 23 ddech everyone's finance and public administration committee. As the oldest member of the committee, which I am required to state, I will be convening the meeting for the first two items of business, which will just take a couple of minutes, until the committee chooses a deputy convener. Sadly, the convener is not able to attend today due to a bereavement. I know that the convener would firstly want me to put on record our thanks to Daniel Johnson for all his hard work in supporting the committee's scrutiny and for his collegiate approach as the deputy convener. I'm pleased to welcome as his replacement Michael Marra as a new member to the committee and I invite him to declare any relevant interests. Thank you. Item 2 is the appointment of a deputy convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish Labour Party are eligible for nomination as deputy convener of this committee. As such, I nominate Michael Marra as deputy convener of the committee. Do members agree to choose Michael as our deputy convener? The committee agrees. I'll now suspend for 15 seconds while we change chair. I thank the committee for my appointment and I look forward to working with you all. As deputy convener, I'll be chairing the rest of the meeting in the convener's absence. For our next agenda item, the committee will continue its inquiry into effective Scottish Government decision making and today we will hear from Dr Judith Turbyn, chief executive of Children in Scotland, Lucy Hughes, policy and parliamentary manager at Engender, Craig McLaren, director of Scotland, Ireland and English regions at the Royal Town Planning Institute Scotland and Rachael Lennon, policy and public affairs officer at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. I welcome you all to the committee today. I intend to allow up to 90 minutes for this session. If witnesses would like to be brought into the discussion at any point, please indicate to the clerks and I can then call you. We have your written submissions already. Thank you for those. We will move straight to questions. To begin, I'll ask Michelle Thomson. Good morning, everybody. First, I want to say thank you for the very fulsome submissions that you've made for this inquiry. It really has been noted. Rachael, I wanted to come to you first in terms of the SEVO submission. You make an interesting comment where you note that it's about trust and power and who has it. You also quote a very interesting statement. Trust and power to have a steam, it should be in spheres, not tears. When you have tears, you then have the whole issue around power and who has the power and influence. Can you think of an example where that has had practical effect and talk us through that? Thank you. Good morning, all. Thanks for inviting us to give evidence. Yay, I think that the point about the trust and power came out of the three reports that we actually published last year, which were done separately, but when we look at the three, it's the same theme, so trust, power, value and time. The issue around power, I suppose, is that our point would be that it's not really acknowledged in terms of the decision making process. Looking at the voluntary sector, it's always linked to the issue of funding, which brings an additional layer, I suppose, to the decision making process. You have this power imbalance from the start, whether, no matter which working group you might be sitting on, which is not always acknowledged. Our point would be that we need to recognise that from the beginning. You're always going to have the issue of the public sector funding, the voluntary sector, to some extent, but that needs to be recognised, and then we can just move on and just be seen as partners, not just as the voluntary sector delivering services for the public sector, for example. We need to have this, what we call this parity of esteem, that is, the value of the sector needs to be recognised as a power in itself, so that we all have the same say, I guess, at the table, and then we can move on and try and solve issues together. Usually, you would see it in practice, if you sit in working groups, you might have, on a regular basis, 20, 15 civil servants sitting on a working group, but you would have one or two if you were a key representative from the voluntary sector. We argue that putting that amount of expectation and pressure on one person is a lot, and you should recognise that that person can't just speak for 45,000 organisations in Scotland. You need to have a bit more acknowledgement that you could invite more people along from the voluntary sector to rebalance the power in the room. I get what you are saying about the scale of the representation that you give, and you make that clear in your submission. Has there been times where you are aware that, in terms of line of sight of funding, you or any of the organisations that you represent have been required to give the right answer or the preferred answer because of the mechanism of funding and fears or uncertainty? Is that a general concern that you would concede or a fear that you hold? I put it in now as submission on the issue of the critical challenge, because in the three reports, when you look at it, in each of them, so the three reports were interviews with various stakeholders, but in each of them, some people raised the issue around being a critical friend and receiving funding from the Scottish Government. I want to apply to everyone in the sector, some feel that they absolutely find speaking and challenging the Government, but it comes across that, for some of them, it is a concern and they don't necessarily feel that they can't be as critical or as challenging as they would like to be because of the funding, so that's why we're also calling for, maybe, defined from the beginning of Immortal, what is the expectation, the parameters for those discussions, what would you like to discuss, and just make clear that the issue of funding wouldn't have any impact, I suppose, on what organisation might be able to say or not. It does come through that, for some of them in the sector, it is a concern. Do you think that, in general terms, the Scottish Government wants a critical friend or is a statement to use that it's a kind of esoteric desire because there's a difference between the two? Yeah, I think that that's a fair question, so it came in one of the, in the interview statement, I believe, said, yeah, do they actually need, do they want a critical friend, do they need a critical friend? I think it's a fair question to ask. I think it might depend on who you're dealing with within the Scottish Government, so in, I don't know, some units, some department, maybe it might be, you might feel more comfortable providing challenge or a critical feedback than others. Thanks very much for inviting in gender speech today, and just before I give my comment, I'm keen to point out that we're here to represent a joint response from Close the Gap and Scottish Women's Aid alongside Engender. All three other organisations work in the women's sector and have worked alongside the Scottish Government on gendering policymaking for a long time, so we have expertise to speak to the issue of trust and power, definitely, Michelle, which you've brought up, so one of the things I was keen to bring in on this was that the role of equalities organisations can be seen as tokenistic, there can be an expectation about why people are being invited into working groups and into spaces, but necessarily the trust there to share that power and say, this is what realistically you're able to influence in this space. So, if you're being brought into a discussion or a policy development process, we need to understand what exactly is up for grabs in terms of discussion, what has actually been decided already, whether that's through budgetary decisions, through manifesto commitments, and what is there that we can discuss and really influence in terms of a gender inequalities perspective in our case. I think that this really links to the point around the role of the civil service in terms of skills and the burden that many civil society organisations like ourselves feel the need to continually upskill civil servants on how to do gender inequalities analysis, so that role can often feel rather than being brought in as experts to feed into a process, the burden is actually on us to then do some of that work, which we feel is within the remit of the civil service. We know that that's a lot to do with the resources available to people, the training they might have had access to, the consistent turnover of staff within different teams, but it's really difficult as a small organisation, although funded to do a lot of policy work, to continually respond to those asks across the whole of the policy portfolio. For us, gender inequalities applies to every single part of government, but that burden to come in and consistently upskill every single team, especially if those teams change, often having to then start from scratch again and go through some of the basics around gender inequality, the need for equality analysis. It can feel like a churn, which others have said in previous sessions, and that arose trust over time about how meaningful is it to be invited into spaces and also what power do you have to really change long-term what those policy decisions look like if you're sort of having repeated conversations over a lifetime of a piece of policy development, for example. Well, that was serendipity, convener, because I wasn't tending to bring you any Lucy in around this thread about trust and power and decision making, and I have some, if it's okay, I do have some specific question from your very fulsome submission, Lucy, which appreciates, on behalf of Scottish Women's Aid and Closer Gap, was well in gender. However, just to finish off this point about how there could be a subliminal effect on bringing thoughts to the table or decision making, I want to ask you something contentious, Lucy. When we had our big debate in this Parliament about the Gender Reform Bill, I was personally surprised to find that no qualitative impact assessment had been done over a period of six years on the impact of women who had been raped or sexually assaulted of finding fully intact males, or male genitalia, rather, in what they would consider spaces. Now, I'm making no comment on this about the rights or wrongs or any of that debate, but I'm exploring it from a decision making point of view, because it seems to me from a decision, it seems surprising that no qualitative impact assessment had been done whatsoever over a period of six years. So my question to you and all of the bodies around the decision making you saw, did you seek for this type of qualitative impact assessment, because I know that you obviously mentioned equality's impact assessment, did you seek that and were you discouraged? Did you not seek it? How did that come about over a period of six years? I appreciate that you might not have been there for six years, but I'm interested in that because it actually framed out a decision making process. I appreciate that that's kind of a consistent issue that you want to have a look at, but I think in terms of the evidence that we're here to give today, it's not necessarily on that specific process around gender recognition reform, but what I would say is in terms of... I'm interested in the nature of power, how that operated. I'm using this as an example of how did we get to a position where within six years it never occurred to... I mean, I'm not saying that is the case, but it looks like it never occurred to anybody to ask that question, which seems quite incredible, but I find that hard to believe. I'm sure people did ask that question and say, maybe we should have a look at this. So what I'm trying to understand from a power base is did the three organisations, which in my opinion, you do excellent work at giving voice to women, it really is excellent. So my question to you is, was there a power dynamic at play where you asked that question and were dissuaded, or did you just not ask that question, maybe we should look at that area, because it talks to this issue around trust and power. I'm happy to answer that. So the answer to that question is no, we didn't ask those questions. Our inequality impact assessment was done for the process of the bill, and that was up to civil servants in terms of how that was conducted. I think that it does link to the discussion that we're here to have around what does it mean to do equality impact assessments, who gets to feed into those, how is evidence gathered. I couldn't comment on the specific EQIA for gender recognition reform, I haven't prepared to talk about that today, but we can follow up with yourself after the session to talk about this in more detail. What I would say is that all three of our organisations were involved at all stages in consultation in terms of our views on gender recognition. We gave evidence-based arguments as to why we supported many aspects of the bill, and that was across all three of our organisations. In terms of our role on EQIAs, it wouldn't be commonplace for third sector to run those or to create those for the Scottish Government, but I'm not sure of the details in terms of how that process happened or wasn't that in general. If there's a writing in answer to that question specifically, I think that the committee would appreciate it. I know that Judith Skeen to come in as well, Michelle, if you indicated previously. Do you want to continue on this area at the moment? No, that's fine. I had one more general question about wellbeing economics, but I'm happy to hear from you, Judith, or indeed yourself, Craig, on this particular theme. Judith, do you want to come in? I know that it was back to that whole idea of power and funding and how that can have an impact. I think that it's very interesting because my feeling is that within the Scottish Government there often is a real intention to have the right conversations and to listen and to hear. I think that one of the issues—and this would have been discussed in many different forums at many different times—is the funding models that we have. Again, I know that you're all having those discussions, but when you have short-term funding that people are feeling insecure, that's much more likely to impact on somebody being able to be a critical friend. I just really wanted to point out that I do think that it varies quite a lot across Government in terms of who's willing to have those constructive challenging conversations, but sometimes the challenge is that you may have those conversations. Even though—because you can't expect everybody to take everything that you say on board—what you can expect is to have some feedback in terms of why the decisions have been made in the way that they have been. That's particularly true and we'll probably come back to this later on when you're talking about engagement of children and young people. That's often what they report about. We did this so why didn't—what happened with the stuff that we did? I think that there's something about that feedback loop. The intentionality is often good, but particularly when you're in a stage of crisis—and certainly I would say over the last three to four years we've been in crisis—power begins to take over again. That's the nature of the world and so you have to keep backing that back. It's not surprising, but I think that there is a challenge to building a partnership approach and keeping that partnership approach. I'll stop now. I'm sure that we're going to come back to many of those things. Last week's question for Lucy. I really thought the submission that you put in was excellent, and it's something that I myself have asked about a lot. You make the point about—and I'll quote you—the collection and analysis of intersectional gender sensitive sex disaggregated data on women's experience and it carries on. I feel as though in the short time that I've been here I keep asking the same questions, but I don't really get any further forward. In that respect, routinely disaggregating data by sex, because if we don't know what the position is then we can't begin to move forward. Going back to our decision making slant in this, it seems as though we are continually making decisions with one arm tied behind our back, because if we don't know what the actuality is, because the data would tell us that, and if we're not collecting the data. Is that your sentiment as well, and how would you describe what you're saying, your submission, in terms of the quality of decision making for 51 per cent of our population? That's a really important topic, and again, one that in gender continually make the point on around the need for better data. That relates to the review of the public sector equality duty and the Scottish specific duties, which are under way with the Scottish Government. What we are seeing is a routine lack of high-quality data that looks at demographic information, which is sex disaggregated, which is intersectional. Not just recording characteristics around sex, but other forms of inequality, which again helps policy makers to create tailored policy that has the best outcomes for everyone in Scotland. What I would say on this is that we really want to see the committee in this role put pressure on the need for the Scottish Government to implement the National Advisory Council for Women and Girls recommendations. They are far reaching around what needs to happen. Data is one aspect of that in terms of improving what we record, what we make visible in our evidence base and therefore what policy is made as a result. One of the things that we are really struggling with is progress on that and seeing resource, investment and time put into really questioning how some of these processes work within Government. The committee could have a really strong role in restating the need to progress with the NACWAG recommendations. In terms of the data questions specifically, what we are really keen to see is that Scottish Government decision making does not reach for the easiest data sets that are out there, because often they are not robust enough in terms of telling us the lived experiences of intersectional gender inequality, which we know from the evidence that we have as organisations across the third sector and beyond is very real, especially in a time of cost of living crisis, with the legacy of Covid and with 10 years of austerity policies across the UK. I think that what we want to really see is much more strident progress on that. Again, as Jude has brought up, at times of crisis, those can be seen as additional extras. It goes back to business as usual, where equality considerations and thinking about how we are going to look at who the impact is and who is missing out on where the funding is going. It falls down to the wayside because it is seen as an optional. It is nice if you have time, but, as we know, Scottish Government often does not have time. It is often reacting in crisis scenarios and in a reactive space. That is why the NACWAG recommendations will build an architecture that does not allow that to happen. It is going to build in systems and processes where that is not an optional part of data collection that falls down the side or is a nice thing to have. It is a core part of Scottish Government business. Across the sector, policy is only as good as the people who are represented in the data and the evidence that informs it. If someone's lived experience is not represented in the evidence that a team gathers, how can they possibly create a policy to respond to that? We see that through housing, through planning, through many of the big portfolios in Government that fail to look at intersectional gender equality at all. It is mentioned in a cursory way, if at all, within many parts of Government. That is QED on my opening question. Douglas, do you want to come in on a specific supplementary question? It was just on the fear of funding, if I could. Do you feel that that has been covered? No, no, just really to dig a little bit deeper. Okay. On the fear of funding, I think that you had mentioned that, especially when it comes to organisations being critical of the Government that they were, there was a fear that funding would be removed. I was just wondering if there were any examples of that that could be given. If that really is the case, I guess there's a big trust issue that consultations are being as honest as they can. I'm just trying to think how we get that trust back. I would be able to give you an example, maybe to get back to the people who made those comments to see if that actually happened in practice. From the interviews we had, it seems to be at the moment a concern of what could happen if they are being critical. Maybe it's just a perception as well. Maybe it's not the intention of the Scottish Government to give that impression. It's important to raise it at an issue because it came through the three reports. It does matter for some people in the sector. Again, I would just repeat the point that it's not all organisation, it's just some in the sector who feel that way. On the issue of how to rebuild the trust, I think that it is not a key there because what you want is being able to have this open and honest conversation, which is another point we're making in our submission, but that takes time. You need time to build other relationships. Some organisation will have those relationships because they are in touch with civil servants who've been in post for a long time, who understand what the organisation does and what the impact of funding or lack of funding might have on their functions. Some are dealing with, I think, the churn of civil servants came up quite a few times in the evidence you've received so far. What we'd like to see is just give time to people to build relationships, to engage with people properly, time to listen, time to think and learn about what we're doing, what did work, what did not work. Once you have those relationships, it will help people to feel comfortable discussing any aspect of what might be looked at in any decisions you make. You need to have this environment of people who feel they can be challenging. It's okay because I think that the sector is not the enemy here. The sector is here to help those decisions and to help to reach solutions for everybody because what we don't want is being here again in five years, 10 years time, looking at the same issues that we are looking at now or looking at the same problem about engaging the sector, the value of the sector. You've got a huge amount of data, knowledge, expertise that is available there and that needs to be fully part of the decision making process. When we've had the Fraser Valander Institute, the Carnegie Trust and Audit Scotland in front of us, they have all individually been very clear about the need for clarity of purpose when it comes to policy making. That's absolutely paramount, if I was pretty much the first thing that they said. Could I ask you if, in your relationships with Government when you are assisting with policy, do you feel that the clarity of purpose is there in each case and if it hasn't been, could you just give us a little idea of what the problem has been? I was just looking at my nose. Yeah, our main relationship sits with the planning architecture regeneration division in Scottish Government and we very closely ship with them. I think the clarity of purpose is often there and what we're trying to achieve. I look back over the last few years and the key work we've undertaken with them, mainly what that has been our review of the planning system going on since 2016 which has led to a new planning act and a new national planning framework. I think there's been some clarity there. I do think however that the Scottish Government have taken a fairly flexible and collaborative approach to doing that. They have engaged us and used us and given us grant funding to engage with the profession. So there's an idea of what they're trying to achieve but I think there's a flexibility in how that can be done as well. So absolutely the experience I've had working with colleagues in the Scottish Government planning division is that they're willing to listen and willing to learn and willing to adapt if need be on that and to use us as a conduit for that because we've got access to the people who essentially run the planning system and the private public and voluntary sectors. The one thing where I would say that there's sometimes a lack of clarity is that quite often I feel that there's a necessity to try and deliver the project, whatever that project is, without thinking through how it achieves outcomes. I've sat and for example on a couple of programme boards for the Scottish Government and if you look at the risk register, the risk register is very much about delivery of the project itself rather than if you can achieve those outcomes. I think there's a bit of work which is required to figure out exactly how that's done. The Scottish Government, they do use different models to try and make that work, a theory of change models which looks at outcomes first and how you work back from that. I think that there's a need for that whole outcomes-based approach still to be embedded much more within the way in which the Scottish Government will look at how they deliver their different programmes and projects. Is it anybody else who's got any comments on? Yeah, just sort of a little reflection on that. I often, I think that there is often quite a clarity of purpose at the start of a process. If you look at the children and young people sector and the work done around GERFEC, there are a lot of projects where there's been a real vision about how we want Scotland to be for our children and young people. I think it's more in the implementation that the decision making often falls down. I think it comes back to that outcomes-based approach and keeping your eyes on the preventative and the long-term agenda, which is extremely difficult when you're trying to show that you're doing things and things are getting done and showing progress. That is a skill in itself and it's very difficult. I don't think we should underestimate how difficult it is to implement ambitious policy, but I think that's more where no doubt there's times when purpose isn't clear, but I think it's more in that kind of breaking things down into what we're going to do now, losing the long-term view, losing that outcomes focus and losing that preventative focus along the way. Can I just ask on that basis? That's interesting in light of some of the comments that we've picked up in private sessions, so no names attached from former civil servants and former ministers, and it's been highlighted in the Times newspaper this morning. Do you feel that because of the difficulties that you've just cited, that sometimes decisions have to be rushed and not enough time can be devoted to thinking through, just to pick up the point that Mr McLaren raised, thinking through exactly how this is going to be manifested in policymaking. Is that a problem? I think that there is a real challenge at the moment across Scotland, across Scottish policymaking. We have a lot of massively big ambitious projects, and therefore I do think that it becomes a bit of an issue because what you're trying to do is keep everything moving and all the cogs moving, and you do have to, as public servants, show that you're having some output and therefore sometimes it's easier to show you're having that because you've delivered a wee thing over here or a wee thing over there, and that's an absolutely natural, normal place to be, so I do genuinely think that sometimes what we have at the moment is a bit of an unmanageable, but overall unmanageable task to deliver all these things in a timely fashion. However, if I could just reflect back on the timely thing, because sometimes it's good to have a timely decision that's 95 per cent good, then a perfect decision that's 100 per cent good that takes 20 years, that's the opposite of what we want, so it's trying to get in that optimum sweet spot between saying, right, we've got enough information now, we've got the data that we need, this is a good enough decision, and that maybe sounds a bit, my staff will be going over here, she goes again, but it's like you can be really good by not striving for perfection because perfection is not possible in decision making. That's a very interesting point, very astute observation. Do you think that part of the problem of why sometimes it's very difficult is because the quality of the data that is available is not as good as it should be? I think that, coming back to that point, if you get the good strong data at the beginning, that will very much help you make the right decisions in the right order to have the right impact and across portfolios often as well, which I don't think we've really touched on because with children and young people, for instance, it touches everything, so actually getting that decision making right so that you don't have unintended consequences in other bits of policy making is also quite difficult, so having the right data is very helpful on that. Just on that point, in reference to what Ms Hughes said a wee bit earlier, how easy is it when there is a policy that transcends several different government portfolios, children and young people being one of them, planning being another one? How easy is it to get a common agreement on the delivery of the policy when, obviously, there will be some conflicting problems within that? I'm happy to speak to that. We've been working on mainstreaming for many years in terms of trying to encourage a gender equality approach and a general equality approach across all of Scottish Government's work. I would say that there are significant challenges, so one example would be the equally safe strategy, which sits, again, it's not really in a specific area, although it looks at violence against women and girls, it covers economy, it covers lots of different areas, housing, homelessness, the list goes on. One of the challenges that we do have is that the strategies are excellent in terms of being well-leading, very strong evidence base, but then it's the implementation gap after that. We'll then go into discussions with colleagues in government on a specific issue and see maybe a cursory reference to equally safe, but not necessarily a change in how they've shaped that policy area because they've looked at that strategy. We don't want to just see an acknowledgement, we want to see learning and then adapting based on what a strategy says, like equally safe, which has specific learnings for all of government to look at. Instead, it is often on the civil society sector and ourselves to go in and say, why has this not been mentioned, where is evidence of this. That's not the case in all areas, in some areas it has been very well linked in, so education has won, for example, with equally safe. There have been really strong examples of cross collaboration, but a lot of that comes down to leadership, to competency of the civil servants in those roles and how aware they are of the importance of that policy to their own policy portfolio they're working on. My last comment, if that's all right. If we're in a situation whereby a particular policy has failed to deliver what the good intention was, which sometimes happens, what or do you think there are adequate processes there to ensure that it can be properly reviewed? Why did we not implement that good intention and what are we going to do about it next time or do we have to make some changes to that process? Actually, one of the difficulties is that the post-legislative facility within this Parliament is quite limited. We don't have an advisory chamber for a start, but nor do we have much time within committees to look at what happens when a policy goes wrong. What do you think could happen to try to mitigate that and improve the process if there are failures that we do something about it? I think that we have seen it happen in some occasions. I do think that there's a pressure on the civil service to get things happening quickly, so quite often that time for reflection and to take a step back and think through what has and hasn't worked isn't always there. There are some good examples where it has happened. I've mentioned that already from a planning perspective. We had the planning review. There was quite a lot of work going into that before things were done, just reflecting and trying to see what could and couldn't be done. For me, compared to some of the previous points that were made, the issue in many ways is that at the start of a policy process we quite often get good policy, but it's the delivery of the policy that isn't really thought through. I'll give an example again from a planning perspective. We've got a new national planning framework. A lot of people agree that it's a good policy framework. It could make a difference, but there's been no work done on that about how we deliver that, both in terms of the capital investment that is needed to put in place in many of the projects and programmes that it will want to put in place, but also from a workforce strategy perspective as well. We've got real concerns that, when there's not enough planners to deliver this, we've lost a quarter of planners in the last 10 or 15 years, but also from a skills and knowledge perspective that there's a lot of new things required from this, which there needs to be an investment in upskilling as well. I don't think that that element is ever really—it's not often seen as part of a policy programme. The policy programme is about the policy around about the delivery of the policy, and I think that there has to be a bit more emphasis put upon that. Your points there, I think that Lucy Hughes said that we have world-leading strategies, and Craig Hughes said that we have good policy, but surely those things aren't world-leading or good policy if they are not thought through as you put it about how they might be delivered. Are they not just completely unrealistic in that regard? I mean, what way are they world-leading if they can't be delivered? Lucy? That is a valid question, but I think that it's not all or nothing that are good pockets of work happening with these strategies. It's just that we're not seeing enough across Government. I think that for ourselves, when it comes to gender and equalities considerations, that equally safe is a huge part of that in terms of operationalising what that looks like in policy change. It's about a lack of mainstreaming, so that is something that are ways that Government can create changes and upskill across different areas. It's not that it's impossible or it's unrealistic, it's just that the resource and the time and the approach potentially just isn't quite there yet. It's on a journey and it needs committees like yourself to really keep putting the pressure on to say what you're doing about this, whereas, for example, the National Advisory Council recommendations that we've got a centre of expertise set up within the economy directorate. We've not seen any other sense of expertise set up yet. It's very early in his infancy. We have to give Government time to get up to a standard that we need in terms of gender mainstreaming specifically. I think that it's not about saying that there hasn't been enough progress, so we scrap it. It's not good enough. The ideas are there, it's just the follow-through, and we need to come up with solutions to work alongside civil servants to create mechanisms and training and upskilling, for example, which will address those concerns. I stand by the fact that, I think that, set in a planning perspective, the policy ambitions are good and they're very laudable as well. For me, it's often not rocket science. It's about having a decent delivery programme, which gives you an indication as to how the policy is going to be resourced. From a planning perspective, there's a national planning framework in Ireland, for example. It has a 10-year capital investment programme that sits alongside it. The vision in the national planning framework and the capital investment programme goes alongside it. In Ireland, I'm asking why it can't be done in Scotland, and we've been asking that question to the Scottish Government through the national planning framework process. I think that it's just about aligning that resource and making sure that the skills and the human resources are there as well to try to make sure that's delivered. I think that that can be done. It's a quick point to go back to Ms Smith's point about learning about failure. From where we stand, we're still at the stage where we actually don't really understand how the decisions are taken and why. We need more understanding. We don't need to agree with the decision, but my point is that we need greater understanding of how they're coming to those points. As well as learning about failure, we need more learning about what's working well. We've got a good example of good practice around sustainable development goals, for example, and how that project worked. We were involved in it and it was good, but then what happens to that? If you've done it once and it was good, why can't we hear more about it? Is it used then within the Scottish Government? We don't know. Judith, do you want to come in as well? That's a quick point really about, I think, it's quite possible to have good policy and it not to be implemented well, but I think that if you go back to the Christie Commission and what the Christie Commission said was, we're going to have to do more with less. I think that at the moment we're doing too much more with too much less, so where is it that we change what and how we do it so that we actually do implement the very good policies that I do think in many parts of government are coming out? I think that I just wanted to take it back to, you know, you can trace it back to there. We see a civil service that's pretty stretched. We see a lot of churn where I think that that thing of, you know, it's true you want, you don't want everybody to stay in the same portfolios forever, but you do want to see a bit of continuity so that you can start building that expertise and I think there's a challenge that we have to ask ourselves at the moment about how do we get enough to do what we really need to do, which I don't think we have at the moment. Coming back to some of the earlier discussion about which was about trust and trust between government and your own organisations, I'm also concerned in that about trust with the public as well. It seems to me that we're talking about big policy regimes and what in my head I'm thinking about the promise, for instance, to care experience young people, a real frustration, a lack of progress, you know, not being delivered, but there's political unanimity that this is the right thing to do. Do we risk trust both with organisations and with public if we set those very ambitious change directions but haven't thought about how we might deliver them? Please, Lucy. Yeah, and I think it's related to this. It's something that we've thought about a lot in terms of the amount of high-level commitments there are, for example on gender inequalities mainstreaming. There is, you know, a host of commitments that the Scottish Government have made, but there is something around sort of what's something we would call deep culture or deep structure in terms of the everyday business of government and how that's then implemented down through chains of command, through into implementation, how you involve public bodies. There might be buy-in at a certain level, whether that's political, whether that's at director level, but it's actually how do you create buy-in and an understanding of how important this is as whatever that policy area might be. For us, it's about the fact that although there's maybe a high-level commitment around gender mainstreaming, actually civil servants working on the granular detail of something might not understand how to do that work, why it's important and why they're being asked to do it on stretched resources and time. I thought it was really interesting looking back at Liz's point earlier on some of the discussions from former civil servants and ministers. In February, someone spoke about the equality and fairer budget statement and that's a really useful tool, but it felt like there wasn't enough time to do that justice. So we have the knowledge, it's just allowing the civil servants in those roles to really use them to create better policy design and also explain why they're important as well. We can't assume that because someone at a senior level has made that commitment that every single person delivering it really gets it as well. Craig, you want to come? It's just to perhaps give you an example of where we need to be careful, as you say, about policy ambitions and public trust. I'm acutely aware of public confidence and the planning system being quite flaky sometimes. It's a contested space, shall we say. I suppose one of the things that's come out of the 2019 planning act is local police plans, where local communities have the ability to now produce their own plans for their areas. That's a great thing, something we've supported, something we're keen to make happen on the ground. The issue that we have with that is that policy ambition isn't supported by resources at a local level. I know a number of planning authorities are trying to do what they can do within the context of them, having very limited resources as well, but that worries me from a planning profession perspective because it could hit the confidence of the public saying that that's a planning system not working for me, not because the policy is wrong, but because the implementation of the resources of that policy hasn't actually been put in place to support that policy ambition. I'd like to pick up on what Judith MacDonald quoted from the Christy commission a moment ago in the wider question of policy ambition versus delivery. It feels that there is a bit of attention here. If we're to improve both policy delivery but also review and analysis of that, that requires additional capacity. We know, certainly for the remainder of this parliamentary session, civil service capacity is not going to get any bigger. The civil service in Scotland is bigger than it's ever been, but we know until 2026 roughly what our finances are going to be. The civil service headcount is probably going to go down. At the same time, as quite rightly advocating for improvements in policy delivery, your organisations all also quite legitimately advocate for lots of new policies and lots of really, really good ideas that would improve people's lives if we delivered them. However, there's a clear tension there of if we're going to put more resources into improving the quality at which we do what we've already committed to do, the resources are not going to be there for the new policy ideas as well. My question to you is, instead of adopting new policies and there to be constant pressure on Government to come up with something new and flashy for every budget, every programme for Government, should we be doing less better? Have we hit that point in devolution now where the capacity is not going to get any greater? We recognise that, as the Auditor General's point today, there's a gap between policy ambition and delivery. Should we focus on doing what we've already committed to do at a much higher level of quality than adopting new policies regardless of the merits of what those new policies might be? Yeah, I can start that one off. It's a difficult question because of course if you asked all of us we'd all have different priorities about what's a priority and what's not a priority. But I do think that we probably are at the stage of having to ask the hard questions. What are the priorities, the promise that you've mentioned? That's been mentioned. Super big priority, we don't want to let that slip, we want to implement that properly and there'd be many others as well. Christie talks about making the choices and prioritising and so on. We have to ask ourselves a question and say, okay, what can we, if we know what our resource is over the next period of time, what can we legitimately deliver and therefore deliver with quality because I think that's how you get trust. If you're going to lose some people on the way if you don't do, but if you deliver things well, if you actually do impact on child poverty over the period of the Parliament, that will well engender trust across Scotland if you do deliver the promise or if there's good delivery on the promise and so on. I think there's another challenge though and I think again, I'm sounding like I'm Charlie Christie, I didn't write it, I promise you. But there's something I think quite fundamental as well about is it time we start to ask the question about how do we resource this work because some of this work is weak, it's brilliant. The ideas and the notions and the challenge and the ambition that we have are brilliant. As a nation, are we willing to start having these conversations about can we raise slightly more revenue? Are we brave enough to have that conversation? We might not be, you might not be at that stage but I think it's a question that has to be asked. But if we're not going to raise more revenue and we're not going to have more resources then yes, you do have to prioritise and I won't fight with my colleagues about what's going to be top of that list. Just on Jude's point around prioritisation and doing more with less, I think that was how you phrased it. I do think there's something around the historic commitments around gender and equality's mainstreaming that it is possible within current resource to do a lot. We might have these bigger ambitions but organisations like Engender, Close the Gap and Scottish Women's Aid have worked alongside civil servants to look at what's currently happening and how can that be harnessed in a different way, whether that's looking at the roles that civil servants have, working alongside the National Advisory Council on how things could be structured in a different way. It's not necessarily asking for a huge additional investment but using the resources that are available in a slightly different way. Just on Jude's point, I would say that when we see a time of scarcity or crisis, often equalities and gender considerations fall off a cliff to put it in blunt terms, we don't see that being a primary core consideration. It's seen as a nice to have and I think that involving children, young people and many other colleagues here would agree on different issues. They feel that that is often the first thing to go. Actually, if it's not seen as a core part of business, what you'll see is that the unintended consequences of that lead to more work down the line. For example, for Covid, that was a huge reveal of how, when a crisis hits, when you only have a limited amount of resources to tackle something of that scale, equality impact assessments go out the window, human rights assessments, looking at how those different resources are being put together, it's seen as, well, we just need to get this done. What that has caused is a legacy of women's rights eroding from Covid and having to pick up those pieces with increased investment now as a result of not looking at that at the time. That's something that we all really want to safeguard against. We don't want to see human rights and equalities considerations as optional, as something that's nice to have, but it's something that has to always be a priority. It's not about asking for a huge amount of new funding always, but it's not about keeping what's already there when it does become more stretched. It's something that all of our organisations are concerned about. I think that it's a question of asking hard and brave questions, I think maybe different questions, because at the moment what's happening is that the sector itself has limited resources and capacity, so you might have something like the social union advisory board that came up with a list of recommendations of what should happen. We got involved with that. The new thing now is end set, for example, of wellbeing economy, so the sector field needs to direct the resources towards inputting into those working groups, but we're not sure what's happening to the recommendations that were made in the SRAP document, for example. You feel you always have to catch up with a new policy, but we're not sure what's happening with the old good ones that were there before. Just a point to say that this inquiry is focusing on Scottish Government, but some of the principle is about partnership working, but we can all do better across sectors, so it's about partnership working and how do you use that to work on those big policies? I was going to ask a follow-up to Lucy, but it applies to everybody on the panel, so feel free to chip in. If I could be a little bit challenging, I was going to direct it to Lucy, because I can't remember the last time in gender advocated for a new policy that I disagreed with, but if we go back to that question of should we be doing less better or doing more, if the Scottish Government followed through on previous commitments that have made improved policy delivery in areas that you'd already worked to secure commitments on, would that result in your organisation putting less pressure on the Government to deliver on, to commit to new policies? Ultimately, there's a political trade-off here. Government feels pressure to constantly commit to new policies, because that's the reality of politics, but if the organisations who are able to put that pressure on Government were directing that pressure on follow-through delivering commitments that are already made, then perhaps we would see a shift in political focus and then resource public sector capacity that comes with it, but that requires give and take on both sides. I think you've put that to Lucy and then I'll bring in Craig. That's good. That's a good question, Ross, and what I would say is that we have been doing that for many years, especially colleagues in the Scottish Women's Aid, for example, have been trying to follow up on specific asks, such as a leavers fund for women who have experienced domestic abuse, which was committed to in 2020. We're three years later and we've not seen that materialising. We are consistently having to repeat the same messages, all three of our organisations. It feels honestly that we are on repeat sometimes. In terms of our role in holding Government to account on previous commitments, that's pretty much our everyday. I would say that we don't often have space to create proactive ideas for what we would like to see because we're in a reactive space where we're consistently having to go in and remind whether there are civil service teams, ministers of what they've already committed to. That's why I keep bringing up the National Advisory Council, because you had a huge set of recommendations about how effective Government decision making should work, yet we're however many years down the line. That work is only really just getting started. Much of that resource was reallocated elsewhere for crisis situations that have occurred over the last few years. I think that there's something there, Ross. I would say that we are very much in that space. It's actually where most of our work is right now, is trying to revisit commitments that have already been made, rather than getting space to imagine different possibilities and put forward ambitious new policy. Thanks, Craig. I'll come back to your previous question. I think that one of the issues that we have here is the short-term long-term issue, which is not news to anyone. We've been talking about it for some time, but I do think that there's a demand for the Scottish Government quite often to do things in the short and medium term and to do things quickly. Whereas I think that the real value in a lot of what we do is that we take a long-term approach, but the issue with that is how do you show the progress you're making on that in the short term. There's a bit of a dilemma there as well, but one of the key things that Christie talked about was preventative spend. We all still talk about it. I'm not absolutely convinced that it's something that we put at the forefront of decision making as much as we possibly could. I argue that town planning is preventative, because if you design places in a way that can make people healthy, you're not having to pick up things in the health budget later on, for example. I think that there's a thing about how we join things up a bit better and think about things most strategically to embed that preventative spend. I also think that we'll probably get far too many plans. I look at the type of things that planners have to deal with on a daily basis. There's all these different plans that have to align with one another. Quite often they don't. They come from different perspectives, but quite often they will have engagement exercises with communities, asking very similar questions around the same time. I think that there's a means of trying to see how we can join up some of those plans and some of those exercises that we can get to developing those plans. I've got one more question for the community if there's time. Just picking up on, in particular, what was in the SCVO written submission around length of time for consultations and some of the analysis that you've done around comparing the 2004 commitment, which I think was 90-day consultation to recent ones. There's a tension in two types of criticism that the Scottish Government comes under and Parliament comes under as well often. One is that there's not enough consultation, there's not enough co-design, there's not enough co-development getting by in from key stakeholders, and the other is that it takes far, far too long to deliver anything in Scottish politics. The legislative process takes too long, policy change takes too long. There's an obvious tension between the two of those. How would you suggest that we wrestle with that? If we're to do more consultation, more co-design, we might end up with better outcomes, but it will take longer. If we're talking about issues like child poverty, for example, or a lot of the issues in our justice system, there's an obvious and urgent pressure to do something right now. How would your organisation suggest that the Government wrestles with that tension? That is probably simplifying it far too much, but if you had to pick between the two, lack of consultation and getting by in, and taking far too long, what is a greater challenge for government at the moment? Judith MacDonald is a very, very good question. What makes good consultation, and when should you do it? I think that one of the lessons, or one of the things that I would reflect back on, is that sometimes you feel like you'd perhaps consult. There's similar consultations on similar issues, and so there's a bit of repetition there, so it's sort of been quite clear about this is something that does, and I know there's things within statute you need to consult on, but how do you actually learn from what's gone before? There's sometimes knowledge there already, and you're sort of consulting on something where you've already got data or you've already got knowledge, so I think that first bit sort of ticking that off. When we talk about engagement, for instance, with children and young people, what you're finding is little pockets now of lots of engagement with children and young people, and actually what you need is a more how do we engage with children and young people over the whole of, you know, over the whole, over every policy area in a way that's kind of consistent, clear, coherent, and doesn't, you know, have unintended consequences, and isn't asking the same questions five or six times, so I think there's a bit of a getting up, you know, getting upstream, getting upstream of where you want to be, and I am definitely of the thing that you should be consulting when it's something really new that you need the information on, and then you should be feeding back on that, and I do think sometimes a short consultation is probably quite good if you're only asking, you know, I don't, you know, whatever, so I think there is something to be said for looking at that whole, the way that's done, and making sure that the very first step is that what have we done before, what information do we have, what do we have there, what do we really need to ask about what we, you know, so learning from what's gone before. I'll stop. The issue around repeating ourselves, I think you need to, like, what's already there given, you know, the issues we're dealing with, the sector has been providing evidence for years on them, so what is it, what is the point that you now need to consult on, and then it's the issue around feedback, the feedback, so people provide evidence, provide data, we don't know what's happening with it, so my point about understanding what is happening with the data we provide, what is it used for, how is it used, so I think there is an issue around, you know, the criticism about policy taking a long time, part of me, maybe I'm just too optimistic, I'm thinking if you explain to people a bit more what's being done with what they provide to you, maybe they would be less quick to criticise, you know, if it's taken a bit longer, but at the moment we don't have that feedback, it could be much better, so I think that that's key when it comes to consultation. Consultation is also just one tool that you could maybe think of innovative ways of engaging with people and involving communities. If I can just jump in on that point, so the government's main consultation portal, the consult.gov.scot, I think it has the you said we did page on it. Now from a lot of the feedback we've got from stakeholders, it doesn't sound like that the direct stakeholder consultation, as opposed to that general public consultation that's done through that portal, it sounds like that fall-through isn't happening as much when it's the kind of stakeholder consultation that your organisation's been involved with, is that the case, or are you feeling that the you said we did approach isn't really your experience of government consultation? I think that Lucy and Craig are going to come in that might be on a slightly different point, but everyone's come directly back and they'll come to the court. Yeah, I would say whether we come in on, you know, on the programme for government, we've asked for accommodation, consultation, quite often we just don't get any information on what's being done with that, and it could be, you know, all we can't do that because of this and this and this. Again, it's the point about understanding what's happening. Lucy? I just wanted to go back to the original question. I think it's about asking different questions sometimes. I agree with Jude that sometimes it's consultation for the sake of it in terms of the absolute volume that sector organisations like ourselves have to go through in order to influence different processes, so that's a huge burden across all of the third sector, all of civil society, to have to consistently be consulted on in a really wide-ranging amount of areas. I completely agree with a lot of the stuff that we're saying, we're just repeating ourselves, we're quoting our own evidence again and again. Again, that's why I keep coming back, I sound a bit like a broken record, but what do we need to do within government to create different strategic ways of working, where we can upskill civil service teams who are creating these consultations to write them in a way that reflects what are the data gaps, have they done their equality impact assessment right at the start, where they look at, okay, we know this about women's lives in relation to this area, but we actually don't know anything about this specific group and what they're experiencing. That should be what the consultation is based on, it shouldn't just be, we're just putting this out because we have to as part of the process, these should be much more honoured and used intelligently for policy design to create the best possible first draft, because so much of the delay comes from people then having to go back and challenge, rewrite unintended consequences, et cetera. If we can do that at the start, we're asking more intelligent questions around, for example, the qualities, that means that at the end you don't have a policy document, for example, to name the national strategy for economic transformation, which is gender blind, and then you have the women's sector, like ourselves, having to think, okay, where do we go from here? We have to go back and try and look at ways to influence further. That's what I would say on your first question, and I can't quite remember what the second one was, Ross, if you want to pull up on that. I'm trying to net them together into something much shorter, to be honest, rather than just waffling at you. The core point of it was about that tension between consultation and length of time taken for delivery, really, that a lot of the time the Government comes under quite legitimate criticism for not taking the urgency that organisations believe it should in those kind of areas, but then when it does take urgency, people feel that they've not been bought in to the process. I don't think that it's an either or. I think that the length of time is to do with the lack of strategic thinking around which questions are being asked, so I don't think that we should have to choose between either not being involved in it happening very quickly in a way that doesn't create participation and expertise from the civil society sector, but then we also shouldn't be waiting for three years, four years, for commitments to be followed through, so I don't necessarily agree with that the way that's framed in terms of having to choose one or the other. I think that we need to look at why is that length of time needed in the first place to create intelligent policy design? Are there things we can do to reduce that time frame to ask better questions using tools like equality impact assessments much more intelligently and much more robustly at an early stage? It saves so much time down the line if the resource and the skills are there at the start. It's just to make the case for an approach that is much more having engagement with one another in the process because I think that you can save at the end in some time on that. When we do stuff and planning, my ideal scenario is that we have a sure-et model where we're trying to create a vision for a place and I think that that could work almost for any policy approach. The gathering of all the key stakeholders involved in that over an intensive period of time—that's sure-et—is three or four days. You talk through what options are, you talk through potential, you talk through constraints, you come up with a vision for what you're trying to achieve from that, you can then work out what your outcomes are going to be, what your outputs are going to be. The important thing about that is that it becomes a conversation. From there, you can then start to identify who that's what, what roles and responsibilities are, who will be providing resources for things as well. The conversation continues to be a dialogue based upon milestones that you've set in terms of that period. At the end, you can monitor what's being said, so that becomes a much more intensive conversation. You get buy-in commitment to do that and you've got the views of all those people who will be affected. They might not all be totally satisfied by that, but having that conversation will appreciate why that decision has been come to. On the question of follow-through to consultation feedback, it sounds like, certainly from your written submission, that the NPF4 process was perhaps quite a good example of that. You said that we did. Did you feel that what you were feeding in, you were getting some kind of direct response to either to say, yes, that's now been adopted or an explanation of what it hadn't been? Yes, there were several aspects that we obviously tracked what we've said and see if it's been lifted or been used, and I think there's been a bit of that in there. We also talked to officials a lot, so they would tell us quite often, yes, we're going to go with that, we're not going to go with that. They may not always tell us the reasons behind it, but they will tell us that. What interesting I think they did in the draft national planning framework is they actually published a document which looked at all the different consultation responses that would come in and gave the reasons for why they were making changes, and that was a really useful way of tracking what had been said, what had been done and where things were going, so I think that that was a good example. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Douglas Lamesthan. Yes, thank you. Thanks, Cymru. Just on the point on consultation, Craig, from your submission you said that the RTPI Scotland would advocate for consultations to include draft delivery programmes as a matter of course. Do you not feel that government would be then maybe criticised for pre-determining the outcome of the consultations if that was in there? That was the argument for not having a delivery programme with the national planning framework. I can't see that. I personally think that if you've got a policy you've got to show who you're going to deliver it with, we've had these discussions already, so I think there's no harm in setting out what you're going to try and do and how you're going to deliver it. You may get criticised for what had been seen as a fate of comply. I don't think so because if you're using that as part of the discussion debate, the delivery programme can be changed as well to meet the needs of the policy ambition. Would others like to see the same thing in part of the consultation, a delivery plan or nothing? It's not something I've actually thought about but I think it's interesting and maybe comes back to building those relationships of trust because I think if you're able to have those open and honest conversations, then having a delivery plan then there would be actually fine because it would be able to show how this could look concretely, which would be a good thing to get your teeth into at the baseline of that. We've talked in different ways about trust across different parts of the Scottish Government. There's very good levels of trust but I think that if you have that bedrock of trust, then something like that isn't seen as a fate of comply, it's just seen as. If we did this, this is what that would look like, which could be helpful. That's just me reflecting back on that. The next point that I want to go on to is the performance framework. For me, that should be at the heart of all decision making. Is that how you all see it as well? In your organisations, do you refer to the NPF at all times when you're putting submissions in to remind the Government how they should be focused on the outcomes of that? Just on the national performance framework, it's interesting because there is a consultation out at the moment to look at reviewing the different outcomes, national outcomes. What I would say is that, historically, the national performance framework hasn't always used because just two of the statistical indicators directly relate to women's equality. It's very limited in terms of looking at gender equality as it stands, and that will be something that we are putting in our response to Government. At the moment, we see that the national performance framework isn't mainstreaming gender enough into all the different outcomes that it looks at. To add to that, the purpose of the national performance framework was to operationalise the SDGs and sustainable development goals, but there were far more links to gender equality, which were not included or referenced. I think that there are some questions for us around how fit for purpose is that in terms of the other commitments that the Government has made for gender inequality mainstreaming, if the NPF isn't doing that in itself. I think that there is opportunity with the supplement consultation to really look critically at that. Again, align what the NPF is doing with all the other commitments that we've seen so that they speak to each other. They are not in contradiction or in tension with each other. Anyone else? Judith? I think that it's not a perfect tool, but it is an outcomes-focused piece of work, which is what we are very keen on. We use it a lot. We look at it a lot. I think that there are outcomes that should be sharpened up or added to that. I've worked in lots of different countries, and to have that framework is a very powerful thing. We should be making it as good as we possibly can to be able to deliver for women, girls, children and young people. I'll be honest. We probably don't refer to it enough. In some ways, we've got other NPFs, as you've mentioned already. I like the idea of it. I like the concept of it. I like what it tries to do. Sometimes it can feel like we've been nebulous, and I think that I need to try to make it real in relation to how it relates directly to certain policy issues and to certain ambitions that we have. I think that we've got to remember our outcomes-based approaches. I'm a great fan of them, but they're really, really difficult to do. I think that we're still struggling, God, how many years on it was since the national performance framework came in 2007. I think that there's still a bit of work to be done on almost how civil servants, but also organisations and people like ourselves interact with it and use it and understand it and see how it becomes that overarching context for what we do. That, in some ways, is a bit of a cultural behaviour change issue, which I think we're still not 100 per cent there yet, and that's across the board. Everybody's not just exercising civil service for that. It's just such a difficult thing to do, but it's the right thing to do. Is it what organisations are trying to get to, or are they trying to align to the NPF, or is it seen as something for the Government to deal with? I certainly say that it's something we should be, and my members should be, trying to achieve as well. We've got a role to play in it. Sometimes the difficulty is figuring out exactly what that role will be in achieving certain outcomes. Sometimes others appreciate the role that we can play. I've always got a bit of an issue with the perception of planning. People don't always see it as a positive, constructive thing that enables things to happen. My job in relation to the national performance framework is missionary. We can try to show people that planning can actually help you to achieve this, and we've got a role to play if you help us to work with you. I think that, getting away from the idea of some of that silo-based thinking, and having a better understanding of where different people fit and what they can contribute, if we get that right, that would make a major difference. My last point, if I may, is around transparency and financial transparency. Rachel, in your submission, you spoke about a budget line of £800,000 being moved, but the impact of the budget reduction was unclear. How could that process be improved so that it's a much better way to follow the money a lot easier? It is a big issue for us once we've been pushing for years. We are working with the Scottish Government on it at the moment, so I understand that the third sector unit within the Scottish Government is doing some work trying to figure out all the flows coming to the sector, but the financial systems being used, if my understanding is correct, are not helping to get a whole picture, basically. That's just an example of this work being done, but the systems are working against it. Another platform that is being suggested is this 360 giving platform. That was being suggested in a recommendation for the Scottish Government to use, so we know that the fund from a CVO is on the platform, but what we would like to see is others using it, so more funds coming from the Scottish Government. I understand that local authorities can use it as well, so if more people could populate it, that would help in trying to get that picture, because at the moment we don't have a full picture of all the funding. Your submission also speaks about potentially being funded through the Scottish Government, through local government, and it's not clear where the overlaps are. When you have that, it's not really an efficient way of the Government spending their money. It would just help all of us to understand what's happening, how it gets back, and then put a bit of accountability towards what's happening. However, at the moment, you just won't be able to get that picture just yet, so I know that there's work being done, but there's more to do. We've been looking quite a lot at how things work within Government, although I understand today that you're mainly commenting on how Government as a whole relates to you. However, I was interested in SCVO's point about how it's helpful for the voluntary sector to get a better understanding of how the Scottish Government works, and how decisions are indeed taken. That's what we're trying to do here. Does it matter to you whether the civil servants are the main people who are leading on policy and the minister just trails along behind, or, in other cases, the ministers driving things and the civil servants are trailing along behind? Is that something that impacts on you at all? I hadn't thought of it, to be honest. We are the point where we don't have enough understanding full stop to begin with, so we don't even know whether it's civil servants who think that evidence is provided to the minister. It's almost like going back to basics. We just need basic transparency and feedback into what's happening within the Scottish Government. That would be great. If you feel that you've won over the civil servants on a particular question, can you take it that the minister will just agree with that, or have you not had that experience? I don't know. I couldn't comment on that personally. If you've got supportive civil servants, it's just a sign of a good relationship. If you feel that you can have a said open honest conversation, you might agree or disagree with the decision being taken at the end of it. What we need is more understanding around the decision making bit of the process. I was going to take Mr McLaren first, if that's all right. I'm assuming that it's quite a technical area that maybe you deal mainly with civil servants and the minister is more in the background, but that's not fair. We talk a lot to civil servants for a good relationship with them. One of the interesting aspects of the civil servants that we deal with in the planning division is that many of them are planners and experts, and there isn't that shift. They know the technical detail about things as well, so you can have a fairly detailed conversation with them around certain things. I always find that civil servants don't ever give you a straight yes or no, because it will refer to the minister afterwards, which is what they do, simply as that. I've always, certainly from when I've been involved in meetings with ministers and civil servants or them all separately, the things seem to be locked in together. I've never really seen any sort of changes of opinion or differences of opinion between them. That sounds positive, Ms Hughes. Again, like others, I hadn't specifically thought of this question in advance, but I would say that ministers are able to give leadership on key issues. As much as we can foster relationships with civil service teams and we have great relationships across Government, if that person leaves post, we need that accountability and that line of sight to know that the buck stops with the minister who covers that directorate. They need to understand the detail and know exactly what is motivating their civil service teams. In terms of gender, mainstream and inequalities, that is so important, because that needs political leadership. It needs ministers to buy into that and lead that from the forefront, so that civil servants aren't trying to advocate from within. That's a really difficult thing to do if you've got one good relationship with someone who really cares and understands. If they're not able to change the whole direction of the directorate that they're in, that's for the minister to do, so they have that leadership role. It's really important that they can step into that and feel again that they understand gender inequality and how that's intersection on Scotland, how their area relates to that and what they are doing with their civil service teams to work on that. Otherwise, again, we're having a small organisation. How big is the civil service team? It's absolutely huge. How could we possibly foster enough relationships across those teams to lead out inequalities? It's more important that the relationship you build up with the civil servants than the minister. No, I would say that it's different roles. There's a leadership role for ministers in terms of being able to create enough resource and the structure of the way that their civil service teams work to prioritise different areas. One civil service team is not able to make that change from within because they are constrained by what they've been set by a minister. That's the accountability mechanism that should be there. I don't think that there are very different relationships that you have as a civil society organisation, but what I would say is that a civil service team is much less stable in terms of that person could leave post next week and spend years or months trying to advocate for a certain policy change. However, if the minister is bought in, that's going to still be the case. When that civil servant changes, there will still be that priority as set. There's a level of accountability there, which ministers should have, especially for mainstreaming gender equality across them. Dr Turbine, did you want to come in on that one? Very quickly, because she said quite a lot about that leadership role. I think that both relationships are important. I think that civil service is very important in terms of that detailed look. You cannot expect the minister to have that deviate overview of that whole policy area, so that's extremely important. We've talked a bit about the churn of that. We've seen a recent case, of course, when ministers have churned, and that had a massive impact on the funding round for children and young people, so discontinuity there is quite difficult as well. I think that you need good relationships with both. My feeling is that if you have good leadership at the top and you have a good strong civil service team, then most of the relationships are done through the civil service team, and it's very positive. We've already mentioned a little bit the question of how we make longer-term decisions, and it's not all short-term. I think that you've all recognised that there's a problem, but I was wondering if any of you had solutions. We had the example from New Zealand that the civil servants will set out a longer-term plan, not even a plan, but the different options that there are in a sector. That's not connected to the minister, so that's not something that we ever do here, because everything that the civil servants do really comes through the ministers. Does that sound feasible, or have you any other suggestions as to how we can get a longer-term planning, given all of us are elected every five years? I've not heard of that example, but I do think that there's a need to set out a vision that goes beyond a parliamentary term, because the things that we're investing are meant to be preventative, they're meant to be long-term. We have, we're lucky enough, I mean there's areas of disagreement across government, but actually there's quite a lot of areas where there's a lot of joint buy-in, so we can actually have that long-term vision for children, young people, for child poverty, what is it we're going to do over the next 10 years, and that doesn't mean that, I'm not talking about a detailed plan, I'm talking about this, and that might help then do that prioritisation exercise of what can't slip and what might be able to slip and what might be able to move and have that overall vision. So it sounds like a good idea, I don't know how to work and practice, but I think it sounds good. I'll quote the national planning framework, because I think a fairly useful example of, it is a provisive vision for the next 20-25 years. There was quite a collaborative means of doing that both within the technical field, but also politically as well. I think the minister at the time, Tom Arthur, took a lot of time to try and work with other parties as well, so if you can try and take that collaborative approach, I think there's probably more in common than take us apart on some of these things, and it's sort of trying to see how you can establish that. If you can get some form of unanimity around lots of it, and maybe not all of it, that might help to take that, if you then get that vision in place, it can then provide the framework for the decision making which ensues after that's been agreed. So if you can work in a much more collaborative way, and try and de-politicise some of those issues as well, I think that can make a difference. That sounds quite good, but maybe planning is an easier thing to do, because buildings take a long time to build, whereas one of your problems I think would be just year-to-year funding and all that kind of thing. That's why we're also asking for fair funding, so multi-year funding, for example, is part of that. So when you take a, I suppose, a long-term approach, just consider everything. If you had longer-term funding, that would probably be helpful in terms of working towards that vision. It would free some resources for organisations on the ground, not having to report every quarter annually on what the funding is for. So it would free resources, capacity, people would be able to work towards this vision. It would probably help towards building those relationships that we need between institutions, because at the moment, as we said quite a few times, we might rely on individual civil servants. It's like a personality, but you need to have somehow institutions that, you know, partnership working is embedded between institutions, so when one person leaves, you still have collaborative working between sectors. I think that a long-term budget would help with that. You're always going to have to react to decision. You're always going to have to make short-term decision. That doesn't prevent you from having a long-term mission, I think. Just on your point around the New Zealand example, I think that that's really interesting in terms of expanding the remit of what a civil service team could provide in terms of advice and in terms of expertise for new Governments coming in, whether that's new ministers being appointed, whether that's a completely different elected government, because there are parts of government business that will not change as a result of a political administration changing, yet we do see that often there will be that need to continually come in and say the same things across all of the civil society sectors. Again, the National Advisory Council has spoken about that, creating gender expertise within centres. I heard from a previous session that someone spoke about policy anchors, so having particular civil servants that have a gender expertise and they can guide other parts of the civil service and minister as well on how to embed certain frameworks, because we shouldn't just rely on political leadership for certain everyday parts of government business, for example, furthering equality. That should be the business of government every day, no matter the administration in place. We have to safeguard that by building up the mechanisms that civil servants can use to create knowledge in-house that's sustainable, that's long term, which upskills staff across policy portfolios to continue this work, led by different ministers and different priorities, but they will have those raw skills ready to go. What's happening is that are civil servants not incentivised properly? I don't think it's actually on individual civil servants. I think it's a do with the way that the government is structured right now in terms of what's prioritised on job descriptions, who are they recruiting in and then once in post what is accessible to people. Do they have time to upskill in these areas? Do they have time to look at equality impact assessments and know how to do those really well and really thoroughly? Do they have access to the data that they need? Training and upskilling a bit. That's a huge part. We can't expect everything of someone who doesn't have those tools and that's why organisations like ourselves, of Scottish Women's Aid and Close the Gap, consistently come in and have to do that work almost on behalf of teams because that knowledge isn't in-house. The pandemic has been mentioned and I got slightly different views from a couple of you as to your experiences. I think that on the whole SCVO was positive because decisions were being made really under pressure and maybe the third sector was being dealt with a bit more fairly, you felt. Whereas I also got the impression, misuse your paper, that corners were being cut. And I just wonder how we tie these two up that the kind of urgency we bit like Mr Greer was talking about earlier, that urgency is against better decision making. The pandemic was positive? What we heard is that some organisation had a better experience in terms of partnership working, so they felt that they were trusted more to deliver services. They felt funding came with maybe less bureaucracy attached to it and there was just greater trust. That won't be the case for everybody. I've heard other experiences as well, but I think that's the point that we're making. That's why the inquiry into Covid is something to keep an eye on because we might be able to learn something from it. What did work, what did not work, but that's the learning bit. It would be interesting to see what's happening with that because we hear different experiences, but on one side some had better experience during the pandemic. Misuse all negative or were there positives? I'm not going to say all negative, but we have seen a disproportionate impact of the pandemic on specific groups such as women. There is so much evidence out there that women's rights have been actively eroded by the last five, ten years of not only austerity, but also the Covid pandemic and now the cost of living crisis. Consistently, that is putting at extreme risk hard-won rights for women in Scotland and for other marginalised groups as well. Dr Sorbran, you want to go? Very quickly. I worked for many years on international development, humanity and disaster relief, and the two things are not mutually exclusive when you're responding to a crisis. Actually, you need to start at the very beginning and say what is the most preventative way we can respond to this crisis. In some cases, I think that some of Covid was positive in terms of the way it was dealt with, but in other areas we failed to take that preventative approach from the very beginning. It's the same discussion really, but you just have to do it in a slightly different way. In terms of the sort of emergency response aspect of it, I think that we had a good relationship with the Scottish Government. We formed a short working group advisory group with the minister of civil servants with COSLA, with the heads of line in Scotland. We were kept up to date on a very regular basis on how things went on and we were discussing about what type of things had to change in the short term, so of changing regulations for different things. These were things that were discussed openly and an incident agreement was made probably on a consensual basis, to be honest with you. It allowed us to put into things, but it also allowed us to keep an eye on what was going on and what thoughts were from other stakeholders. From a process perspective, it was useful. The last First Minister set out a national mission to combat drugs deaths in Scotland. I wondered how your organisations have been involved in the decisions in implementing that. Can I start with Rachel? I mean, I couldn't comment on that. That's not an area that the CVO is working on, so some of our members would be, but we're not. It's not something that we're engaged in. Okay. Lizzy, yes? It's not something that I've looked at for today's session. I want to come back to you because I've only been in post for a year and I don't know about some point. We did have some involvement in that. From the children and young people's perspective, it's quite possible that we did some work. I can come back to that. I suppose that I raise it because it feels a little bit emblematic of something that we've already discussed, which is a high-level, very challenging policy direction that the country should pursue, backed by quite catastrophic data or underpinned by one of the worst drugs deaths records in the developed world. I'm trying to understand how then all those organisations orientate towards dealing with it. It's maybe slightly illustrative to me in the first instance. I understand that it feels a little bit left field in terms of coming into the conversation. How would your organisations be involved in the work of public service reform in those kinds of areas? I could draw on other instances. For instance, the promise, which requires a high-level statement by a detailed public service reform and the involvement of organisations, or what the last First Minister called the sacred duty of closing the attainment gap in Scotland. Those are big public sector reform jobs, and I wonder if you are involved in those decisions and how that might work. I might come back the other way, Judith. On the promise—and again, this is before us with Children in Scotland—we were actively involved in the title of the working group, I don't know, but in some of that base work that went on at the very beginning in terms of getting together our different stakeholders to think about how that might look in practice. There was quite a very active involvement in that. We are now doing some specific work around what that might look like to support pupil assistants in schools who are dealing with people on the edge of care. We are then actively trying to, in our forum and so on, be a subject that we would talk about, get policy input into and so on. We are quite actively involved because it is particularly about looked after children. The example that I can bring in, which we have experience on, is the application of the public sector equality duty, which is very much looking at how do public bodies fulfil those duties in their functions. We have done some detailed work on that. I would be happy to write to you about that as well, but especially on equality impact assessments and data gathering, as we have already discussed. We have created some really detailed guidance on how that should be done well, what a high-quality impact assessment looks like. We are not expecting people to magic up that understanding. There is a need for that knowledge to be learned and upskilled over time. We have come up with a solid set of steps for how to improve that process across all the public services. I would be happy to speak more about that. I do not want to just place that as culture, because it clearly informs outcomes in terms of the way that it works, but not at the heart in terms of decisions about where policies might be delivered. I am thinking about how medical assisted treatment standards and drug use might be applied in a rural area versus an urban area. Is there an impact in gender work around those issues to try to inform the gendered nature of those decisions? Rather than work on granular specific parts of public service reform, we are looking at how we create tools such as equality impact assessments, which inform the processes that you have spoken about. If someone is looking at a niche area, how do they look at the equality impact assessment alongside that and inform it? They are interrelated in terms of being part of the decision-making process, but we are not seeing that in practice. It is very tokenistic. It is very much a check box exercise. It is not having the impact on how people monitor and gather data on the impact of those public service reforms as we call them. Craig, those are public sector reform programmes about spatial planning as well, very much where services might be provided or not as part of the question. Is that something of those discussions in terms of public sector reform across those different areas that you are involved in? We were probably talking more directly to the planning division about this. It was interesting when the national planning framework was approved by the Parliament. The chief planner talked about how their work was going to change from being about policy development to policy delivery. As part of that, we have been having discussions with them as to what that looks like from a public service reform agenda. We are looking at, for example, early discussions around a workforce and upskilling strategy, what that means and what it could look like. We are also developing some work just now on new ways of working, which will push into to the Scottish Government as well, particularly within a constrained resource context. It is thinking about roles, responsibilities, who does what, processes and things like that. We are involved in a whole public service reform that we should push into that. One of the issues that we face as a profession is, as I said earlier on, this idea of trying to show the value that planning and place-based approaches can bring to that. We have been doing quite a lot of work on the place standard, for example, and trying to give that a bit more teeth, to be honest with you. The fact is that a principle just now means that it is probably not monitored and it is not transparently monitored as to if it is being effective or not. We want to try to change that. There are certain initiatives that we are trying to influence and make sure that planning in place is a key part and a key component of how the public sector works in the future. I believe that you are about to receive a civil submission to your inquiry into public service reform. Our main points on that are funding. We need longer-term funding, timely payment and better transparent monitoring and reporting. We also have concerns around the delays in decision-making regarding ground-making at the moment. The last one that we have for this one is about fair work. We support fair work, but at the moment we have big concerns about the implementation of the guidance and the conditions of new living wage having to be paid if you receive the grants, because there is no resource attached to it at the moment. Thank you for your evidence today. We have gone slightly over time and I appreciate your forbearance with me at the end. Bear with me a second while I look for the script. You will notice that this is my first time doing this. We will continue to take evidence on effective Scottish Government decision-making at our next meeting. That concludes the public part of today's meeting. The next item on our agenda, which will be discussed in private, is consideration of our work programme.