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There are two aspects to Mr Griffin’s questions. The first is my view of the individual proposals. Mr Griffin will know that I am not a minister who avoids questions, but I will avoid that question because statute expressly takes ministers out of a review role in the process. Parliament has decided that, so it is important that I do not express a view on whether a proposal is right or wrong. Parliament has decided that ministers should be removed from a review role; I should respect that.

The second question was about what would happen if Parliament was to reject any of the statutory instruments. Let me get the sequence correct. If the committee did not recommend approval, I would, obviously, in the light of the committee not being prepared to support an instrument, look at the decision and would likely seek Parliament’s leave to withdraw it. That would be the appropriate step for the Government to take. I would then refer the matter back to Boundaries Scotland.

It is unlikely that Boundaries Scotland could undertake and complete the process, and that Parliament could consider revised proposals from Boundaries Scotland, before the 2022 local authority elections. The Gould principles, which came into force after the challenges that we faced in the 2007 Scottish parliamentary and local authority elections, recommended that there be no change to arrangements within six months of an electoral contest. For elections in early May, that brings us back to November. I hate to remind colleagues how close that is, although they might feel that it is getting closer, given the temperature this morning. There is no way that the work could be done by Boundaries Scotland and completed by Parliament before November, so changes that Parliament did not support would have to be left until after the elections.

On the impact of that on wider boundaries activities, I would have to consider what other issues we are putting to Boundaries Scotland. My recollection is that there is some upcoming work that it is required to do. I ask Maria McCann to give me some assistance on that.

The first point is to recognise that the idea of parity of electorates is not uniquely Scottish. Boundaries Scotland made that point to the committee. It is a well-established international principle in design of electoral areas. Given its international standing, I am not surprised that that principle has been a consistent part of the statutory framework that has supported Boundaries Scotland since its conception in 1973 as the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland. In essence, the arrangements flow from application of that principle.

However, of course, that principle is not applied in an absolute sense; provision is nowhere near identical in individual wards. There is an attempt to get as close as possible to parity, as I would describe it, but in some circumstances that cannot be achieved, because of geographical factors—for example, population sparsity—or factors that might prevail when we take into account the essential element of connections between communities, which is the other principle under which Boundaries Scotland operates.

Parity is an understandable characteristic of our electoral arrangements, but I do not think that it can be deployed on an absolute basis, because of variation in communities.

The issues are related, because one of the fundamental considerations that statute requires Boundaries Scotland to adhere to is the question of electoral parity between different localities. Of course, the other principal pillar of the framework required by statute is locality itself, which Boundaries Scotland has to take due account of. On the question of parity with regard to the population composition of wards, the more sparsely populated an area, the greater the amount of land and degree of rurality that will have to be considered as part of the settlements.

Frankly, there is no easy answer to this. I suspect that the challenges of representing a large geographical area are different nowadays; as someone who represents a large rural area, I have found that a different approach has had to be taken in light of the pandemic. In my 23 years of representing the communities that I represent, I had never had a single videoconference with a constituent. I am now doing that every week of the year, and it has suddenly dawned on me that it is more convenient for many of my constituents to have that conversation with me remotely instead of our having to travel endless distances to see each other. There are ways round that particular challenge.

On your very significant question about the repopulation of sparsely populated areas, that is a policy objective in its own right that carries merit, and it should be reflected in Parliament’s decisions about the composition of wards where the volume of population merits such an approach in applying the statutory principle of parity among wards.

That an interesting question. I am struck by the fact that there are mainland areas that, in many respects, have some of the same characteristics that islands have. The Rannoch area in highland Perthshire, which I represent, is essentially an island on the mainland. There is one route into the Rannoch area, and one route out. At the other end, there is obviously a way out, but it is a long walk that is not for the faint hearted. The route in is not dissimilar to one that would be used to access an island. There are similarities that perhaps need to be reflected on, and it is within the Parliament’s scope to ensure that the statute reflects that important point.

With regard to the nature of the statutory framework in which Boundaries Scotland operates, I come back to the point that I made in my first answer. There are two pillars to the analysis that Boundaries Scotland undertakes: the question of parity and the question of locality. I know that Boundaries Scotland attaches significant importance to maintaining the cohesion that one would ordinarily think should be in place when it comes to the nature of localities.

Boundaries Scotland will have explained to the committee the specifics of its consultation process. The committee has also heard testimony from a range of representatives from local authorities and communities, who have expressed their satisfaction at the nature of the engagement process. I am therefore confident that Boundaries Scotland has, notwithstanding the challenges of Covid, been able to undertake effective consultation.

I have been quite struck by my experience over the past 18 months. Until the election, I had the great privilege of policy responsibility for nurturing the Gaelic language. I held a number of extensive stakeholder discussions about the Gaelic language, which included representatives from, in the main, the remote and rural areas of Scotland. I have two observations about that.

First, connectivity was actually pretty good. I was very pleased with it, and we had good conversations. Secondly, through engaging in digital dialogue I encountered more people and was able to interact more conveniently with them than would have been the case had I gone on the road. Nothing would have brought me more joy than to go and sit in community halls in the Western Isles or north-west Sutherland to conduct face-to-face public meetings, but I would probably have interacted with fewer people if I had done that. Instead, while I sat at home in Perthshire I had on the line countless representatives who were able to interact directly with me, and for longer because I did not have to think about travel time and all the rest of it.

It is swings and roundabouts, but I am certainly satisfied that Boundaries Scotland has done nothing but undertake an effective consultation process.

I recognise the importance of the issues that Elena Whitham raises, but I come back to the point that I made to Mark Griffin. Ministers have been taken out of the statutory process, so it is important that I act in a fashion that accepts that decision.

There is no easy answer to any of those questions. To highlight the challenge in such issues, I go back to the question that Paul McLennan put to me on the situation in Arran. Arran seems to be quite pleased about having an island-only representative who can fight the corner for Arran locally, within North Ayrshire Council and with other public bodies, whereas the community in Islay takes a different view. I can sit here and argue the merits of both cases. There can be different approaches and perspectives.

On the situation in Highland Council, I go back to my exchange with the convener at the outset about some of the issues in relation to Highland. There is a duty on local authorities, as there is on the Government, to make necessary and appropriate policy interventions that meet the needs of localities. It should never come down just to what is said on a locality’s behalf by a local elected member for that locality. It is a question of how Highland Council can reach all of Highland and do the right thing by all of Highland, rather than only doing the right thing by a particular locality because its voice is strong enough. That is not representative democracy and that is not how we listen to communities or respond to the agendas about which they are concerned.

I will not give a specific view on the merits of individual proposals, but those are the general sentiments of which public authorities need to be mindful when they are coming to their conclusions.

There is undoubtedly a debate to be had about that because, as I set out in my opening statement and my responses to the convener so far, the national performance framework is designed to give clarity of purpose and direction to the country, to which all relevant organisations—I use that term in its broadest sense—can look and ask, “How is it relevant to us, and how can we contribute to the journey that the country is on?”

Another purpose of the performance framework is to discipline us to make tangible progress in achieving these objectives over time. The issues that Mr Johnson raises are very relevant there, because there could be greater signposting in that exercise, and there could be more definitive targets about what could or should be achieved over a given period. That is a perfectly legitimate debate. That approach would probably require much greater policy direction of what was expected to happen as a consequence. Undoubtedly, there is a debate to be had, and the review that we undertake in 2023 will provide us with the opportunity to reflect on the genuine approach that was taken in 2018 to engage with a variety of interested parties—not least Parliament—and to design a framework that is relevant and effective for policy making in Scotland.

Undoubtedly the framework could be simplified, but the Parliament would have to come to a view on whether, in so doing, it would lose any of the national performance framework’s rounded nature. There are fine judgments to be made here, and I am not trying to suggest that there is any perfect science, but the fact is that some citizens will attach a greater priority to the country putting emphasis on a particular policy area rather than another and will want it to be more predominant in shaping our country’s future. All such considerations are subjective. It is therefore possible that we would lose some of that rounded nature if we were to simplify the framework. However, the upside of following the route that has just been put to me is that it might provide greater scope for making sharper choices about where we place our emphasis and make our interventions.

On the national performance framework as a proposition, I would say—to be frank—that the more you delve into it, the more you discover. It is all there. In the detailed documents, we set out the rationale for why we have arrived at a particular selection of data sets or information to determine progress. That approach can stand up to scrutiny. Nonetheless, people are free to say that they do not think that we have arrived at the right half a dozen indicators to support a proposition on tackling poverty, for example, and that we are not looking at the right things.

Of course, there is scope for that debate to be had, but the rationale for how we have arrived at the selection of information is all there. It is subject to challenge and debate, and the review that we will undertake in 2023 will give us the opportunity to have that discussion.

I would differentiate between some of the issues that you suggest would drive changes in the national performance framework. For example, I do not think that Covid should be a particular driver of change in the composition of the NPF. Covid has happened, and it challenges us, but it is just another issue for us to wrestle with in addressing the agenda of what the NPF seeks to encourage the Government and other bodies to do.

However, the requirement to achieve net zero might force the substantive reconsideration of the national performance framework because it is a strategic policy imperative that, to go back to the points that Daniel Johnson raised with me, might require us to reshape the balance of the NPF for the policy to be realisable. There is scope to do that—that is what the five-year review is designed to do—but it is more about the aspirational elements of policy direction than addressing the consequences of issues such as those that Covid or Brexit has forced on us.