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It is in the same area. At one of our workshops in Glasgow, the comment was made that the NPF should be more practical and not so aspirational. You are in that space as well. Is the NPF too vague? Oxfam made the comment that there is a lack of time-bound commitments.

I am struggling with this a bit. I see the NPF as being aspirational, which I think is good, but maybe it should not be just aspirational. Does it need to be more than that, or is there a danger that we would just end up with a set of rules if it said that A, B, C and D must be done by 31 December?

Keith Robson, in your paper, you talk about a national impact framework, which appears to be an attempt to tie the national performance framework and the sustainable development goals together. Is that correct?

It is the third-last paragraph. You say:

“the SFC has committed to working collaboratively with the sector and key stakeholders to develop a new overarching National Impact Framework ... to ensure greater alignment”.

Will we then end up with a situation in which, instead of the Government saying that we have got to the 1,140 hours for childcare, some councils will say that they will use the national performance framework, they will have 1,000, 1,200 or 900 hours, and there will be a varied picture around the country? Would that be a bad thing, or would it be okay?

I want to make a couple of points. I am slightly more sympathetic to the team than some of my colleagues are. To be fair, the project has come in roughly on time and on budget, which is a good result, given that we have much experience of IT projects that have not done so.

I do not use the new website that much, and I find searching for things a little difficult. I was looking for a motion that I had lodged on councillor pay, but when I searched for “councillor pay”, the website gave me no results. I thought that the wording might have been something else, so I searched for “councillors’ pay”, and the system gave me one result, which was my motion. I wonder whether the public might struggle with things like that; unless a person knows the exact wording of a motion, they will struggle to find it. I will leave that with the team, because you said that the site will be developed.

In making my other point, I will probably reiterate what others have said. I do not think that I was on the Finance and Constitution Committee when the project started. Ms Hegarty, you said that you will present information slightly differently in future. I want to emphasise that it is important for a finance committee to know that a project will run on for several years. I think that that happened with the security enhancement project: I remember that the committee asked about that project and was given the information that it would go over more than one year.

As other members have just pointed out, if you had come back to the Finance and Constitution Committee in year 2 and it had said no, because money was tight, I presume that that would have meant that all the year 1 money would have been wasted. It is important for a finance committee—whoever is on it—to know what it is committing to. Correct me if I am wrong, but the committee is committing to a five-year project, when normally we commit budgets for only one year at a time. There is a risk to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body that your budgets for the second, third, fourth and fifth years might get knocked back if the finance committee does not understand that it is making a commitment for five years. Have I understood that correctly?

I am interested in the use of the word “performance”. You are quite critical of it and others seem to want to keep it. Is that because “performance” suggests that we can measure things, in the way that we can measure the performance of a car? We can say that it is 99, 100, 98 or whatever the figure happens to be. “Performance” suggests that we can measure it and that we can hold the Government or someone to account, whereas “wellbeing” is a vaguer word.

However, the Parliament tends to question how many people have got highers, how many people have got degrees, how many people are at college—those very fixed things—rather than asking, “How’s the wellbeing going?”

We could explore that for longer, but I will leave that to the convener.

That ties in quite well with the question that I was going to ask next, which is about the budget—I think that Ms Wallace mentioned the budget. Government officials have commented that they do not see the national performance framework being used in the budget process. Are you saying that that is not necessarily a bad thing, or should the national performance framework and the budget be a bit more closely tied together?

I want to follow up on some of those points. My first question is about how important language is. At our workshops on the NPF, we spoke to various people. When we spoke to Government officials, they talked about how the language was intangible for outsiders. When we spoke to people from Citizens Advice Scotland, they said that, although the language differed—they said that the language that they used was different from the language of the national outcomes—they felt that there was broad alignment.

Dr French, in your submission, you make the point that we should rebrand the national performance framework as Scotland’s national wellbeing framework. How important is it that we get the wording right? Should we change some of the wording?