 Hewyd i mi, ac rydyn ni'n hyn הואch yn yw'r microphoneau Blisdown yn 2023 ergynny llon. Tobeilion ni'n ymweld llawer o cyf 1943 daf, fel Llyfr caton, Oedden i ddelu'r EU ond leur. Rwy'n credu i'r gael i'r ddau, ond mae'n gwneud eu cyfnodau ar gyfer Iesbydd. A zedden nhw'n dweud i'r dweud i'r ddau, ac yn ni'n dweud i'r ddau a'r ddau, a'r ddau ar gyfer Evinins Pwg, Pwg, Pwg, Pwg, Pwg, Pwg. A'r ddau ar gyfer Iesbydd i'r ddau a'r ddau, Dr Helen Foster, Ulster University. A bwg i'r ddau, mae'n gweithio i'r ddau a i'r ddau i'r ddau, a ddau i'r ddau i'r ddau, I will move straight to questions. The first is from me, so I will open up with some, and then colleagues around the table will contribute subsequently. In relation to the taller inquiry and to the former prime minister, the Sunday Times editorial two days ago said and I quote, The civil service is one of the great institutions of state. It is effective as rest on its neutrality. That is now in question and reflects badly on ministers as well as officials. Civil servants must provide candid advice without fear of reprisal, but ministers must be able to demand professionalism and results from their officials without fear of a grievance claim. Now this was obviously referring to Westminster, but is it the same here? If that's directed at me, I don't know, is the honest answer, which is not the best opening answer to a committee like this. I should say my expertise is in Westminster and UK level civil service. I'm very happy to speak to the tolly inquiry and the RAB affair. I would say that the editorial that you quoted is absolutely right, that in the impartial civil service able to speak without fear of a grievance claim. The favour to ministers is very necessary to good government and also ministers should be able to demand high standards of their officials. I think it's unfortunate in the debate around the fallout from the RAB affair that has sort of turned into a debate about the civil service, about the impartiality of the civil service. If you read the tolly report, it's a pretty thorough piece of work. It's definitely written by a lawyer. It goes through in fairly clear and, to my mind, fair detail around the circumstances in the Ministry of Justice, the Foreign Office and the Department for Exiting, the European Union. It finds a couple of specific occasions where Mr RAB, in Mr Tolly's view, was intimidating. Because of the test that Mr RAB had set himself, he resigned. I personally don't think that speaks to a wider problem in the UK civil service or the part of the civil service that service ministers in Scotland. Clearly, like any large institution, there are officials who are not as good at their jobs as there might be. There is a need across all of the different parts of the civil service to improve the skills, the project management, perhaps to tackle occasionally a culture of risk aversion, to improve policymaking for civil servants to have more background in data and deeper expertise and so on. Some of the things that we might get into over the course of the rest of this session, but I don't think that there is some sort of conspiracy to thwart ministers in either the UK civil service or the civil service in Scotland. I should have said Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister there. Dr Foster, does anything you want to add on that? No, I think that my research principally looks at public accounts committee and public accountability. From my interviews that I have done, it's obvious that personalities pay a very, very big part. That is officials and politicians. I think that, as Alex said, this is just a reflection of our particular sort of circumstances. It is not an indicator of wider problems. Dr Foster, in your submission, mentioned the churn, which he said that churn among civil servants is an issue across the civil service in both Whitehall and across the devolved administrations, which is encouraged for the development of generalist civil servants. Researchers have also commented, adverse, about churn among politicians. I had a wee look, and apparently in the year to September 22, the UK Government had five education secretaries from 2020 to 2022 housing ministers. Here at Holyrood, we have had four transport ministers in two years. How much does the churn in ministers, as well as civil servants, meet against good decision making? Oh, absolutely, because each minister that comes in will have their own set of priorities. They may be looking at a wider framework that has been set out by Cabinet, but everyone has their own little emphasis, I suppose. The minister is as important. It is a two-way street. It is the minister and the official working together. If you have a large number of ministers looking after a portfolio over a short period of time, it means that they also have to get to grips with their brief, not only the officials but the ministers as well. They are not building up that expertise. I would also say that the figures that I have looked at have been at very senior positions in the civil service, but I think the churn from interviews that I have done, the churn below that higher level is actually worse than the highest level. There is a lot of churn at the middle-ranking civil service as well. I would entirely agree with that. I think that it is a problem in the civil service. I think that it is a problem among ministers. We did some research and produced a graphic a few years ago that I am happy to share with the committee that compared the tenure of UK Government ministers fairly unfavorably with our football managers. There is a real problem there. I would always argue that Prime Ministers and First Ministers should do what they can to maintain Ministers in post for as long as possible. It is definitely not a good thing for the delivery and execution of Government priorities for Ministers to turn around. I would highlight that the problem is perhaps particularly acute in the civil service if civil servants are spinning around too much because we rely on the civil service to provide that continuity. One of the benefits of an impartial civil service that stays in office across administrations is that it develops that deep expertise. The legitimacy of the civil service relies on its expertise and its ability to serve successive Governments and Ministers. While I absolutely think that there is a problem with Ministers moving around too rapidly, I would say that there is something particular to focus on in the civil service around making sure that officials stay in post so that they can support whichever minister is in office to take the best decisions. The structure of the civil servants at Whitehall and much of course the civil service structure that we have here is more or less based on that. It has been in position since 1854 when generalism was seen as the be all and end all. We are now in a much more sophisticated high-tech kind of society and we have a lot of differences over the generations. The contract procurement is complex and needs special skills. Are we in a situation now whereby we cannot deliver Government without an increase in specialism? The generalism idea just won't cut it anymore. I think that you need both. If you look back to the 19th century and the sort of foundation of the quote unquote modern civil service, there was an assumption about generalism but actually even then that was mostly about rooting out the second and third sons of minor gentry who were looking for an easy life in the civil service. So even then it was actually about recruitment on merit and about getting people with the right skills. To some extent the context changes but that desire, that need to get people with the best possible skills into those jobs retains. It is one of the slightly depressing things when you work on civil service and government reform that you look at Northcott Travellian in the 19th century, you then look at Fulton report which was in the 60s, you look at some of the debates in the 1990s, you look at Blair and then Francis Mord and the same themes around skills keep coming up time after time. I do think though you hit on an important point and certainly the UK civil service at the UK level but I think the same is true in Scotland has made fairly strong efforts over the last 10, 15 years or so to professionalise what it calls its functions. So the commercial and procurement function, the finance function, audit, digital and data importantly, they do not have a high enough status in the civil service but they are getting there. They are at what slightly euphemistically referred to as different levels of maturity which basically means how good and well established they are. And you'd say that some are more mature than others and actually some became more mature like digital in 2010 to 2015 and then perhaps slightly fell back a bit. So those functions do exist. It's got better than it was in 2010, 2005 but there's still quite a long way to go. I would make a very brief word in favour of the generalist. It is important in government that ministers have people who can synthesise advice, who can fix things, who can act as translators of their policy objectives into the department. But of all the things to worry about in the civil service, it's not the fixers and the generalists I would be worrying about who have an important role, it's the people with the deeper technical skills as your question implied. OK, thank you for that. I mean, I don't think anyone would want to replace generalists in their entirety so also about the balance isn't it Dr Foster and I think there's a concern there isn't that. And also that people when they could develop a level of expertise then in order to get promoted, get transferred into other areas of the civil service and that skill is kind of lost. Also, I think there's an issue about how some of these specialisms have allured in the economy just a few weeks ago that I think the head of cyber security Westminster was advertised at somewhere in the region of less than £56,000 a year which in that kind of area is not going to attract and I thought top notch recruits no harm to whoever gets the job in the end. So where do you feel this balance should be struck Dr Foster between specialists and generalists if we are to get optimum decision making? It's hard to know the exact balance. I don't have to wait for this to go to pink or to green. It's hard to know exactly where the balance should be but I agree there's always room for the generalist. I suppose the skill that I would say was lacking from the reading and so on that I have done is project management. It seems to be a particular area that would be particularly important here. And I know from being a member of staff at a business school that in fact project management even trying to get somebody to deliver project management to deliver a course in it is very, very difficult. There are skills that are very in demand and as you say sometimes we are both as universities and you know governments are hindered really in who we can attract because if you are competing with the likes of the major professional services companies that are going to offer x times what you can offer in Salaride that's going to be an issue. I think the finance has actually increased. That specialism has improved over the years. There are far more money fully qualified accountants now in the civil service than would have been the case a number of years ago but there are other areas where those specialisms haven't been developed to the same extent that they should have been. One of the things that was mentioned by former senior civil service was the view that there should be a separation between policy development and implementation. That wasn't shared instantly by former ministers we spoke to which I think is quite interesting. If you are looking at policy development and then policy implementation when I was looking at failures that had gone before the Audit Office had reported on invariably there seem to be this is policy this is implementation we don't look at policy we look at implementation. There's a blurred line sometimes it's very easy it's very defined but usually it's messier I think one of the other submissions talked about messy this is a very messy business it doesn't follow the we would see the academic the nice little diagrams that we draw. So I think you need some people who are there from the beginning right through but then you need people coming in and out really to add value as you go through the whole process. If that answers that yeah I'm I'm I'm pretty skeptical about too much separation between policy and delivery not least because I think for the last 20 years or so longer actually there has been a sense that policy and delivery are separate and the government has been struggled all governments have been struggling to rebind them together I think one of the things that the civil service needs to get better at is building genuine multidisciplinary teams that see projects all the way through from policy development to implementation that doesn't mean as Dr Foster said that the cost can't change a little bit and you might need lots more project management and implementation skills towards the end of the project and unless at the start but I think actually having continuity of civil servants involved in these projects is really important. I also think there's something about there's an assumption often that those teams need to be led by the policy wonk or the generalist. Sometimes that's correct but it goes to your point Mr Gibson that in order to rise up the civil service you tend to develop those generalist skills and those leadership skills it's quite hard you hit a you're much more likely to hit a career buffer if you're a project management specialist and you want to stay in that. Again a bit less so now than 10-15 years ago but I still think it's a problem. I think the people who really get to the top of the civil service are those people who can work well with ministers have those generalist kind of courtier style skills and I think we need to be much better at having multidisciplinary teams that are genuinely led by the person with the right skills to implement that policy. There should be ownership of policy right through from the conception to delivery and post-legit scrutiny of course that relies on the ministers being in post as we touched on earlier on. One of the things that I've been very curious about in terms of the evidence sessions that we've taken and we've taken them from former ministers, former senior civil servants, from civil servants and academics, there's been absolutely no mention whatsoever from anyone of special advisers. Those are ill-defined and appear to have no specific job description. They've been around for about 45-50 years and they're endemic in both Whitehall and here in the Scottish Parliament. Boris Johnson had 126 on an average salary of 102,000. Holyroodd was 17 last autumn on an average salary of 92,000 incidentally and now there are 12, I understand. So what's their relationship like with civil servants and how do they fit into ministerial decision making? I think this is a particular, the growth of the special adviser has been a particular problem as regards accountability because it doesn't fit neatly into the paradigm we have, which is ministers are responsible to Parliament, politicians are responsible to the electorate at the end of the day and then there are procedures in place for the official for the civil service. They can be called before the order committee or they are answerable and it is much more blurred whenever the special adviser is involved and obviously the special adviser is a political appointee. It's not impartial like the civil servant. So that is a whole area. I think that needs to be looked at in much more detail. I don't know if that's something that this committee can look at or it's a problem throughout the devolved administrations. It's not just Whitehall or here. If we had a government in Northern Ireland we'd have the same problems. We still have spads. I agree on the accountability point and I think there have been some very high profile examples of special advisers that rather than exceeded their remit have been allowed by their ministerial principle to exceed their remit. So I think some of the things that Dominic Cummings for example said about I appointed or I dismissed a cabinet secretary or I forced out a chancellor poses real and quite profound problems for accountability as Dr Foster said. Why did he do that though? It was because the prime minister at the time let him. So I think it does come back to ministers, prime ministers, about how far they allow the special advisers to run and in the end the accountability sits with the minister. I do think that we can get distracted a little bit by those very high profile examples and in my experience and in our research the vast majority of relationships between civil servants and special advisers are actually very, very good. I would have no problem with more special advisers if prime ministers were willing to take the heat or first ministers willing to take the heat being appointed. Because I think a good special adviser and a good civil servant firstly get on very well and recognise their complementary roles and secondly a good special adviser can amplify the voice, the views of a minister in a way that a very time poor minister can never do. So actually very close working relationships between a special adviser and those civil servants in the private office, those senior civil servants in the department that are trying to get stuff done can be really, really good. And a good special adviser who can synthesise the politics, the policy, the media is absolutely worth their weight in gold. I think it's interesting, they also share the fate of their ministers often as well, so if the minister does well they do well and if not they don't do particularly well, although they're not always tied to them in that way. I mean they try and help the ministers to formulate and deliver policies so I can understand your view there but it does benefit the governing party and it is politicised. I'm just wondering whether they have an impact on the access of ministers to the Government, sorry, whether they have an impact on the access of civil servants to ministers. Are they kind of a Martin Borman type character who stands at the door and prevents access from others, even senior civil servants, getting to the minister when perhaps they need to? Dr Foster? Of course, again that's down to the politician as Alex had said. Is the politician prepared to actually tell the Spad that he's stepping out of line here? That may be the case in some circumstances but both the civil servant and the politician, all parties have a part to play, they almost take responsibility. So if the special adviser is exceeding their power and is holding back access, that is something that needs to be addressed by the politician. Before you come in there, you did touch on workload earlier on and obviously ministers can have a dozen meetings a day, they've got to respond to questions in the chamber, they've got to formulate policies, they speak in debate, they're often pressed to deliver statements or indeed they're proactive in terms of that and they may have a constituency, they probably have a home and family life. How do they actually manage to balance effective decision making with these other pressures? I think it's really really hard for ministers and I think it's one of the problems in the system that we put too much pressure on ministers to take their decisions. On the special adviser access point, it can be a problem but it's fairly rare because in most Westminster government departments there are only two special advisers, sometimes three or four, that's still very small in relation to the number of civil servants. It's quite rare for Spads to block access. They might pick favourites a bit, work out who they think is good in the department and who they think isn't so good and use that to regulate access. One of the things that I think is important, there was an experiment in Westminster called extended ministerial offices which was about giving ministers more personal support, more people they could personally appoint, not necessarily political appointments. I was worried a little bit about that, that that might mean that the minister floating off a bit if you like being in a bubble and insulated from what was actually going on in the department and what civil servants were doing to deliver it. Too much insulation around a minister I think can become a problem. On your workload point, I think that's right and I think that is, in Westminster certainly, there are secretaries of state who can be entirely overwhelmed by the workload because they're trying to run these huge government departments. There are junior ministers who can sometimes feel a bit underemployed and actually some of it does come back to a secretary of state who's prepared to delegate, who's prepared to set clear priorities, but I do also think that there is a role for ministers being perhaps a bit clearer with civil servants where their powers of delegation lie as well to clear some of the clutter off ministers' deaths so that they can focus on what's really important. Dr Foster, does that mean that because of the workload of ministers not being able to have their eye constantly on the ball all the time, does that have an impact on the quality of decisions? Does it mean that some of the decisions are affected by them being outsourced because they're having to rely on other people effectively to have a full grasp of the details? I suppose down the years the politicians I have interviewed would all say that they're busy, they're very busy people. People sitting on this committee, I've interviewed committee members before, maybe people sitting in the future from committees constituency a couple of hundred miles away etc have lots and lots of commitments and I'm sure that is even more exaggerated for a minister will have additional responsibilities. However, it is a matter, as Alex said, of prioritising what is important and I suppose sometimes there is a tendency to try and do too much or even to focus on too many different policies, the feel that they have to do lots and lots of things particularly if they think they might only be in office for a short time. You have to get all of these through without thinking them through taking a very short term approach. Again, it's down to prioritisation. What can I do? We go in in the morning, you've got X, Y and Z but which is the most important? What does the particular government want to focus on? At the end of the day, the minister makes the decision and the civil servants or whatever advise. Consultants are sometimes used and there was a big piece of work a number of years ago by all of the national audit office and the devolved audit offices on the use of consultants. I'm not convinced that the consultants were giving necessarily the best advice at enormous expense. There actually was a case of a report coming in in one particular case and the consultants hadn't even changed the name. They'd actually reused something and it hadn't been proofread properly. Of course, consultants are hired because there isn't the specialist capacity within departments often. That's why they're obviously... The use of consultants would need to be weighed up very carefully. Are we using it as just a way of passing the buck rather than taking both the civil servants and the politicians have to own the decisions that are made? They can't really be outsourced. Last but not least, you've got 24-hour news cycle pressure for the ministers to make announcements. They want to be seen to be successful in their own political parties as well as the wider public. They've only got the life expectancy of a Hibs or a Chelsea manager. You can understand that they want to make an impact right away. It all comes back to the same thing about churn and stability within the civil service-ministerial relationship, doesn't it, in terms of being able to develop long-term significant outcomes? We have a situation where ministers often come up with wonderful ideas that may not be wonderful in terms of implementation. They've long since moved on by the time the ideas are implemented. The other issue is that you can measure the outputs fairly quickly. Do we employ more people or whatever? It's the long-term outcomes that are not likely to be seen for five, ten years down the line. There's not an emphasis on that because you measure what you can measure easily. That's necessarily what you should be measuring. As you say, the people have moved on. There's always an emphasis, I suppose, on the press. In particular, ministers want to do the sexy bit, announcing the policy rather than the drudgery of seeing the whole thing through. Again, going back to failures that came before our committees and public accounts committees, it seemed to be that second bit that was really missing. I agree with what Helen was saying, but not to be too counseled to spare about it, I absolutely stand by everything that we were saying earlier about the churn of ministers and civil servants. I do think that there is a danger, and this goes back a little bit to the Dominic Robb debate, assuming that these are two antagonistic tribes. The civil servants are saying, go slow, and this is very risky. Ministers are saying, I don't have much time and I need to respond to the demands of the media. Both of those pressures are true. Civil servants will tend to be more risk averse. They will tend to point out the financial, legal, practical obstacles, but that can be a creative tension as well. I think that one of the things for an incoming Government or a Government that wants to refresh itself or incoming ministers to think about is how do I work really constructively with my civil servants but not just take everything they say at face value or dismiss everything they say? How do I get under the bonnet of the advice that they are giving me so that I can form my own view about whether they are being too risk averse, whether we should take this financial risk, what the risk is of something getting gummed up in the courts or whatever? I think that the really good ministers give civil servants a hearing but are very active in forming their own view about whether they believe civil servants advice. Some of the best ministers I've worked with, regardless of the political party, were very open to that, had their own strong views, but recognised the different players' role in the process. I think that the best civil servants do exactly the same. A lot of that has come through strongly in evidence. I'm going to open out the session now, Daniel Timfold, by John. Thank you very much, convener. In a sense, I want to carry on in terms of the line of questioning that the convener was asking regarding generalism. Before I do, can I just thank you both for, first of all, name-checking the Fulton report, which is something that I've done in the past, because I think it's interesting how frequently these themes come around and also project management. Dr Foster, you set out key stages of decision making, of being problem identification agenda setting, consideration of potential acts, implementation and evaluation, which I think is a really good framework. But what has struck me, when we've been sitting down discussing this, whether it be with former ministers, civil servants or indeed outside, the tendency is to always dwell on policy. Our inquiry is about decision making in the round. We're not being prescriptive. If we push a bit further, we might talk about finance, but really only at prodding. Certainly, if we ask very specifically if things like commercial considerations, and given the number of external contracts and relationships that the Government now has, it's not that the state does everything, it contracts out a lot. That's quite odd, and in a private sector organisation that commercial function becomes key. When we're talking about generalism, is it not so much generalism, but that we over emphasise that policy, that those early points, those first two billet points in Dr Foster's, to almost the exclusion? It's not so much about generalism in terms of an area, but we need a bit more focus on those different stages of the life cycle and having specialist skills within them. Would that be a fair summary? I think that that is fair enough, yes. The identification of the problem, then the agenda setting. The consideration of all the potential actions, and also, I think I noted, I certainly have read the issue of non-action. There's always an option not to do anything, and what are the consequences of that going to be, which is perhaps everybody wants to do something, rather than maybe just consider that the status quo might be okay. The implementation then and the evaluation also, it should be a loop. I tried to do, I tried to upload a little circle, but I wasn't very good at trying to upload this onto your, I should have done it as a PDF and then attached it, but it should be a virtuous circle. When you have implement, you look at what has happened before, you have implementation issues, which didn't, something that didn't work out. That should inform the agenda setting and the policy, so there should be learning as we go through that, and I am not convinced that that happens. That these lessons are not learned, so we reinvent the policy and we make the same mistakes again. I wonder if you'd agreed, but I'll add to the extrins, you were discussing some length about not throwing out the generalism. I wonder if the question is actually how that generalism is actually acquired. If you look at other organisations, typically you would be drawn into a particular function, and when you hit a certain level, you've developed expertise in an early career, you then start hopping, so you'd see people who have come up through a finance function or an engineering function or a sales function, and it's only once they hit the mid to senior career that they maybe start broadening out their skills. Is there a need to sort of not throughout generalism, but think about when we seek civil servants to acquire that generalism? Yes, and I think there are the specific skills that you need in order to do a finance job or a commercial job or a digital data job. I would make something of a distinction between those quote-unquote policy skills, so we quite often ally the policy civil servant with the generalist civil servant. I think one of the gaps that the civil service does have is deeper specialist expertise. I don't think that civil servants should stay in the same job or in the same narrow field going up for the whole of their careers, but I do think that the way I talk about it is to have more of a career policy anchor. You have those commercial, financial, functional experts who are part of the multidisciplinary team, but within each broad policy area, so education policy or social policy, you have people who are much more consciously anchored to a particular policy specialism so that, over the course of their career, they are not very narrow, but they are developing a broad understanding of how government works in their sphere, but they are anchored to something more than they might otherwise have been. I worked in deaf or a beard, I worked in other government departments, but I was anchored to the kind of how government worked. I worked on constitution, I worked on electoral systems, I worked in private offices. I was a sort of boiler room and mechanics of government type person and I felt that was my career anchor. I think that civil servants should be thinking that way so that they can bring that to the party as part of those multidisciplinary teams that I was talking about earlier. Just following on from that, one of the other points that has been made by separate groups of people is that there is a lack of consistency in terms of the approach to both policy making and implementation across different portfolios. Bear in mind that, in the Scottish Government, we do not have multiple departments. It is essentially a single government department, which is, in a sense, quite a surprise. You might expect that in Whitehall, but not the Scottish Government. I wonder whether you would both agree that therein lies a bit of the problem. If you do not have those consistent approaches to both policy development and implementation, you will always struggle. I suppose it is not a case of one size fits all, which I think is said somewhere as well. Sometimes you know that you can have a framework, but the framework needs to be moulded for particular circumstances of a particular function or a particular area. I suppose that it is also moulded to a certain extent to reflect the particular personalities that are involved. You have the framework, but it is how you interpret that. It is very dependent on the people that are involved. As you will probably be aware, in Westminster we quite often looked with envy at the coherence and consistency of the Scottish Government because of that sort of one department. It might not feel like it here, but it felt more coherent looking from London. Two quick points on that. It is a really difficult and complicated balance subject, but who should be accountable or how should civil servants be accountable for that consistency of application and of skill? I have come to the view that we do not get the accountability arrangements quite right. Civil servants should be more directly accountable, whether to Parliament or through some other means, for the consistency of certain functions of Government. I would include contingency planning and some aspects of project management or commercial skills. It is really hard because that butts up against ministerial accountability. There is a very delicate balance, but there is an important and interesting question about how we more directly hold the civil service to account for the skills that it develops and the consistency of those skills. I think that there is a second point also about the public scrutiny of that, but that may be something that we come on to. I do think that there is a bit of a risk, looking through some of the evidence that you have received, wiring diagrams and everything, that we focus a lot on the process, on the policy cycle or a policy and implementation cycle. The other thing that civil service and ministers need to think about is having the right people with the right skills in the right place, because Government is always going to be messy, as Dr Foster said. It is always going to be an incoherent. You are always going to have to react to the demands of a media cycle, and it is pretty rare that you get the opportunity to sit down and map out a policy cycle and say, OK, we have got five years to deliver this, here is how we are going to do it. It is much more common to have the right people reacting in the right way to develop and implement a policy. My only slight counterpoint is that that assumes that everything in the private sector is neat, orderly and predictable, and it is not. If you look at successful large organisations, they will have a lot more consistency and standardised methodologies. I agree that they need to be adapted, but I think that we need to be careful about exceptionalism for decision making in Government. I would entirely acknowledge that. I sometimes get to it too much reading across between private and public sectors, because the pressures are different, but I do think that, particularly in these areas that we are talking about—commercial, finance, data—there is nothing magic about public sector or nothing magic about Government, which is why I came up with that. How do you hold the civil service more directly to account for the consistency of these standards? Also, another thing that we have written about quite like the IFG, how does the centre of Government set those standards in a way that does not undermine an individual minister delivering their policy and being accountable to Parliament for doing it, but does set some kind of basic standard of how Government should work? In Westminster, the Cabinet Office is far too weak in doing that. It has become a very strange department. There is much more space for a smaller, in some respects more contained but much stronger and authoritative centre, which is precisely to set those standards that you say. You have got me on a hobby horse now, so why don't you get off it? It's an interesting one, Michael Barber's book on the destruction to deliver sits on my bookshelf. It's one sort of final question, and I'm interested by the IFG's proposal that there should be a new civil service bill clarifying the role. More than just function, we also need to think about the structure. One of the things that strikes me in the Scottish Government is that you don't have direct mapping at the director general level to cabinet secretary. When you look below that at director level, some directors will feed into multiple ministers and cabinet secretaries as well. I'm not arguing that you need a direct one-to-one, but you do need something about the wiring diagrams. You don't want too many connections. Critically at cabinet level, if you don't have that clear line of accountability and delivery into this issue, is there a need to think about that in the Scottish Government? Are there examples in the Whitehall of Good and Bad, because I'm guessing that the different departments are quite different in terms of how they manage those relationships between civil service roles and ministerial roles? I quite like the way Francis Moore talks about his reflections from his time doing civil service reform about tight and loose. Whitehall suffers from acute tension between the vertical, the departmental structures and the horizontal, which are the functions and the cross-cutting skills and support teams, if you like. Francis Moore, with which I agree, is that there are certain things that centres should hold tightly, like finance standards, for example, and those should be applied consistently across government. Then there are other things that are loose, like policy development and, to some extent, implementation, which should be held in the vertical hierarchies of the department and for which Secretary of State should be accountable to Parliament for delivering. However, I think that you have to recognise that there is a tension there, and there is a tension over accountabilities and there is a tension over, particularly, budgets and who sits the money in the role of the Treasury in it all. However, I think that there is something in that model about having, to your point, clarity, clear vertical hierarchies, but also everybody being clear on what those horizontals are as well. A better or worse practice, I think, is hard in Whitehall to disentangle the overall complexities and problems with the department that might be in, not in a particularly good way, like I would say, perhaps, the Home Offices at the moment, with the challenges of its policy agenda and broader cultural questions about the wiring diagrams. However, you look at the Cabinet Office, and it is pretty messy at the moment. There are lots of senior people trying to carve out their role. There has been a profusion of second permanent secretaries in Whitehall, which, to some extent, relieves the burden on permanent secretaries, which is a difficult and overloaded job, but also confuses accountabilities and so on. I would definitely lean towards having clearer accountability lines. I do not know fully whether that answers your question. Dr Foster, do you have anything to add? No, I do not really have anything to add to that. In Northern Ireland, we obviously do not have an assembly at the moment, but we are very much the functional, the traditional department. We do not have the structure that you have here. Dr Foster, in your paper, I was interested in one or two points that you made that were interesting. One was around the area of public engagement and consultation, and you seem to suggest that the Scottish Parliament Government does consult quite a lot. However, you make the comment, or you quote someone else, that media attention may be a stronger driver in Scotland than the majority of Government agendas in other countries. There was a quote for someone else. It was an observation. You can tell me if you agree or disagree. The media is particularly strong in Scotland. When I was looking at the Public Accounts Committees and Order Committees, I was trying to ensure that there was accountability. We looked at the media coverage throughout the devolved administrations, and the media would seem to be quite strong in Scotland. One of the quotes that I got was that the media, for instance, in Wales, was quite weak. Generally, in Northern Ireland, we have a phone-in programme in the morning called Nolan. Ministers and officials do not want to appear, and I do not want to be quoted on Nolan. When something is picked up by that media, it is very difficult, perhaps in some cases, for the Government to have to react to it, because it is just snowballs. His first comment was that I spoke to the department and nobody was available. The next morning he said, we still have not received anybody, and this goes on for a week. It can have an adverse effect, but getting back to the media, you do consult. You have lots of consultation, but sometimes you have open calls. Do you end up resulting in the same people responding all the time? Do you consult with people who are, like, favoured? Do you consult with people who are going to give you a particular answer? That is not talking about Scotland in particular, but just generally. Even when it comes to appointing consultants, as we talk about consultants, do you appoint consultants that are going to give you a particular answer, because that is what they come up with? I think that we need to be very, very aware of that. Are you consulting them for the purposes of taking a box that we have consulted? Or are you consulting because they are really going to be a driver of the policy? The literature suggests that that is something that Scotland has done very well in. It has taken more consultations to heart, perhaps. Would it be fair to say that we are making better decisions because of that consultation, or is that not necessary? Not necessarily, because the other thing is that you end up then perhaps with parochialism. In the Northern Land context, I know about the health service so that people do not want their local hospital closed, but in fact for the bigger health picture, we do not have the specialisms there. We need to close them, and we need to reconfigure it. If you consult with that local constituency, they are not going to say, close my local hospital. I know that you are all politicians. I know that somebody was quoted on a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly when we had a sitting one. One was met on the steps of Stormont one day and he had sat on the committee and he said, I am away off the constituency, there are no votes here. You have to remember who you are. Even though he performed very well in committee, that was not actually what was going to get him elected again. Mr Thomas, do you want to come in on that? I find it depressingly hard to link improved processes of consultation and engagement with better outcomes, as Dr Foster was just saying. Reflecting all that exactly the same at the Westminster world, I think the more reactive a government gets, the worse its decisions would tend to be. Not always by any means, and sometimes decisions need to be made in a crisis. When I think across my experience in our research, the mistakes that tended to be made, the legislation that tended to be botched tended to be that that had been introduced in a hurry and often in response to a specific crisis, something must be done, this is something, rather than more thought through. The value of consultation and process in getting to better decisions is often less about the engagement with individual communities, but more about the how of the process, letting some area and giving some time, more time to reflect, allowing people to be more bound into a process that they can sign up to, rather than getting to the sharp edge of better decision making. Following on from that, the whole question of short-term decision making against long-term, we took evidence from New Zealand where the suggestion was that the civil servants have a requirement, I think it may be a statutory requirement, to produce some long-term options, not to give advice but just to give these long-term options, to try and get a more long-term view. Dr Foster, you mentioned short-termism in your paper. Should we be more long-term in our thinking, or how do we make better long-term decisions? That is a perpetual problem. It has gone on forever. Obviously, politicians are here until the next mandate. You want to achieve things in that time frame, but I think that there needs to be a more overarching longer-term view taken. In particular, sometimes decisions are taken, or policies are developed, which will actually hinder perhaps an improvement in the future. They answer a particular problem at a particular point in time, but they are actually going to impede something else happening in the future. It has joined up. You can take shorter-term decisions, which are part of a longer-term strategy, if you like. It is difficult, and I do not have the answer. I would not be in a different job if I had the answer. Would that be like putting more money into accident emergency instead of preventive healthcare? Yes. It is always the reactive versus proactive prevention. I am briefly covering the two great problems of decision-making in government, one short-term, long-term and the other cross-departmental, cross-boundary decision-making. On the long-term point, I think that it is very difficult. Ultimately, democracy is the worst system apart from all the others. The failures of the political cycle are outweighed by the many other benefits of it in terms of accountability, responsiveness and so on. My answer, and it is not a perfect one, relates to what I was talking about in response to Mr Johnson's questions about accountability and some of the responsibilities that should rest with the civil service. I strongly believe that the civil service must remain under ministerial control and that policy decisions need to rest with ministers. I do think that there is scope for Parliament, whether it is Westminster, the Scottish Parliament or any other, more explicitly giving the civil service responsibility for certain things, like contingency planning. I think that that would help permanent secretaries and other senior civil servants to feel the heat a bit more on those capacity capability of the state type questions that absolutely should not prohibit Parliament then taking that away again or changing it. It also needs to remain under democratic control, but I think that saying, permanent secretary, you have a responsibility for maintaining a capability in your department up to this particular level on these particular issues would overall help public administration but also help ministers know that there is a kind of base level of competence and capability in the department as they go about pursuing their other policy priorities, but it is not a perfect answer by any means. Does that need legislation to do that? You could set out the aspiration, but given the tendency of the system to sort of revert to the norm, legislation would underpin it. Secondly, the fact that I am defensive when I talk about this and acutely alive to the sort of anti-democratic argument, kind of permostate argument there, I think it would be important if any role like that were to be taken on by a bureaucracy that it was under a parliamentary mandate and parliamentary control. The other area that I want to touch on was the question of transparency. Generally speaking we think of transparency as being a good thing, but we have had it suggested to us by former civil servants that too much transparency means that civil servants and ministers cannot be as frank with each other as might be beneficial. How do we get that balance right, do you think? Well, you can have, as I quoted in my paper to you, when we had the, we have the RANDUX in Northern Ireland, but it was to do with the award of the contract in Westminster, and then we had the renewable heat issue in Northern Ireland. It came to light when we had a full inquiry that meetings were held and there were no minutes, which was an issue. So I think it needs to be recorded, but not necessarily all the detail needs to be recorded, so it's not a verbatim account of what has happened, but it is who was there, what decision was made, and that is recorded. Transparency, I mean, I could go back to civil servants, they would say that wouldn't they? I know that the Freedom of Information Act has actually been used as a reason for not recording. In some cases certainly that came out in the renewable heat inquiry in Northern Ireland that if it wasn't recorded then it couldn't be reported. It's a truism, but transparency seems like a very good thing when you're out of government, not such a good thing when you're in it and vice versa. So I think there's a, you absolutely must preserve the private space for ministers, officials, others to take decisions to maybe, you know, say silly things and then realise they're silly. But I do think, maybe this is now out of government, I think we need to shift the dollar more towards at least the underpinning evidence being more publicly available. I mean impact assessments certainly Westminster pretty shoddy quite often and a more thorough public presentation of underpinning evidence I think would work. I do also think that, again, I would shift the dollar a little bit on the provision of advice to ministers. I absolutely wouldn't release submissions that go direct to ministers in public within a few days, weeks or months, but I would, it comes back to the accountability theme that I keep going back to, again, for civil servants just to feel that bit more kind of accountable for the advice that they're giving to ministers than they currently do because it can disappear a little bit into a black hole. So something more that could be published after a reasonable period that doesn't get into the specific conversations between civil servants and ministers but sets out more on what basis the decision was taken would I think be a good thing. Alex Rowstead is particularly interested in the suggestion from the Minister for Government-Arwndag on new statutory duty, try that again, for the civil service to serve the public interest as well as the government at the time and exactly that point that he just made of countering the anti-democratic deep state argument around this. And he said that the key there would be parliamentary accountability, so what it sounds like is you're interested in the civil service should both serve government and serve the public through Parliament, which leads to the question of what would the civil service be doing for and at the behest of Parliament that government wouldn't be asking of them. I would take a slightly narrower view, so my answer to the question relies on taking a slightly narrower view of the civil service working to the public interest. So I don't think the civil service, it's this sort of impartial but not independent thing that is going around at the moment, partly following the Rab controversy. I don't think the civil service should be, or civil service should be saying, I have some duty to the public interest, therefore Minister you can't do X, Y or Z. I think civil service should be saying I've got a duty to good financial management, to the law, to ministers. And that's why I frame it as a duty to government capability. So I think there is something that Parliament can and should hold civil servants more directly to account for than it currently does around the capability of the state. So the areas in which I would give the civil service that responsibility, absolutely not in policy areas, they are in the kind of, you know, under the bonnet if you like. So I mentioned contingency planning but I also think, and we touched on it earlier, capability around financial management, around project management, procurement, contract letting. I think those areas for which we could reasonably expect the civil service to have the professional skills to support ministers, we should open the box on that a little bit. So that's the link that could go into Parliament through a public accounts committee or a committee like this or whatever. Thanks, and just come back to one of John's water points there around transparency. I'll set the scene with an example. You might have seen a couple months ago now there was a suggestion, a leak from a private conversation, senior NHS official suggesting that maybe to ease the pressure on the health service, we essentially needed a two-tier service with the wealthiest people paying for it so it would no longer be free at the point of use for some people. The then health secretary, now a First Minister, obviously had to immediately come out and say, not a chance of that happening, not under this government etc. But there's a strong line of argument there to say, given the pressure on the health service, senior officials should feel free in a private space at least to come up with whatever idea they want as long as there's sufficient accountability and ultimately it's for ministers to decide and in that case that idea obviously should never have flown. Your argument on transparency from understanding from both of you is that whatever decision has been made needs to be correctly monitored and documented. The evidence base for that needs to be presented but that we shouldn't necessarily compel the civil service or government to publish what the alternative options were in each particular case. Every idea that's floated shouldn't necessarily make its way into the public domain because that would have a chilling effect. Is that a correct paraphrasing of your positions or is there a level of transparency that's required around alternative proposals to whatever one the government eventually lands on? I think yes, basically. I think a reasonable position to end up in would be that the decision that is, the course that is settled on is more fully justified and evidenced and all of the different options because precisely for the reasons that we're all realistic enough to know that the media and campaigners and others will take controversial things in controversial directions and that's fine and that is as it is so I think you just need to, it's a balance isn't it? So that's a very long way of saying yes. Dr Foster, again going back to the point that John came up on earlier, in your written evidence you made the point that the Scottish Parliament is generally well regarded for public engagement. The flip side of that and a point of criticism that's often levied both at ourselves and at the Scottish Government is the length of time it takes to make any particular decision or to deliver any particular policy in Scotland. Any piece of legislation is going to go through multiple consultations at government level. It will then obviously have to go through parliamentary consultation before it's considered by committee. That's not to mention co-design processes that are becoming more popular for very good reason. Those are all cumulatively in all sorts of areas of public policy that are leading to a lot of frustration about the length of time it takes to deliver on issues that are not even vaguely politically contentious, issues that there's complete consensus in Parliament on but it still takes us years longer than the public would want or that we would want to deliver on in part, not entirely but in part because of the consultationitis is what it's been referred to before. How do we wrestle with that tension between further public engagement, which by necessity takes time, and delivering policies on the timescale that the public would expect of us and that we would want to be delivering them on? I suppose there's always a tension there but just because policy takes a long time to develop doesn't necessarily mean that it's right but I'm not totally familiar with the amount of consultation that you do here. I said that I know that there's a lot of it. Perhaps the consultation could happen with shorter time spans so you put a call out and you say, right, if you are going to comment, it's a very short period of time. I'm sorry, I really don't have the answer but I think something must be, you know, if you say that generally the politicians are not happy, the public are not happy, that everything's taking so long to develop particularly where it's not contentious, I think there must be some way of addressing that. I don't know if you've got anything to add, Alex. Only to say that I suppose part of the answer, I agree with all of that, part of the answer is, and I think you've heard evidence on this before, but showing people what the consultation is doing, yes, kind of keeping it rapid, keeping it pacey. Pauli Mackenzie used to work at Demos, writes interestingly I think about the value of the process. In highly contested areas or areas where there is no perfect outcome, one of the values that government can bring or parliamentary debate can bring is bringing people into a process. So if people are properly engaged in a process, they'll be less frustrated by the time it takes to get there I suppose. That's all from me, convener. I had a question around the recording of decisions being made by ministers. It's maybe a question for you, Alex, from your experience. Is it a robust process or system in place for ministers that maybe give approval for something, for that to be kept and then maybe looked at later to check who did approve a certain thing? I think, again, speaking to my Westminster experience and my Hall experience, there are times when it's broken down in practice. I think there's a long term trend around data recording and emails, WhatsApps and so on that means that we're about to hit when we get to the kind of 20 year rule, 25, 30 year rule, we're about to hit a period where the records get much patchier and much less coherent and comprehensive. Because of technology. I also think that there are periods when we saw in moments of deep crisis, notably the pandemic, decision making around contract awards and recording of decisions around contract awards broke down. It's also distressingly common for now in my current perch at the Institute for Government to get a phone call from a journalist saying, we've been asking the department about X, Y or Z and they've said that there's no record of it should this have been recorded and my answer is normally, yeah, actually probably should have done at least an email from a private secretary saying ministers consider this and it's happened. I think the biggest decisions, the most profound decisions, the central decisions do tend to be properly recorded. I think looking at the evidence in the Grenfell inquiry, I think what's likely to come out in the Covid inquiry will show that the kind of often those bigger or longer term things were probably, you know, submission went up, minister considered it. A decision came out properly recorded. I think there's a whole sort of miasma of other things that are not so well recorded and I think more discipline around and more clarity of decision points because not everything in government absolutely should be recorded and some of the debates around what's apps has got a little bit over the top but clarity about points of decision who was involved in that and then how that goes into the official record is definitely something to improve. Because that's something we've experienced in the Scottish Parliament around the ferries you might have seen, you know, where there was a decision made about a, well, 90 million spend at the time, it's up to about a quarter of a billion now and there was emails being frantically searched for to find out exactly who gave the approval and for me I just think that's wrong that we're trying to hunt about in, you know, email archives to try and find out who actually gave the decision. Surely there must be a better way of recording or maybe there is, but it just hasn't been followed and trying to work out which one it is. I suppose that's the difference between, you know, the policy and what happens on the ground and, you know, in all of the devolved administrations we could come up with examples of this is what should happen and this is actually what happened or this is what was recorded. As I say, you know, famously, the renewable heat in Northern Ireland, these meetings happening in no minutes. And government by WhatsApp is not, you know, not likely to be good government because you're likely to miss out key people who should be involved in decisions. You won't necessarily record those decisions, you won't have all the evidence in front of you as a value. You know, why do we look at COBRA and the contingency planning architecture? Again, there's no magic to that. That's just about getting the right people in the room, putting a bit of thought into it in advance, having a proper agenda, working through recording a decision and transmitting it. There is value in those kind of slightly pompous old fashioned meeting, miniting, submission, writing and decision making on the basis of that. I think all governments need to just keep an eye on the WhatsApps and not go too far down that road. Yeah, I think that's something we've discussed as a committee before, a government by WhatsApp. Other question I had was around review. In terms of policy decisions made, do you feel there's a proper review process to look back in years to come, whether that was the right decision to be made or what we could have done differently in trying to learn from that to go forward? Well, I did talk about trying to put in the little circle, the diagram. The institutional learning throughout all the demonstrations in the UK is, I would say, fairly poor. We don't learn from the mistakes that we make. The orders that we'll tell you when they go back, 10 years after doing, looking at a particular area, they'll see the same issues coming up again and again and again. Sorry, I've lost my train of thought there when I start talking about order to get very excited. Sorry, what was your question again? It was about the... It was just about a proper review process. Yes, but when the policy is developed in the first place, that's when how it's going to be evaluated needs to be built in. It's not looking five years down the line. We look at, and then you discover that you don't have the data to actually do that evaluation. So evaluation is actually something I think that we're fairly poor at generally, but that needs to be built in right from the start because it's better to collect the data and maybe not use it than to have the data available to you. And then you can mould it in whatever way appropriate. That's appropriate, but the evaluation piece I think is something that needs to be improved on and can be improved on. Completely agree on that. I think lack of evaluation is a huge problem. It's often claimed that's because ministers aren't interested in evaluation or it's politically embarrassing or whatever. I'm sure there's an element of that actually in my experience. It's as or more often because the caravan's just moved on, there's no resource, everybody's now focused on the next shiny thing. We think quite a lot about how on earth to try and build in evaluation at the start of the process. Do you demand an allocation of 2% of the budget must go on evaluation and you try and build that in at the start? So you have to spend that towards the end on evaluation. Do you tear it up with parliamentary select committees to keep hammering away at it? We do that already kind of and it doesn't really work. So I don't think there's an easy answer other than hammering away at these accountability lines, whether it's through parliamentary select committees, ministers holding officials to account, or trying to kind of, as Helen said, through every means possible, finance and procedural and potentially legal, build that in at the very beginning. I guess the final point is obviously we've got the national performance framework in Scotland. Do you feel or maybe you don't know that the decisions we are taking or sorry, the government's taking are aligned properly with the NPF when they're making that decision right to start? I'm sorry, I can't really speak to that. It's beyond my knowledge. I would say I was civil servant in the coalition government in UK level 2010 to 2015. It really helped that government, whatever you think about the decisions it took, that it had a clear and politically very entrenched programme that was agreed right at the start, that everyone knew what was what. And so perhaps reflecting that experience, one of my views is that any incoming government needs to invest political capital in time early doors to agree a programme and make sure that that is well known across the government and I think that would lead to more effective outcomes even if occasionally be politically presentationally awkward. I think everyone in theory agrees with the national performance framework and outcomes that tries to achieve, but sometimes people say that it contradicts some of the things that people want to make public announcements on. So, for example, it might contradict numbers, so one may say that, for example, we want to achieve a certain health outcome by reducing the number of beds, but then when it actually comes to reducing beds it causes a political kickback that was actually touched on earlier on. I mean, I just want to finish off with a couple of questions, but before I do that I'm going to elect Jamie in because I think he's got a couple of things he wants to. Very briefly, because I'm conscious of time, and I'll put my two questions into one. You talked about people becoming, having a generalised approach rather than something specialised, and obviously a churn of civil servants, a churn of politicians. I wondered what the concern is that individuals can be stuck in the same kind of position for too long and therefore not able, even if they're implementing other people's ideas, not able to come up with new approaches, certainly from the civil service side and also longevity of government. We've got two parties that have been government for a very long time, and how that might impact on the civil servants that are asked to deliver whether there becomes an institutionalised approach or a general approach, whether that has an impact on how they're able to take decisions and respond to decisions. On the sort of jaded or institutionalised point, I do recognise that. I think there are civil servants who, whether through a huge passion about a subject area or for other kind of career incentives, end up staying in one post or a very narrow range of posts for a long time. That can lead to stale thinking, or actually more often, of course, that isn't going to work because we tried it ten years ago and sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong because the circumstances have changed. In fact, Helen and I were talking beforehand about the contrast between the civil service in Whitehall and the civil service in Northern Ireland, and I think they're polar opposites, actually. The Whitehall civil service, there are some people who develop deep expertise, but it's basically spinning like a top. Various demographic and cycles of cuts and growth, Brexit, Covid have led to the UK Whitehall civil service. The problem I would worry about there is very much not one of stale civil servants being stuck in a rut. I think in Northern Ireland, but Helen can speak to this much more authoritatively. The opposite problem is there. It's a Goldilocks moment. Whether Scotland has got the Goldilocks quite right, I don't know. I sense, and from talking to people, that Scotland neither suffers from the stuck in a rut nor quite the churn that Whitehall does. There's hope there. Obviously, the civil service here is part of the home civil service, whereas Northern Ireland, because of its history, has a completely separate civil service, because at the foundation of the state civil servants left Dublin and came to Belfast. We're all a product of our history. The history is very, very different. I think that what Alex has said is true. Just to wind up a couple of questions from me, consultation. I think we touched on when Ross was asking questions, but I think the issue really isn't about consultation. I think what people want to do is to feel that the article is involved in the start, so it's really about participation. For example, at the first major consultation that I was involved in was 25 years ago when I was a councillor in Glasgow and the local authority announced it was going to close 9 secondary schools of 38 in the city. It named the nine and then there was going to be a consultation on whether or not each of those were closed. Remarkably, the nine that they announced six months later were the nine that they voted to close. There was a huge feeling that this was just a cynical manoeuvre, a box-ticking exercise. 25 years later, I think that's still a real concern. Surely when it comes to, we shouldn't really be talking too much about consultation, but people participating in policy development at an early stage being consulted on what government is going to do, but allowing them then to participate in the development of that policy and say, this is a policy, what do you think about it? Governments are going to come back most of the time and say, well, we're still going to plough ahead with perhaps only minor changes. Dr Foster. Yes, I think for those people who are involved, participating or being consulted regardless of their involvement, I think you need to justify, you know, maybe what they want. You can't keep all of the people happy all of the time, but you need to, those people who have participated, certainly it's better to have them participating in the policymaking rather than just being consulted as a tick box, as you say. But it is important that, if the particular view that they are expressing is not seen to be taken on board, that that is then explained to them, that they do actually get some feedback. It's not just a case of, no, we just missed what you said. The really cynical approach would be to announce a different nine schools or 12 schools, but know that they're not the ones that you're going to settle on. The political art of consultation and participation is more of your expertise than ours, but I agree with you. I think it's participation, and I think, as Helen said, it's the leadership skill of explaining to people why decisions have been taken the way they have. Not everybody's going to be happy the whole time, of course, but in the context of this inquiry, the aim should be to take better decisions so that ministers and civil servants don't have a monopoly of wisdom, and so the objective needs to be to hoover in information that enables you to take a better decision. And then, as Helen said, to play that back to those who participated. I mean, I think that, for Asia, just said monopoly of wisdom is interesting, because, I mean, what's interesting is we talked about the generalism versus specialist, I mean issued terms of civil service. But, of course, ministers are almost all generalists. Some of them are appointed to ministerial portfolios that they have no understanding of, no real interest in before they're actually appointed to it, and may perhaps say they would have rather been offered something else completely. Now, that means they're obviously reliant even more on specialist advisers and their civil servants. So, given the fact that situation is unlikely to change and all governments are going to continue to promote gennals, how can we enhance decision making within that context? I think that's a great question, and huge will be for the next two hours. But there's something for me about the kind of the craft of government. If you look at a government minister who's often held up as someone who has broadly made a success of those ministerial jobs, he's taken Michael Gove. Michael Gove is not an expert in environmental agriculture. I've worked with him a bit in deaf rays, not an expert in the justice system. But because he understood the levers of power, because he understood how to run a department, because he had the political authority to win fights with a chancellor over budgets, etc, etc, he was able to come into those departments. Not every decision was the right one, I'm sure, but to assert himself on the department, take some time to work out what he thought his policy objectives would be, and then properly use the civil service. Sometimes, uncomfortably, appointing people who might not always have been happy with it, but that discomfort is part of the grit of government. Sometimes, uncomfortably, use the departments then to prosecute those objectives, whether you agreed with them or disagreed with them. So there's something for me about the craft of government, and it comes back to what we were saying earlier, the role of ministers in that, the role of civil servants in that, the role of civil society and the public in that. Perhaps, and I always feel the need to get around running. The same would apply to when I interviewed people who sat on the Order of Public Accounts Committee. They said, well, not a specialist in finance when I was put on this committee, etc. Some people wanted to be on there. And then, I was speaking to someone else who actually said, what we need is not necessarily, come back to your talk about statehood, but statecraft, it's not necessarily members who are experts in finance, but experts who are people who are good at scrutiny and asking questions, not necessarily knowing the answers. The same applies really to ministers there. It's knowing, as you said, that the architecture, etc. and the work around it, rather than the specifics. Okay, I'll just ask our witnesses if there are any further points they want to add before we wind up the session. Is there anything you feel we perhaps should have touched on but didn't? No, not for me. Exactly, thank you. Okay, well thank you. Great to be back in this lovely city. Thank you very much for your contributions that have been extremely helpful. I also want to thank you for travelling to Scotland. I think that it makes a huge difference to the quality of the evidence that we take. That really does. I say that to someone who is quite averse to virtual meetings in the first place, but also we've had some quite difficult situations in the committee in terms of all sorts of snarl ups with that recently. So, thank you very much for coming along. It's very much appreciated. I'm now going to call a five minute break while we change witnesses. Okay, then, folks. So, we will now continue with evidence-taking on effective Scottish Government decision making. I'm delighted, therefore, to welcome to the meeting Paul Sheeran, chief executive officer and Rebecca Rigg, commercial director, Scottish engineering and Sandy Begby CBE, chief executive officer of Scottish financial enterprise. As members have made a call, this evidence-session is intended to focus not only on the witnesses' experience of Scottish Government decision making but also provide an opportunity to explore how their sector approaches effective decision making. So, we're going to move straight to questions. With that in mind, the first thing that I'm going to ask Paul is how do you approach effective decision making in our sector? Well, there's a question that I expect to start with. It takes as much time as you need to. We are the engineering manufacturing sector, so, as you would expect, there's a fair chunk of logic in that. There'll be a spreadsheet or two that sits behind it, usually. But I do think that that underlines quite a methodical, quite a logical process. I would say that a theme that I'm sure will come up today, it's generally pretty rapid. Generally, there are reasons why at times it will have constraints from a time point of view, particularly where the company is part of a larger group, perhaps part of an international group. So, there'll be constraints in terms of, you will get to a point where the decision is, we want to do this, but it will need to be approved perhaps because there's some treasury of finance considerations that come with it. I think that I'd like to say that generally the direction for our industry is that it is one where certainly the best examples in industry, the decision making is genuinely coming from across the entire company. So, any company who has adopted lean principles will understand that the top of the company set the direction or the ultimate destination for the bus, but the people on the bus are the ones who decide how the bus is going to get there. I think that one's direct across the board. There are times within that where the process has to kick in from a logical process of financing, return on investment and so on, and those will be management decisions. But generally, I would say, where you're looking at the best practice in our industry, it's coming from the team upwards in terms of what the road that's chosen to get to the point that's the destination. First of all, I think that that's an excellent answer in a very short time. I think that you've really heard it in a nutshell. I think that there's been another approach that I think we had several decades ago that's dissipated at least in companies that ought to be successful. I think that people, you know, all levels of a company realise they've got to push in the same direction and I think that people are involved in that direction. I think that it does help. I worked in a pharmaceutical company and they basically had a staff suggestion scheme and they asked us all to come up with ideas to improve how the company would deliver. Nobody submitted any ideas. I suggested to my manager who then passed that line that maybe if they gave people an incentive, they would find that things would be different. What happened was that they then decided that members of staff could go up to 10 per cent of any savings that was actually made by implementation of a policy and the company was overwhelmed with suggestions about what improvements it could make. I think that having heard me talk about participation versus consultation in terms of public sector, staff being able to participate in terms of their own company and suggest ideas that would be beneficial to them directly as well as in the long-term delivery of the company. I think that that was a good example. I was at a company yesterday that is one of, we have to be honest and say that it is still in the minority but it is a growing group of employee ownership companies and that brings a whole different dynamic because literally everybody in the company has a stake in it and they have a state. They have a stronger voice in the decision making and they have a stronger voice in the direction. There still needs to be, to an extent, a command and control structure because chaos would ensue otherwise but I think that that is a direction of travel. Even in the privately owned, family owned companies where, as I say, go back to those that have adopted lean principles to thrive and survive, they do not work unless there is a genuine consultation. I did hear the end of that conversation. I remember hearing before, a very old fashioned way of defining consultation, I remember consultation is not negotiation but where people embrace consultation in its truest terms which, as I heard, was before you have made your decision, then I think it is really effective. I think that there was another point that was made there in your last guest, which I heard as the consequences of a lack of diversity of thought. That is again when organisations talk about when they get this right, is the diversity of thought of listening to everyone at every level of the organisation is what makes for really effective policy for companies. What are they going to do to survive and thrive? You said that open-mindedness is one of the criteria in terms of behavioural decision making. O'Hrani, in my own constituency, is owned by its employees and it has 170 workers so it is not always small. People think that sometimes it can be very small scale but it can actually be much larger and even encompass sectors that people do not automatically think of. I was just building some of Paul's points. In my experience about the effective decision making, I think that there is a strategy that is key. I think that in the absence of having a well-developed, tight strategy that articulates what the priorities are for the business is where a lot of that can go wrong. As part of that, you have that balance between the operational plan and the PINs strategy but also the businesses that Paul is in and Arbyn in that long-term investment. You need to be able to invest long-term into the business in line with that strategy. The concern is that you never make those longer-term decisions and therefore you maintain in this operational cycle. The other thing that is important about decision making is understanding what are the small number of measurements that you are going to achieve, so over-measurement can be an issue as well. Organisations can end up spiralling around trying to measure everything when, strategically, there is probably a very small number of things that you should be focusing on. If you have that framework, decision making then aligns behind that strategic framework. On the back of that, I will echo one of Paul's points. Once you have that strategic alignment framework, you can empower people to make those decisions down in the organisation. You can engage them around the implementation of that. On the PINs, all that is happening is effective governance and making sure that the governance is appropriate, so that ranges from the normal things that people associate with governance around board committees, board structures, if required, divisional structures, et cetera, but also around diversity of thought, creating the right culture, the challenge, et cetera. Governance should enable support, challenge and oversee the delivery of that strategy. The only other couple of points that I would add is that leadership and tone from the top is hugely important. People are empowered when they feel as though the tone from the top aligns with what they are being told, so quite often that inconsistency of leadership behaviour can disempower people. The culture and organisation needs to understand that if you are going to empower people then not everything is going to go right all the time, so you need to be able to accept it. There will be mistakes that are made. The strategy is about articulating the end point and then empowering, recognising that different people in different teams in different areas will move from where they are to where they need to get to in slightly different directions. It is more about outcomes rather than being directional about how to get there. I think that that is quite important about empowering people. If they agree with outcomes then leave them to it. One of the things that is important there is leadership in terms of the private sector. People tend to have a strong knowledge of their company perhaps over many years. One of the differences in the public sector, for example, is that you go to a minister. You go to a minister for justice one week and then you can be a minister for health the next week if that is what the First Minister or the Prime Minister decides to do. There is a real difference in that. The ministers here have to rely on the advice of civil servants, special advisers etc. What kind of structure would companies come in all different shapes and sizes and sectors? What kind of structure would a small and medium-sized company, which the majority of companies in Scotland expect to have, if any, Sandy? The question is about leadership and the movement of leadership and the transferability of leadership. That is not uncommon in the private sector either. The organisations are working, which granted are larger, but we would naturally move people into areas for which they may not have any necessarily great technical expertise, but they are doing it for the purposes of development. In that case, it is important to ensure that they have the team around them who can provide that. It is all about balance and setting people up for success. One of the most important behavioural traits and leaders in that position is about understanding what they do not know and the ability to ask questions. Some of the best politicians ideal in MSPs understand what questions to ask because they will not necessarily know the answers. When I engage with them around financial services, that level of engagement in that two-way communication is really important. That is a good trait in leaders. It is about being able to recognise that, even though you are in the most senior position, you are not necessarily the most technically capable. In some ways, you should not be, because you are not there because of your leadership capability. Therefore, it is about empowering people to make those decisions on your behalf. It seems to me that, ultimately, in politics, when the challenge function goes, that is when the politician is coming up, because they get to a stage where they think that they are the only ones who surround themselves with people who agree with them and eventually they can have hit the buffers. What you have emphasised in terms of challenge function is really important. Paul, what about the dichotomy between long-term and short-term? In politics, the emphasis is on five-year cycles, perhaps even shorter, if you are a new minister who wants to make an impact. When I studied economics at university, I remember a lot of people just thought that companies were there to make a profit. One of the first things that we studied was the theory of the firm, whereby companies are trying to make long-term survivability and growth rather than just making a quick buck this year or possibly next. How do companies generally, speaking—again, we know that they are all different across a huge range of sectors—how do companies generally look? If the economy is buoyant, for example, how do they decide on short-term versus long-term decision making? I am going to come to that one. Can I add a comment to the transferability of skills? Again, I agree with Sandy. I mean, I would say, but take that example of a minister who is going from justice to education. The political framework is the same, and so I would compare that in our sector with someone who has come from an engineering manufacturing background. They have gone from electronics to sheet metal manufacturing or fabrication. Increasingly, what we see there is about understanding or building a good culture, preserving and maintaining a good culture. It is about leadership behaviours. It is about the ability to analyse whether you know the subject or not, and so they ask into what questions. The last one that you touched on is the lifelong learning. The leadership has to come with an aptitude and desire to be consistent every day as a school day, because you do not know what you do not know. However, if you are interested enough in it, you can get into it quickly enough that your leadership skills can then allow you to differentiate and lead in that way from those behaviours, cultures and analysis. To go to your question on short and long term what companies do in that situation, I think you are right. You started by saying that the only running a company, managing and leading a company is not something that you do just to make a profit. That is important, because if you are not making a profit, we are not going to be a business that is going to be a business. Fundamentally, the best companies are the ones where people are building a community, where that community will more often change but has a longevity. When you think about that, the challenge for the company comes if you are in a time of crisis, the leadership has to make decisions that are extremely rapid and less considered, because there simply is not the time to make the consideration that you would, as opposed to the time that Sunday, rightly talked about the fundamental being on good strategy. Companies having good strategy is the responsibility of leadership. Having clear, medium and long term strategies is absolutely fundamental. Good leadership is recognising when the situation in hand has to be adapted rapidly to the situations in hand. Unfortunately, we have seen such a number of them in the past decade and a bit. Covid has been a great example in terms of adapting the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on energy prices, adapting, changing to that. Some of those have meant that companies have had to say, you know what, we have some long term strategies that are still extremely relevant, but if we do not do this today, we will not survive and therefore they have had to pivot very quickly and change to make sure that they preserve the company. At the heart of that, it is not just about profitability, it is about a company as a community that has to be preserved at all costs. In terms of behaviours, you were very straightforward and you talked about an open mind, genuine listening and a rational approach in there as well. I think that that balance is short term. To Paul's point of view, it has been tested to destruction in the last two or three years, but likewise, that business environment with that clear long term strategy in many cases will still have faith and that strategy will undoubtedly have gone through some refinement or at least a good thorough review at the board level. A lot of that will remain consistent. The thing that I would add is that there are huge differences in sectors that I do not think should be underestimated here. You have businesses like in the retail side who are hugely impacted by the economic cycle and massively impacted by things like Covid and other things. In part of my career, I have spent in the energy sector for example. You are making 40 to 50 year investment decisions and that is a much longer term business that, yes, granted with the Russian Ukraine has probably experienced a challenge that it has not in the past, but in many ways you are still making those long, long term investment decisions and therefore your business cycle is less volatile than say if you are in retail. I am using them on the two ends of the spectrum. Different sectors have different cycles in the middle of that, but your strategy is the thing that hopefully will provide that consistent direction, but you always need to be alert to what is going on in the outside world and respond to it. Again, that is partly down to leadership and culture in the organisation and its ability to react, take on board and get the organisation to pivot or change in the short term in order to deal with those challenges, but very often the strategy will be that constant. For me, the discussion has become so fascinating and I am in danger of being drawn into it to the exclusion of my colleagues here, so I am going to just touch on one other thing before I move on and let them in. In regard to your submission, Paul, you have basically been asked about what does effective decision making with the Scottish Government look like and how can we learn from what has worked well and not so well. You have said what worked well as the Aerospace Response Group is a response to the significant pandemic impact in Scotland's Aerospace Centre. What has not worked well is the reaction to the current skills crisis, so if you could possibly touch on why the Aerospace Response Group worked so well and why the reaction to the current skills crisis did not. I think that this is a little bit selfish because I think that it looks from our sector. The Aerospace Response Group was really appreciated because it mirrored the way industry works. Generally, we hit a crisis which hit everybody, but in our sector particularly there was a very immediate impact for our sector, the Aerospace sector, which we value for Scotland. The huge value, high quality jobs and there was a deep concern. I would say that the rapid response, the collaboration to bring together the right people in the right room virtually to address that quickly and look at solutions-based discussions, interested in actions that can make a difference in the short term. The medium term did not jeopardise the long term, but really about looking at what is the situation in hand, how do you react to that, how do you get the right people around the right table. I think that it was remarkably successful. The outputs from it are still being appreciated in the sector. The sector has its own challenges, mostly with the other problem of growing and overall growth provides some challenges. In terms of the groundwork that I laid, it is a great example of moving at pace, rapid decision making, genuine consultation, the truest meaning of the word, but action-orientated outputs because that is what the situation requires, Aerospace Response Group. On the skills response side, I find that one much less successful because I think that the crisis, and we are a crisis in skills in our sector certainly and I suspect in other sectors, has been arriving for some time. I suppose that the question that we are asking ourselves in the sector is, are we being unclear enough or unhelpful in the way that we are articulating that, in the way that we are putting that out? It is really hard to put ourselves in the other set of shoes and ask, why is this not being listened to and being reacted to? In terms of the size and scale of the challenge versus the size and scale of the opportunity that Scotland has, principally in respect of climate emergency, the lack of response and the lack of timely intervention, the lack of concrete actions, which will change that, feels disappointing in comparison to a good model, which was the Aerospace Response Group. Maybe others will probe that. Sandy, do you want to say anything more before we move on to colleagues? In addition to my role as SFE, I chaired DYW and I also authored the young persons guarantee. I have caught a lot of engagement in the skills agenda for a number of years. It is just not fit for purpose, bluntly. It is slow, it is not aligned around the needs of the economy. Just about every meeting that I have these days with businesses invariably comes back to skills, regardless of what the topic is. To Paul's point, if it is about growth or overseas markets or export opportunities, it comes back to the fact that we cannot access the skills in order to maximise the opportunity. I mentioned climate change, our own industry launched our own skills plan last April. 50,000 opportunities we are going to have over the next three years. I am trying to get the further and higher education system to understand that, a line behind it. It is not because they do not want to do it, it is just that there are so many barriers to them trying to do it. The traditional ways that colleges, universities and schools have done things in the past are not keeping up to pace with what the industry needs and what the economy needs. Covid has just shone a light on that, but it has been there for years before that. There are endless numbers of examples of where our economy has been held back simply because we do not have the provision of skills. Do you want to add anything at all? No, I think that I am fine. We shall move on now to colleagues around the table. First I will be John, to be followed by Daniel. In the previous sessions that we have had, mainly with civil servants and people in government, there has been a lot of talk about transparency. Obviously, when they make decisions in the public sector, it is all subject to FOI and all that kind of thing, whereas in the private sector that would not generally be the case. Do you think that that leads to better decision making in the private sector? Does it lead to better decision making? It could. It should not lead to that level of transparency. I think that transparency goes hand in hand with making good decisions. If there is transparency around decision making, whether it is in the private sector or the public sector, that should give rise to improved decision making, where you are engaging a broader range of people in order to reach a better decision. The fact that there is a freedom of information request that might hang around and you might be called upon, then, if you make the right decision and you feel as though you have made the right decision and you have taken on board people's comments and you have had a proper decision making process and governance around it, that shouldn't in itself concern you if you feel as though you have reached the right decision for the right reasons? Within a business financial sector, would it vary how much transparency there is within the business so that even if the outsiders don't know why decisions were made, at least everybody in the business would know why decisions were made? A lot of that comes down to governance. I think that having clarity on where decisions are made, who is making those decisions at what level, if required, what committee is that decision going to be made, then having the transparency. A lot of that transparency comes around the data that goes into those committees in order to make those decisions. I've been fortunate to work for two organisations whose governance was really, really important and was very highly regarded externally as well. Therefore, I've got a good understanding of what that looks like. It's the transparency of not only the decision making but the leading up to the decision making. It's about the quality of what goes into making that decision and then it's the quality of implementation at the end of it. Transparency throughout all that process is hugely, hugely important. You can see lots of examples of where decisions have been made without that transparency on data and information, et cetera, which leads to the bad decisions. You can see it in the corporate world all the time. I mean, CBI is probably a good example. Okay. Mr Sheehan. Yeah, I don't have a good question to ask. I think I'd say that I don't think there is a difference between the racial quality of good decisions and not so good decisions with the private in the public sector, but there are some key differences in the way it gets there. One of the first things that I would say is that I suspect that every decision that is made particularly from a Scottish Government point of view, if you had the time and patience, you could wade your way through the 70-page documents to understand it, whereas in a company in terms of where there's been known that there's a consideration to be had, the expectation from the employee group is that you will boil that decision down to a one-page slide. More people will understand how that decision was made and therefore will be in a position to raise their hand at the town hall or at the employee representative group and say, hang on a minute, but what about it because it's easy to understand. I would say that you look at it from our point of view. One of our challenges is some big impacting decisions that are made. It's very difficult for us to get any company of less than probably 250-300 people interested in understanding that to give us some feedback that we can be helpful, because the size and scale and the weight of the information means that you have to be a dedicated follower to wade your way through that. That's not to say that I don't think that the understanding and decision making is in there, it's just not very accessible. I would say that a big difference between private sector and this example of government is that there will be more people out there who understand that. I think that in terms of going back to that rapid, companies will come forward and say that coming up from a Kaisen event or a Lean Six Sigma event we had, we considered this, we challenged it, we've done this, this is it and we think that we're going to do this, we're going to invest in that and that there's our decision. That will be explained at the town hall and all employees will hear that because they will run it through night shift, day shift, back shift if they have shift systems and everyone will have a chance to stick their hand up. On the other hand, there will be an employee representative group or a works council where their employee rep, if they're a question that people want to ask but they didn't feel comfortable, they can take it to there. A much more direct relationship between boiling, distilling the information down is what we consider this decision we made and the ability to go, hang on a minute, I want to ask about that. You've mentioned speed a number of times. Is that a strength of the private sector and a weakness of the public sector that you can make decisions quicker? I wouldn't pretend that I know enough about what you do and that to say that your decision making should be faster. Certainly our sector would love it to be but whether that's a possibility with the constraints you have, I don't know that, it is definitely a delineation. The private sector knows that when you can, so we talk about rapid and considered decisions. Rapid where the only thing you need to do now is make a decision because of the situation you're in or the triviality of the outcome you need to make a decision. There's only one other type of decision and that's considered, where you have to pause, rapidly take and consult, understand, hear different voices and then back to the rapid a make a decision and move. I don't want to put you in the spot but I do realise you've not really said very much and so on. Are too many decisions made in business by men? Well, I'd like to think that society is changing and that board rooms are changing and decision making is changing and now that we're working in an environment where women are considered when decisions are being made. But as Paul said earlier, I think it's about consulting everybody and having broad input to decision making which is important. Do you think that that is changing both from what you know of the public sector and the private sector? Do you think that we're moving in the right direction? Yeah I do, slowly but yeah. OK, thanks for that. I think it was yourself Mr Begby, you talked about mistakes are made inevitably. Do you think that the private sector handles that better than the public sector in learning from mistakes and so on? Not necessarily. I think that a lot comes down to company culture so I've seen cultures where mistakes are not tolerated in the private sector which then obviously has a perverse impact by basically driving transparency underground because people don't want to admit to mistakes. It also gives rise to a culture of lack of accountability so people will not want to take accountability for it. I wouldn't necessarily say that the private sector could say that that's always the case at all. I think it's about the culture that you create and you almost, through leadership tone, legitimise the fact that making a mistake is OK and actually it's a learning opportunity and businesses can build on that. So I wouldn't say there's a distinction between private and public sector in that regard. I talked about lean principles and lean cultures and I do think that it has been adopted almost wholesale in our sector and one of the best things about it from a company culture point of view is that close enough is good enough and go. So we regularly talk about if the decision feels like it's 80 per cent right, go and then make it better and this iterative look where you go and then go OK, we're close but that still needs to be fixed, now change that, now change that. And that's how when you talk about lean six sigma you're approaching your 98.666 per cent, it's the steps and steps and steps to get there. I think that's a hugely healthy part of our sectors and companies adopted lean principles to survive and now those that are especially those that are really on board with it get the benefit of that. But the fail fast learn quick is that's that 80 per cent. Close enough is good enough, let's go. That might be a challenge for you. We could explore that probably further. I mean presumably some decisions even within business therefore you're 80 per cent sure you make the decision and then you can perhaps improve on it as you go along although the other risk is that it's just been totally the wrong decision and you have to start again. 80 per cent says you're in the right ballpark and the big challenge that companies make is any company who thinks that we'll wait until that decision is perfect or our belief in it or our analysis is perfect, the other ones are staring at their belly buttons. So 80 per cent says that you're on the right track, you have the right direction but you may have to tweak the model but that's time to go and that's the thing that brings the pace and rapidness back into things. So from what you can see of the public sector we probably don't do that. I wouldn't pretend to know you well enough to know that 80 per cent is good enough for you. There are different scrutinies, there are different cultural impacts on your ability to do that but yeah I would say it's the gold standard if government could find a way to work and act in that way I think it would work like the best of private sector. I think one is speed of decision making can be important depending on the situation you're in, quick decisions might not necessarily be the right decisions but a couple of observations in my dealings with civil service over many years, I think one is there is a culture of wanting to try and reach 100 per cent so there is this point at which there's a lot of time and effort applied to try and close down every single one. There is no potential risk and concern about a decision so the 80-20 mindset in my experience is an uncomfortable one and you can see that through, because I've had exposure to a number of reviews over the last few years in particular that are undertaken where you can end up with 60 or 70 or 80 different findings that come out of review. When the reality is when you look through them probably half a dozen will deliver 80 per cent of what you're looking for but there is this desire to have a long tail of actions that aren't really going to really materially change the outcome. So as an observation there isn't a mindset or a culture of trying to say okay we've done the review we're now just going to focus on delivering on these three or four things and actually the rest of them are important but none of that are important. As I said I'm involved in various review groups on the skills action, so the end set for example on the skills programme board, if you look at that there was 76 findings, you can't deliver 76 findings, you can deliver four just leave the other 72, so really try and prioritise. That's really interesting, I'll leave it to that. Interesting stuff. Daniel, to be followed by Ross. Yeah, I mean finding the discussion really fascinating and I actually think to Paul Sheeran's points I think that the twin kind of concepts of lean of both the Six Sigma but actually also the Kaizen principles of actually ensuring that everyone's involved with the improvement is actually something that I think the public sector could really benefit from. I'm just wondering just to continue with the sort of the compare and contrast and I take the points about rapidity and also the other hand in terms of the difference in the private sector being or successful private sector and I think that's an important distinction, not everything in the private sector is good about strategic alignment. I wonder if there's also an issue and I'd wonder if you would agree with this about over emphasis on policy, so in business successful businesses actually kind of the operations and that the delivery will tend to actually be much more important than that kind of the, or at least have equal weight to that you know the idea origination. Do you think that's an issue in terms of kind of government decision making that can over emphasis policy and a lack of depth of understanding and kind of delivery and managing that side of things? I'll have a go first. I do think that it comes back to a little bit at that point I made earlier about distilling the message down so I would say if in industry our equivalent of policy is strategy then a successful strategy is one where you stop someone anywhere in your organisation and say could you tell me in two sentences what the strategy for our company is and they know what it is. To do that the way you explain and present has to be extreme, you need to spend so much more time clarifying and distilling it down to the essence and that takes real work and effort and leadership. If you can say that about policy from a Government point of view well done but from what I see policy it's people like us who take the time to understand that and it's harder work and you look at that difference again between industry. Industry is aiming to get to a point where everyone in their organisation, as far as possible, understands and can repeat what the key strategy for the company is. I agree with Paul on that point. I think that one of the best things we ever did at Standard Life was we had two sheets of paper, one was our financial strategy on a page and the other one was our non-financial strategy on a page and it was literally two pieces of paper and it told our 10,000 employees across the world how we were performing and it actually became so rooted inside the organisation that you could speak to anyone in any place in the world and they would be able to tell you how the company was performing and it was literally two pieces of paper. The idea of understanding the audience and trying to make it relatable so that people do understand their role and that was part of the cascade, which was to understand that your role is contributing to whether it's financial or non-financial performance of the organisation. I think that that's important because then people are likely to then relate to it and then feel as though what they're doing and then implement it effectively. The other thing I would add, Daniel, on this again as an observation, is that at times you get a sense that there's some contradiction between policies or actually there's too much going on and therefore if you've got too much going on then how can you effectively embed it and deliver it? There's not the bandwidth inside the organisation to do it effectively so that prioritisation process, I'm not sure how it happens but it always feels as though there's a very broad base of policy work that then presents some of the embedding and execution challenges. One of my reflections, we've heard a lot about how there's a lack of consistency both around policy making between portfolios and indeed implementation, probably even more so. The explanation is that the things that the Government does are so different that you can't have an identical approach. My pushback on that is if I think about some of the large organisations that I've come into contact with, they may have different, at a technical level, different approaches but they're typically based on common approaches so that somebody from one part of the business would recognise in broad terms. Do you think that that is a lesson from business that the Government in terms of having different detailed implementation but very strong core principles in terms of both policy design and implementation? I would say this. There are huge, large global organisations who will have a consistent change in delivery model applied across the globe. I don't think that the size and complexity of the organisation applies. To your point is that there are certain aspects of change in delivery that can be consistent. The technical element of it will be different. It's the same in the private sector. You can be dealing in a different part of the world with different consumers and a different product, etc. The reality is that the elements of that change in delivery methodology are consistent. Therefore, if you are working in one part of the business, you can relate to what's happening in another part of the business. You might not understand it technically but you understand how it's going to be different, whether it's Kaizan, Six Sigma, etc. There are lots of different methodologies but usually an organisation will choose to adopt a methodology that works for them. I don't think that I've really got anything to add to what Sandy said. I think you've summed up really well. One of the interesting points is that we've got consistent understanding of roles through the Scottish Government. One of coming from my previous corporate life, we were obsessed with race models, which was about responsibility accountable, consulted and informed. Sometimes there's a blurring of those distinctions, particularly zeroing in. If I look at what is understood by a programme board within the Scottish Government, I think that we've got a number of different things going on, some of which look like programme boards, as I would understand them, which are really integrating different areas of delivery. You'll see just Government officials but other programme boards seem to be more like consultation boards because they've got a lot of external bodies. Both of those are important functions but they're different. A programme board should be very much internal and managing risk across different projects. External consultation is absolutely engaging with some of those things. Do you think that there's potentially an issue with the Scottish Government mixing metaphors and having clarity about the different stratae of decision and where integration sits and where external consultation sits? Especially Sandy, given some of your experience in terms of some of these things. Yes, I think so. I sit in some of the consultation or advisory boards so you do wonder where it sits within the broader governance structure of the delivery of something. If you're there to, and having that clear terms of reference, I think it's important and sometimes it's clearer than others. Understanding how all that connects together is quite important. It goes back to my point about having a consistent methodology that underpins that in language to your point. Language is very important so people do understand that distinction. The whole racing model and what you talk about roles and responsibilities is just a subset of a broader point, which is about understanding how the organisation is designed and how it's supposed to operate effectively and efficiently. That picks up organisation design, it picks up structures, it picks up capabilities, which we've not really touched on, but do you have this organisation, actually have the capabilities to execute what it's going to execute? For me, that's a broader piece around organisation design and how the organisation is supposed to set itself up for success. A tricky one for me to answer. I'm not on a number of such boards. I'm on the programme board for making Scotland's future. The way that's structured is quite a heavy contingent from public sector and from civil servants that are there, but there's also representation from industry. The way that's run, if we weren't there, if industry weren't there, then there would need to be some other mechanism because otherwise you'd be operating in a bubble and you wouldn't be having the voices with a different perspective and hopefully can act as critical friends. I suppose that I listened to that and think from an efficiency point of view, now you're going to have to run two sets of meetings, you have to run one where you're in the public sector only and then another one where you're consulting. What would we do in industry would do one meeting? Is it programme board as you'd recognise it though? Is it more of a sort of a round table discussion board? I haven't been on any other programme boards. I'm on other boards. The one that you do sit on? The one that I do. We definitely have space and time for scrutiny and act as a critical friend, which I think is useful. Can I just ask one final follow-up question? I think the points that were discussed about generalism versus specialism are interesting to me. I wonder if there's a question that I put to the previous panel. Is there a question about how you bring about generalism in that it's not something that you should be starting people off on a career that people need a grounding in a specialism before you broaden them out into generalism? Is that potentially an issue if the civil service is trying to create generalists from the moment they arrive in the civil service? I've always used the Kennedy principle, which is breadth and depth. I think that the most effective leaders will have both and depending on what they're in, they might have more breadth at certain points but they will always have a depth, usually a profession or something that they've got a technical expertise in that they can then transfer. I don't think that it's a case of saying generalists versus technicals. I think that the further you go up in the organisation, there's a lot of research around this. The further you go up into broader leadership roles, the balance between breadth and technical expertise changes. I think that just trying to understand that at different levels in the civil service is important because quite often people are promoted because of their technical expertise but you do get to a point in your career where leadership becomes more important than your technical expertise. I think that when I look at what good leadership looks like, I think that the ability to port from something to another thing very quickly is the bit that always impresses me, but then what they have is that breadth and depth. The tea analogy is their ability to literally fall like they're falling on a parachute to get down to the level of detail they need to and then get right back up to the top again. That always impresses me when I see that in leadership. They skirt along the top, they stay broad and then they die really quickly, get to the nub, get back out because that's not their place to be. Ross, you follow by Douglas. I'm subbing on the bureau today and I'm going to have to leave in less than five minutes. I don't want to be rude to colleagues and get up and leave while they're answering my own questions so I'm happy to just move on to another colleague if that's easiest. Douglas? Thank you, convener. I want to go back to skills because you said that there was an issue there and it's really just to try and work out what is going wrong and what can the Government learn and put in place going forward to try and make things better. It's not really particularly around the skills agenda. I ask this. It's about the governance and decision making of Government to try and improve the situation. Do you want me to? It's quite difficult to stand that in our question without context. For me, the young persons guarantee report is really important for our Government to be really clear about what the industries are going to be part of the future economy over the next five, ten years. That clarity of direction goes back to the earlier point about strategy. If you have that strategy, you can then make decisions about how you then make decisions whereby each component of the skills system, including education and all of that, then aligns behind that. At the moment, for me it's a big supply and demand equation and at the moment the demand and supply side are out of line. The decisions for me need to be taken around how do you better align those two. Industry needs to be cleared about what it needs, particularly those industries that are going to be growing. If you take the whole environment and climate, for example, what are the types of jobs that we're going to need in industry over the next five, ten years? That is at best going to be an 80-20, so it's going to change, but you need to have a direction of travel. How do you then get the supply side to align behind that, colleges, universities, secondary schools etc? The test that I always applied through the young person's guarantee was that if I'm a 15-year-old in school and I'm interested in a career in manufacturing or engineering or renewables, how do I go from where I am to put myself in a position for that at some point in the future, whether I'm in college or university or apprenticeship straight into a company? At the moment, we've got this big disconnect and that's why industry gets frustrated because there isn't a pipeline of people who are coming into the industry with having the knowledge and taking the right decisions around the pathways into that industry. So at the moment, I think that the decisions need to be taken around that. Is that because Government are just focused on short-term goals, as opposed to looking at longer term, and it could be like 10, 15 years before you have, I guess, children coming through education and then into industry? I'm not taking industry out of this, Douglas. I would say that there are decisions that need to be made within Government around some of those, how to reorientate the system. I think that engineering do it well, and financial services do it, but we're trying to make efforts to do this better. I think that a lot of other sectors need to be clear about what their need is, looking out over the next three, five plus years. I don't think enough of them trying to articulate the demand side well enough, so there's work needs to be done on both sides. So is that maybe Government working closer with industry to work out what the needs are and consulting with them more, as opposed to maybe general consultation? Yes, correct. I guess Government would, to give them credit, might say, we're working with organisations like Skills Development Scotland and they should be doing that. Would that not be correct? I think that we've got all the components of the system that's just not aligned at the moment, and I think that it lacks that clarity around saying, here are the industries that we're really going to double down on over the next five, ten years, that actually we need the skills system and education system to align behind. I'm trying not to be overly critical, because I think that we've got some good examples of where it can work, and I think that we've got all the components to make it work better. But if you look at other countries, some of them in Europe, some of them in the Far East, they've got that really, really tight alignment, and so therefore the industries that are really important to the future economy can look at education and skills, and they can see that a lot of that activity and that content is actually aligned with what they're going to be needing. And I think that we need to tighten that up, whether it's SDS, whether it's secondary schools, colleges, universities, but as I say, employers need to do more as well. I'm just trying to think how we would fit that into a report going forward, convene of it. I'd like to illustrate the point, because I think that it goes back to the example that I gave in the evidence that we submitted beforehand. So, Sandy's point about tying what we do in our actions in the short, medium and long term to the economy for Scotland is absolutely key in this respect. So, we start the situation where we are just now. So, our engineering manufacturing sector are just off the back of eight quarters of successive growth and output and orders. With that have come the same eight successive quarters of lack of people, lack of skills. Our big wish for industry has been that our companies, particularly our SMEs, will step up to the plate and provide the demand signal, which will pull through, particularly in work-based learning, where we have the majority of our shortages. And we face a future where the opportunity for Scotland is off the scale through the four pillars of offshore wind, the associated hydrogen generation that goes with that, decarbonising transport and decarbonising heat. All of them, our biggest shortage is in work-based learning, apprentice-based skills. Our situation just now is that there are companies who have approached their local training groups and their local colleges to be told, I'm sorry, there is no budget for more apprentices. So, we have a situation where the majority of the work that we will actually have to have hands on is arriving in the four, five year timeframe. You start an apprentice today this year, they will become useful to you in three, four, five years time. And we are saying that we cannot fund those places. As a country, we spend three per cent of our entire skills budget on work-based learning, which is, in my opinion, pitiful. And it goes back to Sandy's point about our priority for the kind of training which will deliver high quality, well-paid, fair work jobs. We're spending only three per cent and the answer seems to be to bat the ball back to Skills Development Scotland and say, it's your budget, you go and find it. Again, from industry's point of view, Skills Development Scotland had their budget cut by £10 million this year, which impact directly on their ability to deliver apprentices in an overall growth in the skills budget for Scotland. So, the frustration from industry, from a decision point of view, is that there is a huge opportunity for well-paid, high quality, fair work jobs. But we need to act on it now and we cannot even seem to move at the pace to say, we need to change our priorities. Because we understand there are no magic money trees, we can't just dream money up out of nowhere. But in a situation, go back to what is business to, you make some harder choices. Where are the links to the economic opportunities for Scotland that need to be given priority? And yes, that will mean that somebody will lose out. But if we do not do that, then the opportunities, those four pillars, will sail past us and we will not realise the opportunity for Scotland. So, our frustration is faced with that admittedly slightly blinkered view of the world. We could not understand how you would sit in any company. So, Scotland PLC and say, this is not something where we need to act and change tack now and change priorities. If I was leader of Scotland PLC today, what advice would you give him? He would probably say, well, I would have to defund something else to do that. What would your advice be on that? So, I'm not going to go to that. That's the same as people who have said to me when I sit in a leader position, that is your job, Paul. You carry the leadership role but you know and I do know that you have to act today. Or else you lose that opportunity. So, I'm not going to say who should lose out in that. And that would be a hard decision, no doubt. That's life for all of us, a hard decision he made to make. I guess what you would say is for the long-term benefit of the Scotland PLC in the end. It's always good to put numbers. So, sitting within Scotland, the first 17 projects alone, and I believe we're up to 20 now, plus the recently announced intog ones, the innovation and target oil and gas. The first 17 projects alone carry a committed spend in the supply chain development statement of £25.8 billion spent in Scotland. That is the target that was signed up for by those companies when they put their bid in. £12.8 billion of that is manufacturing in Scotland. We don't have enough people today. If we don't do something that delivers the skills, which will take up that opportunity and the economic benefit will sail past. If someone else can make an argument that trumps that, fair enough, I don't believe that's the case. And then there's the wider issue of all of that is simply us doing our part and the bigger challenge against the climate emergency. And final question, is it lack of people or lack of skills then? So, there are no shortage of people who want to come and do apprenticeships. Our average, we believe, is around 50 applications for everyone in place. Now, back to a point that was made earlier, the balance of any measure of diversity in that isn't where we would like it to be. But to Rebecca's point, it's something that's changing a little too slowly, but there's lots of work being done in that area. So, whilst I would agree that the balance isn't great, there is no lack of demand. But you have a situation now where a company says, okay, I'm going to do an apprenticeship or more apprenticeships. And they've come forward and said, I'm ready to do it, let's go. And right now, some of them are being told, I'm sorry, there's no budget. And that's the bit which we industry find just unacceptable. Right. Okay. Thank you. Dain here. We're trying to talk about how to improve Government decision making. That's more about the choice of decisions, I think. But I think it's points that are being extremely well made by Paul, and it was a good question, actually, by Douglas, is an issue which I have raised with the previous First Minister at the convener's committee as well as many other forum and including the chamber. So, I'm certainly on board with what's being said. So, I think one of the things, though, to follow on from that and just to finish off, really, is how can decision making improve, decision making relationships with ministers be improved? So, we've heard about how the private sector takes decisions. Before that, we had a session about public sector and how we can perhaps improve decision making. So, how can this interaction be improved? We have a lot to go first. I think that this is very much on the outside in terms of my experience. I think that the interaction between ministers and solicitors, I think that they're... For me, our job has joined ahead of the last 10 minutes. I mean, there's no doubt that you've got a political cycle. It could be five years, it could be less. Ministers can be moved. It is about having a gender that is wherever possible is not only reliant simply on that minister, I would suggest. I think that that then allows people, gives people the confidence to make those decisions. Wherever possible, I almost have that direction of travel as being set in regards of the minister. That might be an easy thing to say, harder to bring about in practice. I think that's the only way you get that longer-term focus on delivery and implementation and then impact on the back of that. I think that there needs to be, at the point of our makers, which I've touched on earlier, is about making sure that there's that diversity of thought. That comes from a whole variety of different perspectives, but I think ensuring that the quality of decision that's made has gathered as much of that diversity of thought as possible, through whichever forum you choose to do it, but I think making sure that that relationship between minister and broader civil service and any other consultation group recognises that diversity of thought, so that ministers are getting all the information, the transparency that's there earlier, in order to help them to make those decisions. I think that's an important point that you've made, because obviously where the Scottish Government has done better relative to the UK Government is being where there's been consistency of policy, whereby the private sector knows that this is going to be the policy. Is in tablets as strong as it can be in politics, and therefore it can make long-term investment decisions where the Scottish Government has not done as well relative to Westminster is probably where there has been this turmoil and perhaps change of direction in policy. I think that's an important point, Paul. I really agree with what Sandy said, the points that I've added. I come back to this rapidity of decision making. I do think that that consideration of whether something needs to be rapid now or considered is one that I think would improve that. I think that we all understand that we would say that we get good access to forums where we can give our input. We, you know, both ministerial connection and also to civil servants. The decisions are the decisions. Some will like, some will not. I don't think that's the issue. I do apologise if I went off track on my skill soap box, which is usual for me. The bottom of it is that it's not that we don't like the decision, we don't like the lack of decision, because from industry's point of view that's just kicking the can down the road. That's one where that lack of, oh, we're in a situation where a decision needs to be much more rapid. That for me would be an example of an improved decision making process. Okay, so indecisive, this is obviously a concern in some instances. Okay, I'm going to wind up the session now, just be giving the opportunity to our witnesses to meet any final points. If there's any issue we feel we haven't touched on or you wish to emphasise at this point. Sandy? I'm fine, thank you. You okay, Paul? Anything you want to say? Thanks for inviting me today, I must admit. I came along, I thought I'm not sure how useful the conversation could be. So thanks for the questions, because I think they've allowed us to make it specific to particularly the sector that we know. So thanks for that. Okay, thank you, Rebecca. Last word with you if you want to make the same. Just thank you very much. Okay, well thank you very much. Again, I want to thank our witnesses for coming along today. It's been very helpful and given us another dimension to the inquiry that we're undertaking. So we're continuing any evidence on effective Scottish Government decision making at our future meetings. That concludes the public part of today's meeting. The next item on our agenda will be a discussion in private with regard to our work programme. So I'll just like to call a two minute break to enable our witnesses and the official report to leave. Thank you.