Seòmar agus comataidhean

I will move on. I have another question about Leslie Evans. She retired at the end of the year, but was paid until the end of March. Is that correct?

It is my understanding that she was paid until the end of March. Is that correct? I am only trying to get my head around what she was doing that meant that she could not appear before the committee, because she was still an employee.

Would decision makers and investigators take part in that process?

My concern is that there could be two individuals—an agency employee and a staff member—with identical complaints, and one complaint would be handled completely differently from the other. You have explained some of the reasons behind that. Ministers could be criticised because one complaint was not being dealt with effectively because it came from an agency worker.

Would a minister still be aware that a potential complaint was being made from an agency worker?

I asked about the issue of agency workers at the 25 January meeting and I still have a concern about that. I get that agency workers are not employees—they have their own employer, so the approach needs to be different. However, the new procedure says:

“Propriety & Ethics will take steps to assure that any agency worker with a concern about a Minister’s behaviour can have their issue addressed.”

Will that follow a separate procedure? Will the decision makers and investigators get involved at all in that process?

Thanks for allowing me back in, convener.

When I was reading Anna Fowlie’s blog last night, this stood out:

“We know that investing time and money in prevention is essential if we are to address poverty, inequality and climate change. We have known it for years, even decades, but we don’t make that important shift because the benefits don’t show up within that electoral cycle and it means moving spend from immediate pressures.”

I agree with that completely, but the Government claims to be taking prevention and early intervention seriously. Do you think that it is not doing enough? What more could it do on prevention?

The link between the NPF and the LOIP is broken; organisations that are aware of the LOIP might be less aware of the NPF, at the national level. We should combine them better so that people are aware of both, not just of one or the other. I do not know how to fix that.

Should it be quite clear, as soon as there is an application for funding, how it will align with the NPF? Maybe that is something that is also missing, just now.

Aberdeen City Council has embedded the LOIP at the start of projects. I think that you mention in your report that it should be embedded right at the start of projects.

The way I read the situation is that it is almost as though it is measured how a project has aligned with the NPF at the end, as opposed to the question being asked right at the start how it will achieve the outcomes of the NPF. Do you have any ideas about how we could change that?

It will be no surprise that I am going to ask about local government. Of course, I was new councillor of the year back in 2019, but I do not like to bring it up much, deputy convener. [Laughter.]

I will ask about a thing that struck me when I was reading the report. I asked a question on it of the Deputy First Minister, I think last month. Obviously, local authorities have local outcomes improvement plans, and at the national level we have the NPF. When we are commissioning services at local authority level, one of the first questions to ask is how the services will contribute to the outcomes that we are trying to achieve. That is the golden thread that goes through at local government level—we do not really ask about the NPF.

It is almost as though there are two chains—the Scottish Government chain, which seems to be broken before it gets down to local government, and then there is a chain at local government level. Is that a fair assessment? Have your members mentioned LOIPs not being aligned to the NPF? I guess that the situation is almost like VHS and Betamax: they do the same things, but they are different. How do we combine the two chains?