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Thank you, convener. I welcome the opportunity to appear before the committee today.

The national performance framework is Scotland’s wellbeing framework. It explicitly includes increased wellbeing as part of its purpose, and it combines measurement of how well Scotland is doing in economic terms with a broader range of measures. The national performance framework is also the means to localise delivery of the United Nations sustainable development goals in Scotland.

The NPF provides a framework for collaboration and for the planning of policy and services across the spectrum of Scotland’s civic society, including the private and public sectors, voluntary organisations, businesses and communities. It is based on achieving outcomes that improve the quality of life of the people of Scotland.

The NPF is also a reporting framework that helps us to understand, publicly and transparently, the progress that we are making as a nation towards realising our long-term vision. Its data helps us to understand the challenges that we all face in achieving better outcomes for the people of Scotland, and to focus policy, services and resources on tackling those challenges.

The NPF promotes partnership working by making organisations jointly responsible for planning and spending to achieve shared outcomes. Although the Scottish ministers are accountable to the Parliament for the NPF’s development and delivery, the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 places a duty on public authorities to “have regard to” the national outcomes. To reflect that partnership approach, the current NPF was launched jointly by the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. Local government plays a key role in achieving the national outcomes.

Given my remit, I am keen for the NPF to continue to guide our approach to Covid recovery. During the early stages of the pandemic, the Scottish Government’s approach looked to the national performance framework. The coronavirus framework for decision making explicitly reflected the core values of the national performance framework: kindness, dignity, compassion, respect for the rule of law, openness and transparency.

Analysis has shown that the pandemic has had significant and wide-ranging impacts across the national outcomes. As would be expected, the impacts have been largely negative, particularly in relation to health, the economy, fair work, business and culture. Covid-19 impacts have been, and will continue to be, borne unequally. The impacts are expected to widen many existing inequalities and to be borne disproportionately by some groups, including households on low incomes or in poverty, low-paid workers, children and young people, disabled people, minority groups and women.

However, analysis shows that there might also be positive future developments, including the acceleration of the shift towards digital technologies and services, partnership working between the public sector and other partners to improve outcomes for disadvantaged groups and shifts in the empowerment of communities to make decisions for themselves. Understanding those impacts will be important in driving the recovery and in achieving the national outcomes, as reflected in our recent programme for government.

We are preparing for the next statutory review of the national outcomes, on which we will consult widely across Scotland, including with Parliament. Following the outcome of the 2018 review, when the NPF received cross-party support, we will revisit the round-table approach to further political engagement on Scotland’s future wellbeing, building on the shared policy agreement that the Government has reached with the Scottish Green Party. The review will focus on how we can better achieve impact that is recognised and felt by the people who live in Scotland.

We strongly believe in our duty as a Government to protect the interest of future generations, including by restoring the natural environment and reducing our consumption in line with what the planet can sustain. That duty to future generations is spread across many policies and institutions.

The national performance framework provides for intergenerational wellbeing and improving opportunities for all, and means attending to the conditions that are required to ensure wellbeing into the future and for future generations, and not only for the present.

That will vary from area to area; in some circumstances, that will be the case. In relation to the early learning and childcare example, indicators would be in place to set a timescale for the implementation of such a policy and, as a consequence, to determine the timescale within which decisions were required and practical actions needed to be taken.

In other areas of policy—for example, eradicating child poverty—we will be aiming to achieve particular target dates and plans will be put in place to try to achieve those objectives. That will throw up challenges for the Government and public authorities, because the timescales may well be more demanding than we can achieve. However, milestones to structure the way in which decisions require to be taken will be available where they can be of assistance in achieving those outcomes.

My assessment of the situation with high-growth and innovative businesses is that it has been affected by two factors, the first of which is the historical trend of economic activity in this area being a challenge for Scotland for many years now. That said, in the aftermath of the financial crash, significant enhancements were made in the development of high-growth businesses, with the Government putting in place a range of different interventions to support that. I am thinking, in particular, of the Scottish EDGE—encouraging dynamic growth entrepreneurs—competition, which was a collaboration with the Hunter Foundation and other stakeholders; of support for the women in enterprise action group; and of the converge challenge, which encouraged the roll-out of more high-growth companies from the higher education sector. A number of different interventions have been put in place to address areas of poorer performance.

The second factor is the effect of the more general economic conditions in which we have been working as a consequence of Covid, as evidenced by the situation with economic growth. It is therefore a combination of historical and real-time issues.

The employee voice issue is slightly more difficult to nail down. All the policy interventions that we will take as a Government are designed to support the acceleration and intensification of employee contributions to the operation of organisations and businesses. I would argue that, from a business perspective, that is a very sound investment, given the added value that is attracted by capturing the input and contribution of employees in the development and running of organisations. That particular indicator will have been informed substantially by surveys of employees, and if that evidence reflects a lack of such input, the Government’s fair work agenda will have to be intensified. We will take that forward in the dialogue that we will have with a range of organisations including the business representative organisations and the Scottish Trades Union Congress, with which we collaborate closely on all aspects of the fair work agenda.

On all those different indicators, ministers and officials will be heavily engaged in assessing performance and patterns across the country. If I go back to the world of education policy that I occupied during the previous parliamentary session, at all times I was looking at differential performance around the country. For example, performance on educational attainment and the progress that I expected to see there was the subject of some frequently pretty robust discussion between me and individual local authorities.

I would not want the committee to consider that this is the only stocktake or the only discussion about performance. A lot of discussion will go on in and around the territory of the national performance framework to make sure that we are doing all that we can to intervene to improve performance.

The national performance framework is designed to be a helpful and useful guide to all public bodies and private organisations about the direction in which Government policy, supported by decisions made in Parliament, is heading, and what organisations can contribute towards the achievement of that vision. Obviously, a number of issues are properly and statutorily the responsibility of other public bodies, particularly local authorities, so local decision making is crucial. We will not get to a strong position on performance at the national level if we do not get to a strong position of local performance. There has to be an interaction and dialogue there.

There are obviously political choices to make here. There could be more directional decisions taken. Parliament has particular views about that; sometimes it is in favour, sometimes it is not. In the current environment, ministers have to operate within the statutory framework and the national performance framework, which is endorsed by our local authority partners, is designed to give a clear and coherent approach to the delivery of policy to shape the decisions that can be made at the local level and then influence the contribution that is made to achievement of the national outcomes.

I am very happy to do so.

Undoubtedly, decisions could be taken to tilt the balance in order to place more emphasis on, for argument’s sake, the outcome that

“We live in communities that are inclusive, empowered, resilient and safe”

as opposed to the outcome that

“We are creative and our vibrant and diverse cultures are expressed and enjoyed widely”.

We could say that there is much more importance in ensuring that we have greater progress on community empowerment than on cultural appreciation. I extracted those two topics randomly, but of course there is scope for the balance to be tilted. Obviously, we would have to be aware of what the implications of that might well be, because we are trying to achieve an approach that enables us to fulfil the purpose of policy making in Scotland. There is scope for us to reshape the balance of that to address other and particular priorities.

That is a really good example to focus on. When we come down from the national outcomes, believe you me, there is no shortage of data beneath the aspiration of children growing up loved, safe and respected. There is no absence of data. Indeed, that is highlighted in the national indicators, and they are only a snapshot of the data that is available.

As for what is required, as somebody who was immersed in that area of policy for five years, I would be examining a whole range of data sets to establish trends for whether we are heading in a positive direction or a negative direction as a consequence of the experience of children and young people in our society, and I would be intervening at an operational level to remedy instances where I thought that there was a need for stronger performance.

If we take an indicator such as the quality of children’s services, for example, that is an area that I would be examining very closely, looking at the data identified by the Care Inspectorate and Audit Scotland and at some of the wider collection of data on child protection and child wellbeing issues so as to determine—to go back to the convener’s point—the degree to which I needed more of a focus on area A versus area B in the country, where very different patterns might be emerging. What was driving good performance in area B versus poorer performance in area A, for instance? What would we need to do as a Government to be confident that we were doing all that we could to ensure that children were growing up loved, safe and respected and to intervene so as to secure better performance where that was required?

The question that Mr Johnson fairly puts to me is whether that can be more visibly set out in the national performance framework, somewhere in the gap between outcome that children and young people

“grow up loved, safe and respected”

and the half a dozen indicators. I think that there is a reasonable point to be considered as to whether the information that we promote to reflect the achievement of the outcomes represents the most effective collection of data, as there is a whole host of data that we could select from to enable that to be the case.

The point that Mr Fraser raises—which Neil Doncaster expressed this morning—is entirely reasonable. We are aware of the labour market challenges, which are visible to all of us, and the challenges around the availability of stewards are well documented. I do not in any way, shape or form dispute that point—I accept it, hence the rationale in the Government’s paper that we published last week, in which we indicated that there was a necessity for organisers to take reasonable measures and that there was likely to be a proportionate approach in different settings such as a crowd of 200 versus a crowd of 60,000. We envisage that there will have to be different approaches, and we are working through the issues in detail with football authorities in order to have that proportionate approach—principally because they will be the ones with the big crowds that will be affected, although other events and sectors will also be affected.

We are trying to encourage a climate in which vaccination uptake is understood to be a significant protection for the country against the spread of the virus. Even though there may not be a check of absolutely everybody who attends a football game, the more that we can do, the more we can make these events safer and less likely to be places in which the virus is transmitted and the more we contribute to the suppression of the virus.

We are actively involved in discussions with the football authorities and other players on these questions, and a proportionate approach is likely to be taken, as we highlighted in last week’s paper. As we also indicated, guidance supporting that information will be available to relevant parties.

There are two issues to address in that question. First, the question whether the lady in question should be vaccinated is an exclusively clinical matter, so I will say nothing that would intrude on such decision making. These are, in some circumstances, very difficult judgments. It is estimated that fewer than one in 1,000 people—or 0.1 per cent—cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. We are therefore talking about a very small number of people, which I think demonstrates the difficulty of the clinical judgment that has to be applied. As I have said, I would not seek to intrude on that.

Secondly, on the implications of non-vaccination for a vaccination certification scheme, we have to ensure that the scheme does not disadvantage people in accessing venues if they choose, as an unvaccinated person, to do so. In other words, someone who is unvaccinated for entirely legitimate and proper clinically assessed medical reasons should not be disadvantaged if they want to see their favourite football club playing. Obviously that will have implications for other members of society, but there is a limited risk of exposure. Fundamentally, though, that is a judgment for the individual, so we have to ensure that the vaccination certification scheme in no way disadvantages or discriminates against them.

There are two elements to that question; the first is about engagement and the second is about what reasonable measures are. On engagement, I appreciate that this is being done quickly, but a lot of stuff around Covid has had to be done quickly because of the nature of the situation that we face. The rationale for us acting quickly in that respect is twofold.

First, we face a very high level of cases. The point has been made to Parliament that, if we had had case numbers a year ago of the type that we have now—although they are slightly lower than they have been—we would have been in lockdown. Thankfully, the vaccine provides us with a huge amount of protection against that, but we still have very high levels of case load, which flows through into levels of hospitalisation that are resulting in well-documented pressures on the national health service and all its constituent parts. There is a need to act swiftly to suppress the virus. That is the nature of the urgency around engagement.

The second point in relation to engagement is that we have had a range of discussions. The First Minister and I were involved in a session the other day with a variety of stakeholders, and representatives of hospitality sectors were involved. I cannot recall off the top of my head whether Mr Stevenson was involved as there was a large number of participants. Jason Leitch and the finance secretary have had similar discussions with other sectors, and our officials are involved in dialogue to understand the practical issues. We are actively involved in those discussions in order to make sure that we hear the practical issues so that we can shape the guidance to ensure that there is a clear understanding of what is envisaged in the process.

That brings me to what reasonable measures are. Clearly, we can help organisations only by providing the necessary context, detail and information that allows them to form their view about reasonable measures. Having listened to the evidence that the stakeholders on the first panel provided, I note that there is willingness to do that and to be engaged in the implementation of such a scheme. They appealed for an understanding that there may be steps that they have to take to get more reasonable measures in place, and I certainly give an assurance that the Government is listening to that message and argument as we formulate the guidance.