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There are a number of dimensions to that question, and one that we cannot ignore is Parliament and political debate. I cannot control what members of Parliament raise as the issues that concern them and which they want to pursue, but I sit and listen to questions and debates in Parliament daily and, to be frank, I hear members railing against what Liz Smith just put to me as a question. Members want ministers to be taking or accountable for such decisions. It is all very well to put forward the argument that we should empower the front-line professionals but, in parliamentary questions and debates, members of Parliament take a completely opposite approach.

I can give an example from my five years as education secretary. One of my biggest priorities was to encourage and support a much greater empowerment of schools and headteachers in our communities, but that did not stop members of Parliament pressing me about the performance of the education system across the board—including, if I may say so, the former Conservative education spokesperson, whom I respect and admire deeply. There is a conundrum, which Parliament must resolve, about what Parliament thinks is important and should be the subject of scrutiny.

Well. Going back to Liz Smith’s question about the apparent lack of accountability in the system, I feel as if I am being invited to reflect on my term in office as a minister.

I freely concede that there are a lot of institutional barriers to making progress, and we should not underestimate the challenges facing any Government with regard to compartmentalisation. Of course, it is not just Governments. Before I entered Parliament in the 1990s, I worked for a large private sector insurance company. It, too, had its own compartments, and its leadership wrestled with the necessity of focusing on—in its case—customers and avoiding a focus on process and structures. The challenge is therefore not unique to public sector organisations or governance.

However, what is needed is a universal or agreed approach to enable us to overcome some of the barriers that I have mentioned, and the Christie commission helps us by giving an approach, methodology and set of principles that can be followed in any public sector organisation. In that respect, Christie has really stood the test of time. As I said in my opening remarks, its approach remains fundamental to what we and public sector organisations are doing today. The thinking behind the Promise, for example, essentially develops the thinking in the Christie commission report.

I suppose that what the 2021 John Swinney would say to the 2007 John Swinney is that he should not underestimate the scale of the obstacles to be overcome. That would probably be the best advice that I could offer.

There was a lot in that question. To follow up my previous answer, my first point is that the challenge of compartmentalisation is less acute in the Scottish Government than it is in Whitehall. I say that not to be critical, but to acknowledge that we have benefits of size and proximity.

I go back to some of the Covid issues that we have discussed. When I wanted to sort out any compartmentalisation that affected a Covid issue, the necessary people were on a phone call within five minutes and the issue was aired, sorted and addressed. My colleagues and counterparts in the UK Government often tell me—and there is a fair amount of truth in this—“It is much easier for you. You can just bang heads together. It is much more complex for us.” There are opportunities for us in that respect, and I am discussing with our incoming permanent secretary how we can overcome some of the boundaries and barriers.

Secondly, Mr Johnson spoke about the need for us to be focused on wider purposes. We have tried to do that with the establishment of the national performance framework, which is designed to provide us with a sense of direction over a longer period of time, and therefore to give public organisations a sense of where we are heading and what we might be achieving. There is, however, a natural conflict between some of the aspirations in the national performance framework and some of the accountability mechanisms that are applied operationally and which Parliament might spend quite a bit of time scrutinising.

Thirdly, I come to the colossal question of the role of local government, whether the 1994 reforms were absolutely perfect and what is the best way through this. There are a number of elements to that. One relates to the optimum level at which services should be delivered to individuals. That is never a perfect question at the local level. Through the health and social care reforms that we have discussed, we have tried to recognise that, although local government has responsibility for social work, the health service has responsibility for health, and there is a thing called social care that does not fall neatly into local government or health. Every individual case is at a different stage on the spectrum. The health and social care reforms were designed to address the need for collaboration between the health service and local government.

We then get into other questions about the natural desire of communities to have more control over what happens in their locality, and I am not sure that that is determined by how close they feel to their local authority. For example, irrespective of whether the council is located in Perth or Dundee, both those places feel quite distant to the citizens I represent in the town of Blairgowrie, in terms of what really matters to them and their absolute locality.

Finally, there is the role of Parliament. I go back to my example of education. I understand why this is the case and I am not complaining about it, but, fundamentally, the levers that affect the performance of the education system lie with local authorities. As Mr Johnson might have observed over the past five years, I and my successor are held quite closely accountable for the performance of education, but a large proportion of that is not within ministers’ operational responsibility. In the health service, it is different: there is ultimate ministerial control and ministerial appointments.

Parliament would have to be involved in a discussion about where the right amount of accountability lies in relation to some of these questions.

He would probably say that he should give shorter answers.

In my previous answer, I should have said for completeness that there will be areas that are much harder to penetrate than others. I have given some examples of where cultural change has happened. There are other areas that are more challenging.

One of the problems is that I could sit here and give a litany of examples of good practice, but I would struggle to say in all of them that they were systemic approaches. They might be good examples, but I am not sure that those approaches are happening everywhere.

That brings me to my response to your question about the appropriate care for individuals. I think that we have made very good progress on ensuring that people receive the care that is appropriate for their needs, but I live in the real world and I know that we currently have around 1,400 to 1,500 people who are experiencing delayed discharge in our hospitals. I do not think that that is because anybody in health and social care partnerships around the country is taking any view other than that they are keen to ensure that people who are in hospital and could be accommodated at home with a care package are able to be. They often face practical challenges in doing that. Some of those practical challenges might be to do with the availability of money. There may not be enough money to afford all the social care packages that we would want to afford at the local level because resources may be tied up in the more acute hospital settings.

Actually, I do not think that that is the problem that we have just now. As I have explained to Parliament on a number of occasions, the problem that we have just now is the availability of staff to deliver social care packages in communities. There are simply not enough available people on the ground to do so.

We got a leaflet in the mail to my house yesterday from a much-respected local care provider that invited people to come forward to join its social care staff. We have never had such a leaflet through our door before. That indicates the lengths to which care providers are going to try to encourage people to join the labour market because of the acute challenges that are being faced.

I go back to a point that I have just made. There will not be a health and social care partnership in the land that believes anything other than that an individual should be accommodated in the most appropriate setting for them. If a care package in the individual’s home is the most appropriate approach, the health and social care partnership will want to provide that. However, there will be practical impediments to their ability to deliver that, and the most important practical impediment just now is the availability of people to deliver social care in our communities.

Philosophically, we need to encourage organisations to follow one of the principles of the Christie commission—the principle of partnership and collaboration. There are various ways of taking forward an agenda of public service reform and one approach could be structural change. We have used that option in certain circumstances.

In other circumstances, a route could be taken around the theme of partnership and collaboration whereby we establish the atmosphere and motivations to encourage different public sector organisations that need to work together to do so effectively to meet the needs of individuals. As an example of that, some time ago I visited the team at Perth royal infirmary, which serves my constituency. A joint team of health and local authority staff work in a rather small room in Perth royal infirmary and they focus on intelligence coming from the hospital about who is almost ready to be discharged. They then work out between them the timescale and circumstances for that individual’s discharge and the necessary support within the community.

That, to me, philosophically brought to life what I am talking about here—public servants from two different public bodies working together in collaboration, focusing on individual cases, and working out how best to ensure that those individuals have a smooth journey out of hospital into their own home, and that they are well supported as they recover.

The route that was chosen there was collaboration, but a different route could have been chosen. Structural reform could have been undertaken, for example. However, encouraging public servants to focus on the delivery of the best possible outcomes for members of the public is a strong incentive.

It is about supporting communities to enable them to intervene and act effectively in their areas. That support varies around the country.

During Covid, a local hotelier in my constituency established an organisation called Feldy-Roo—incidentally, a local resident phoned him up one day and said, “I’ve just had a leaflet from Deliveroo—I think they’ve done something with your name,” which is an interesting way of looking at it. Feldy-Roo did not exist before Covid—it was set up by an individual named Gavin Price, who owns a couple of hotels and bars. He had kitchens, and there were vulnerable people in Aberfeldy who needed hot meals, so he got a squad of people together. By accessing financial support from different bodies, they created a mechanism that went on throughout Covid and delivered free, good-quality hot meals to vulnerable individuals in the community.

Such fine-grain intervention is absolutely welcome, and it comes about because people feel that they can do something to make a difference. Gavin Price was not asked to do what he did by the local authority, although it encouraged and supported the initiative. There are countless such examples around the country in the Covid space and in other spaces, too.

The Scottish Flood Forum supports a lot of organisations at a local level by providing early intervention for householders in relation to flooding incidents in communities. It works with local authorities and resilience partnerships but has decided to take the initiative so that it can actively support communities.

For the Government, community empowerment means making sure that people are enabled and supported to advance on propositions of that nature rather than us designing an elegant system of governance that—I venture to suggest—would not do much else to have a practical effect on people’s lives.

Yes, but that will vary in intensity, given the significance of the issues that are at stake. Inevitably, that will depend on where the policy focus is and what the issues are that arise from the events that are taking place.

If statute requires ministers to interact with a public body in a particular way, ministers should operate in that fashion, but if statute says to ministers, “You’ve got to keep a distance from these boards,” ministers should do that. The situation will vary, depending on what statute requires.

I certainly do not feel any lack of accountability, and I do not think that many other people feel a lack of accountability. There are multiple accountability streams in our systems. Ministers are accountable to Parliament, members of Parliament are accountable to their electorates and the electorate make their choices—they made one on 6 May. Local authorities are accountable to their electorates, and health boards are accountable to ministers and through annual public meetings in their localities, so there is no lack of accountability.

One of the Auditor General’s relevant points on accountability was that some of the channels, requirements or measurements of accountability that we have might not be helpful in achieving the Christie commission’s aspirations. The convener asked me about a discernible shift of resources to support prevention. If the accountability mechanisms are in place to monitor and assure performance on aspects of public service delivery, it is difficult for public servants to move away from those mechanisms to something else, because there will be continued pressures on the existing accountability mechanisms.

That system is beneficial because it creates the space for focused discussion of the needs of individuals. One of the big lessons that I have learned in my political life, especially in my life as a minister, is that cases hardly ever fit neatly into one single compartment. If Mr Mason has a constituency case, as I have had, that does not fit neatly into the health board compartment or the local authority compartment, the health and social care partnerships have the structure and the ethos to focus on the needs of individuals and to find solutions for them. Many practical impediments will exist in resolving issues; that third organisation provides the necessary focus.