Seòmar agus comataidhean

“Youse”, to use the Scots form, which Dr Allan is very well qualified to deploy.

I turn to my NRS colleagues, who were part of that decision-making process. Paul Lowe has put his real hand up, as well as his virtual hand, to answer that. It is not for me to second-guess. To me, just reading through things, the rationale is exactly the same as that which led to at least 60 per cent of other countries that were in the same circumstance to come to the same conclusion. I leave it to Paul Lowe to take us through things, as he was there and was part of the process.

The additional expenditure was £6 million. That equates to 4.3 per cent of the £138.6 million lifetime cost for the May 2022 census. The extension increased the lifetime cost of the census to £144.6 million. and added 4.3 per cent to the cost of the census.

The answer is yes, it was. Is there still more that can be done? Absolutely. There has to be a full toolkit of ways in which one can reach different parts of society—that is a reflection of the fact that we are living in an ever more atomised society.

I am pleased about the different ways in which support was offered. Support was there for people who had English as a second language, some of whom needed translation. It was there for people whose eyesight was not good, so that they could complete the census over the phone, with somebody helping them through it. People who prefer to do things in written form rather than online could have a written census form, and they were given one when it was suggested on doorstep visits that they preferred doing things on paper.

It is important that we do not lose sight of the fact that there was an extremely high digital return rate for the census. This was the first time that digital completion was prioritised in the way that it was. Our society is in flux in that younger people are absolutely at home when using digital access to services—the fact that nine out of 10 census forms were returned digitally shows that people are content to do that—but this time we also had to recognise that there are still people for whom that is not their preferred way to take part in the census. That is why there was an additional range of ways in which people were able to take part.

As far as students and other groups are concerned, I would be interested to know, as part of the on-going process, how effective internal communications were in, say, the university or college landscape or in certain faith communities in which there might be a higher percentage of people who come from linguistic minority groups. There will definitely be lessons that we can learn from that about what worked well and what we need to do more on.

I do not know whether my NRS colleagues have anything to add on any early impressions that we have from all that.

First, convener, if you do not mind me correcting the record, in my previous answer I talked about 60-plus per cent of countries delaying their censuses. It was 59 countries but 71 per cent.

On Jenni Minto’s point about storytelling and the sense of communicating more effectively, that undoubtedly has to be part of the solution. In effect, that is what was happening. I do not know whether all committee members saw the television adverts that involved imaginative ways of communicating the connection between taking part in the census and the provision of a local hospital or other form of public service. Those efforts were undertaken to try and help explain why the census is not an abstract exercise but something that really matters to us all. Could we do that better? Undoubtedly. In 10 years’ time, who knows what Scotland will be like, although I have some hopes about what it will be like. I see Donald Cameron smiling in agreement—good, we are making progress. I am sorry; I am being a bit cheeky.

The trends that we are trying to understand will continue. The nature of society is changing and we will have to be imaginative about reaching out in different ways to different people in different places; we cannot expect to have the same impact or rate of return on things otherwise.

I am sure that colleagues here would agree that it was important to hear that our NRS colleagues are part of international networks and that they work with colleagues in comparable countries, and further away as well, to learn what others are doing. I do not think that there is a silver bullet in any of that, and I do not think that something that would have made significant statistical difference was missed.

The lengthening of the collection period was really important in reaching those places where, notwithstanding the extensive communication work that took place, there clearly needed to be more, different and direct communication. We will have to calibrate that in the best possible way for the next census.

There is something in Jenni Minto’s point about schools. I was talking to officials about that before the evidence session. It is good that efforts were undertaken in the run up to the census. When we think about kids going to school, understanding what the census is and why it is important and then being able to ask their parents about the census at home—asking, “When are we doing it?”, and all of that—we can see that it could be an important part of the equation. Education is part of it, and we need an imaginative response. It is being done already, as are all these other things, but on whether these things can be reviewed and better understood and their effectiveness assured, the answer is yes. It is going to be a case of constant improvement, but that is what colleagues at NRS do already. It is all about doing a job, learning the lessons, reviewing it, implementing the changes that need to happen, and publishing what they are doing. I am all for it when I hear people say that they want transparency. Well, please go to the NRS website and have a look at what is there and at the documentation that has been provided—it is extensive.

I have not said this yet, but I want to put on record my appreciation of the hard work that went into Scotland’s census 2022 by NRS and, by extension, everybody else who took part in the process, from the enumerators to the people in the call centre and so on. An extraordinary effort went into ensuring that we could get to this stage of having high-quality data, which some people cast doubt on—including people in the parliamentary chamber, let us not forget. It is just factually incorrect to suggest that Scotland’s census 2022 will not provide high-quality data. It is providing that and it will provide that, and it has delivered. It is having to deliver in a different way from previous censuses, and I think that that trend will continue. All lessons that need to be learned must be learned, and I have no doubt that we will come back to the committee to report on what those are.

My colleagues here are extremely intellectually curious. They want to know what has to change and how to do it. Countries elsewhere in the world are looking to Scotland to better understand this phenomenon, because they realise that they are dealing with the same phenomenon or similar phenomena. You cannot get much further away in the world, geographically, than New Zealand, and people there, too, are speaking with colleagues here about our experience to ensure that they maximise their return rate. They have settled on a number that is remarkably similar to the return rate that we secured here in Scotland.

Forgive me, convener, but we could spend a whole session on that. As part of my broad range of portfolio responsibilities, I chair the Scottish Government’s population task force. I acknowledge that Mr McMillan will have a particular interest in the issue, given that the population statistics for Inverclyde in particular are of great concern for elected members there.

I will answer the question in a number of ways. First, the Scottish Government is very seized of that issue, as are, understandably, local government leaders in authorities whose areas have suffered historical population decline especially. Traditionally, we in Scotland would have looked towards the north-west of the country—the Highlands and Islands—as an area in which there has been particular population decline challenges in the past, but we are now seeing those in other parts of the country, not least in Inverclyde.

That was observation one. Observation two is that we are heading towards population decline in the whole of Scotland. That is a huge challenge—and, frankly, totally unnecessary. Sadly, it is in significant part to do with UK Government policy and the restrictions foisted on us by the type of Brexit that we have, which has ended the free movement of people. Indeed, it is the single biggest contributor to our facing population decline. It could—and this goes to the heart of Mr McMillan’s question—be changed by Government policy. Our views are very well known and understood in Whitehall and Westminster and are totally ignored. The UK Government has shown no willingness thus far to be imaginative with different approaches to immigration policy or, indeed, taxation policy. There was, for example, the approach that we favoured to deal with refugees from Ukraine, which was not the same thing as immigration but was about giving people a place where they could stay and live. As we know, people in such circumstances often make a life decision to stay in the longer term, but we have a UK Government that is pursuing a refugee crisis as an immigration issue.

On all those levels, the UK is taking the wrong approach. Of course, the simple solution is to put Scotland’s Parliament and Government in charge of immigration in order to make better decisions and make Scotland an attractive place to come to and to live, work and study in. We are doing what we can. We are setting up a migration advisory service; we are doing everything we can to join up government at national and local levels to work out what we can do; we are running international marketing campaigns; we have policy ideas that we are trying to understand better; and we are working with other countries on these matters. Not long ago, I spoke to Spanish colleagues about this challenge, because it is being felt in parts of Spain. Lessons can be learned from other countries, perhaps primarily Norway, given what the Norwegians have been able to do to support population numbers in the west and north-west of their country.

There is a lot in your question, and I could give a lot more answers. Indeed, I think that the issue would be worthy of an entire evidence session. I am keen to keep up my attendance rate at the committee, convener, because it has been pretty good thus far and now that other colleagues from Government are attending with me, I do not want to slip down the batting average. I would want to have an exchange on where things are with population decline in Scotland, because it is such an important issue that brings with it very damaging economic and social consequences.

That is an apposite question, because it is a consideration for not only the Scottish Government but National Museums Scotland and the National Galleries of Scotland, whose trustees I met yesterday. That is one of the matters that we talked about, and the trustees made observations about the changes that they have seen over the past 25 years. There has been a change towards a much broader representation of people attending the national museum of Scotland and other museums. However, there is still a gap to be bridged.

I echo what my cabinet secretary colleague said. Embarking on the resource spending review approach will encourage all of us to ensure that we think about those things. One of the potential ways to deal with times of constraint is to increase the number of people of all backgrounds who attend and use our cultural institutions. How do we ensure that there is more school participation in museums, galleries and other cultural institutions, which could help to increase the attendance numbers of children from deprived backgrounds, for example?

Those considerations are very much on our minds in the Scottish Government and on the minds of the institutions, which see it as part of the task in the years to come. We will work collegiately to try to work out how we can help and how they will be able to manage to do it themselves.

I underline the distinction that my cabinet secretary colleague made between a resource spending review and a budget—they are not the same thing. That is point 1. Point 2 is that Historic Environment Scotland is an organisation that is significantly better funded in global terms than other parts of the portfolio, and it is fair to say that everybody has to play their part in making sure that we are able to live within our means.

I am the first to acknowledge that HES is an organisation that has particular responsibilities. The specific nature of the estate that HES has to look after is an area of significant challenge.

Point 1 is that this is a spending review and not a budget. Point 2 is that this is the beginning of a process of working with all organisations, including HES, to work out how we can manage through the next years. We need to be imaginative about whether there is the potential for additional and parallel funding streams—I am extremely keen to explore that area—so that, we hope, not everybody will have to deal with the constraints that the resource spending review points to, as an envelope. I am highlighting the point that it is not a budget projection.

Yes, that is certainly part of the consideration. Committee members will realise that all our institutions that have a high throughput—a high number of visitors—have in recent years seen that income fall off a cliff. I do not have the HES numbers at the forefront of my mind, but I can share an example that I can remember. Yesterday, I was at the national museum of Scotland. Before Covid, its annual visitor numbers were 3 million, and in the past year, it managed to recover that figure to 1.5 million.

That is an illustration of the fact that there is still a way to go, but there is a huge opportunity if we—I say “we” in the royal sense, meaning the institutions, Government and everybody else that is involved in the culture and arts sector—can give people confidence to go back to museums, galleries and events. We should do what the convener highlighted, which is to make the most of the untapped and thus far not-included parts of the population who have not been able to make best use of things. Doing that will have an impact. I hope that for those whom the sector is an income stream, doing that will put them in a better financial position than they would have otherwise been.

I am not sure that I have much to add to that. The logic is sound, but making it work in practice is the challenge and we will have to be mindful of that. This will be the subject of the committee’s deliberations, as part of which the cabinet secretary and I will come back on a regular basis to look at whether the switch is beginning to happen. If we can see some bite or progress being made on those things, that will give the committee the confidence to say at what point a particular strategy or approach, which is certainly being pursued, is working. When will we begin to see that happen? That depends on how quickly we get up and running with doing some of those things.

Another observation that does not necessarily make things easier is that some things might take longer to change than some other things do. I do not know which those might be and how long they might take, but that echoes the point that Kate Forbes was making about having a mature debate about some of those things. If we are agreed in general terms that this is the best way to go forward—and I think that there is large-scale consensus that it probably is—we have to find our feet by working our way through the process. I know that I am committed to making it happen.

As I have said to the committee before, I am very interested in any ideas or pointers that you and other colleagues on the committee have about how we ensure that the Government thinks about how it can make some things work faster and some things work in different ways. Are any areas being missed as part of the process? It is one of the models of how the Scottish Parliament is supposed to be working. In that sense, we are a collegiate whole, which is trying to make sure that we are able to deliver, particularly on big cultural changes in how we do our business.

I would not rule anything like that out. We need to be open to suggestions of how we make sure that we understand things as well as we can and that we are doing everything that we can. I would need to know more about the proposal but, as I said a moment ago, I am open to suggestions about ways in which we can ensure that we are leading the change that we know is necessary.