Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, December 15, 2016

Official Report 427KB pdf

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Commission on Parliamentary Reform

We move to item 3, which is an evidence session on the commission on parliamentary reform. I give a warm welcome to John McCormick, the chair of the commission, and a warm welcome back to the Parliament to Fiona McLeod, a commission member, who is sitting on the witness side of the table for a change.

I invite Mr McCormick to make a short opening statement.

Thank you very much, convener. I am delighted that you have invited me and Fiona McLeod to speak about the commission’s work. It is good to have the opportunity to share what we have been doing since our first meeting, which was just five weeks ago.

As you know, the Presiding Officer established the commission and announced it on 26 October. Our remit is fairly broad—to ensure that the Parliament has the right procedures, checks and balances in place for the most effective conduct of parliamentary business; to look at clarifying its distinct identity from that of the Scottish Government; and, underpinning all that, to look at the Parliament’s engagement with the public and wider society and look to increase that engagement. We are aware that we are carrying out the work against the background of the many changes that have taken place since the Parliament was opened in 1999—changes in the Parliament, including changes to its responsibilities, and changes in wider society.

There are 11 members of the commission—we have a representative from each political party in the Parliament and six members from civic Scotland, who represent a diverse range of experience. We have agreed to loosely plan our work in three phases.

Between 7 November and December, we have been in our planning phase. Our fifth meeting—the last one before Christmas—takes place in the Parliament tomorrow. At the meetings, we have been hearing about how the Parliament currently works, its challenges, the future of scrutiny and what engagement might look like in the future. We have heard the views of a number of experts and we have heard from people who have worked with the Parliament about what that experience was like.

Our next phase is the engagement phase, which will take place between January and March. We plan to meet people across Scotland. We will hold our own meetings across the country and we will attend others that are already planned by different groups and organisations.

At the outset, we wrote to more than 200 groups and we immediately had more than 50 offers of support. We will work with those groups and participate in an approach to assessing engagement and people’s views of the Parliament.

We launched a request for written views on 24 November, with a deadline of 15 February. On our website, we list a range of ways to contribute to our work, including an online survey and a discussion toolkit. I am told that the discussion toolkit is the sort of thing that can be used in any group, small or large, anywhere—even in a pub setting, in a corner—so that we can get people in communities across the country to take part and give us their views. It will be a great start for us to have that information.

As I said, we have a range of events set up. Last week, we met 48 former MSPs and heard their views. That was very interesting. We hope that current MSPs will contribute to our discussion over the next few months.

At our meeting tomorrow, we will consider undertaking research on comparisons with other Parliaments and sub-national legislatures in relation to scrutiny. Of course, we will also use the wealth of data that the Parliament has collected on aspects of parliamentary business.

Our final phase will be between April and June, when we will consider the evidence that we have gathered, analyse the research and data, and consider a draft report. We have been charged with reporting to the Presiding Officer in June. We want our report recommendations to be challenging but realistic and practical.

I think that that is enough from me, convener. We are happy to answer any questions that the committee might have.

Thank you. I am sure that there will be a number of questions from members.

It is probably fair to say that all of us, as individual members of the Scottish Parliament and of the committee, welcome the commission’s existence and look forward to seeing its conclusions. We are happy to have the opportunity to have a discussion with you at early doors.

I will start with the remit, because it seems to be the most obvious starting point. When I saw it, my reaction was that the second and third points, on increasing engagement and clarifying the identity of the Parliament as distinct from the Government, make complete sense.

Will you say something about how the commission interprets the first point, which is on the Parliament being

“assured it has the right checks and balances in place for the effective conduct of parliamentary business”?

That could be interpreted either as just a bit of a tune-up or as an opportunity to look at some re-engineering, reimagining or reconfiguring of how the system works, particularly in relation to the capacity that the Parliament needs, given that the Scottish Government has new powers to exercise and given that the Parliament’s ability to hold to account a Government that has changed a great deal has not changed much.

When discussing the remit with the Presiding Officer, I was encouraged not to take a narrow interpretation. The remit for any task should not be seen as tramlines and I do not take that approach. I wanted to discuss with the Presiding Officer the ability to range broadly. As items and issues emerge, I and my fellow members of the commission do not feel constrained in any sense from discussing and exploring them.

One of the issues that came up early was capacity, as you would expect—the committee would know that through its work. I take the wide-ranging view that, with the new powers of the Parliament and the powers that might come to it in the future, we want to look ahead to something that will future proof the Parliament in 2020-21. We are looking at what we would need to cope with dramatic change and even more powers coming to the Parliament, in addition to the ones that are being plotted through from the Scotland Act 2016.

We are taking a broad view. We are looking at and evaluating a lot of the work that has been done by parliamentarians, by the committee and by others in the past. We are working with the broadest possible remit, rather than a narrow and constraining one. As we go through the process, conclusions and thoughts will emerge and we will focus on a number of recommendations that we hope will be practical and able to be implemented. There is no point in us not taking account of that. We also hope that our recommendations will be fairly challenging.

We know that the task is big. Many things have changed, and people have been talking to us about everything from the Parliament’s new powers to changes in society and how other legislatures engage with citizens and voters. The social media explosion has changed things a lot. The extension of the franchise has brought new expectations to a range of 16 to 17-year-olds, who have been speaking to me about what they expect from their Parliament. Things have changed and we want to take account of that, so we need to interpret the remit broadly.

It is helpful and encouraging that you suggest such a broad interpretation. In using the term “future proof”, you hinted that we might encounter and need to respond to a range of potential changes in the future. The Brexit situation does not mean that one particular batch of powers will be exercised by the Scottish Parliament in the future; it means that there is a great deal of uncertainty about the range of powers that the Parliament might be able to exercise. It seems to be a difficult challenge to produce recommendations that will continue to be relevant in the scenarios that we might face.

I can think of a number of ways in which we might do that, but it is too early to talk about them, because we have not yet discussed them around the table.

The Parliament is going through a process of steady change, but a period of quite dramatic change might be coming, so we need to have a number of options for scenarios that will enable us to be flexible. We will come up with a range of suggestions and recommendations—it will not be a tightly wrapped package of tight recommendations—that will come to the committee, which will assess whether they are in keeping with what is happening in the Parliament. We hope that we will deliver a report that at least encourages discussion and thought about a range of ways of approaching the next five to 10 years.

Patrick Harvie touched on the fact that inclusivity is a core part of your remit. I would like to reflect on the successes and strengths of the Parliament and also its weaknesses. One of its strengths is that it has brought power closer to people—that is a key part of its remit. The flipside is that, although it has been successful at providing access for third sector and other organisations, it is less clear whether it has done the same thing for the ordinary citizen.

I am interested in hearing how you might approach that aspect of parliamentary reform. Beyond the Public Petitions Committee, which is our key vehicle for providing access to ordinary members of the public, how can the Parliament be opened up to people? In taking evidence and consulting people, how will you open up the process as widely as possible? You were right to mention groups, but that presumes that people can organise themselves into groups. What does that mean for people who are not in groups?

We are clear that a range of bodies and individuals work closely with and engage with the Parliament, whether through advocacy or lobbying for different causes. We want to speak to them about their experience of the Parliament; indeed, we have begun to do that. We want to know whether they feel that their engagement has been positive and that things have happened as a result.

We have looked at some research on the issue and we know that it is difficult to track through the influence that people who have come to committees have had on the outcome of the committees’ deliberations and whether that has led to legislative change. We do not really know what impact the people who have been to committees over the past five years have had—only a superficial look has been taken at that, and we want to go into that a bit more deeply.

We will go round the country between January and March. We have been contacting groups that have no experience of the Parliament. We have been in touch with groups that represent the interests of Travelling people and people who are homeless. We want to speak to a range of people who do not feel engaged with the Parliament as well as to people who are engaged with it, whose experience as people who know how the Parliament works is valuable to us. We are going for the broadest range of people.

The groups that have expressed an interest in helping us in our work will either have a meeting based on our discussion plan and then give us their response to the questions, or one of us will engage with them to raise issues with them. Those groups will cover the Highlands, the islands, the Borders and the cities. We are making sure that we get in touch with groups as widely as possible in terms of not just geography but interest, background and experience of the Parliament. It is important for us to meet people who have no experience of the Parliament. A lot of that information will come to us from our online survey.

You make a good point. We have talked about the fact that we must go beyond the people who have experience of the Parliament and find out why lots of other people do not engage with it and whether they would want to engage with it. As someone said to me, it is possible to be a citizen and not want to engage with the Parliament. There are people who think, “I elect my member, they get on with representing me and I am happy with that.”

We have been looking at other countries. We are thinking of doing research on how other, similar-sized Parliaments and sub-national Parliaments engage with their communities. We have heard about lots of exciting work that is taking place in South America and some European countries on participative democracy. We have a representative democracy. We are looking at participative democracy to see whether people would expect that to open up to them in Scotland with the explosion of social media. However, we are at the early stages of that.

10:15  

It is encouraging that you are proactively reaching out to groups that might not have previously participated, but what work are you doing to reach out to people who might not be organised into groups and who otherwise might not come into contact with you in regular consultations? What you have outlined is very much a consultation process that we would all understand, in which you advertise for and invite responses. Is any proactive research being done through surveying, opinion polling or focus group-type work rather than research through the passive voluntary process? Is there proactive engagement to understand some sections of society?

We will discuss the research approach tomorrow and early in January. We are interested in looking first at the reactions from the online survey, as we are getting indications of reactions from people who perhaps have not engaged with the Parliament before. That is an introduction to the polling.

We are not too sure about public opinion polling at the moment. We have discussed it, but we have not decided on it yet. That is one aspect that is open to us. We have looked at other surveys that have been done—from Electoral Reform Society surveys to the Scottish social attitudes survey. A lot of polling data already exists, and we would prefer to go behind that data and try to get to individuals.

I take your point about groups. We are not going to just the established groups that you would expect us to go to. We want to get behind them, and we are working to do that. That might mean going to a pub quiz in Invergordon, to a parent-teacher association that does not even know about the process or whatever, and we will work hard to get to other people through groups and through our contacts and interests, to extend the net. I think that it is fair to say that everybody is keen on extending the net to ensure that it is all-embracing.

I just warn you that I am not sure that a pub quiz on parliamentary reform would be very popular.

I recommend looking at our website and seeing whether you could get away with that in your local.

Good morning and welcome. Thank you for coming to speak to us.

I am interested in the workload and scrutiny of issues in our Parliament. In the past, I have been struck by how people have beaten a path to the door of the Scottish Parliament to see what we are doing as a democracy that has been established in the past 15 or so years without a drop of blood having been shed. As such, that is remarkably educational for people around the world. The issue is how we can build and improve on that.

Each of the five sessions of Parliament has been different, and we have responded as a Parliament differently to the workload and scrutiny in each session. You will be well aware that, in session 4, with a majority Government, there was a perceived lack of scrutiny. The Parliament was not designed to have a majority Government, of course. However, we are now in a different situation and getting back to how the Parliament was designed to work.

What will you do to look at the issues around scrutiny, which have been addressed in different ways in each of our five parliamentary sessions?

I will ask Fiona McLeod to come in on that. We have already had very helpful discussions with former members of the Parliament who were here in different sessions. We talked to them in groups that related to their experience in the Parliament about scrutiny, including post-legislative scrutiny, and how the committees work. We hope to engage with all the committee conveners and committee members to take their views of the experience, which you outlined, of 17 years of the Parliament and how things are working and how they have changed under different forms of government.

I used the phrase “majority Government” in this room to one of our academic presenters. She corrected me and said that the coalition Governments were majority Governments, because they had decided on a majority programme. I think that she was quite right, so I have not used that phrase again.

We are aware of the differences between minority Government and majority Government and things that perhaps were not anticipated by the Scotland Act 1998. Fiona McLeod will want to add to that. We have been looking at the work of this committee and its predecessors over the years.

Members will know that I am a big fan of this committee, as I sat on its predecessor. We are very cognisant of the issue.

On legislative scrutiny, we have looked at a number of reports by this committee’s predecessors. In its first report in 2016 your predecessor committee looked at the number of members of committees and the use of rapporteurs. The commission is thinking of looking not just at how MSPs engage in legislative scrutiny, but widening our view to see how we get the public to be part of the scrutiny process. For example, your predecessor committee’s third report in 2015 looked at stage 2 and stage 3 timings. Perhaps extending them would give the public the opportunity to become part of the scrutiny process.

At the meeting of former MSPs last week, it was interesting to hear how much people talked about the use of rapporteurs, which has kind of fallen away since the first session. It struck me that that could be partly participation for the public. Rapporteurs working on behalf of committees could bring the public into the legislative scrutiny process.

We are very aware of the work that the committee and its predecessors have done and how we can use it to direct what we are asking of people.

I would certainly very much welcome trying to deal with lack of time between stage 2 and stage 3 for committee scrutiny and public scrutiny. That is one of the weaknesses. It is not anybody’s fault, but it is something that needs to be sorted a bit.

I was interested to hear what Fiona McLeod said about rapporteurs and members of the public coming in to do that. I remain to be convinced of that—that is my knee-jerk response. As Fiona knows, all of us sitting here have an accountability regarding what we do. However, I welcome what she said.

The final point that I would like to make is on the consideration of best practice world wide. In my committee—the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee—we have been looking, through a desktop study, at practices around the world that we might learn from and improve on for our committee. To our delight, we have found something on the other side of the world—in New Zealand—that we may consider bringing into the working practices of the DPLR committee, after some lengthy consideration.

There might be an opportunity to do something like that. In the past, one thing that has struck me is how democracies work in different ways across the world. Everybody’s way seems to work perfectly well. If we can capture and copy bits of other people’s working democracies that might enhance ours, would that not be a clever and smart thing to do?

We have already had a flavour of that from some of our expert witnesses. It is something that we will research in the spring. Even from our introductory look, we have seen some exciting and different things happening. We need to get behind what we have learned already and see whether they would translate here. It would be very helpful.

Forgive me for not knowing that.

I would like to clarify that when I was talking about rapporteurs, I was not talking about co-opting members of the public to be rapporteurs. The discussion has been about using MSPs on committees more as rapporteurs, as we did in session 1. However, it should be remembered that the legislation allows the Parliament to co-opt lay members on to our committees—we have just never done that.

That was my mistake.

I echo members’ comments about how much we welcome having the commission before us today and we welcome that its work will develop as we go forward.

The general public’s perception of the workings of the Parliament is probably measured through the media that they read and see. Being here, we see a very different regime from what is perceived in the outside world. Most people probably do not see that there is a difference between the two.

You have said that you are engaging with civic Scotland. Engagement is an important element to manage. Aside from civic Scotland, what other areas of engagement are you trying to develop?

You talked about branching out to find other individuals and resources. How easy will it be to engage and to achieve all that? Do you have sufficient resources, including the manpower and workforce, to carve out that engagement, or do you envisage it happening in different stages as you go forward? Based on your initial evidence, you may come up with something different from what you thought you were seeing, and you may need to go back and reinvestigate or take the engagement to another level. I would like some clarity on those ideas.

We feel that we have—and the Presiding Officer said that we would have—sufficient resources to complete the task and to deal with anything that emerges.

We have to be very careful in spending public money, and we will be very accountable for that. We do not want the commission to be an expensive operation using taxpayers’ money, and we will be very careful and cautious in that regard. However, if there was something that we felt that we could justify, we would demand extra resources. We could take that to the Presiding Officer and it would be for him to decide, at his discretion, whether we extended the work.

At present, we are sufficiently resourced for the work that we have planned. We have a secretariat of four people who work very hard to support us. The Presiding Officer confirmed to me at the beginning of the process, “Remember—make sure the work goes to your satisfaction and to the extent that you wish, and come back to me if you feel that we have been too modest in our expectations.” That was very clear.

You, along with your colleagues, have touched on the important question of how we get beyond the people who are easy to contact. We are working hard on that through a number of different groups and with local people—we have to start somewhere in a community. We hope that, through the 200 organisations that we have contacted, which include many charities and organisations that work with those who are vulnerable or who have particular challenges in life, we can reach those people.

I do not want to give the impression that such engagement is easy. Our intention is to be able to say, when we present our report, that we have reached across Scotland to many different communities, including those who work with the Parliament and can give their assessment and those who are disengaged from the Parliament, as well as those—as I said to your colleague—who have no wish to engage with the Parliament and just leave us to get on with our job.

As I said, it is not compulsory to engage with the Parliament; I have had to learn that from one or two people already. We are not suggesting that we seek to make engagement compulsory, but we know that there are people who would like to engage but who feel that they are outside the process. We want to get beyond that and do some work in that area.

I do not want to give you the idea that working out the strategies for engagement is easy, and we are only in the early stages of the process. We think that we have a way forward, and I will be able to tell you at our next meeting whether we have been successful or disappointed.

Do you plan to use the media and the press to get your message out in a way that is different from the way in which the Parliament is promoted on a day-to-day basis?

Yes. We have a session pencilled in for the spring—unbeknown to the media thus far—to engage with a range of journalists to talk to them about our work and to hear their views. As you said, the media mediate our views to the public, so we would like to engage with them and hear their views about the Parliament, and talk to them about our work. We have got that pencilled in for some time in February.

I wonder whether you have had the taxi driver test yet. The driver asks, “What do you do yourself?” and you say, “Oh, I am reviewing how the Scottish Parliament works.” The driver responds, “Well, let me tell you something ... .”

I have to be very honest—I would never want to tell a lie in Parliament. When I was asked that question, I just said, “Not much”. Perhaps I will start using Patrick Harvie’s approach from January onwards—thank you for the suggestion.

One concern that we have in the Parliament is about the diversity of members of the Scottish Parliament. Although I welcome everything that has been said about equality and diversity in the engagement process, what cognisance has been taken of any reforms that would be suggested that might damage the aspiration for representation in the Parliament to reflect Scottish society?

I do not think that we are at the stage of being able to answer that. First, we have to hear what people say to us and then work out what it is that they are saying and what effect that might have.

10:30  

I will go on to another subject. I suppose that what you are doing in the early stages is identifying the problems as perceived thus far.

One issue is the workload, which I touched on earlier but did not expand on. As you said in your opening statement, more legislation is coming towards this Parliament, and there is the potential of a great deal more coming post-Brexit or in other circumstances. Will you be looking into the workload of committees and how to deal with it? Will you look at the sitting days of the Parliament? At the moment they are, correctly, sacrosanct, in that they are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, but the organisation of time is an issue because there is a constraint on committee time—an inability to go on for longer than 9 o’clock to 2 o’clock, because we come up against the hard barrier of chamber sitting times. You will recall that, historically, Tuesday was the committee day. We could go on until 2 o’clock in the morning, and occasionally did, if we needed to, so that committees could crunch through the workload that was expected of them in those earlier days. I think that those things need to be, potentially, revisited by someone. Will you be looking at that?

Certainly it is our responsibility to look at the capacity of the Parliament in relation to its responsibilities and the changes in its responsibilities. With regard to how granular we go, we have only scratched the surface of it. We have had a lot of discussion and done a lot of thinking, and we have to talk to a lot of people in the Parliament about it. We have a lot of data already from people who have tried to introduce changes and who have suggested changes. Some changes have been introduced. As Fiona McLeod said, we are assessing all that evidence at the moment.

I see the point that you make, Mr Scott—the capacity of the Parliament—as an emerging issue, because people have said that to me in the first few weeks, and because of the quite heavy responsibilities that are coming in relation to taxation and social security, never mind the other aspects that might happen in the future. We cannot say that the Parliament is in a steady state; we have to address the issue. However, we have no outcomes to suggest at the moment.

Well, there are parameters to consider. The existing constraints are the number of MSPs, the building that we have and the time available to us. The issue is how to juggle those for the future increase in workload that is inevitably coming down the track towards us. It is a big responsibility—I wish you luck.

That comment underlines the importance of it. Thank you very much.

If there are no further questions, is there anything else that we have not covered today that the witnesses would like to put on the record before we finish this session?

We would just like to make sure that the message goes out that we would like to hear the experiences of individuals as well as the parties—all those who have worked in the Parliament. Any help or support that you can give us would be much appreciated, because this is the heart of your work as well. Thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning.

Thank you for attending. It has been a very interesting session for us, and we look forward to seeing you throughout the process and before publication next June.

There will be a brief suspension to allow the witnesses to leave.

10:33 Meeting suspended.  

10:35 On resuming—