Seòmar agus comataidhean

On a not entirely unrelated note, I will move from consultants to secondments. I would be interested to hear whether you have come across any evidence in that space. I will take the rural and environment portfolios as an example. I am aware that organisations that represent agricultural business interests have had staff seconded into Scottish Government departments to assist with policy making in those areas. However, if you reduce things to a binary, the other side of those debates is the environmental non-governmental organisations. I cannot recall a single instance of a member of staff from an environmental NGO being seconded to those departments. In that particular scenario, that sometimes results in the agricultural business sector being broadly pretty happy with how the Government goes about its decision making and the environmental NGOs being broadly unhappy.

How much of the evidence that is out there and how many of the views that have been expressed about Government decision making are to do with process? How much of that is more representative of the responders’ agreement with the outcome? Are people saying that they do not like the Scottish Government’s policy making process because the outcome was not the one that they wanted?

I am interested in the point that you made at the start about the Welsh Government’s relatively systematic approach to external evidence gathering and the perception that the approach is perhaps not as systematic here. I am trying to reconcile that with some of the criticism that has been put the Scottish Government’s way about its externalising too much of the policy development process. The most recent high-profile example was the criticism that the national care service came under for being, to a significant extent, a production of KPMG, because the contract for that bit of policy formulation was awarded to KPMG.

Is it simultaneously true that the Scottish Government does not gather enough external evidence when it is doing internal policy formulation and that it outsources too much policy formulation, or is the picture a bit more muddled and there is not really a neat distinction because both can be true?

I appreciate that, and you do not need me to tell you that there is absolute logical consistency in what you say. The conclusion is still that the bill will result in better practice. However, co-ordinated support plans are the result of another bit of legislation, and those statutory requirements have not resulted in the change in practice that we want. I accept what you say, in that they are not exactly the same as transition plans. However, the premise of my question remains: why will legislation result in the change in practice that we are all looking for on transitions when other bits of legislation in education that were intended for exactly the same thing—not specifically intended to address transitions, but intended to force a change in practice—have not forced a change? What is different with the bill?

That is great. Thank you very much.

Pam, I will pick up on what you said about legislation driving policy and policy driving practice. At the core of what you propose is the premise that we need to mandate such action if we want transformational change. I am interested in the comparison between that and the experience with co-ordinated support plans, which, I think, both you and Bill Scott have mentioned. They are not the same thing but, if we are looking at the same space, they are currently the only kind of plan that has statutory underpinning, which should result in a compulsion on relevant authorities to improve support for a young person.

However, as Bill Scott pointed out, that does not happen for the 99.5 per cent of young people who do not have a co-ordinated support plan. Even for the 0.5 per cent who have one, we have plenty of examples in which, despite the fact that it is a statutory plan that should give them the ability to pursue recourse if they do not get support, it does not happen.

I am interested in your thoughts on why that statutory approach has not worked for CSPs and why, if it has not worked, the bill would provide a solution and result in a different outcome—the compulsion on authorities that you are looking for.

On that last point, just to be clear, would you prefer it if, rather than Parliament proceeding right now with full legislation in its current form, a bit more time was taken to do some co-development work with those who are directly experiencing transition? The bill or something similar could come back to us at a later point, with a bit more work having been done.

I have one more question. Part of the premise of the bill is that we will improve transitions if we compel public bodies to take on these duties. Compulsion is the core premise there. I think that we can all understand the thinking behind that: if we simply mandate something, it should happen, and that would resolve some of the inconsistencies, because there are some good experiences of transition out there. However, the comparator would be the co-ordinated support plan, as the one statutory plan that currently exists in this broad space. There are two problems with those plans. First, almost no children and young people with an additional support need have such a plan, and secondly, for a lot of those who do, it still does not result in what is in the plan being delivered.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts on that question. Is compulsion for public bodies the solution here, bearing in mind our experience with CSPs, or is the problem with CSPs a different, unrelated issue?

Before I move on to my main line of questioning, I want to follow up on the issue of the financial memorandum, which is an important one. Obviously, we will take evidence from Ms Duncan-Glancy on the bill, but what engagement has the Government had so far on the financial memorandum and getting the additional information that you have identified as being needed?

Taking on board your point that the ASL action plan is only part of a wider landscape—we have already discussed how cluttered that landscape might be—once the ARC pilots are completed, that will provide a valuable data set, and other data sets are being gathered. Should we expect more quantifiable actions in the next revision of the action plan, with stuff that we can measure? The difficulty for the Parliament at the moment is that it is hard to quantify the action plan and the progress between each set of revisions.

I accept that not everything that we are talking about is easily quantifiable—people’s lives are not that simple—but, at the same time, we have a duty to scrutinise the progress that the Government is making. At the moment, the action plan is quite hard to scrutinise in that respect. If you were to commit that the next revision of the action plan will include some more measurable outcomes, that would make Parliament’s role a lot easier.

I do not have questions in this session, convener.