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I do not quite follow that question. Could you just clarify what you mean?

The national performance framework is designed to enjoy as much consensus as possible. If we want it to be something that is owned nationally, we have to maximise consensus so that people cannot disagree with it. Except for climate change deniers, for example—to go back to Ross Greer’s point—people do not disagree with it.

The national performance framework is a vision that we want to deliver now and for generations to come, but it sets out the end destination that we want to get to, and it cannot replace the political day-to-day decision making that is required. For example, the committee has just heard the finance secretary talking about winter fuel payments. With regard to the choices in and around that, we want to reduce poverty, but there are a number of different ways to do that. There is the Scottish child payment, and there is building good, affordable homes.

John Mason mentioned roads; in rural areas, roads are part of reducing poverty, because if people cannot get to work or if it costs them a fortune to get to healthcare facilities, that exacerbates poverty. Fuel bills in rural areas are a massive driver of poverty, and that is linked to transport.

The national performance framework sets out, and reminds us constantly of, what we want Scotland to be. However, we still have to take the difficult choices, which can sometimes be between good and better, not good and bad.

This may also be an opportunity to say something about the work to support policy officials who give the Government advice. Policy officials are trained on the national performance framework, and it is promoted to the policy advisers who are tasked with the job of giving ministers advice about what to do or what not to do.

More recently, as of May, the First Minister has been really clear that he wants there to be a focus on strategy and delivery. A bit of restructuring has been going on. People in the strategy directorate and the performance, delivery and resilience directorate are tasked with ensuring that we meet our aims, and they now own the national performance framework. In all the work that they do internally on monitoring delivery and strategy, they must be cognisant of the national performance framework, which provides the ultimate direction of travel.

There is definitely a lot more stick with the work that John Swinney, as the First Minister, has done in government during the early months of his tenure. I talked about restructuring. Under his leadership, the delivery function has been reformed so that delivery is measured and so that we ensure that we do what we say we are going to do. That is why this year’s programme for government is a lot punchier, because it is a lot easier to monitor progress against fewer hard-hitting actions than it is to do that against lots of nice actions that no one could disagree with.

The programme for government has a tight focus primarily because John Swinney places such weight on monitoring delivery—he has tasked a team in the Government with focusing almost entirely on delivery. The same team owns the national performance framework. The rigidity around measuring progress will also be applied to how our actions compare with the ambitions that have been set out in the national performance framework.

That tension is inherent in any document that is owned by all of Scotland. There is no way that only the Government can achieve any of the aims that are set out in the national performance framework; that would be the case only in a structure that was not a democracy. In a democracy, there is agency and many different public sector organisations have responsibility, as well as private sector organisations, which we always seem to forget.

I will give you a small example. The more that fair work principles are embedded in private sector organisations, the more likely it will be that people are paid a fair wage and that their wellbeing is considered, and the more likely it will be that we reduce poverty. That is a responsibility for the private sector. In a document such as the national performance framework, which is widely owned, it is inherent that there will be tensions. That is why I am open to the committee’s views on accountability and implementation. If too narrow an approach is taken that does not hold all of Scotland responsible for achieving the aims, we may miss the point of the national performance framework being a national document.

Stop me if I am getting this wrong, but I assume that you are specifically referring not just to the creation of the wellbeing economy and fair work outcome, but to the overarching purpose of the national performance framework.

I think that we are, but I note that there are two big drivers of the short-term decision making. The first is the nature of the funding. We need, once and for all, to get beyond the year-to-year annual budget setting; I am hopeful that the UK Government might help us in that. Our local authorities need it, and we in Government need it. If we could get a really decent spending review from the UK Government—I think that the review is coming next spring—that could give us long-term certainty on funding and it would be much easier to plan for the longer term.

The second driver has been the number of short-term challenges with which we have been grappling. Emerging from the Covid pandemic, which in itself was a short-term emergency shock, we have then had the cost of living emergency shock and a number of additional pressures that are driven by the inflationary environment, and which have meant that we have had to take immediate decisions.

We have the inputs, which is the funding position, and the outputs, which is the demand. If we can get an element of stability and get through the challenges, and if we can work collaboratively with the UK Government—as we are doing right now—on the longer-term points, that starts to set us up to make those decisions.

I will make another brief point. Shona Robison has had to make very difficult choices, and I know that Michael Marra has been scrutinising those decisions and holding us all to account for them. However, if we can make some of those difficult decisions now, that sets us up to be able to think about funding for the longer term on some of the biggest and most impactful changes that are required to give others longer-term stability with regard to what actually works.

No, because I think that we are making those decisions. That resource spending review was published in 2022, and I still stand by it; I know the amount of work that went into producing it. Nevertheless, it was published immediately prior to the emergence of double-digit levels of inflation and pay deals that mirrored the rocketing cost of living. Good grown-up Governments do not simply make plans and then stick their fingers in their ears and ignore what is happening around them. Good Governments are conscious of what is happening while sticking to the long-term ambitions of their plan.

In the past few months in particular, Shona Robison has made difficult choices to set us up for the long term, which is actually very much in the spirit of the spending review that I published in spring 2022.

Let me take on board the first half of your question, which was on how committed we are. I will come on to that.

I challenge again the idea that the consultation should have been broader—in other words, about our doing more things. That is what sits uncomfortably with me. We should have a streamlined and focused approach, which is ultimately much easier to embed and much easier to measure. The proposed revisions that we have made will enable us to streamline and focus the work that we are doing.

On the consultation itself, we have made changes where there was a strong evidence base of the need for change. We have introduced new outcomes—you will know that there are new outcomes on care, housing and climate—in areas where we had significant support to make changes. On the flipside, some stakeholders have cautioned against increasing the total number of outcomes, which goes back to my point about having a streamlined and focused approach.

You asked at the beginning about the extent to which the NPF is embedded in the Government. In any sort of political cycle, in the tidal waves of politics coming and going, there will always be pressure to lift our eyes off the outcomes that we have set out in the national performance framework. During my time in government I have seen an increasing awareness of the national performance framework and an increasing desire to align our policy work with it.

That has been most visible in finance and is most visible when it comes to the budget. It has meant that there has been very stark conversations about where the national performance framework outcomes clash with one another, because at times they do. At times Government, and indeed Parliament, has to make a conscious choice about what it is going to focus on, and sometimes you see that.

I just talked about two new outcomes on housing and climate. I am in Shetland, so I will use this example. I was told yesterday that the council here has a choice to make. Should it decarbonise the houses that it already has with the money that it has, or should it build more houses? Let us not pretend that all these decisions are easy, and let us not pretend that there are not still further questions to answer when it comes to embedding all the national performance framework in our policy work, because I do not think anyone would disagree with the picture that we are painting with the national performance framework. We would all like to live in a Scotland where all those outcomes are met, but the business of Government requires us to start with those outcomes and then figure out the most effective way of delivering them through policy.

To my mind, economic growth it is not an end in itself. The end is the outcomes that are captured in the national performance framework. When we talk about economic growth, that is about making Scotland more prosperous and fairer, and it is a means of delivering against our environmental ambitions. It is a means to an end.

I would be reluctant to embed economic growth as a national outcome in and of itself, as that would be confusing means and ends. We do not celebrate economic growth as an end in itself. I want to live in communities where there is fairness, where everybody is paid a fair wage, where there is no fuel poverty, where there are better health outcomes and so on. I could go through the whole list, but I will not.

That is what the UN sustainable development goals are about—ensuring that there is fairness and equality across the board. I would far rather that that fairness was a result of people having high-level incomes, and that is where we need more economic growth. However, that is not an end in itself; it is a means to the ends that are captured in the national performance framework.

The general theme of all my comments this morning is that I am not minded to make changes for their own sake. I will make changes that mean that we are better at delivering the national outcomes. To my mind, changing names does not help anybody, so changing the name of the framework, as has been requested, would not be one of my top priorities.

We have got strong branding around the framework, which has been built up since 2007. It is a key part of some of our international work. The engagement that we have had with other Governments, in terms of how we have developed the national performance framework and how we use it for policy work, is aligned with the name as it stands. If I thought that changing the name would deliver more fairness to somebody in the country, I would be more persuaded, but I am not.