New Deal for Business Group - Report on Progress & Recommendations: Implementation Plan

Annex E - Sub-Group 5 – Sharing Key Metrics

Overview

The sub-group is to propose an agreement on collating and sharing key metrics and real-time evidence across different sectors, with the aims that (i) the Scottish Government is aware of the business climate and can consider policy in the light of this and (ii) Scottish businesses can use metrics and data to capitalise on sectoral and international market opportunities and to contribute to the National Strategy for Economic Transformation (NSET) metrics.

Achieving each aim requires different metrics and therefore two different sets of data. The purpose of the work of the sub-group has not been to identity a common baseline of metrics that could be reported at top line level and broken down into sectors, but rather to consider what metrics industry is using, how to co-ordinate and feed this into policy making within the Scottish Government and to gain a better understanding of how the data is used when policies are being developed.

The sub-group will also propose the set of business metrics on business sentiment, business engagement and business confidence that will form the measures of success of the Implementation Plan.

Recommendations

The sub-group presented 9 recommendations – 7 to be actioned in the short-term (6 months), 1 over the medium-term (12 months) and 1 over the longer-term (18) months. The recommendations are in two areas:

• improving understanding of the business climate; and
• improving industry understanding of market opportunities and contribution to NSET.

How we will report on progress

Success in developing the actions around metrics will be measured by monitoring the use of the new different reports, use of the new channels of communication and use in BRIAs, linking to sub-group 1. Progress on implementation will be discussed with the sharing metrics sub-group regularly.