Thank you for the questions. We reviewed all the performance frameworks that we can identify at the national level, and we have moved on to identifying all the local ones. We will pull all that together in a final report on what we are doing on performance.
I appended two or three overhead shots to my submission to summarise some of the mapping work that we have done. Members will see that a staggering amount is going on. There is a huge number of overlapping performance frameworks.
What I said was less a critique of anybody and more a point about frameworks having evolved at different points for different purposes, after which we have added new purposes and fitted on other things. The most recent arrival on the scene has been an outcome focus, but we have often posed the question the wrong way round. We have asked what the outcomes of services are as opposed to asking what outcomes we want for the Scottish population and how services contribute to them. We have begun to create silos around outcomes, even though the idea of an outcome focus was to help us to break out of the silos that we started from.
A lot of any performance framework in a major public service is made up of indicators on what is needed to run that service well. There is a lot of political and public interest in running public services competently. Are we meeting service standards that we have committed to? Are we using the available resources as efficiently as we can? An awful lot of the performance armoury is focused on that level. There is nothing wrong with that, as public services are massive businesses that need to be run competently.
We sense that, of all the audiences for performance measurement, the one that wants the holistic overview—as the committee seems to—is still the weakest voice. The sectoral or service voice remains much stronger and the business management voice remains very strong in how we go about performance measurement and management. In Parliament, although the Finance Committee wants an integrated and holistic view of outcomes, I suspect that other committees are interested in distinctive indicators that relate to health, education and children, for example.
In a way, we all want to come together but, at the same time, we all want to look in particular lines of sight. Therefore, in performance management, we get a kind of compromise between those things.
The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill, which is being scrutinised elsewhere in Parliament, will place a common duty on public bodies to work together to improve outcomes. Once that duty is in place in law, it will introduce a dynamic behind reaching a collective view of the outcomes that we are trying to improve and the measures that we will use to show that we have actually improved the outcomes.
As I say, I did not particularly intend the first part of my submission to be a critique. It is simply an honest recognition of where we are. It is a recognition that the business management interest properly remains powerful in public services, and that those who want an holistic view of what we are achieving overall for the Scottish population are, frankly, probably not the strongest voice in performance management at the moment.