Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 4, 2023

Official Report 682KB pdf

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Pre-budget Scrutiny 2024-25

We have a packed gallery for the excitement of our consideration of petitions in due course, but we have two evidence sessions to take immediately. The first, unusually for the committee, is on pre-budget scrutiny. We usually resist that opportunity, on the basis that the committee does not have the same involvement in the budget as do other committees.

We welcome George Adam, the Minister for Parliamentary Business. The minister is supported online by Doreen Grove, head of open government, and by Amy Watson, principal research officer, both at the Scottish Government. Good morning to both of you. I assume, minister, that if you want your colleagues to come in, I can leave it you to invite them to contribute to our thinking. I understand that you would like to make a brief opening statement, which would be helpful. I think that you probably understand the narrow focus of our interest in relation to the budget. Over to you.

If you feel that you do not need to ask me back for budgetary reasons in future, do not feel obliged to do so. I am a bit disappointed that the crowd is not here to see me; it must be here for the excellent work that you will be doing later.

I thank the committee for asking me along. The Scottish Government’s vision for public participation is for people to be involved in decisions that affect them, making Scotland a more inclusive, sustainable and successful place. In summer 2021, we established the institutionalising participatory and deliberative democracy—IPDD—working group to help us develop the infrastructure and skills needed to deliver that vision. In March 2022, the working group published its recommendations, which focused on developing a broad range of democratic innovations. In March 2023, the Scottish Government published its response to the recommendations.

The Scottish Government agrees with the working group on the importance of the availability of high-quality, meaningful and inclusive opportunities for public participation in order to ensure that public services deliver what people need to improve their lives and outcomes. That remains a vital driver for reform. We recognise that that means significant changes to the ways in which policies and services are developed and implemented, with partners, stakeholders and the people of Scotland playing a vital role. Our response sets out what we will do in order to deliver on each of the working group’s recommendations and notes the current limits on our ability to deliver our complete vision. Those limits are a result of the financial situation facing the Scottish Government, which continues to be the most challenging since devolution. Nevertheless, we still recognise the important benefits of involving the public in decisions that affect them.

We live in times characterised by complex challenges: the climate emergency; substantial economic turmoil and the cost of living crisis; and the Covid-19 pandemic and its legacies. By drawing on the considered views of the public, the Government will be better equipped to take the complex and difficult decisions that we face. Public understanding of and input into those difficult decisions can help us chart a route through that is fairer and that meets the fullest range of people’s needs.

I am happy to take questions from the committee.

Thank you very much, minister. Yes, we eventually got the Scottish Government’s response to its own inquiry. We certainly exchanged calendar dates for some time about when that might be coming and, eventually, it did.

I will sum it up in short and outline the concern that underpins my question. The committee has now completed its report on deliberative democracy in consequence of the extensive inquiry that we held. The Parliament asked the committee to lead on that inquiry at the start of this parliamentary session, following the recommendation from Ken Macintosh’s Commission on Parliamentary Reform in the previous session that we look into that area. As a committee, we have been on a journey, but our report is enthusiastic about the opportunities that are presented, which are in two forms: what the Government can do and what the Parliament can do. The Parliament will debate our report in the chamber at the end of the month and we very much hope that the parliamentary aspect can be taken forward.

The Government’s response appears to accept the emerging use of citizens panels and their value and probably even the lessons learned from the experience of the Scottish Government model. Ultimately, however, the response is that “There is nae money.” I accept that, and we think that it will probably cost about £1 million a pop to hold a meaningful citizens panel on the model that we have seen in other national Parliaments.

In the first instance, I want to understand whether there has been a diminution of enthusiasm for the concept of the citizens panel as a result of the Scottish Government’s experience to date. Is money being used as a lever to suggest that the panels do not have quite the role that the Government had thought, or is it still very much the Scottish Government’s intention to find a way and a means, at some point, of embracing the concept of citizens panels as an embedded process in Scottish public life? If that is the case, is there an idea in your mind or in the Government’s mind about whether that is likely to happen in this parliamentary session, or will it most likely be in a subsequent session?

When you say “citizens panels”, I assume that you are talking about the assemblies.

The citizens assemblies, sorry, yes.

There are other—

In fact, the whole nomenclature of this stuff is difficult to be certain about, but, for citizens assemblies, let us talk about the idea of a unit of about 100 people convening to undertake a proper exercise.

I will answer your question as carefully and concisely as possible. We still believe that citizens assemblies are a way forward. Do we have financial constraints? Yes, we do. The level of citizens assembly participation that we were looking for will need £2.8 million to set up. That is challenging at this time, as you will be aware. When everyone in every portfolio and across portfolios is looking at their budgets, it is difficult.

Are we engaging with the public in other ways? That is why I asked a question in return. We are using other panels involving the public to ask the same questions and to engage at a smaller level. The enthusiasm is still there; the question is whether I can get the funding. Obviously, funding has moved and it will now be from the individual portfolio that is asking the question of the citizens assembly. We are looking at individual portfolios to deliver, and they are looking at that, but they also face challenges.

My opinion about citizens assemblies in general and how we go forward with them is that we should do what other nations have done and keep the questions pretty simple. The first two questions that we asked were wide-ranging: how do we save the planet and what is Scotland’s future? Those are big questions and it is difficult to find out what we could deliver from those reports. The Republic of Ireland used citizens assemblies to deal with questions that its politicians found difficult to discuss in their Parliament: they were able to use the public to push them forward. For example, a citizens assembly was used to discuss abortion. Assemblies provide an opportunity to really look at a subject.

We have committed to look at council tax and how local government is funded, and it would be interesting to hear what the public said when they got all the facts and figures in front of them. We politicians have kicked that question around for all the time that I have been in the Parliament and it would be an interesting subject for a citizens assembly. Our main issue, at this stage, is getting funding for the assemblies, but we are still engaging with the public through other means to answer such questions.

That is very helpful. Some of that will be the subject of the debate that we will see in the chamber. I share your analysis of the nature of subjects that can be best deliberated through this process.

Given that there is other engagement going on, as you say, how is that quantified as a cost that the Government is undertaking across the different portfolios? Are you able to quantify the cost of the engagement that the Scottish Government is currently offering?

The direct answer to that is no, at this stage, but it is something that we have in mind to work out. One of our responses to the IPDD working group was that we are looking to get a central unit within Government that will be able to go out to the various directorates and quantify that cost. The whole point is to make sure that the very idea of open government is at the heart of each portfolio and directorate, so that they think that it is a normal part of their day-to-day work and not just something extra that has been added in from above. However, I understand that we still need to get a centralised team that is able to correlate all the information, so that I can come to you and say, “Well, that costs £X”.

I will bring in colleagues in a second. On the face of it, it looks as though the public information budget will be reduced in the next year. Is that correct, or is it now being allocated in different ways that might mean that the headline public information budget does not reflect what you expect to spend?

Again, we are talking about a mix-up of terms and everything else with this subject. The budget line entitled “Public Information and Engagement” refers to marketing and communications, rather than public participation. That is at £2.3 million for 2023-24, compared to £2.8 million in 2021-22 and £2.7 million in 2022-23. That is not the budget for public participation; it is the budget for communications and marketing. It is nothing to do with citizens assemblies or anything like that.

Okay, thank you. Colleagues, would anyone like to come in?

I want to raise a wider issue about citizen participation. As we know, the purpose of this committee—good morning, minister—is to act on the side, as it were, of David versus Goliath, which is the Government.

Is that a metaphor that you recognise more generally, minister?

Generally, coming from Mr Ewing, yes.

I will try not to be too predictable, then. Just extending the metaphor one more time, our purpose is to provide David with a sling so that there is some equality in the weaponry. To be serious, we find that many of our petitions relate to concerns that ordinary people—citizens of Paisley or Inverness—have with Government agencies, the authorities and the powers that be. In fact, those petitions probably account for more than half of the total.

10:15  

I want to raise a specific example. Last week, the convener of the Finance and Public Administration Committee, Kenneth Gibson, pointed out the cost of the commissioners, also known as tsars. There is a plethora of those commissioners in Scotland, and the cost amounts to £80 million over a five-year period. We will discuss the A9 later, but a 10-year saving on the tsars—if we decided to purge them in Scotland—would save £160 million, which just happens to be £10 million more than the cost of the proposed dualling of the section of the A9 from Tomatin to Moy. Minister, you may not have direct portfolio responsibility for the tsars, but, given that we really need to look at making savings, do we get value for money from our tsars? Are they any more relevant to our citizens than the Romanovs were to the Russians in their daily life? Would it not be worth considering a purge of the tsars and, if so, does history not tell us that October is not a bad month in which to carry it out?

You are as eloquent as ever, Mr Ewing. That is not my portfolio to discuss. I take your point that we should have a conversation, but that is for the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body and the Parliament, because they are the ones who deal with that budget, as Mr Gibson said in his question last week. For every single commissioner, there will be stakeholders who value the work that they do and understand how important it is, but you are right that there is a question to be asked and a debate to be had by us all as to how we go about such work. In New Zealand, I think, they have an office of the commissioners where they all work under one office, so you no longer have each organisation operating on its own. The Government is not looking at that; I am just aware that there are different ways of working. It is always about a balance between giving something to the stakeholders who value the work of that commissioner and what we can go forward with, looking at the finances. I agree, Mr Ewing, that it is possibly a discussion and debate that we should have in the Parliament.

I am grateful for the minister’s reply. It is not ungenerous, and it is appreciated. I will just comment that we spend a lot of time in the Parliament deciding how to spend ever more quantities of taxpayers’ money, but we spend very little time reviewing how much value for money we get from the billions that we spend every year. With the pressures that face us now, perhaps that argument’s time has come. I am not necessarily in favour of a mass purge and assassination, but a sunset clause, for example, was another idea that was put forward. That would be a gradual turning off of the lights.

As I said, we definitely need to look at having that debate. That is not a Government view; I am just looking at it personally from the point of view of how you deal with the situation in the question that you asked.

Thank you, minister, for your flexibility beyond the targeted focus of our agenda. I say that as the mover of the Parliament’s only ever sunset clause that will lead to a bill’s coming back before the Parliament, so that we can take a further view on it.

I come back to the issue in hand of citizen participation in democracy. Obviously, the budgetary constraints that you talked about mean that, although the enthusiasm might still be there, the financial underpinning to allow that work to proceed is not. What implication does that have for the institutional experience and architecture in the Scottish Government that was involved in the organisation, running and understanding—in fact, the learning—of the citizen engagement work that has been done? What is happening to the individuals or the infrastructure that supported that work, given that there is no immediate intention to proceed?

I will bring in Doreen Grove. This is one of her pet subjects and she will be able to give you a more complete answer than I can.

Thank you very much. Doreen, good morning. [Interruption.] I am sorry, we cannot hear you.

Can you hear me now? I am sat at a conference in Copenhagen on the future of democracy, including citizens assemblies.

To answer your question directly, we are not just sitting on our hands and waiting for finance to turn up. We have been careful to take the learning from the IPDD report and, indeed, from the two secretariats that were set up to make sure that, as we move forward in the ways that we use deliberative democracy, we share that learning and improve how we do things. We are putting in place the foundations to make all this work much more focused and better understood by public servants, so that they have access to easier ways to procure resources for working both with children and young people and with adults.

We are putting a procurement framework in place, and we have a participation framework that tries to help to provide guidance on how people can best get involved in Government decision making. While we look across Government to find the skills that can be brought together to drive some of the higher-profile work, such as citizens assemblies, we try to put high-quality participation on the agenda and, as Mr Adam says, feed that into the ways in which we work. We are putting in place advice and identifying how we do participation over time so that, when budget becomes available, we are able to create a team that will be able to lead this and drive it much more effectively. All that foundational work will be there.

We keep entirely up to date with the fantastic work done by your committee and also with what has been done internationally. We are trying to make sure that Scotland keeps its international standing of being a reforming place and a place that cares about how it brings in the voices of its population in a way that is properly inclusive.

My team and I have been working around that equalities idea and building up our ways of making sure that we hear seldom-heard voices, because, often, Government is more difficult to reach than if we get out and properly talk to people.

Thank you. I have a point to make and a follow-up question. I very much agree about taking as much understanding as possible from international examples. In our report, the committee decided not to recommend a legislative process at this time, because we felt that the model that might suit the Scottish dynamic would need to evolve as a result of experience and learning from other jurisdictions. Our experience, having visited Ireland and Paris and having engaged with Brussels, is that there is no one-size-fits-all model. A model has to evolve within the constitutional architecture of every country to ensure that it achieves its proper outcome. I am delighted that that work is still going on.

My follow-up question is whether you are satisfied that, within the Scottish budget as it is currently constituted, the funds are in place to allow you to undertake that continuous evaluation and work to determine where we might land in respect of any architecture that we put in place for participation at that kind of level.

I am in Copenhagen with the leaders of all of the work that you just outlined. They are all here.

The answer on the budget is that “satisfied” is a big word. I would love to have quite a bit more money, thank you very much. We have sufficient at the moment, however, and we have sufficient weight and understanding. We run a kind of virtual team in Government to bring in the expertise that we need. As we develop and properly put in place what the IPDD report recommended, we will be much better placed to work on those things.

The team that is working on this is conscious of what is happening at home in the community empowerment world as well as what is happening internationally. We will make sure that that feeds into our work. Hopefully, we will come back to the committee to share that experience.

Thank you very much for your candour: that was very enlightening. I do not think that we have any further questions. I am sorry: Mr Golden wants to come in. Mr Adam, do you want to come in before Mr Golden?

I was just going to say, after Doreen’s very public pitch for more funds, that she engages with colleagues across the world. There are yearly events: there was one in Rome last year and one in Tallinn this year. I did not manage to make it to those, incidentally. For the Rome one, I was in Aberdeen at the Scottish National Party conference, because I know the right thing to do. For the Estonia one, I had to be here to deal with the programme for government. However, it is important that we have those engagements, because we do not believe that we have every single good idea or right idea. It is about seeing how those other models might fit with us.

You may have felt that it was the right idea, Mr Adam, but I am not sure that it was the most enlightening of the options that were before you.

I am sure that committee members would be willing to fill in on your behalf, minister, at any of those events.

I want to make two interlinked points. We have seen a 37.7 per cent reduction in the real-terms budget. I wonder whether, either now or in writing, you could give us a breakdown of how that total budget will be spent: the relevant workstreams that the proposed £2.3 million might be allocated to.

Secondly, you mentioned public participation across different departments. I am interested to know how you monitor that. For example, this year, we will have the climate change plan, which is a really meaty document. You mentioned the assembly that addressed the question of how we save the planet. How will you monitor how that climate change plan is being disseminated and how the public are being allowed to participate in what can be a very technical document?

Okay. To answer your first question very quickly, as I said, the £2.3 million is not our budget for public participation, so that is not the case.

How do we manage to bring it all together? As I said earlier, one of the things that came out of the IPDD working group was the fact that a lot of good work was happening in pockets all over Government. It was a case of us finding a central group that would bring all that together—how much the costs are and what we are doing—so that I can sit in front of you and say that we are doing X and Y in various directorates. We have decided that we are going to put that team in place, in order to make sure that we have that information and can do that. Can I tell you right here and now what is happening in various other places? Probably not, and definitely not off the top of my head. The whole idea is to get the culture of public participation into every part of Government. You will understand that, in an organisation of the size of the Scottish Government, that can be quite challenging.

I have experience of that, because freedom of information requests are part of my portfolio. I have seen what happens when you make such a culture change, as we have done recently, and you make sure that such activities are pushed as part of the day-to-day work of Government and not an addition. Getting the mentality of, “This is what we do. This is part of the job,” into the organisation as a whole is extremely important.

Do these things happen overnight? No, but I as minister, and Doreen Grove and her team, push for that in Government all the time. We have committed ourselves to having a centralised team. At a time when we are looking at taking resources away from various places, we will invest in that team in order to make sure that we get the detail.

What metrics do you use to assess whether departments are successfully engaging with the public?

10:30  

I will ask Doreen to answer that, because she is at the coalface on that issue.

Thank you. There is no coalface, so my answer is in two parts. We currently have a tiny team in the Government and we try, through our open government work, to ensure that there is at least an understanding of the very biggest areas. You mentioned climate change; there is an action plan commitment around that. There is also one around how the public get involved in our health and social care reforms.

One part of the role of that extended team would be to properly evaluate the standards that are set to ensure that the participation that is happening is fair and is bringing in voices that we need, so that we can answer those questions much more effectively in the future and that we do the kinds of participation that really will have an impact and effect. It is about investing where it is needed and sharing learning, so that we do not keep going back to the same people to ask the same questions, because you hear a lot that there is consultation fatigue. We need to be really careful about how we use and invite people to be part of the work of Government.

Okay. Doreen Grove, Amy Watson and minister, thank you very much for your participation and attendance. We will have a brief suspension while we move to the next session.

10:32 Meeting suspended.  

10:33 On resuming—