 Good morning and welcome to the 14th meeting of the Public Audit and Post Legislative Scrutiny Committee in 2019. We have received apologies from Anas Sarwar this morning. I would like to welcome David Stewart who is attending in his place. Item number one is the decision on taking business in private. Do members agree to take items three, four and five in private this morning? Thank you. Item number two is Audit Scotland planning for outcomes. I would like to welcome our witnesses to the meeting. Caroline Gardner, Auditor General for Scotland, Fraser McKinlay, controller of Audit and Director of Performance Audit and Best Value from Audits Scotland. The Auditor General won't be making an opening statement, so we're going to move straight to questions and I'm going to ask Alec Neill to open for the committee. Auditor General, can I start with a general question? I refer you to Exhibit 1 in your report on page 3. There are 11 national performance framework outcomes, which the public sector and its partners work towards. The first one is grow up loved, which then goes on to say safe and respected. The third one is creative and diverse cultures and so on. Let me take grow up loved. How on earth do we measure that? I think I should start, convener, by saying that clearly the national performance framework and the outcomes in it are owned by government itself. As the committee knows very well, it's not my job to comment on policy. My view is that it makes perfect sense for any government to be aiming to set more strategic, longer term outcomes for the services that they provide, for things that the Government can do rather than focusing on inputs from the number of nurses or police employed in public services. The Scottish Government has been notable for its ambition in the outcomes that it has set for itself over the past 12 years now since the original national performance framework in 2007. Having said all of that, you're right that it's important that not just setting outcomes is the be all and end all of the national performance framework but that the Government has a robust and consistent approach to planning for how it wants to improve those outcomes through its own actions, through those of other public bodies and through the other ways that it can influence and leverage things that will have an impact on the outcomes. The briefing paper before you today is called planning for outcomes because that's what I think our interest is in, whether we can look at what Government does and see a clear line of sight between the outcomes set out in the national performance framework and, for example, the strategies that it's developing, the legislation that it puts forward, the money that it's investing in both capital and running costs of public services and all the other things that Government do. The two that you've pulled out are the higher-level, more less tangible outcomes, if you like. The Government, I hope, will be in a position to articulate how it's doing that, and I'm sure that it would point to things like the care review for looked-after children as part of that. Our paper is setting out the challenges of making sure that its approach is more consistent and more embedded in everyday policymaking, resource allocation decisions, performance reporting and monitoring. Let's take the example of looked-after children. We can measure whether they are getting well-looked-after. We can measure particularly in later years what their destinations end up being to see if they're ending up in the employment market with as fair a chance in life as everyone else. We can measure their educational outcomes. We can measure their health outcomes. How do we measure whether they've been loved? You're right that some things are easier to measure than others. One of the things that we say in the paper is that an outcomes approach, particularly the way that the Scottish Government is implementing that, means that they need to be more innovative and perhaps take more risks in a managed way, not just in the ways that they plan to improve outcomes like the one that you've pointed to but also how they measure them. We talked towards the end of the paper about the importance of asking in this case children themselves what their experience is as part of the measurement framework. It's not the only part, but I think it is another part that's important, particularly for the sorts of outcomes that are included within the latest national performance framework. If you take children, for example, growing up and you want to audit whether the Government has achieved its aims and outcomes in the national performance framework, how do you measure them? I realise that one thing that you can look at is the opinion of children, but we don't. Children can't tell you if they're more loved than their predecessors or less loved than their predecessors, therefore we don't know if we're measuring progress or regress. How is an auditor, do you measure whether the Scottish Government can improve love? Our starting point is to look at whether the Scottish Government has set out for each of those outcomes, first of all, how it plans to improve them, and secondly, how it will know whether it's succeeding or not. As we say in the paper, that means that it needs to have some baseline information, it needs to understand what the gaps are in that and it needs to be going through that cycle of setting how it plans to measure what's improving or not, doing that and then tweaking its plans as needed. That performance framework is now 10, 11 years old, so surely in the last 10, 11 years they have defined how they measure whether they're achieving greater love or not? I think that that particular measure is a new one in the latest version of the national performance framework, which, as you know, is now set out in legislation. More broadly, as we say in the paper, we've seen some examples of good practice, but equally, we think that there is room for it to be much more embedded in policymaking and performance reporting and that, although there are examples of good practice, that's not consistent. Do you not agree that if you have meaningless guff like this, it's going to destroy any exercise of any credibility before you start? I completely agree that the value of having a national performance framework is not in setting the outcomes, but in doing the underlying work, which is about planning for how you expect to improve them and then monitoring whether that's happening or not. For some of those outcomes, it's definitely more challenging than for others. I'm going to bring in Willie Coffey. I'll come back to you, Alex, and let you deal with your device. Thanks, convener. It's sort of continuing in the same theme, and it's really to ask you, Caroline, who, if anyone, is doing any work to try to make sure that targets or outcomes are meaningful for us. It can be pretty aspirational on one side, and it can be very prescriptive on the other, where we demand that something is reduced by a thousand, by such and such at a time, no specific targets. Who's doing any work to see whether the targets will have given ourselves collectively are actually achieving anything for us and achieving the outcomes that we seek? Is there any work being done to try to review and refine this sort of process? Are you the person to do it, or should it be government? I think it's for government to do it, but Fraser's been involved in the work that's under way at the moment, and I'll ask him to pick that up. Thank you, Caroline. There's a lot of work going on at the moment, Mr Coffey. Indeed, last week saw the publication of this report, Scotland's Well, being delivering the national outcomes, which was the first report of its kind, which is trying to pull together not on individual outcomes but a broad sweep, if you like, of progress. It's being made against the national performance framework and the outcomes, taking Mr Neill's point that, in various iterations, that has been around now for some time. Particularly in this latest iteration, which was launched last June, a lot of work had gone into looking at not just the outcomes but the 81 measures that sit underneath those outcomes to make sure that they are meaningful and that they are telling us something. There's absolutely no doubt, just to pick up Mr Neill's point, that some of that stuff is difficult to measure. It's difficult to audit. It takes us into territory of hearing stories and personal testimony from people and recognising that as legitimate evidence, both for measuring progress but also for us as auditors. We have dipped our toe in that water. We did a report a couple of years ago on self-directed support, for example. A lot of that report was based on us going out and talking to people who were receiving services in their homes and getting a sense of how that was going. That, in itself, isn't enough for us. We would always need to, in the jargon, triangulate the evidence with more quantitative stuff. I do think that, bearing in mind that this is a joint Government and COSLA enterprise in its latest iteration, there's a lot of work going on to make sure that underpinning the 11 outcomes, which are, in a sense, a statement of intent, aspirational, as you say, that we can have some sense of progress. I think that our challenge, as Karen Lyon says, to Government and councils and all partners, is that too often we still find good and strong statements of intent and vision but not enough of a plan as to how they're actually going to get delivered. Take, for example, supposing a particular target isn't made—and I'm sure that we could come up with a view—does anyone look at the people who didn't reach the target or meet the target or get the thing delivered on time and so on and so forth to see whether there was a positive or a negative outcome for them who missed out on our target? That's what I mean by do we review what the targets actually mean for us, because if there was no negative outcome for people who didn't meet the particular target, why have we got the target? That kind of review process in outcomes and target setting is that what's contained in that piece of work to look back at whether the targets themselves are appropriate. Shall I pick that one up? It's an interesting question. When things aren't going as planned or targets are being missed in, yes, I think that most of those will be reviewed. I think that what is tricky to come to your point, and this is something that we mentioned in our briefing for you this morning, is that the accountability systems around that are quite difficult, because almost by definition those things need to be delivered by multiple organisations and multiple people. I genuinely think that the days of saying that you were responsible for the delivery of that target or that outcome solely is quite hard to do these days. That can be very frustrating for the public, for you as you're doing your scrutiny work on those kinds of things, because it can be quite difficult to point to a single person that's accountable for the delivery of that thing. I think that our accountability systems need to catch up with an outcomes-based approach, because I also don't think that it's acceptable to say, well, nobody's responsible for it. That hasn't worked, we've missed a target, therefore it's some kind of systemic thing. We need to be sharper than that. But there is a tension in there, because I also see the opposite effect, which is accountability systems that actually encourage and drive people in the public services to do things that actually aren't necessarily in the best interests of outcomes or in the interests of their individual organisation. So there is a tension there that I think we need to surface and grapple with. That's very helpful. If I can try and draw an example of the point that Mr Coffey raises. I think that Anas Sarwar raised a question when we were looking at children's mental health as well, and he asked very specifically if somebody had counted and there was evidence of suicides by people who were on a mental health waiting list. I think that that kind of example goes to the heart of Mr Coffey's question, are there terrible outcomes for people whose government's targets haven't been met? That's something that the committee has touched on in different evidence sessions. I'm going to bring in David Stewart. Thank you, convener. Other general, your report mentions the importance of meaningful engagement with public sector workers. Could you provide some best practice examples of that, and I would refer members to my register of interests from a member of Unison? I think that we see examples of that on a small scale in most of the performance audit work that we do. For almost all public services, I think that the quality of the service that's provided depends on the quality of the interaction between the person receiving the service and the person providing it. And we see repeatedly really good examples where public sector staff, workers of all sorts, are encouraged to listen to what's important to the person they're providing a service to and to look at meeting their needs. We published a report a couple of years ago on self-directed support and there were some very good examples where people would sit down with a person with disabilities, listen to what would make a difference to them in their early lives and really think how they could use the money and the other resources at their disposal to provide very tailored support that gave people the best outcomes and helped them to develop their own independence. We also saw people who either weren't being encouraged to do that, weren't trained to do it or didn't have the flexibility themselves to do more than provide the services that the council already had available and the difference between those for the groups of people affected was like chalk and cheese. That was one of the key recommendations in our report that councils needed to understand better the approach being taken locally and to make sure people were trained, supported and had the resources to do what was needed and to listen to the voices of people being affected. Very often though we sort of see it from the other end from third sector organisations that we're talking to as part of our work and we do a lot of that engagement ourselves. So we spent some time as a leadership team within Audit Scotland talking to people from the weekly group about the way their housing services have got a, I think, yes approach where they're looking to meet the needs of people locally and where they can do that through the flexibility of the housing service itself or things that they can easily put in place. That can work very well. We were told of an example of a gentleman with very severe hearing problems who had the television turned up loud enough to the extent where he was disturbing his neighbours and the housing officer was able simply to buy a pair of wireless headphones that meant that he could hear the TV and the neighbours weren't bothered. Equally we heard examples where what was actually needed was some involvement from the health service or from social care services and it was much harder for the housing officer in some circumstances to engage the local public services in saying what is it that this person needs and how can we best meet it and it's that kind of consistency and flexibility and innovation that I think is needed to make a reality of this which takes us back both to the culture and the ways of working that we talk about in the paper and the sorts of evaluation that Fraser was talking about about listening to people and whether what matters to them is being delivered. Nobody's saying this is easy, it's clearly complex but those are the things that can make a difference. I think that these are some excellent examples and I think that although it's simplistic perhaps for me to say that people in the front line sometimes know best, I think that this is a tourism across Europe. Certainly the criticism and sometimes I find that surgeries and talking to the public is that you politicians and the general criticism that you would have come out with policies but you're not really talking to people in the front line and without making a party political point which of course we're not doing. If you take issues such as workplace parking, there's clearly some controversy among public sector workers which I remember as you know about issues like that. While you cannot let the general talk about the policy per se, is this a kind of example where talking to front line workers in the public sector or indeed the private sector first before developing policy would be quite helpful? Without getting into the specifics of the workplace parking levy proposals, I think that in general Governments tend to come up with better policies by talking to the people affected by them consistently not as a one-off consultation. The Scottish Government has made some serious commitments to that through its membership of the open government partnership, through the community empowerment legislation, through the approach to public service reform which is built on participation as one of the four pillars going back to the Christie report in 2008. Again I think that it's an example of where it's not the aspiration which is in question, but it's the consistency of following that through. There are some examples in other countries such as in America about looking at townhouse forums to discuss policies. I think that Mike Russell is looking at some issues around citizen forums and so on. Is this a development that you've perhaps picked up from other European countries that we could look at more carefully in Scotland? As you say, the Government itself is investigating lots of that. Fraser can probably give you a picture of what we see from some of that from the work that he's been leading. We see it in lots of different guises, Mr Stewart. The whole citizen assembly thing is clearly one version of that and we see lots of good community engagement locally. The challenge is getting that engagement much earlier in the process. As you know, I do a lot of work in councils and a lot of councils are very good at engaging with communities and service users when they themselves have an idea of what they want that service to look like. The challenge is involving people much earlier in that process and I would include staff in that. Before decisions are made, before proposals are made for consultation and the earlier conversation that says actually what's important to you, what really matters to this community. My experience is that when organisations do that, they are very often surprised that it's not necessarily the thing that they thought was going to be the answer. I absolutely take your point about very often the answers lying as close as possible to the front line service delivery, if you like. All outcomes in the end are local and to some extent individual. That's where I think the whole community empowerment and engagement agenda is obviously headed and I think that's the next challenge, is to do that much earlier in the process. Colin Beattie. I would like to link between money and performance. In the 2017-18 report on Scottish Consolidated Accounts, you recommend that the Scottish Government prepares a performance report that clearly links the financial resources outlined in the consolidated accounts. The briefing does discuss this and it talks about the Scottish budget should be clear about how spending contributes to specific national outcomes and we've talked about some of the difficulties of defining the national outcomes. You may recall that when the committee raised this issue with the Scottish Government as part of its scrutiny of the consolidated accounts, the Government indicated that it would include brief material in the consolidated accounts and signpost individuals to more detailed sources of information. What's your view about that proposed approach? You'll be aware that all of this work is rooted in the recommendations of the budget process review group, recognising that making a reality of the national outcomes means investing money and other resources and that we need to be able to track how that's doing to either continue investing or reinvest somewhere else if it's not having the desired effect. We are very clear in Audit Scotland in line with the budget process review group recommendation that there needs to be a much clearer link at both the budget end of the cycle and the financial reporting end of the cycle with performance, with the outcomes that the Government's planning to achieve and how well it's doing in practice. We're also clear that that's not a simple thing to do. It's complicated for a number of reasons that we outline in the paper. I'd be very relaxed about the Government's signposting in its financial report to the information that is held somewhere else. It's always a challenge to make sure that financial reports are accessible to readers, that they're not overburdened with detail and that the high-level messages are clear and apparent to readers. My concern would be that the signposting was clear and that's easier to do these days with technology allowing you to make very direct links to different sources of information and that the information that it was linking to was fair and balanced and rounded. We give an example in this paper of where the Government's reporting of its performance can sometimes highlight the positives without highlighting the things that aren't working so well and that obviously has the effect of limiting parliamentary and public scrutiny and making it harder to stop doing the things that aren't working and reinvest in things that are more likely to have the desired effect on outcomes, but the approach that sounds fine to me is the detail of how you implement it to make it accessible and make sure that it is giving you the rounded picture that's needed. Just expanding on what you've been saying there, do you think that approach is sufficiently transparent on how spending is directly leading to improved outcomes? I think that it is as long as the other parts of the package are in place, so if the budget is very clear about which outcomes financial investment is intended to improve and how it's expected that that will happen, it's quite straightforward at the end of the financial reporting cycle to link back to that and say, this is what we expected to do and link forward to this is how it worked out in practice, but it does need to make that link across the whole budget cycle and, as I say, the information does need to be rounded rather than selective and simply pulling out the things that are working well. It needs to show the whole picture. Fraser McKinlay wants to come in on this. Thank you, convener. It's just on that point, Mr Beattie. I think that the budget process review group got a point of saying that trying to identify specific budgets for each of the 11 outcomes is a difficult and probably not terribly helpful task because of the interrelated nature of them, and I absolutely signed up to that. Having been involved in some work some years ago to try to do that is difficult. What isn't good enough, though, is that if you take the children and young people's mental health report that the convener mentioned earlier, we just don't know how much money is spent on that. We couldn't tell you, and that's just not good enough, it seems to me. It seems to me that we should, and I think that this is the direction of travel, rather than trying to do it as an abstract exercise of what's the budget and what are the outcomes, a more practical taking a plate, a thing like children and young people's mental health, figuring out what the collective resource is that's being applied to that, and you could pick any other numbers of topics that we've reported on over the last few years. I think that we had a similar discussion about economic growth and trying to figure out how much money was actually being invested in economic growth, and we just don't know. That, for me, is absolutely critical, because if you don't know—for example, this report that was published last week on delivering the national outcomes is a good report and gives a very good picture of progress—places that we're doing well, places that we're not doing so well, but money doesn't get a mention anywhere in this report. We need to be better at joining the two things up, for sure. I think that, as Caroline says, there are lots of different ways of doing that, and it is going to be difficult to get a single bit of paper that sets all that out for people, but it seems to me a big gap, because, apart from anything else, it's quite hard to make a judgment about, well, where should we be investing more money? Part of this conversation has to be about shifting resource from one place to another to make a bigger difference in the delivery of outcomes. I was actually about to come back to those comments previously about the complexity and the number of different elements that come in to achieving a particular outcome. Is it actually possible, in all cases, to be able to identify the stream of money that's going into that particular service or whatever to achieve that outcome when there are so many bodies looking at different aspects of it and putting money in in different areas? Would it not be a case that you get to the point where you're tying yourself and not trying to figure out where every pound is going? Yes, I think that you do get to that point eventually, but I guess that my point, Mr Beattie, is that we're miles away even from starting that process. There's somewhere in the middle, I think, between not really knowing and spending forever trying to tie down every individual pound and pence and where that came from and who's responsible for it. We're not expecting perfection in any of this, but I do think. As we say in the report, the money is a means to an end. It's about allowing Government and their partners to make decisions about where we should be investing the money and, in the absence of a decent understanding of how much we're spending on things in the first place, that's a very hard thing to do, it seems to me. Given the work that's being done by Orbit Scotland, would you say that it should be possible for the Government to identify at least the broad stream of money that's going into that particular area and to measure the outcomes directly against that, given the fact that there's anomalies and gaps where other entries and so on are spending money into that as well? So it'll always be a flawed process, but what we're looking for is just the general thrust. Is that crudely correct? Yes, in short. We find ourselves doing that quite often in our reports where, in the absence of available data about spend on a thing, we do some analysis. It's based on assumptions, and as long as the assumptions are reasonable, it gives you something to work with. Fraser McKinlay has touched on the point that I wanted to raise, so I'm going to come in with it now, but it's on the point about data. The committee has looked at this across a number of your reports, Auditor General, and I raised that with the First Minister at the convener's group with her just a couple of weeks ago. I think that the most stark example of this, Fraser McKinlay just said, was the children's mental health report, where we discovered that we had no idea about how much in total is spent on children's mental health. There was no data on the outcomes specifically, and there was no data on why referrals to children and adolescent mental health services were rejected. Where there was data, it didn't seem to be consistent across the 14 health boards. It didn't seem to be shared in any way. We've also discovered, in self-directed support, that there is a lack of data. Very worryingly, on the early years and childcare report, you told us that there was no business case made, despite the fact that there were huge amounts of public money going into the increase in hours for childcare, but no kind of sense from the Government of what that was expected to achieve in terms of outcomes. Those are three examples. I suppose that my question to you is, is it even more widespread than this? Given the era that we're living in of big data and evidence-based decisions, can you give us a sense of where the Scottish Government is in terms of making evidence-based decisions with our money? That's a really important question, convener, and very timely, given that the approach to information is moving away from the need to collect it as a separate thing to it being generated by the things that we do in our everyday lives. You can see that in the way that the unbuses trackers work. They know where the bus is, and you can tell when your bus is going to arrive. We don't seem to be using that approach in public services. I'd pull out one more very important example to the handful that you've given us. I've reported a number of times about the slow progress that is being made with the Government's 2020 vision for health and social care, of helping people to spend much more of their lives well cared for, healthy, happy at home rather than relying on acute hospitals for their care. However, most of the data that we've got about health and care is still about acute hospitals. Most of the political focus is on what's happening to the amount that we spend on the NHS and on waiting times for acute services. There are big gaps in some of the basics around health and care in the community. We're just finalising our work on the primary care workforce planning, and the Government doesn't have good information at all on the number of GPs around the country and the amount of care that they're able to provide. Without us knowing that, it's very hard to be able to genuinely plan for how you can avoid hospital being the first resort rather than the last resort for people who are just about coping in the community. Those gaps are things that ought to be relatively easy to capture. We ought to have better information about how long people are waiting for GP appointments, for how much primary care practices are able to avoid people being admitted to hospital unnecessarily or to get them back home again quickly. As part of making a reality of the outcomes approach, an important question for Government about how it is using data and digital capability in exactly the way that you describe to get more nuanced and more real-time data about what's happening across the country rather than relying on the old approach of quarterly data collection and publication, we can move well beyond that now, and that's not built into the outcomes approach well enough yet. Your report says that the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre and the Scottish Administrative Data Research Partnership are doing some work at the moment on data to see if we can match with the performance framework outcomes. Do you know how far advanced that work is? I think that Fraser can tell you a bit more about that, and it's worth noting that that's a big part of the Edinburgh city region deal is making it a digitally enabled area. There's work and way, Fraser. I'm not sure that I can tell you much more about it, if truth be told, but we can certainly follow up in writing convenient if that would be helpful. I guess that that's an example. There are others that Glasgow University has called the Urban Data Centre, which does similar kind of work. As well as the issue of the gaps in our data and understanding in some you would think pretty obvious places, it's also an issue of the data not being terribly well joined up and people having access to different sources of data and making sense of that at a level that they can really make a difference in terms of the outcomes. I know that that perhaps sounds a bit techie. I just think that it's such an important point. I think that in 20 years' time we're going to look back and think that we were just putting a finger in the air to decide how much money is spent on certain initiatives in the public sector without the evidence to back up. There's even a front page article in The Herald this morning on exactly this, that the EU commission has withdrawn money from our public services in Scotland and it said that Skills Development Scotland do not have rigorous enough controls over how the money is spent and what is achieved with it. I think that that goes right to the heart of the EU commission of obviously decided that there is no evidence of outcomes in the money that's being spent in Scotland so they've actually just taken it away. Would you like to address that point, Auditor General? The committee will be aware that we've reported on problems with the management of EU funds, both the structural funds and the agricultural funds in recent reports on the Scottish Government and we'll pick the detail of that up again in the report that's due to this committee in the autumn. In general terms you're absolutely right that that chain of money from Europe through to the Scottish Government and on to the bodies that spend it is very important in accountability terms and the money is there for a purpose, as all public spending is. I'd like to pull the frame back and say that we're not talking about just funding that comes from Europe for particular purposes or just new announcements from government, the money that's focused on reducing waiting times. We're talking about a budget of about £42 billion a year now and the way all of that money is spent is crucial to improving outcomes or not. What Fraser and I are saying is that we'd like to see a much clearer line of sight for how that's intended to improve outcomes and obviously we need the data for whether that's working or not so that we can find soon and make adjustments as needed. It's maybe a bit of a wake-up call for us that the EU commission has decided that Scotland's clearly so poor at evidencing how that money is contributing to outcomes that they've just decided to withdraw it altogether. It maybe gives us a wake-up call for that in the rest of our spending as well. In principle you're right, I think it's a bit more nuanced in the picture you've described. I think that the funding is in suspension and in interruption, which are technical terms that the EU uses until it receives the assurance that it needs, but absolutely in general terms Government, to make a reality of the national performance framework, needs to know what it intends to achieve with the funding that it provides and whether that's happening or not. It's really related to the same point and very briefly I would say that despite a commitment to an outcome-based approach that we're reading about, one of the things that comes from your report is that performance still seems to be measured on inputs an awful lot or certain areas of the public sector are measured on inputs rather than the outputs and the outcomes. Politically, is that going to change? A difficult question to ask us when it, I think, you're right that it is in some ways a very political, both small p and big p problem. I think that the Government's approach is the right one. I said in response to Mr Neil's first question that whatever you think of the individual outcomes in the national performance framework, it has to be right for Governments to be focusing on the big challenges that their countries, their societies face and how they intend to tackle them. Those challenges tend to be long-term things that require that joined-up strategic approach. There's widespread consensus that the approach is the right one and, as we say in the paper, there are real challenges to making that a reality. Making the commitment in some ways is the easy step, the hard one is doing the long-term difficult work of actually improving the things that the Government has set out as its aspirations. One of those challenges, no doubt, is politics. I think that if I sat down with every member around the table there would be broad agreement around most of the outcomes in the framework around people being healthy and active, around us being well educated and the things that lie in there. On a Thursday lunchtime at First Minister's Questions, the challenge is to come back to the short-term things that are not working well and will, under any Government of any complexion, rather than progress towards the longer-term things. I think that it would be better for everybody involved whether there is a clearer line of sight, a direction of travel between where we are today and where the outcomes are. I think that that would make it easier to focus on the long-term changes that the Government is looking to see as a country. Equally, there is a role for politicians to us themselves about where the balance of advantage lies between today's political advantage and the longer-term changes that individuals and parties are looking to see. Thanks for that. I appreciate that it is quite a difficult question for you to answer. It is just on the same point, because I think that people watching this will be asking themselves this question. In paragraph 12, you talk really in similar terms to that which you just have, Auditor General, about long-term outcomes that may bring difficult decisions into sharper focus. You give an example of health moving more to a community setting. Now, bluntly, that could hurt in the first instance. That is going to require some big decisions. It is going to require some brave decisions before the outcomes actually improve. The question that will be in people's minds is, is that ever going to happen? Is that realistic, given the political environment, the electoral cycle that we find ourselves in? Do you have any thought on that that you can share with us? I do, and I am sure that Fraser will as well in a moment. I think that there are two things. I do understand why this is so difficult. I have come out of a BBC studio on the morning of my report on the NHS that is published talking about the need for shifting care from hospitals into the community and then had an opposition spokesperson going in after me who will say quite frankly, we know that you are right, but we have to be criticising moves to downsize hospitals or close wars or whatever it might be. I understand why that is difficult, and it makes that shift harder. You know that as well as I do. Equally, I think to say that that means that it is never going to change as a council of despair really, but it is right in my view to be taking that longer-term view of what Government and what public services are for. One step in doing that is to set out the outcomes that Governments are looking to achieve, and I think that the thing that helps to move that along is putting more of the rigor underneath it about planning for how you want to improve the outcomes and being accountable for what is working and just as importantly what is not. There will be political knockabout going on in there. We all know that it is a rough old trade, and to an extent that is what politics is about—it is about making those sorts of disagreements public and accountable to the public. Having that longer-term picture in mind has to be one of the things that makes it more possible. Fraser, you will want to add to that. The only thing to add briefly, Mr Kerr, is why the stuff that we are saying here about engagement with communities is so critically important, because that is where the conversations really need to happen. That is not about Government or health boards or councils just going out and doing a sales job. That is about having an honest conversation with people in local communities that explain the rationale, the evidence base for a decision, why and what the alternatives might be to come back to Mr Stewart's point about the people locally knowing what the alternatives might be. That, I think, too often does not happen. I think that the first thing that communities hear about it too often is that our leisure centre is going to close. If that is the nature of the conversation, then of course people are going to be up in arms about that. It is about having the conversation much further upstream to explain what the challenges are, what the alternatives are going to be and therefore, in that context, those difficult decisions might be more palatable without recognising that any of that is easy. My final point, convener, would be at a national level, because I think that, interestingly, those same principles apply in very local places, as well as ultimately for Parliament, in making some big decisions about, for example, it looks like, by the end of this parliamentary term, something like 50 per cent of the Scottish budget will be spent on the NHS. At what point, as a country, do we think that that is okay or not? If we continue that trajectory, I think that we need to be talking about the impact that that might have on other places. I make no policy view about that, obviously, one way or the other, but it is the kind of, as you say in paragraph 12, that is the kind of big discussion and decision that needs to be taken and looked at by Government and ultimately by Parliament. Bill Bowman. Thank you, convener, morning. Just to go back to the beginning of what Alex Neil was saying about growing up, loved, safe and respected, so you realise your full potential now. I think that I have conventionally stopped growing up and probably grew up quite a long time ago, so a large proportion of the population probably did. Maybe a lot of us fall out of this, I do not know. However, how does the Scottish Government know if I have realised my full potential and how do you audit it? How do we know that Bill Bowman has reached his full potential? I think that I will resist the temptation to personalise that and instead talk about the outcome within the national performance framework, as it stated. I recognise the challenge that you and Mr Neil are putting to us. To a great extent, it is a challenge to Government rather than to us. It is for any Government to set its own policy. I think that it is a good thing that the Scottish Government is doing that in a longer term way, which is focused on outcomes. I think that what flows from that is a requirement that they can say how they will measure whether that is being achieved or not and upstream and how they intend to achieve it. If I turn it round a little bit and the discussion this morning, you can see perhaps clearly where some people have not met the outcomes and we put resource to try and help them. However, in the potential side of it, there could be a large amount of unrealised potential that we are missing out on by maybe focusing on the more obvious aspects. Are you in suggestions how we might tap into that? I think that one of the things that we say in this paper, which is a truism, is that there may be trade-offs between outcomes. If you make a decision to prioritise one set of things within society, by definition others are going to be less of a priority. For example, picking an example, we pick up here that there may be a trade-off between economic growth and sustainable development between emissions and the environmental impact of all that. What we are suggesting needs to be done is more surfacing of the trade-offs there and then more clarity about the way that the thing that takes priority is being pursued in terms of the investment of money and time and how progress will be tracked. The particulars in here are clearly a matter of government policy rather than something that I think we can defend for you. That is not our job. What we can say is that, if those are the policy that the Government has set, that is what we think needs to be in place in order for this committee and the Parliament to be able to do its job. In the report that came out last week, there is a whole series of indicators around realising the full potential thing, Mr Bowman. None of those in themselves will be able to tell you whether an individual has fulfilled his or her own potential. When you look across the suite of indicators, a lot of which are about inequalities. It is about inequalities between where you live, between your socioeconomic circumstances, whether you are a boy or a girl or a man or a woman, whether you are disabled or not disabled. All those things taken together can give you a picture of whether, broadly speaking, people have the opportunity to fulfil their potential or not. There is a wee bit of a leap of faith in all of this, I accept, but if you are narrowing those gaps of inequality across all those measures, you can argue that more people are more likely to be realising their full potential. I wonder if I could ask you about the performance improvement model that is in Exhibit 3 in the document. I tend to ask this question every time we meet. It shows a cyclic process for continual improvement there. The key part of it for me is the review part, the study part, after we have done a thing to see whether we have done it well and so on, and whether we have met targets, objectives and so on. Do you think that that has been consistently applied across the public sector? Is there enough evidence to support it and do you think that there needs to be a bit more, perhaps, requiring the public sector to demonstrate that they do this? I agree with you. I think that this is a quite simple but quite a powerful way of taking the next step from agreeing now in statute the national performance framework. We have in the paper here a couple of examples of where it has been used well. The most notable example is probably the patient safety framework, where there are real advances in some important things that affect and protect people's lives being achieved by disciplined application of this framework. We also say that it has not been consistently applied. The convener has highlighted two or three of our reports, where some of the early stages about being clear about the scale of the problem and how you will measure progress were not thought about at the beginning. If you do not do that, it is impossible to know what effect you are having in there for whether you should do more of it or try something else instead. It is that consistency and rigor that we are looking to see. In that part of the cycle process, the review part, do you think that in there should also be the bit that I was talking about earlier, thinking about the targets and objectives in outcomes that we set ourselves to see if they are in fact appropriate? Does anybody do that? I think that there is something for me about timing and all of that. Particularly in relation to outcomes, those are intergenerational things. Those can take 30, 40 or 50 years. I think that there is a risk in the discussion about outcomes that there is a general sense that we will wait 30 years and see if it has worked or not. Clearly that is not going to work. It certainly does not work for us as auditors. That cycle needs to work not exactly in real time, but what we do not see enough of, Mr Coffey, is that cycle, particularly the review bit that is happening as it is going. I think that it is not your point about whether the intended objectives were set in the first place. Again, that is sometimes when the politics comes into play, if I am honest. Sometimes that will require people to say that we thought that was what we were doing, but we are going to shift that a little bit. Trying to have that conversation in a way that it is not defined as a new turn or a kind of failure or something is quite tricky. However, that model is actually effectively step 3 of the three-step model that we describe in paragraph 19. So what is equally important is steps 1 and 2, which is really about setting out clearly what it is that you are trying to achieve. The second step that they talk about is creating the conditions for that to make sure that everything is in the right place. That is about operationalising it, and, as Caroline Lline said, not consistent enough would be our assessment of that. Thank you very much, both of you, for your evidence this morning. I now close the public part of the meeting as the committee moves into private.