 Good morning and welcome to the eighth meeting in 2023 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. At first item on our agenda today is an evidence session with Professor Paul Kearney to inform or inquire into effective Scottish Government decision making. Professor Kearney is Professor Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling and the committee adviser for this committee. As part of an inquiry, the committee commissioned Professor Kearney to provide research paper on effective Government decision making, and its paper has been shared with the committee. I welcome Professor Kearney to the meeting and before I invite him to make some opening remarks, I just want to pass on the apologies of Liz Smith, who is unable to make it here this morning. So Professor Kearney, over to you. Thank you. Just a few minutes on the headlines of the report. I don't want to claim that I anticipated all the submissions to the committee and wrote my report before they came in, but I just want that hanging in the air just as a suggestion. I think that they are useful to talk about first. I think that my assessment of the submissions to the committee suggests that they all contribute to this two-part story. The first part is that there should be clearly defined steps or stages to making decisions, and Governments should use well-established rigorous decision making tools. There are lots of submissions that call for some kind of systematic policy making in theory, and then most of them contribute to the idea that they have had very generally disappointing experiences of unfulfilled reforms and implementation gaps, so they identify this absence of systematic policy making in practice. I don't know if that's the same impression that you get, but I think that's the context for all this. I can have general cycle or pattern of assessment of this gap between what people would like to happen in Scottish Government and what actually happens. I think that the report asks, are these problems specific to the Scottish Government right now or at any point in time, or are they more general and systemic and would you expect them to happen in any Government, and can we separate specific Scottish Government issues from general expectations about Government? In terms of the first question, I would say almost all theories and studies of policy making suggest that there's an in-built gap between those idealised models of policy making and real-world processes, and that's partly because policy makers never really fully understand the problems they face or never really control the policy process in which they engage, so they have to be pragmatic to recognise those limits, but at the same time, they have to tell a story that they're in charge because that contributes to their image of governing competence, particularly in Westminster systems. I think that it would be really honest, but disastrous for a minister essentially to say, I'm not quite sure what's going on here, and I can't guarantee you if I make a decision that it's going to get carried out, but I think that that would be the truth. I think that the second sort of ever present issue is that if you try and identify the kind of principles that Governments use when they talk about effective Government, there's quite a long list, and so I try to map my list onto the list that you started with, transparency and such like, so it's about accountability, preventing problems, avoiding power hoarding, co-producing policy, ensuring coherence, using evidence, mainstreaming equity and fairness, and delivering public value. There are all sorts of principles of effective Government that seem really sensible in isolation, but I think that the issue is when they try and put them together, that's when the contradictions arise. Particularly, I think that the Scottish Government has no exception to the idea that because of such a strong focus on national Government elections and accountability, that tends to undermine almost all of those other aims that I've talked about. I think that you've approached that in other committee inquiries. It's sort of the short-term thinking associated with elections undermines or preventive, anticipatory thinking that can focus on power at the centre, undermines sharing of power with lots of other bodies and co-production and such like. The Scottish Government has no exception to that, but it has Scottish-specific stories about how it deals with it. It has a story of how its policy is coherent through things like the NPF, and it has a story about how it produces all those other principles. The Scottish model or the Scottish approach to policymaking talks about co-produced policy, integration, equity and public value and such like. There's always this familiar gap between the story that they tell about how coherent are the things that they do and what their aims are and what happens. It presents really good aspirations for what Government should be, but undermines our knowledge of what it actually does and how it does it and if it has the policy capacity to do the things that it actually does rather than to fulfil the aspirations that it talks about. That's the context for a possible learning example. I identified comparable places where there are some elements of decision making that might be worth learning about. With the Welsh Government, there's the Welsh Centre for Public Policy, which has good practice in terms of the systematic use of external evidence for policy. There's an enduring issue that Governments don't have enough connections with research evidence from universities and other bodies. The second example is the New Zealand policy project. It has an idea about how to formalise and make systematic this approach of giving good advice to ministers and assessing the extent to which they have given good advice. In each case, the question for me would be is the idea to learn about specific initiatives such as to give better advice to ministers? Or is it about situating that learning in a much wider, systematic or systemic perspective about the limits to their powers? I think that the former focus is very limited without the latter or the latter is almost impossible to do. Well thanks for that very positive opening. I think that when we look at the monumental nature of the inquiry that we have decided to embark upon, your report certainly brings that into real sharp focus because there are so many different directions that we could move forward. What seems to me is that there's obviously a clear difference between political rhetoric and reality. I mean that in the most positive sense. What politicians of all political parties seek to achieve in their ability to deliver on the ground for a whole number of reasons are not always able to do that. My resources are one thing, but the issue that we are clearly focusing on is how decisions can be made more effective. Interestingly, we are actually going to speak to a number of civil servants from different departments next week and I'm interested to see whether, even within the Scottish Government, there is a coherent decision-making structure or whether some parts of the structure make decisions significantly differently from others. What's your experience of that? I think that there's an interesting distinction between civil servants who are currently in job and who have left a job. I think that if you speak to the people who have left, then there will be much more frank about the difference between the official story and what they've done. In fact, it's much gloomier than me and I'm still quite an optimist, but I think that some of them are gloomier. When I've interviewed civil servants in job, I think that they've essentially said, here is the Scottish approach, here are the key elements of it and, if I'm being honest, they would say that it's better than the Westminster way of doing it. I guess that's a general tendency. As long as we're doing it slightly better than Westminster, then it's good enough. The last time I did a lot of interviews, it was about that preventive strategy, cross-cutting issues and long-term thinking. You could identify pockets of good practice, things that they believed in and thought they were working well, but it was difficult to find an overall picture of what they were doing. It was essentially trying to identify good practice and scale it up, but they were facing the usual problems when they tried to do that. I know that John and I were involved in the 2011-16 committee. We had a lot of work on prevention. I think that the frustration that we had at that time was a number of frustrations. First of all, we can all identify good preventive spend approaches, but having the resources to disengage from delivery models, which are not working particularly effective, is extremely difficult. Of course, everything that you do is within the hot house of the chamber and the media whereby everything is measured on how many nurses, how many police officers, et cetera, et cetera, rather than necessarily outcomes at the end, although there are attempts across the board to have more focus on that. One of the things that we do is that there is obviously no perfect delivery system. You say right in the introduction all the wonderful things that Governments can aspire to do, but the contradictions are innate just because some of them such as trying to involve a number of partners—for example, the decision-making process can conflict with a strong central decision-making decisive ethos so that people outside can see what their Government is heading and what they plan to do. It is about trying to look at the least imperfect system. You go in in some detail in the report to look at how New Zealand might own some of their failures of policy, although I think that the Opposition will do its best to point out without any Scottish Government involvement necessarily. You also point to some of the successes perhaps in Wales in terms of what they are actually doing. I wonder if you can just, although I have got them in the report here for the record, I wonder if you can talk to a couple of those. Also, if you can go beyond New Zealand and Wales to look where else—there are all international models of delivery—could be something that the Scottish Government and indeed the committee could look at? I think that Wales is the most obvious comparison, because the Welsh and Scottish Governments tell a similar story of what they are doing and what they want to do. There are examples of parallels in which the Welsh Assembly passed legislation to put on the statute a long-term approach, just a future generations approach, where they would try and systematise long-term thinking to challenge short-term. The Scottish Government or Parliament has similar ambitions but without that legislation. To be honest, I am not sure what difference the legislation or not makes to that, apart from to, for example, oblige particular people to report and progress at particular times. I do not know if it is more than that. The other thing that Wales has a bit more formalised is in terms of ambitions between policy makers and the people that they describe as their stakeholders or partners. They had quite a list of formalised councils or partnerships that had to meet so often, in a way that was less informal compared to the Scottish Parliament. The Welsh end of public policy is interesting for me as an academic because there are a huge number of initiatives to try and bring together people who make policy and people who provide research that might be policy relevant. As a usual gripe within universities, the connection between them is quite weak. Policy makers often do not know who the academics they should speak to far less and speak to them very often. They seem to have a system where they have an enduring way of doing that and they are recognised by the First Minister. In terms of New Zealand, I suppose that my impression is that the kind of project that they have needs a high-level elected government buy-in for that kind of project, but it is driven largely by a civil service improvement agenda or a unit within the Government. They identify what they think they should be doing, what skills civil servants and agencies should have and the extent to which they are living up to their ambitions. They have annual reports on progress. I am trying to think how much the Scottish Government could emulate the openness of ministers being asked to reflect on the advice that they have had from civil servants and to give them a score card on progress. It is actually like you know, I wonder how that would work in here in reality. Yes, so that is one of the, at least in the UK, that used to be traditionally the most protected secretive aspect of Government, where civil servants would say that they can only give good frank advice to ministers if they know that it is not going to be reported or talked about. Will those issues come about exactly? Are they given a general assessment or are they talking about—can they avoid talking about very specific things there? There are lots of examples. I was trying to give you a shopping list of other things so that there are organisations that do benchmarking exercise on what it means to be effective. The World Bank and the OECD do that. If you were to go down that road, the issue for me, as a political scientist, is that a lot of organisations present those aims as if they are quite technical, that you can score them and they are non-controversial. Each one of them can be quite contested when you try to make sense of them. Because they involve trade-offs, your strong central capacity means less strong decentralised capacity or something like that. The measures really matter there. There are other things. If you go down the line of the notion of public value, I think that the Scottish Government bought into the idea of public value instead of new public management. I do not know how many times you have done reviews of new public management and that sort of thing, but it used to be, especially in Westminster, that the idea was that you apply private sector business methods to government. You try to have a small estate as possible and the estate that you have should be subjected to another, a more neutral word. They applied these methods to make sure that people were accountable for what they spent and for agencies for their performance. The Scottish Government has certainly taken this line that they are much more interested in public value, which is much more positive about the role of government. They do not see it as something to get rid of or minimise. They see the delivery of public value in a wider sense. There are three tests of public value that I think they follow, which is is it politically and legally feasible? Can you deliver it in a technical sense? Does it deliver value to not only people who receive services but citizens, a wider sense of citizen value for the services that they talk about? There are a huge amount of studies of Governments who have pursued that kind of thing and studies of individual organisations who are so-called guardians of public value. In one of the edited books, I mentioned, one of the case studies that they give of the guardian of public value is the BBC. That reminds me that some organisations or Governments seem successful for a certain amount of time and they can then suddenly jump into this other category. The learning has to be quite agile in terms of the reputations that they have for doing well and how much scrutiny they have. The BBC is colleagues before the public session started. I think that it is quite easy for reputations to disappear almost overnight or be damaged in actual fact to a degree. I am jumping a bit here because it is such a really interesting report. I could spend the whole time just asking those equations, but colleagues are a lot to come in. They always get an archafe for a take-to-all. Don't they, John? One of the things that you have focused on a lot about is that, just before that, you say in the report that the new public management did not succeed even according to its own objectives except for itself. That is an interesting point. One of the issues, of course, is that you can have all the great theories that you like and all the structures that you want to implement. The important thing is to have capacity. One of the things that you have touched on is that, as you have said, does the Scottish Government have sufficient policy capacity? You look at general civil servants versus specialisms, you talk about leadership training and how much capacity even exists outside the civil servants to tap into. The risk of an effective government when the policy capacity and training does not live up to the Scottish Government's high expectations and, indeed, that of the people that we represent. How do you feel about capacity? Where are we at? What can we do to try to improve and enhance that capacity? There are a couple of things. One is trying to identify clearly what their purpose is to identify what their capacity should be. I suppose that I was trying to think what training could you give people in the Scottish Government when they started in relation to what the Scottish Government does. That is not entirely clear. I think they have training in generic things—procurement, for example, or delivering public services, but they do not have training courses on giving good advice to ministers. It is important to work out what exactly they see people doing and therefore if training matches. There are also contradictions about what, if the Scottish Government on one hand says, we focus on senior civil service advice to ministers about what strategies they should set, but on the other hand they want to decentralise to a lot of other bodies. It does the capacity follow their decision. If local authorities say that they should do more, do they then delegate the resources to do that? I suspect not. The other thing is that there is a particular issue to do with smaller Governments. It was much more true at the start of the evolution. The Scottish and Welsh Governments had huge ambitions to do with the set-up of new assemblies and all those ideas that they had, but they found that they did not have the civil service capacity to help them to produce the legislation. Certainly ministers in the Scottish Government would talk about civil service not being equipped for the task of this radical change. That might be different now, but there is still a sense that the smaller the Government is, the more it relies on outside bodies to give it information and advice, and the more it relies on delivery bodies to help them to make and deliver policy in a way that you do not face with a larger Westminster Government, where they are much more confident that they have the capacity at the centre to produce policy and try to advise people to follow it. There is a kind of size issue in terms of the culture of an organisation about what it thinks that it should be doing and how much it relies on outside organisations to help. You have made a number of criticisms of the UK Government. I do not want to go into here, but there is also an issue of diseconomies of scale in terms of decision making. You have talked about how Wales and Scotland, because of their relative size, have a greater opportunity to perhaps work in partnership with some stakeholders than the UK does. One last thing before I open up the session. It is really the last sentence that you have had in the report before you go into the references. The Scottish Government could change in relation to what is feasible rather than restate the value of simplified models that do not exist. So how would you change that? Oh, I know that, but that is a classic. I mean, how opening it is a flourish. I mean, you are a flourish, you are, so to speak. Yeah. To be honest, I have given up. No, that was not the end of the sentence. It is not a good start. I have given up the first sentence. I think it is quite hard to imagine what it would look like because it is so outlandish in a sense, because there is this dilemma that I think if everyone was being honest about what they did, you could identify quite a pragmatic approach to government, identify limits, identify who you rely on, and then try and attach capacity to particular things. But the issue is, I think, very few members of the public will buy that story of we are not quite sure if we can do that stuff. You essentially have to identify or design something that is of two sides of a coin, and on the one side is a public facing. We are highly competent and we are delivering on our promises, and on the other side is this more inward facing about here is what we can actually do, and here are the core scales that we can develop. I suppose that that might start with a kind of internal reflection about what exactly Governments do, what exactly the processes are. I would like to see a comparison of a really simplified policy cycle compared to how people within government would describe what they do, and then try and work out how they could make the things that they actually do more effective. And so it's difficult to know what the second part would look like because it's so difficult to work out what civil servants or ministers think that they're actually doing in practice compared to what they then say to other people. Okay, thank you. Let's open out the session then. Daniel, to be followed by Ross. Actually, I think that last statement you just made probably meet these sums up, kind of, I think, what I'm circling around. I think your paper is really interesting and really excellent. Actually, the bit I'm interested in, I wonder if it's the next tear down, you know, in that when I, in our group that we had, I was struck by everyone essentially framed anything, decisions as either being policy or financial. Now, my experience tells me that actually effective organisations that the really important bits actually the bits in between. So policy, to my mind, in a business context, is around strategy and overall direction. And actually, you know, it's actually how the implementation of that, the, you know, actually the framework you have for delivery that are really, the really critical bit. And actually what, what my, what I'd been hoping to get at was that, that level of decision making beneath that, i.e., you know, once the policy has been set and framed and determined, how are the decisions then captured, structured, and by whom at that next level down? Because I think that's actually very often where policy fails. So I wonder, is that, basically, I'm saying, am I barking up the wrong tree or is there something in that? And actually, is there a sort of an ill, you know, is that an area where there needs to be better definition? Because it feels like, you know, people out there want to talk about policy or finances, civil servants want to talk about policy. Is there an issue there in terms of that lack of definition and lack of clarity about, you know, interim, those sort of day-to-day management decisions? Yeah, I mean, I think, so I won't talk too much about the Westminster comparison, but the classic response to that kind of question in UK Government over the decades was to try and establish a really clear distinction between making strategy and delivering policy, and to the extent that they set up different executive agencies that had their own chief executives, and they were responsible for hitting targets associated with making policy happen. And I suppose, in my field, it's almost a truism that there is no clear distinction between making policy and delivering it, that, for example, people make policy as they deliver, or when people set strategy, they're quite general or enough and quite vague, and so people have to make sense of it in particular ways. It's not like just carrying a simple task. So my impression of the informal discussions was, yeah, there are people who have really good skills in giving advice to ministers, but know nothing about carrying stuff out. Then there are people who have really good technical skills about how to deliver things and project management and that sort of thing. But if you separate them too much and they don't speak to each other enough, then there's going to be this terrible disconnect between what they're doing. So then you're talking about teams of people on projects, some of them giving good advice, and some of them knowing how to manage projects. So, yeah, so I think there is that thing about what an organisation would look like when they're trying to combine all those skills, and if they're focusing on a cross-government or focusing on specific projects each time, I'm not clear my mind about that in terms of how specialised the Scottish Government is, because I think the tradition is generalist civil servants who move around a lot, and so don't pick up for you. To my mind, it's not necessarily about specialism, it's actually just about who's responsible and at what stage. I think that there's a point in which we're all very clear about the framing of policy and its outcomes. It's that the minister standing up in Parliament that ultimately, and I think that's relatively clear, but as the individuals, and I think in particular, I think we're all trying to avoid specific examples, but to my mind the email chain around the ferry, which was a significant contract variation, and essentially that being documented by an email chain, to my mind that, just stands out as being not right. It's not how it would happen, what, in a well-functioning private sector organisation that is not how that would happen. In fact, in some sense, in the financial services sector, I think you'd find yourself butting up against all sorts of regulatory rules if you did that. I think it's maybe how policy is monitored and responsive, but I also wonder if there is a point in your year-round role in that, and it was an interesting bit in our discussion over there about accountable officers, is that maybe how the civil service itself is capturing who's managing the in-flight policy is based around role rather than structure or process. Is that an area that we maybe need to sort of probat more? So I reckon that I am the least knowledgeable about the ferries in the room. But I think in terms of, there are clearly different policy problems that the Scottish Government's dealing with that we've worth categorising. So some, I think that the example you gave is there are very specific issues where there's probably high cross-party agreement about there should be a certain level of ferry service and it should be, you know, you're funded and that sort of thing. So it's very much a focus on who's responsible for delivering something well, and so you would have specialist roles there. I suppose my impression of a lot of Scottish Government capacity is focused on zooming out to wider strategic issues about, say, the, you know, start with sustainable economic development and then identify a series of measures and your health and education and that sort of thing. So I think ferries wouldn't feature in those broad strategies because I think they'd be seen as really sort of technical and specialist. But if, you know, if the Scottish Government, if that is really in the business it's in, then you would imagine that it would make sense to, you know, recruit and train more people if they essentially have to become responsible for that kind of thing. I think that there's similar with procurement, financial procurement, which has set rules. I think it's the same with legal training and legal advice. There are some professions where you can't get by on being a journalist, you have to be a specialist in particular things, but I don't know how they would, it's very hard to piece together, you know, how many civil servants there are, what they do and what their training is. We'll just leave that there for you. Okay, thank you. Ross to be followed by Michelle. Thanks. Excuse me. I was interested in the point you made at the start, Paul, of the comparison of the Welsh Government's relatively systematic approach to external evidence gathering with the perception that that's perhaps not as systematic here. And I'm trying to reconcile that with some of the other criticism that's been put in the Scottish Government's way that externalises too much of the policy development process. The most high-profile recent example was the criticism that the national care service has come under, specifically for being, to a significant extent, a production of KPMG, because the contract for that bit of policy formulation was awarded to them. Is there a distinction there between... Is it simultaneously true that the Scottish Government doesn't gather enough external evidence when it's doing internal policy formulation and that outsources too much policy formulation, or is the picture a little bit more muddled and there's not really a neat distinction there? Both can be true. Yeah, okay. I mean, so, with consultants, I'm sorry, I remember, actually I think it's by someone you might be speaking with, there was a sort of former minister talked about the use of consultants and I think he essentially said, he put it in the context of the number of civil servants they were, he said, the problem with reducing the numbers of civil servants and reducing the number of quangos is that you reduce your capacity and therefore you rely increasingly on external consultants for that kind of work. So I think that's probably a function of that, the size of the Scottish Government and its capacity. In terms of the well centre of public policy, I think that it's slightly different, I mean maybe it's an academic obsession that you don't have to worry about, but I think there is this sense that increasingly universities are incentivised to produce research and evidence that is relevant to government and there should be a direct connection between that production and its use. Governments have found it very difficult in the past to work out how to make a systematic link with universities. So I think that's a bit different because that's a more general source of evidence on things whenever they need them. So they identify their aims or particular topics, they go to an organisation and they say what is the evidence on X, Y and Z, which I guess is a bit different from commissioning consultants to do specific aspects of work. In Scotland, there are lots of links between ministers, civil servants and outside organisations, that's certainly true, but a systematic connection with universities is harder to find. For reasons, to be honest, I can't quite explain, so that interests me. Why is it that these connections can be formalised in some places and there are a little bit of a struggle in others? On a not entirely unrelated note, moving from consultants to secondments, I'd be interested if you've come across any evidence in this space because I can think of taking the rural environment portfolio as an example. I'm aware that there are organisations who represent agricultural business interests, who've had staff seconded into Scottish Government departments to assist with policymaking in those areas, but then if you reduce it to a binary, often the other side of those debates is your environmental NGOs, and I can't recall a single instance of a member of staff from an environmental NGO being seconded into that department. What that sometimes results in is that in this particular scenario, your agricultural business sector being broadly pretty happy with how the Government goes about its decision making and the environmental NGOs being broadly unhappy. On the evidence that's out there, the views that have been expressed about Government decision making, how much of it is about process and how much of it is more representative of the respondee's agreement with the outcome? Are people saying that I don't like the Scottish Government's policymaking process because the outcome wasn't the one that they wanted? I think that there would just be a general sense of, so people use that when they talk about consultation. If they don't like the decision, they say that there wasn't enough consultation, when in fact it could be that there was the same process, but they lost out. To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of who's seconded in it or not, but I think that there are more general, I think that a lot of the submissions were a much more general sense of a lack of delivery in terms of things that everyone sort of agrees on. It would be like, say, reducing inequalities or more joined up Government in certain areas or gender mainstreaming or something like that. In lots of those cases, it wasn't that they lost out in terms of a debate between winners and losers. It was that there was not enough weight or thought put into turning a broad aim into delivery. That's a bit different, I think. Good morning, and I thoroughly enjoyed your report. Just a daft wee question, which can have tweaked my interest if you would like. You referred to Moore, who used the term bureaucratic entrepreneurship, which struck me as quite the oxymoron. Just before I go on to my main questions, can you give me a bit more thinking about what on earth he meant by that? I think that's what he was engaging with, this idea that if you were the bureaucrat, you wouldn't be an entrepreneur. I'm no big expert on public value, I should say, but I think that the general idea is that the delivery of policy is never simply the application of rules or expectations from ministers. There has to be an in-built capacity to interpret what they want imaginatively and think about how it would fit into the bigger picture. I think that entrepreneurship there would be about spotting windows of opportunity for doing things or making advancements in a way that you would do without necessarily going back to minister and asking permission to do it. I think that he was talking about the sense that they should not just have particular skills in delivery, but they should have skills that can build their confidence to be semi-autonomous, people who would know what they were doing in the public sector, because they can't rely on high-level strategic documents to tell them what to do. I'm sure that there are 100 articles written about at the extent to which people have become entrepreneurs or even how you train people to do it. I love what's kind of aspirational, isn't it, Jim? That kind of idea is linked to empowerment that you mentioned, and it has been brought up earlier about accountability. When I was reading your report, part of my thinking is that the cultural hierarchy within the wider decision framework is underpinned by relative power bases. That varies depending on the seniority and the power base of the minister relative to where they fit in Government and also the power base of whoever is the ultimate accountable authority. It would be useful to have your reflections on how that power can inhibit decision making, particularly in a wider context where the decision is required to meet quickly, which also affects the processes. We know some general reflections, and that would be great. I'm going beyond expertise into general thoughts, but the Scottish Government has, just like the UK Government, on paper a hierarchical system where ministers are essentially responsible for everything. Civil servants can't do anything unless it's been authorised in some way by ministers. I think that there is a lot of discretion within that framework for them to do things quickly or with thinking innovatively, but my impression is that the incentives to take risks are quite low compared to the incentives to make sure that your back is covered. I guess that would take us back to the entrepreneurship thing, that if you wanted to have a more dynamic, fast-moving Government, the civil servants involved would need the confidence that if they took risks then they wouldn't be punished for them. I don't know enough about the internal. My impression is that there are rules about that within civil services, but they're informal and they come through socialisation. You wouldn't get someone to come along and say, okay, here are the rules about why people wouldn't take their risks. I guess that there'd be a high profile issue where they could be a real career breaker for a civil servant if they did something that wasn't like a real strong paper trail. That's a whole interesting area as part of the wider consideration. Another area that I wanted to ask you about, I suppose it's going back to Rumsfell, which we keep quoting in the committee, the kind of unknown unknowns. In terms of making an honest—government making an honest assessment of their decision-making capabilities, I sensed that there was quite the disconnect between—and you mentioned it yourself when you said—relatively little engagement with academics in terms of what is best practice. To what extent do you consider a risk that they don't know what they don't know, and if they're not asking the question in terms of engaging with best practice and methodologies they'll always never know? Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, it's difficult to know what they don't know. I would settle for ministers and civil servants being really clear on what they want to do. I think that part of the problem with saying engaging with researchers and academics is there's the usual stuff about people who demand evidence too quickly. They want an answer tomorrow. What's the evidence on all of the stuff that we're interested in? The other problem is that they're asking quite vague questions of researchers. Imagine that a minister or someone who's said to a researcher, well, give us all the evidence on effective government. The first thing that a researcher would say is, well, you've got to tell me what you mean by that. Some of that is not necessarily that they don't know what it means. It's just that they need to be pushed on what, since they make of it, what exactly they would want to know. By success, we mean that we want a really transparent, accountable process. What's best practice in that area? Well, then people could give them advice on that. However, if it's how to be together a lot of disparate things, I reckon that I could study this topic for another five years. Again, you point out something that, in terms of the civil servants themselves, seeking that clarity, they would have to know that this is considerably more complex and it might initially appear, which is part of the challenge of this inquiry as well, in terms of getting value out of it. I suppose that it's understanding the culture to what extent is that prevalent, because it's, frankly, given what you're saying about risk taking, it's easier just to say, okay, I'm coming back with a paper. I suppose I'm trying to explore, and it is the civil servants, because I don't realistically, and the ministers will take advice and accept that advice. Perhaps there's something about not just capacity but the skills base going back to the comment that you made about agile earlier within the civil servants themselves and that kind of continual improvement piece, because this is very difficult. One thing that they could do, and I'm going to argue against myself, is that they could take examples of what they've done and seek external evaluations of how it went, then use those evaluations to think internally about what they would do differently next time or something like that. The reason I'll argue against myself is that, in a Westminster system, that is the last thing Governments want to do. They don't really want to put a lot of attention on evaluating how successful they were, because there's really no incentive for them. It's never a technical process, it's a highly partisan one. It would have to be, I guess, that you could imagine a civil service equivalent where they talk about what can we learn about how we've procured things here, did we have the right people involved in contracts or something like that? That would be relatively straightforward. If you could separate those specific individuals from the general process of learning. The lower stakes thing is to learn from the success and failure of other Governments, because then you can say what you like. I think there's a lot to be said for a continuous process of learning lessons from others, because you just take all the stakes out and reduce all the incentives to be partisan about it. I suppose being able to learn from other Governments, you can at least inquire around the difficult challenges, because the example you gave about procurement, although it's still complex in and of itself, it's easier to put in a box and define this as a procurement process. I think that's probably me. I could literally ask questions all day, but I know other people want to come in. Thank you, Michelle. John, to be followed by Douglas. Thanks, convener. Your paper is full of contrasts, or some would say paradoxes, or whatever it is. My colleagues have already raised a few, so I'll raise a few more. You talk about, under fostering equity, fairness or justice, about the focus on efficiency using economic tools to identify and produce the highest benefits from the same costs, but it should also prioritise the fair distribution of costs and benefits. Is it not possible to be both efficient and fair? Yes, it is. Oh, this is the whole university module of this one. If you break it down into researchers who write about fairness, we'll criticise their colleagues who focus on efficiency. I think that's more like it. The problem with your cost-benefit models is that they assume that, if you improve the most benefit for the population, that will be the best outcome when, in fact, you might want to redistribute some of those benefits. You can imagine situations in which you have efficient and fair processes. People talk about that in education where, to be efficient and fair, invest at the earliest possible in a child's life, early years education, and invest the least at university education because the returns become less efficient over time or something like that. I think that would be an answer in a specific area, or it would be something like, programmes like Sure Start would say, okay, this is efficient and fair. If we invest in the delivery of a range of services from birth to five years, then the pay-offs will be far larger, so you can do it. So it's fairer to invest in all the kids aged two or three or whatever, but we still need some really high-quality graduates, so to be efficient as a country, we have to invest. Is that kind of the contrast? Well, it's such a difficult one because we haven't defined fairness yet, so I hate to be the academic about it, but it's one of those intuitive, appealing words, isn't it, fairness? If we stick with the education example, for example, some people will say that fairness is equal opportunity to access high-quality schools. Other people say that fairness is about equal outcomes after schools or something, and they're fantastically different things. One is equal opportunity will be fair, fair access, but you accept there will be highly unequal outcomes and you'll get some graduates and some not. Whereas I focus on equal attainment overall would involve high redistribution of resources to compensate things like low income or something like that. That would describe that as not particularly efficient because it's a huge amount of resources to help a very small number of people, but it's fair because it helps people who are most in need or something like that. Those are technical terms that are politically contested. I get that. We could spend ages just discussing what fair is and so on, so I'll leave that one. Right, near the beginning of your report under what do effective government principles mean in practice, you talk about the wide range of ambitions that we have in Scotland, and then you go on to list some of these. I mean, do you think that we've got too many ambitions? Is one of the problems that we're trying to do too many things? Well, to be honest, I tried to map my list on to the committee's list, so well, I suppose the more aims you have, the more incoherent they're going to be. But then I'm trying to think then which one would I get rid of? I'd get rid of fairness. Actually, if you want to get rid of fairness, it's much easier to administer government if you don't care about who wins and who loses. Maybe get away with the prevention one because that's not really, the government's not really in the prevention business, they're in the reactive business, but it's a tricky one. Yeah, I'm trying to think. Are there any, actually, if I'm being more honest, the one I would get rid of is coherence because I just don't think that is a realistic ambition for governments. I think the way that they are set up, there is no single centre, no single mind within government working at how it all fits together. It's essentially a collection, a huge collection of different people doing different things and it's just no way they're going to fit together in a coherent manner, so you could easily get rid of that one, I reckon. Well, actually, that touches on what one of the other issues we're going to raise, which is later on in your port, if I can find it, but the idea of decentralisation, flexibility, collaborative working, all of these kind of things, as against having a clear ambition set national accountability, so I suppose that I would feel that that's the case, that you just can't, either you go far one way or too far the other, but if you have this clear driving ambition from central government, then local government and everyone else get squashed, but on the other hand, if you allow local government to do whatever it wants, or local health boards or local anything, there's no coherence to it. I mean, I kind of feel that's impossible to square, ultimately. Yeah, so I think so too, but if you're, so I suppose trying to not be good, when you're academic you could just say these things and then, you know, have your lunch, you know, that's fine, but if you want to actually do something about it, I think there are, I think there are two things to say, one is I would avoid paying lip service to the idea of decentralisation and co-production, because they take a fantastic amount of investment, see to do something, see to co-produce policy well or co-produce knowledge well, it takes a huge investment in time and resources to do it, and I think if you, if you scrimp on it, it's just a waste of time, it's, it will devalue the process, you know, whenever government says it will do it next, it will just say okay, it will just go through the motions. I think the other is that that is, that is an example where the Scottish Government has done some work on what would models look like if you were trying to centralise and decentralise at the same time, and I think the things that it might point to are things like collaboratives, the, there was an early years collaborative that was an attempt essentially to say to local government or practitioners that essentially we will train you in this method of learning about public service delivery, will give you the discretion to do something, if what you're doing is working, keep doing it, if what you're doing doesn't seem to be working, try something else, and so that's kind of an example of giving people discretion in a particular field, and it's supposed to encourage this kind of learning within organisations about what they're doing rather than simply seeking to deliver. You could, I guess you could ask the Scottish Government how, how those collaboratives went. My impression is in the beginning they struggled to work out how they would measure the success, so the first measure they had was how many people came to the events to learn about how, how to do it, and so they declared success because they filled convention halls on that. Then the bigger question I think is how do you measure the extent to which these organisations have learned from their experience and are doing things different based on their learning, and that's fantastically difficult. I did, I was an external examiner for someone's thesis on that, and I think my sum up from that kind of three-year piece of work was, organisations are not really learning, they're doing things experimenting, but it's difficult to point to the changes that were promised through this method. So that's not to say that that's not a good idea, it's just it's very difficult to find evidence that is working that would satisfy people if they're investing more money in doing it again. Okay everything you say leads to more possible questions, but I'm just going to ask you one more. Going back to near the beginning of your report, responsible and accountable government to do with who the actual MSPs or elected members are, you say there should be a clear link between how the systems vote and members of Parliament and therefore the executive. So I don't know if we've got that at the moment. And then the second one, I was kind of more interested in the recruitment of elected politicians from a diverse pool of candidates to boost the representatives of parliaments in relation to social background. Now we have obviously tried to get a balance between men and women. What could we do or is that another impossibility to really get across a section of society in here? No, I reckon that's probably the easiest one. Out of the lot, I reckon that's the easiest one. I think the tricky thing is that it's difficult for the Parliament to do rather than the parties. That's always been the issue, isn't it? This is largely party driven. The Parliament will give a sense of what it thinks the overall composition should be, but it can't direct the parties to make recruitment decisions. Okay, so that's the dilemma there. I think that what they can do is foster a culture. So I think that there's the report recently on gender sensitive parliaments that would be there to foster a particular culture within Parliament that set expectations for people so that they could measure what they do in relation to those expectations. I think that there's been more success in terms of men and women than recruitment from ethnic minority backgrounds. That's been the... Actually, the Scottish Parliament has often done worse than the Westminster in that respect, but it's certainly doable if parties have the desire to do it, I think. Okay, I shall restrain myself that. Thanks, convener. I'll restrain myself to come in on the back of Douglas. Thanks, convener. Paul Ibsdale, one of the areas that the committee is going to be looking at is recording and viewing decision making. And the impression I got from when we had our group exercise was that there was sometimes tools in place maybe not often used and maybe not often followed. Daniel touched on the ferries earlier. It's not really a question about ferries, it's just a question about recording who made the decision and then being able to review that later. In your view, do you think that Scotland is doing anything better or worse than other Governments or just about the same? Honestly, I don't know. I haven't really seen, I could have a proper look, but I haven't seen many comparative studies of how Governments record what they do systematically. It's a tricky one. I think that there was one suspicion, not suspicion, submission by Professor Flinders that went into that a little bit, talking about the trade-offs and reporting to say that you can't record everything you do all the time, so you have to identify what are the important things to write down and unimportant. I haven't seen Governments come up with a really good way of doing that. Maybe I missed something with the New Zealand policy project, so there was a sense of what to do there. I suppose the impression I got is that Governments want to know what are the big issues that are going to arise and then they can go back and record them. It's difficult to know the extent to which they can record what they do. We can give the impression that when you do a specific piece of work, there is a tool that you pick up and use. You do the same thing each time, according to an excellent acronym or something like that. The thing that interests me is that if you ask civil servants within Government what tool do they use or what image do they think of when they are thinking of their processes, which one would they go for? I am not clear on that. If there is a legalistic process or passing legislation has clear processes at each stage that are written down by the Scottish Parliament, I am not so sure that it is the same within the Scottish Government about projects and when a tool kicks in or not. I guess that there has to be a right procurement, for example, but I guess that it is not clear for other areas. It would be key aspects of procurement. There would be things that you would be expected to do, but there would be other things that would be unwritten. Thanks very much. I have just got some three further questions. One of the things that I really like about your report is that we take home messages. I think that they are quite helpful. One of them you said in page 16 is new ideas are applied patchily to established practices, so how could that be improved? With my researcher hat on, I would say that it is just a built-in thing. Government or ministers come in and the first thing they do is inherit all of the commitments of their predecessors. Whenever they want to make changes, it is from that base. Essentially, a Government might come in and it has inherited a new public management style system where there are lots of measures in place to hope that people will take out for particular things. They want to move to a more decentralized system where there is more capacity building and co-production and that sort of thing. I would say that there is no easy way to simply shift from one to the other. It is a reform programme. If someone asked you how long it would take to shift from one model of Government to another, I think that it would take 20 or 30 years to have that kind of culture shift. Essentially, it would involve the length of a career when one approach would end when a cadre of professionals retired or something like that. Now that I am thinking about that, patchy sounds like it is a criticism of particular Governments. It is ad hoc and it is not too coherent. However, I would say that as a routine feature of Government rather than something that I would identify as particularly problematic in either. To follow that up, one of the things that you have also said in the document on one occasion is the need to trust public service professionals. I think that that is fundamental. On the other side, I know that when the SNP Government came in 2007, there was concern that there was no buy-in from the civil servants who were there, who did not think that the SNP was going to win. If it did win, it was going to last six weeks, as Tavish Scott was going to come in famously and said. Of course, it did not. Civil servants are a point to ministers. It is not like we recruit our own staff and our own constituency officers, many of whom we have known for years, sometimes we do not, but they tend to be much more open in terms of their political views with us. How can you build that trust in those circumstances? I mean, of course, personal relationships are key, but on a broader basis. Yes, so I guess a couple of things. One is, I think that public sector professionals is, what would you say, is wider than that, because professions could also include medical, legal education, social work and such like. A lot of that comes down to, there is always a comparison with Westminster, and the criticism within Scotland of UK practices was that there was too much top-down direction, too much trying to constrain people delivering policy. They should really allow people who are highly trained and professional to do their jobs well. In terms of the civil service, I think that one of the benefits of this story that they tell is that civil servants clearly seek to carry out the policies of the Governments of the day, and so they are there to serve ministers. I think that that story is quite useful in that sense, that they can legitimately refer to the rules of their service and overnight switch what they think they are doing. I remember that there is a point at which senior civil servants appear to go too far. I forget the coverage here, but I think that when Sir Peter Housden was the permanent secretary, he made some public statements about being there to deliver on the SNP's independence agenda or something like that. I think that he was criticised by some people for being, essentially, described as too partisan, but he would describe that as part of his job was to deliver whatever elected ministers of the day are there to do. I think that there is a change of party and government. There are no expectations that overnight civil services will change what they think they are doing. In fact, I think that there is a process—maybe it was not a good process in 2007—but there is supposed to be a process in which the civil service prepares for a change of government and comes in to ministers and says, okay, here is how we could deliver on your manifesto. On my politicians point of view, there are some ministers who fear that they will be perceived as having a yes minister kind of relationship and they won't be the ones that are actually running the show in their own departments or it will be perceived sometimes. I think that that can perhaps make relations with you difficult, but I just want to end on one thing and that's basically on page 17, the policy cycle and the policy spiral graph. I'm just wondering if you can for the record talk us through that a wee bit. Okay, I will apologise for the production values. Looks like a tombly the drawing actually, so if it was it would be worth about 70 million dollars. I have been thinking about going out and getting a spiral graph and seeing if I could do it properly. It is supposed to suggest that the simplest image of policymaking that governments project is the idea that it is orderly. There is one organisation doing it. They are doing one thing at a time. When really government is about lots of organisations doing lots of things at the same time and to try and imagine it, I would say, if you want to stick with the cycle imagery, which I wouldn't, but if you want to stick with it, imagine that there is a huge number of cycles going at the same time and they are going to interact in lots of unexpected ways and something will emerge but it won't have a particular bidding on what central governments think that they want to do. The starting point for a Government is to say to the public, here is our process, it is very simple and orderly and you know who is in charge and who to blame. Whereas the starting point for the policy studies that I do is that there is no such thing as this orderly process and it takes a huge amount of effort simply to understand what governments do far less trying to improve what they do. I prefer a dodechahedron to a cycle. I think that what you are really saying is that it is more three-dimensional whereas that it is portrayed as a two-dimensional system. To what extent do you really think that the lack of rationality and uncertainty that is depicted very effectively by your diagram suggests that we should obviously be applying chaos theory to decision making in Government. That is a serious question. The academics would settle for complex systems. That is another module. The assumption of complex systems is that a huge number of people interact, they follow rules that are often going to be locally determined and things will emerge and they will emerge in the absence of a centre or despite the intentions of central government. If you buy into a complex systems view you would say give up in the sense that a small group of ministers can identify what they want to do and make sure that it is carried out and instead try to adapt to the systems that exist, give more discretion to local people to adapt to their local environment and what happens rather than thinking that you can direct things from the centre. That would feed into things like performance management, give up an idea of success and failure and go for trial and error and get rid of the idea that failure is a bad thing because you are just constantly learning. I sometimes talk about that with Silo Servants who would say on the one hand that yes, this is a much more accurate representation of what we do but on the other hand there is no way that we could say to anyone that that is how it works because you have to maintain the story of order because that is the only way that ministers can be accountable for what they do as if there is an orderly system what you know what they are doing. Okay, thanks very much and I want to thank Professor Cairney for his evidence this morning for the excellent report. I am now going to close the meeting so we will go into private session so just a two minute break to allow Professor Cairney and the official report to leave.