say that there is a 32-piece jigsaw puzzle that adds up to making a neat picture about each of the indicators about what is going to happen in each local authority area or each community planning partnership area, but there is an expectation that those partnerships will have due regard to and follow that direction. I have to say that the leadership of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and, in particular, it is present towards supporting the direction of policy that has been appreciated by the Government and is very resolute in how that is taken forward. Just a process question to begin with, cabinet secretary, on the two upcoming processes that will affect the performance framework, one being the review of the national outcomes. The Government has also confirmed that the wellbeing and sustainable development bill will have some effect on the NPF. Can you explain how those two processes are going to interact? Will it be sequential? Will development of the bill only take place after the review of national outcomes or will the processes overlap and interact? I think that there is a likelihood that they will overlap, I would think, but we will obviously have to make sure that there is a clear line of sight between the two. However, the preparatory work on the wellbeing bill is likely to take place. I better just give myself the caveat that I better just confirm this in writing to the committee, but I think that the timescale of preparation of that bill, undoubtedly, will be undertaken at the same time as the review of the national outcomes. How do we prevent those processes from becoming siloed, given that they both feed into what is the same framework? Essentially, we will be internally within Government, and I am very happy for us to be open and to have open dialogue with Parliament and its committees—in particular, its committee—on ensuring that those processes are closely linked together. Many of the discussions that I have had internally about the wellbeing legislation involve ministers and officials who are also involved in the national performance framework. Those are not compartmentalised conversations, but I am very happy to give the committee an assurance that we will have open dialogue around those questions. I am sure that that is an issue that we will want to revisit. It goes back somewhat to Michelle Thomson's initial line of questioning around top-line measurements of improving, maintaining and worsening. I accept completely that that is the top-line of what is a very detailed process, and at every level beneath that you get much more granular data. Even for a top-line, I am concerned that it might be just a touch too simplified. To take as an example the active travel measurement. It is classified as improving, but it is very far off hitting the targets that the Scottish Government has set in active travel. We got to 4 per cent of journeys by cycling when the 2020 target was 10 per cent. Is the improving measurement, particularly the improving classification, a danger that it is simplifying some of those measurements just slightly too much in that a whole range of them could be improving, but essentially glatially and not on a trajectory towards the targets that have been set? I think that that is an entirely fair challenge. If you only look at a minister's only interaction about the performance of a policy area to look at the chart and say, that is improving, I do not need to worry about that, I would not advise that. I think that you have to go beneath and look at the patterns and trends. The students that I would give to Mr Greer are that when ministers are being briefed about detail and performance, the underlying patterns—in my response to John Mason a moment ago and a number of the other answers that I have given this morning—the underlying pattern and performance is highlighted, challenged, explored and compared against what might be reasonably expected so that there is a proper understanding of whether that is a reasonable conclusion to arrive at or not. I have no doubt that ministers are going into that in a far greater level of detail than just that top-line measurement, but to go back to John Mason's line of questioning, if we are trying to get wider public buy-in but also wider buy-in from across the various levels of the state and of the third sector, I suppose, is there not a question about whether or not this measurement is a useful presentation for those who are only engaging at surface level? Yes, that is the short answer. There is one attempt to try to look at what is an assessment of performance. If one were to look at that in a rather glib way, I could see how you could arrive at the challenge that Mr Greer is posing to me. What the alternatives are—I remember, back to 2007, we had a variety of coloured arrows that were designed to try to help, but I think that they probably fell victim to exactly the same challenge that Mr Greer is putting to me. The key point is that a whole range of different actions have to be taken to try to improve performance in a particular area. If we were to say that a journey's back to travel performance is improving, that should determine other steps on active travel, then that would be the wrong conclusion to arrive at. You have to take a whole range of other interventions to improve that performance. The final question is about the role of transport in the NPF. There is one obvious transport indicator, which is that of the travel one that we have just mentioned. It is tangentially related to a couple of others around greenhouse gas emissions, public satisfaction with public services and public transport. Transport seems to be the one major area of Government responsibility that is not directly addressed. Health, education, environment, economy and so on are all categories under which groups of outcomes are measured. Transport is not one of those categories. It has one specific indicator around active travel, but everywhere else it is just tangentially related to it. Given the importance of transport for our net zero ambitions in particular and the challenges that we have had with reducing transport emissions compared to all other sectors, do you have any concern that the NPF is perhaps not taking transport into account to the extent that we need it to to hit those wider outcomes? I think that that is a fair observation that perhaps is not the profile and the focus that there should be. I think that the description of the transport indicators as part of influencing a range of other factors is a fair assessment. Going back to what I said in my response to Tess White, you could take a decision. The review in 2023 might come to the conclusion that that needs to be an awful lot more net zero than it is just now. That might be a reasonable conclusion to come out of that review. Therefore, the transport indicators, given their significance, might reflect that change in emphasis. However, I assure Mr Greer that there will be a number of areas in which the impact and effect of transport in the performance of different areas of policy are reflected, but there can be ways in which we can revise and revisit that material. That is all from me. You have already responded to more than 30 questions from the committee, but we are still within time, so I will ask some more short questions to finish off. Audit Scotland said that there are inherent challenges in delivering an outcome-based approach. For example, it is difficult to separate out what impact public services have on outcomes as many factors are outside the direct control of the public sector. They talk about how that can be resolved through effective joint-up working, early planning and understanding of the evidence and its gaps of help. I am wondering how those gaps can be closed so that we have a much fair picture. The observations from Audit Scotland are reasonable observations. In all my evidence this morning, I certainly hope that the committee has got the sense from me that it is important that we look at a lot of the information in the round so that we do not just make glib judgments about individual components. The challenge that Audit Scotland comments highlight is that it is difficult to make a direct connection about every single pound of public expenditure and every outcome that is achieved. It is more obvious in some areas than in others, but it can be difficult to make that link. However, the comments that the Auditor General made a couple of weeks ago in relation to the way in which we need to operate to ensure that we improve outcomes, which are all heavily based on collaboration, on partnership working, on disrespecting organisational boundaries, on focusing more on outcomes than on inputs. I think that it helps to structure the discussion that we can legitimately have to consider whether or not public expenditure is being used as effectively as it could be used to achieve outcomes that are widely shared within our society. I think that the national performance framework helps us in that respect. In response to Tess White, you talked about audit, statue reporting and parliamentary scrutiny, all playing a role as well as the national performance framework. Amid the landscape, where does the NPF fit in on the success of Government policy? Is it weighted relative to those other areas? Or how does the Government decide? What we have tried to do, and we arrived at this position after extensive stakeholder dialogue and parliamentary engagement, was to create a framework that gave as clear a sense of direction to the public and to the public bodies of the direction that the Government is trying to take the country and of what the purpose of our policy interventions are, what values are underpin those and what outcomes we are trying to achieve as a distillation of that journey. The picture is designed to enable a range of different organisations to decide what they may do where they may spend their resources to contribute towards that direction of travel. That is what I would describe as an approach designed to influence not direct the choices that are made in terms of priorities and policy making at a local level. It is designed to influence not to direct. I think that that is the right approach given our current statutory arrangements as a country. Organisations can then look to identify what they can contribute to the process. There is a whole series of measures and mechanisms of accountability that provide us with assurance about how much progress has been made on that journey. All those measures of accountability are publicly available. Some of them are published in relation to NPF, others are published more widely and others are the subject of analysis by organisations such as Audit Scotland. How do you weigh specifically the NPF relative to those other areas? How do you say that we have looked at those indicators and they are worsening or indeed improving or maintaining whatever it happens to be? You then decide that additional resources may or may not have to be shifted from me to be in order to address those matters. That is a process of reflection that goes on within Cabinet where we look at the issues that are being identified by the national performance framework in relation to our policy agenda and where we look to take different decisions to improve performance. Part of my responsibility as Deputy First Minister is around the delivery of the Government's agenda. I have been looking over the course of the period since the election at the delivery of our commitments that were made around 100 days programme. I am now focusing my attention on the delivery of the programme for government and the partnership agreement to ensure that we have in place the arrangements that will give us confidence that that programme will be delivered and that it will help us to achieve the ambitions that are set out in the national performance framework. The national performance framework has now been in existence for some 14 years. When it came out, it was considered to be world-leading. Do you believe that Scotland is a better place because of the national performance framework? If so, how can you evaluate that? I think that we are in a better place because we have a much greater focus on the achievement of outcomes in Scotland today than was the case in 2007. That, to me, has been the substantive policy development over those years that we have a much greater focus on the achievement of outcomes. That is a prize that is worth having. Government in general can be bedevilled by focusing on the short-term immediate high-profile issues at the expense of taking the necessary steps on the long-term outcome-based journeys. That does not mean that everything is smooth and lateral, that it all just takes a lovely neat course. The road is very bumpy, but having that focus on the long-term policy direction and the outcomes to be achieved is a significant strength for Scotland today. We shall end on that positive note. I would like to thank the Deputy First Minister and his officials today for coming along and particularly the Deputy First Minister for his expansive contributions and responses to questions. I would also like to add that I am particularly pleased that you have been here in person. We found that it greatly improves our interaction with witnesses when people are in the room today, and certainly you have helped to improve greatly our understanding of the workings of the national performance framework. Without further ado, I thank our witnesses. I will call for a two-minute recess, and then we will come back in just a few minutes for one or two wee housekeeping issues, but thank you very much, Deputy First Minister. We will close the public part of the meeting at this point.