Budget Process 2006-07
The next item is to take evidence from the commissioner for children and young people on her budget proposals. As members will recall, when we took evidence from the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body last week we raised concerns over the commissioner's budget. Under the protocol that the committee has with the SPCB and with each commissioner, we can ask any of the commissioners to give us evidence if we still have concerns after taking evidence from the SPCB. We have a copy of a letter from the commissioner and supplementary correspondence that has been supplied by the SPCB.
I welcome to the committee Kathleen Marshall, the commissioner for children and young people. With the commissioner are Elizabeth Foster, chief executive officer, and Stephen Bermingham, head of participation. Welcome to the committee. Our normal procedure is to ask questions after we have given you an opportunity to make a brief opening statement.
Kathleen Marshall (Commissioner for Children and Young People):
Thank you. I welcome the opportunity to speak to the committee in support of our budget proposals. I realise that ours is an innovative and new organisation and that some of our activities may need some explanation. The cautionary note that was included in the letter to the committee from the SPCB focused on two issues. It noted, for example, that I had been insistent that the activities that we were doing and the budgets that supported them were required if we were to fulfil our statutory requirements. I re-emphasise that everything that we are doing and everything that we have budgeted for is based on the functions that have been imposed on this office by Parliament. Those functions have been fully debated and have previously been before the Finance Committee.
We have a duty to raise awareness and understanding in all children and young people throughout Scotland and among parents and agencies. It is a complex duty. For example, when we produce a report, we have to produce a child-friendly version—and there are different ages, stages and abilities of children. The accessibility and languages of what we produce must comply with equal opportunities legislation. We must also inform children and young people about the office, about what I can do and about how to contact me. We have to consult and involve children and young people in the work of the office. We have got to consult agencies and conduct research. We are therefore very focused on our statutory functions.
The other concern in the note of caution was that our proposals were
"overambitious for a single financial year".
If we consider the participation budget, for example, we see that most of that work is well in hand—in fact, we are ahead of schedule with some of it. That has implications for the figures that we are considering today. About £24,000 is allocated to the recruitment of a reference group of young people, yet we feel that we are ready to proceed with that now and can cover it within this year's figures. That £24,000 could therefore come out of the budget. We are well ahead with our work. We have tried hard to keep costs down by working with agencies that are already working in the field.
On the other hand, working with children and young people in the way that Parliament has required us to do is complex and has costs of its own. We are a new agency; I appreciated the fact that, when she gave evidence to the committee for the SPCB, Nora Radcliffe pointed out that this is the first time that this kind of work has been done. We, too, are learning all the way and we require to be flexible in order properly to fulfil the consultative duties that have been imposed by Parliament. If we set out rigid plans and rigid costs, it will not be true consultation, because we will not be taking account of what people say to us.
We have been forging ahead with, for example, the reference group. We are now ready to start recruiting for that, which means that we have some revised figures available: £24,000 could come out of next year's budget because we can cover it in this year's budget. We discovered a double-counted figure, where a sub-total was wrongly added in; if you wish, I can circulate papers showing that revision. In total, therefore, there is a reduction of £31,400 on what we projected in October, which means that instead of a 4 per cent increase on the figures that were before the committee in 2002, what we are asking for represents a decrease of 2.08 per cent on the figures that were projected in 2002. We are well within the expectations that were set by Parliament. If the convener would like me to circulate the revised figures, I would be happy to do that.
There are a few matters that I want to clarify. What is contained in the financial memorandum to bills such as the Commissioner for Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill is not an indication of what the Parliament expects and should certainly not be seen as a financial threshold or ceiling. It is an estimate of the maximum costs that might ensue that is constructed in advance of the post being created. The committee is quite rigid in considering such estimates. They should not be seen as targets for spending.
Members might want to pursue matters that relate to the budget headings that the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body highlighted in its submission to us or to other budget headings. It is proper that we should ask questions on that issue.
Another issue is whether the process of budget scrutiny and control is sufficient. I am not sure that we agree on what you seem to be saying are your statutory obligations and their budgetary consequences. There are some philosophical issues that we need to explore. That applies not just to the children's commissioner; we may wish to explore those issues with other people. However, I will start the ball rolling by asking how you approached and resourced your contribution to the Family Law (Scotland) Bill.
What do you mean by that?
The Parliament is considering the Family Law (Scotland) Bill, which is a big bill that will have a significant impact for children. What did you do in connection with that bill and what resources did you use?
We used our staff resources because our consultative processes will not be set up until next year's budget. In other words, we do not yet have such processes. I have made that clear in my submissions on such matters. I submitted a paper to the consultation on the family law proposals. Subsequently, I sent written information to the committee that is dealing with the Family Law (Scotland) Bill, but it was based on the work that we are doing in the office. For example, we are developing a child rights impact assessment, which we want to use as a tool for auditing all the proposals that the Executive makes or that the Parliament considers. I submitted information on that to the relevant committee. I asked to give evidence, but the timetable did not allow it. That work was done in the context of our current resources.
We have also done a lot of work behind the scenes. Civil servants have come to our office and consulted us. In that respect, we have made a significant contribution. For example, the rights of grandparents were being discussed. A commitment had been made, not so much on giving grandparents rights, but on having a grandparents' charter. We discussed that and thought that the concept would be problematic. We suggested that, instead, the focus should be on having a grandchildren's charter. There is now a measure of agreement on that concept. We have done a lot of work behind the scenes with civil servants and have been in contact with the committee that is considering the bill. All that work was done using our current staff resources and knowledge.
So you did not use the new publications budget, your research budget or your participation budget.
We did not use them in this instance, but we will do in the future. We are setting up the reference and consultation groups partly so that children and young people will be available to us to consult. Our website development will help, too. We launched the second phase of our website recently. It now has a message board, which is a facility for consulting young people. Those developments are on-going, so what we do for bills that are going through the Parliament at the moment is not necessarily what we will do in the future.
We have done more extensive work on other bills, such as the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (Scotland) Bill, in which we identified that there was a gap on child protection. We convened a multidisciplinary group and submitted a paper that was found to be extremely helpful. It led to amendments to the bill, changes to the guidance and promises of more. We did a great deal of work on that bill, but the parliamentary work that we have done so far is only the beginning. We have much more extensive plans. However, we need to develop our publicity and consultation tools, reference groups and so on if we are to make a different contribution in future.
What kind of work did you carry out for the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill?
I was not involved in that bill, because it was passed about a month after I took up the post.
On child protection, have you been involved in the Joint Inspection of Children's Services and Inspection of Social Work Services (Scotland) Bill?
Yes. We have just submitted our written evidence on the bill. Moreover, our parliamentary and legal officer has been in close contact with all the people who are involved in it and has been in and out of the Parliament buildings to discuss the matter.
You have 15 members of staff—
We have 14 staff members.
Will you briefly describe what they do?
Certainly. To do that, I will circulate to committee members a diagram of the staff structure.
I should point out that 11 of our 14 staff members started between April and July, which means that we have been fully staffed only since July. That is why there is so much activity going on at the moment.
You were going to say a little bit more about what everyone does.
First, I am at the top of the organisation, with overall control of and responsibility for the organisation's strategic direction. Next in line is my chief executive, Elizabeth Foster, who is responsible for holding the organisation together. When I took on this appointment, I said that I wanted to employ a chief executive model because I had to be free to be out and about in the country, talking and listening to people and carrying out substantive work. I note that the same model has been adopted for the Scottish Commissioner for Human Rights Bill, which I take as an endorsement of my approach.
Below the chief executive are three managers: the head of policy; the office manager; and the head of participation. The office manager's job is self-explanatory. Two people report to him: a receptionist and someone who acts as my personal assistant but who also organises events. Indeed, a few weeks ago, she organised a very successful event for 130 young people at Our Dynamic Earth to launch a national consultation of young people. As you see, we do not have a huge number of administrative staff.
Most staff are employed to carry out the organisation's substantive work. The head of policy, Maire McCormack, has four staff. First, there is a parliamentary and legal officer, who is our link with the Parliament. He is in and out of the Parliament building, networking, working with clerks and keeping us abreast of parliamentary matters and what we should be doing. Next, there is an information officer, who ensures that we have the most up-to-date information. That is also a service post, because we aim to develop a Scottish children's rights library that will be available to the public and other agencies that cannot afford someone like a qualified librarian to keep them up to date on matters.
We also have an inquiries officer. Although I do not have the remit to deal with individual cases, I have noticed—and indeed it has been pointed out in parliamentary debates—that people will nevertheless seek to raise them with us. We have to respond humanely and helpfully when they do so. The inquiries officer has been very successful in that respect; in fact, after launching our national consultation of young people, we have found that they, too, are contacting us. Beyond that, the officer examines issues that inquirers are raising and identifies gaps in services or areas that require policy development. Moreover, she works with other agencies that deal with complaints such as the Scottish public services ombudsman to develop child-friendly complaints procedures.
Next, we have a policy development officer who has been developing the child rights impact assessment. We have used that tool in some bills that we have worked on, but we want it to be able to tackle systematically as much as possible of what goes to Parliament or comes from the Executive. At the moment, the officer is also monitoring our report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. The UN recognises that we are an independent human rights institution and it is expected that we will submit a report on the extent of Scottish compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. She has visited Geneva to meet committee members and see the structure of the organisation and we have already started our work on how to monitor and report convention compliance.
Our work on policy has two dimensions. One is our core, or reactive, function, which is about responding to what other people put on the agenda, such as bills in Parliament or consultations. We are gearing up more and more for that and taking on more work. Our work also has a proactive dimension, which involves putting issues on the agenda. As you may have noticed, we are currently consulting children and young people on policy priorities. A lot of preparatory work has been done to present a menu of issues on which children and young people are voting. This week, we will launch a policy priorities consultation for agencies that work with and for children and young people, which will give us a focus for positive development.
An issue of particular interest in the context of the debate is our strong participation section. A third of my staff are devoted to participation, which reflects the strong emphasis that was put on participation while the Commissioner for Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill was going through the Parliament. A lot of consultation was carried out of children and young people, who wanted a commissioner who would involve them. There is a high legal duty to participate, which I decided it was important to reflect in the staffing structure. Stephen Bermingham, who is the head of participation, has four people reporting to him. The communications officer deals with press inquiries and is responsible for our website and publications, among other issues. Our research officer, Ffion Heledd, is involved in action research with young people. For example, in the lead-up to our national consultation, she contacted other agencies to ask for the results of consultations of children and young people in the past five years, which she then analysed to find out the issues. She then organised and conducted focus groups with children and young people throughout Scotland, from which she developed the menu of issues on which children and young people are voting.
We also have two participation worker posts, which are an innovation on which other organisations now follow us—we are regarded as a trail-blazer in that respect. The posts, which are based on 18-month contracts, are reserved for young people who are aged between 16 and 21. They are our basic link with children and young people's groups—their job is to ensure that we keep on track. I have noticed already that the way in which those workers communicate with groups is beneficial.
That is our basic structure and the rationale behind it.
Six people, including you, are involved in participation. How many children will you be involved with?
We aim to be involved with as many children and young people in Scotland as possible. That is not easy, because the Commissioner for Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2003 says that I must
"pay particular attention to groups of children and young people who do not have other adequate means"
to make their views heard. We have had meetings with children's rights officers from throughout the country who work with the looked-after and accommodated population. With the help of YouthLink Scotland, we convened a meeting of detached youth workers from throughout Scotland, who work on the streets with children and young people. We have had conversations with them and engaged their help in accessing that particularly difficult-to-reach group.
We have also established links with many groups in the disability field and with very young people. There has been some comment about our consulting pre-school children, but such children are not excluded from the legal duty in the 2003 act. I have recently made it my job to listen to organisations such as Learning and Teaching Scotland and play-scheme associations to gather views on why we should listen to pre-school children and how best to do it. Again, we are blazing the trail with our proposals for engaging with that group.
What outcomes do you expect from that? Do you expect the views of nought to four-year-olds to affect legislation?
They could do. The nought to four-year-olds will be particularly interesting, because the research that has been done so far—although not a huge amount has been done—has naturally been about their immediate environment, in which they tend to be interested, such as choices in nursery school. However, it is important that we have a culture of listening to young people. The recent report on the Western Isles child abuse case noted at several points that people had not listened carefully enough to very young children and that they lacked expertise in that. We are trying to achieve a culture of listening to children and young people. In general, children will not talk about sensitive and difficult matters if they do not believe that we will listen to them.
As I said, we anticipate that the results of our consultation of older young people will ultimately affect law, policy and practice in Scotland. Whatever they decide is a priority issue, we will take it on board and work at it for a two-year period. We hope to effect real change.
The problem is that you do not put bills together; you are not a member of the Executive, so you cannot make that happen. You can advise on bills that are needed, but you cannot ensure that they come about.
I would not have taken on the job if I did not have faith in it. I believe that Scotland's children and young people have a lot of sensible things to say to us. What we proposed with respect to the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (Scotland) Bill, for example, was not controversial; it had simply not been thought of. People will willingly accept many of the sensible ideas and solutions to problems that the children and young people of Scotland come up with.
Recently, someone said to me, "I don't know what is important to children and young people—pocket money or something." However, children and young people have talked to us about safer streets—they have given us suggestions about how to make them safer—bullying, things to do, support and choice in the curriculum, health education in schools and transport. Children and young people are telling us about those issues and have put them on our agenda. They have ideas about how problems can be solved. There is a catchphrase nowadays that children and young people are not so much the problem as part of the solution. I believe in that philosophy and hope that our work with them will show its worth, which was a guiding principle of the act that set up my post.
I want to return to more strategic issues rather than discuss detailed numbers. I do not want to misquote you, but I think that the gist of what you have said is that the budget for which you are asking is necessary or essential to allow you to fulfil the statutory requirements of your post. Your correspondence to the corporate body makes the point that the remit that you have been given under the act is
"very open-ended, with the potential for significant variations in expenditure depending on the approaches chosen."
Is it true that there could be significant variations in the budget for fulfilling the statutory functions of your post, depending on which model is chosen as being appropriate for the role that you are trying to fulfil, and that the budget could be significantly less or greater than the budget that you have suggested?
Obviously, there are options. We could say that our statutory duties have been fulfilled by putting an advert in a paper that says that all children and young people are entitled to contact us, but not many people would be impressed by that. Whatever we do must be real and not simply a box-ticking exercise. The global figures to which we are working for what it costs to do things at a reasonable level have been devised using similar international models as comparisons and we are paying less than is being paid in other models.
We can justify to members all the particular figures as being required for good practice. We have been very careful about money and there are things that we have not done. For example, it was suggested to me when I started in the job that I should spend £5,000 on having photographs taken with children and young people that could be used for publicity purposes, but I did not think that that was a good use of public money. There were 130 young people and their carers at our event at Our Dynamic Earth a couple of weeks ago, including young people with severe physical disabilities and needs. They had a great time, learned about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, went away to tell their friends about it and helped to launch our national consultation. We received consent from most of them to use photographs for our current publicity and we received free television and advertising time. We got at least a triple whammy out of the event. As I said, we have been very careful—many things that we do serve more than one purpose.
There are two ways of looking at matters. At a global level, what we have proposed is less than was expected and is not out of kilter with what is spent in other countries. We are also committed to using public money wisely—I can provide evidence of that in what we have done and in the proposals for next year.
Essentially, your argument is that you are making good use of public money and that you can justify that use, which is fair enough. However, you have argued in correspondence to the corporate body that the budget that you have asked for is necessary if you are to meet the statutory requirements of your post. I am trying to investigate whether that is true or whether it is more accurate to say that what you have asked for is desirable for best practice but is not necessary?
There could be a hundred different opinions about the point on the scale at which the desirable shades into the necessary. We are talking about a qualitative issue that is difficult to quantify. The figures are not unreasonable and we can justify them. What is more, we offer an integrated package for all our proposals. Let us take the example of our advertising and publicity budget. We are planning to use what we have learned from the Edinburgh experience and take a road show round Scotland. We want to go up to the islands and out to the rural areas as well as to the cities. If we are going to the expense of taking staff and materials to Orkney and Shetland, we want to make the best use of the time when we are there. We need to have advertising and events—we need to do things. If members were to say, "Actually, we think this advertising budget is a bit over—take something off it," we would have to look at the knock-on effects on what we plan to do, because we have an integrated and inclusive strategy.
There are necessarily indefinables in the budget. When we recruit our reference group of 12 young people from throughout Scotland—we will do that in three geographical divisions so that we get a good mix—we intend to meet at different locations in Scotland during the year. We have a duty to involve those who are hardest to reach. If we got someone from one of the island communities, for example, who had particular physical needs or communication difficulties, we would want to be able to involve that young person. That could affect our costs drastically, but we do not know how at the moment.
All that I am saying is that if we come back here next year and members say to us, "You haven't spent some of these moneys," I might say to you, "We found a better way of doing it that meant that we didn't have to pay the money." I want to be able to say that to you honestly. I do not want to be in the trap in which people sometimes find themselves of feeling that they have to spend all their budget or they will lose it. If members look at the spending pattern since I was appointed, they will see that that is true. We have underspent because I was not ready to commission research—I was not ready to do a lot of things. My philosophy is that I do not believe in wasting public money. If I underspend, I will come back and say that to you and I will give you an honest prediction for the year to come.
Perhaps I am asking beyond the committee's remit, but is the remit that you have been given in statute too broadly defined? Is it specific enough, because it seems to be causing some problems?
The remit is very big, but we are tackling it. As I said, we are trying to do that in an integrated way. That was the will of Parliament and I am carrying out the job that I have been given.
My budget is very modest comparatively. If one gave an advertising company a budget of £157,000 and said to it, "Right, we want you to contact all children and young people, parents, and agencies in Scotland. Let them know who you are, what you are doing, how to contact you and what events you are holding," the agency would be fairly surprised.
We have a broad remit, but it will be focused by our policy priorities, which is what we are working on just now. Although people have asked about particular bills, one of my concerns is that so much is going on in Scotland that has an impact on children and young people—not just the Family Law (Scotland) Bill or the Joint Inspection of Children's Services and Inspection of Social Work Services (Scotland) Bill. We also want to take account of matters such as transport and the environment. When we have identified our policy priorities, we will have to focus on some more than on others. We will do just a basic children's rights impact analysis of some of those, but we will get involved with others more deeply. That will involve hard choices, but I agree with Derek Brownlee to an extent that in order to make the job workable and to have an impact, that is what we must do.
Would it be appropriate for the parliamentary authority to restrict your budget if that was felt to be desirable?
It is up to the Parliament and the SPCB to decide who makes the decisions about the budget. The legislation makes it clear that I have to be accountable for the money that is spent. I fully appreciate the need to scrutinise all budgets. On the other hand, the legislation that set up my post is also clear that I have to be independent, and that I must not be subject to the direction or control of any member of the Parliament, the SPCB, or the Executive. It is inevitable that there comes a point when scrutiny of the budget or decisions to delete certain parts of the budget impacts on the substance of the job or affects the independence of the job. If you say now that you will not allow me to have a reference group of young people because you do not think that it is appropriate, you will make it impossible for me to carry out part of my job in the way that I see it. We are an independent human rights institution and, under the Paris principles that govern such bodies, we must have satisfactory budget arrangements that maintain that independence.
I am happy to be subject to scrutiny and to be questioned and I do not believe that anyone should have a blank cheque for public funds, but I ask that there be at least an understanding of what we are trying to do and where we are in the process. The strong commitment all the way through the parliamentary process leading to the creation of my job was, "It is going to be up to the commissioner to decide the location of the office, the staffing—subject to approval by the SPCB—and how the work is to be carried out." That has been the clear message all the way through.
That goes to the heart of what I am interested in. I understand the importance of the independence of your office and of ensuring that it is in no way compromised—that view is shared by every member of Parliament—but, equally, we could have received a budget bid for £5 million.
Indeed.
We have an absolute duty to scrutinise bids properly in order to guarantee that they reflect a reasonable assessment of what the commissioner can be expected to do. I return to my point: do you accept that it is appropriate that the SPCB is entitled, in certain circumstances, to restrict the budget?
Audit Scotland will examine how we are doing, and I am happy to co-operate with it. I am not sure that it is up to me to decide between Parliament and the SPCB in terms of who scrutinises our budget. I accept completely—
To avoid confusion, I am not talking about two institutions. The SPCB, on behalf of all members, takes decisions as the parliamentary corporation, subject to ultimate approval by Parliament. My question is this: Do you accept that the legislation provides for possible constraints on the budget?
Of course I accept that—at a general level. If I came with an application for £5 million or £100 million, I would expect to be asked serious questions about it and not to have it rubber-stamped. This goes back to what we talked about originally, which is the status of the financial memorandum. I understand that the memorandum is not a target at which to aim. I have tried not to exceed Parliament's expectations and I have regarded the memorandum as being the top line because some parameters have to be laid down. However, how does Parliament or the SPCB decide that my claim is completely over the top? There has to be guidance. I completely accept the need for scrutiny.
One reasonable starting point for guidance is this committee's report on the financial memorandum to the Commissioner for Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill. I have two points. First, paragraph 12 of the committee's assessment states:
"Despite this, we feel that 15 staff is a large number and it is our opinion that there may ultimately be scope for the sharing of staff between the two existing postholders and the Commissioner".
Was sharing of staff with the other postholders ever considered? Secondly, what do you make of the committee's opinion that 15 staff is a large number?
First, we are the smallest establishment in the UK jurisdictions—the others all have more staff than we do, although I am not complaining about that. In my written evidence to the commissioner for children and young people inquiry, I set out what I thought it would take to staff the office. I think that my estimate was about 12 people, but that was without the big participation team. As the bill went through Parliament, there was huge emphasis on participation and the fact that consultation would require to be beefed up. The establishment of 15 staff was not out of synchronisation with what I thought it would take to staff the office.
When I was appointed, I asked about the budget and the staff. Whether people were not saying what they thought I do not know, but when I had to get my staff structure and terms and conditions approved by the SPCB no questions were ever raised about them.
I have taken on the job in good faith and on the basis of the conditions that were presented to me. I have gone with those. In questioning things now, the committee may want to learn lessons for the future—I notice, for example, that the Scottish Commissioner for Human Rights Bill is different in that it makes specific reference to the location of premises—but I took on this job and developed it in terms of the expectations that were around at the time. No questions or objections were ever raised.
I believe that what we have is reasonable for the job. We have quite a tight staff—our numbers are certainly not superfluous and everybody is working very hard. I am sure that members will see the benefit of that.
I want to capture you on one point. As I recall, when we took evidence from the SPCB last year, we were told that all the commissioners were asked about their decisions on location of their offices. However, you have just said that no questions were ever asked.
The recruitment details for my job said that the location of the office will be a matter for the commissioner. I recall that I was probably asked about that during my interview. Although I live in East Renfrewshire—the location decision was certainly not out of convenience for me—I recollect that I was quite clear that the office should be located near Parliament as a visible commitment to the involvement of children and young people in the life of Scotland. Our location allows us to access Parliament and we want to become visible and active in the life of Parliament.
I was very clear about that from the beginning and my decision was never questioned. I think that there may have been a brief informal discussion when I gave reasons for choosing Edinburgh, but my decision has never been questioned. Again, I made the decision in the light of the terms that were presented to me. My decision was made for strategic reasons and it was never questioned. I have taken on premises and staff on that basis. As I have said, I have done everything in good faith, so I find it difficult that I am now being questioned on matters on which I was not questioned at the time of my appointment.
Finally, I want to pick up on the Finance Committee's original report on the bill's financial memorandum. Paragraph 14 of that report states:
"We would suggest that advertising costs be considered carefully before being incurred."
I see that the commissioner's advertising budget includes expenditure on "Headliners Bus Advertisements", "Portable/Inflatables Panels" and a "Radio Advertising Campaign". The total advertising budget comes to about £70,000. I want to use that budget to illustrate a wider issue.
From my background in the private sector, I know that when our company wanted to get a message across about a newly launched product, the advertising costs would be truly colossal. Such judgments were big decisions because there was no point in advertising the product unless we were prepared to incur colossal expenditure. As you said in reply to Derek Brownlee, the advertising budget should not be just about ticking boxes.
My concern about the advertising budget—which I am using to illustrate a wider concern—is that £70,000 is an absolute drop in the ocean if your advertising campaign aims to reach all children in Scotland. My point is not that you should spend £700,000 but that there must be a better way of going about the task than, to be frank, giving a lot of money to radio, newspaper and other advertising agencies that already have a lot of money. I question what impact will be achieved by spending £70,000 on trying to reach all children.
Such advertising supports our main tasks, but a lot of the publicity that we receive comes from actually doing things. An example of that is the publicity that we got on the national consultation.
Commissioner, that is really my point—
We are already doing that.
As you pointed out earlier, it is great that your event at Our Dynamic Earth received television coverage. I am absolutely delighted about that, but I am not surprised that that was the case given the good work that you do. However, I question whether there is any point in spending £71,000 on advertising. If you wanted to get the message across, you would need to spend 10 times that amount.
We need to take a variety of approaches, particularly as we have a variety of audiences.
For example, one of our aims, which is set out in statute, is to reach people who are harder to reach. We must reach children who will never come to an event at Our Dynamic Earth and those who might not even go to school, although we do a lot of work through schools. We will use the radio—young people's radio stations—and buses. We have taken professional advice on what is most likely to reach young people. We will use buses because young people use buses, so that is a way to get to them. We are told that portable inflatable panels would be really useful for our road shows and for taking round schools.
We have taken advice and have rejected more expensive options such as television advertising. Many ideas have been put to us. Although we are taking our current approach based on professional advice, once we have established reference groups and consultation groups of young people, this is exactly the sort of issue on which we will want their advice. They may well tell us that nobody would listen to that radio station or that we would be better doing such and such. I have outlined what we currently plan to do; our approach is based on professional advice and it supplements the other work that we are doing.
We must get the message out. Young people often say that at the end of a consultation nobody tells them what happens; they are consulted to death, but they do not know what happens. At the end of our national consultation we must get out quickly and in a variety of ways the message about the top priority and where we will go from there.
Our approach is based on professional advice, but it will be developed in consultation with young people. I agree that, given what we are meant to achieve, the advertising budget is very modest. However, I find myself caught between two points of view; some people say, "This is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on advertising." but others say, "That is a drop in the ocean." We are working very hard to find the middle way and so far we have been doing that very successfully.
I am not arguing for you to spend more money or less money. I am arguing for you to spend money in a way that delivers value for money for the taxpayer. I question fundamentally whether spending £71,000 on advertising will have any effect. If you spent the £71,000 on other projects you could separately justify those.
As I said, when we go up to island communities and rural areas in the Highlands we want to use methods of communication such as local radio. Sometimes we can get that free, but on other occasions we might want to put advertisements out. Publicity and promotion was discussed when the Commissioner for Children and Young People (Scotland) Bill went through Parliament. It was said that comparable organisations would, at 2002 prices, spend £220,000 a year on it. A bit was trimmed off that and the cost for us was put down as £200,000. We have reduced the figure to £157,000, so we are planning to make good use of public money. The money will be used strategically; we have always used our advertising budget strategically. We do not go out on an advertising blitz and pay money for a television advertisement to say, "Here we are."
In the debates that led to the bill being passed it was said that a variety of approaches would be required in implementing the duty to let people know who we are and what we are doing, and to involve and consult children, young people and agencies. The advertising budget is part of our strategy. I agree that in terms of national advertising campaigns the sum is a drop in the ocean, but it would be a problem if you were to say to us, "Okay, you can't do that—that opportunity isn't open to you." I am happy for you to ask us next year when we come back to the committee how it has worked out and how we used our advertising budget. This is the first time we have done it and our budget states what we anticipate. We must be allowed such flexibility, which is exactly what Parliament intended when the bill was going through.
I apologise for coming in when you had started your presentation. I hope that you did not cover this point in your presentation.
I am interested in the notion that there is scrutiny of budgets that relate to programmes, but that you have independence in terms of your programmatic approach. I was particularly interested in the comment that was made in a bullet point on page 3 of George Reid's letter to the Finance Committee. It states that the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body
"considered that the programme might be overambitious for a single financial year".
I am interested to hear your response to that statement.
As I explained, the plans that are labelled as "overambitious" are already well in hand. I am not sure whether to take as a compliment the comment that what we are doing is regarded as being "overambitious". We are caught between the two views. Is the publicity budget overambitious or not? Is it too much or too little? We are trying to use the budget strategically to support the structures that we are setting up.
The young person's reference group is ready to start recruiting. We can take the costs for that out of the budget for the next financial year and start the group in the current financial year. We have worked out a partnership agreement with the Scottish Youth Parliament to consult groups of children aged 5 to 9 and 10 to 14. That work is already well in hand. Our looked-after children group is in discussion with agencies, and our early years group is listening carefully to ensure that we are doing the right things. Front-line staff have started to work with children's rights officers, detached youth workers, and so on. The children's champion awards is another triple-whammy, which I will explain to you if you wish. That is an idea that we want to develop, although we have rejected one incarnation of it because it did not suit our strategy.
All that is on the go. We have some agreements already worked out and agreed to, and we have made good use of public funds. One person recently asked us, in a rather bad-tempered way, how much money we were going to spend on consulting children and young people. We replied that it would be £50,000 for the national consultation because we have done it strategically. Later, I noticed another message on a sort of chatroom thing, in which the person said that she had been surprised because she had expected another zero to be attached to that figure.
Our programme is ambitious, but we are delivering on it and are well down the way. Do not put the brakes on us now; we are only just getting up and going. Ask us next year about what we have done. The budget that you are considering is for our first fully operational year. Now that we have taken those figures out, we will have spent 2 per cent less than was anticipated in 2002. We are doing well and we are using public funds wisely. There is a danger of re-running some of the debates that took place during the extensive process of inquiry and consultation that was held before the commissioner's post was set up. It is my job to convince people of the benefits of taking a children's rights approach, and that is what I am doing. I hope that you will by this time next year have seen more of the fruits of that and that fundamental questions about the role of the commissioner will not linger.
There are some interesting questions for the committee about reporting mechanisms. We often get reporting mechanisms that are nothing less than budget headings. The SPCB budget gave us headings such as "Staff Pay" and "Running Costs", which were difficult to understand until we got more disaggregated information. You also report in terms of outcomes; however, you have emphasised the triple whammies, as you call them, and the value-for-money and spin-off aspects. Have you a way of reporting those? Have you anybody to report those to?
We will, obviously, publish an annual report. One of my regrets is that that has not yet been published because we have been waiting for the accounts to be signed. Because they are part of the SPCB's accounts, we cannot present ours on their own. We have wondered whether we could or should have published our annual report without our accounts. In our annual report, you will see details of a lot of the substantive work that we have been doing. That is how we hope to keep you up to date.
We also hope to have more communication mechanisms; for example, we invited all MSPs to an event at our new office at the beginning of June to see our office, to meet our staff and to find out what we were doing and what we planned to do, but only five or six MSPs came. We have tried hard to be open and accessible and to allow people the opportunity to ask us questions. I reiterate that invitation to the Finance Committee to come and see our office, to talk to the staff and to find out what we are doing. We have an innovative role—we are blazing the trail in many ways—and other people are looking to us for examples of good practice. I would welcome the opportunity to show you what we are doing, so that the figures can be put into their proper context when you receive them.
I will pick up on the point that Derek Brownlee made earlier. You are suggesting to us that, on participation, you endorse the approach to participation that is described in article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says that children and young people have a right to express an opinion and to have that opinion taken into account on all matters and procedures that affect them. You are making a judgment on how that should be done, but the right could, in theory, be extended to almost all children and young people in Scotland.
The right applies to all children and young people in Scotland. What is more, that is stated specifically in the Commissioner for Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2003. It is not something that I have just decided.
I explain my job to children and young people like this: I say that, when our country's Government ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is international law, the Government promised the children and young people of this country that it would do certain things to make life better for them. I do not make the promises up; they are set out in international law. My job as commissioner is to keep the Government and the country to its promises.
Two of those promises are specifically mentioned in the legislation that set up my post. One is covered by the duty to allow children to express their views, to take account of those views and to give them appropriate weight. That applies across the board to policy and law.
The second promise—which is perhaps relevant here—is in article 3 of the convention. Article 3 says that, whenever any decision that will affect children is made by social or administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of children must be a primary consideration. That applies to budget allocations too, as has been made clear by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Systems must be set up that allow children and young people to express their views and those views must be given due weight. That is my job; that is what I am doing; that is what I am building up at the moment; that is what the Commissioner for Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2003 is about. I am trying to deliver on that.
If that is your interpretation, why are you not asking for a £5 million budget, as John Swinney suggested.
If you are inviting me to, I will next year.
It seems to me that there is a reduction ad absurdum. If you say that children and young people have a right in legislation to be consulted, and if you are the arbiter of how that is done, there could be an almost inexhaustible budget requirement for that.
That is true; I could come up with a huge budget. However, I come back to what you said about the financial memorandum. With an open-ended remit such as mine, I have to have some guidance on the scale that people are willing to accept. We are at the beginning of the process and I have been trying to keep within expectations. However, if it turns out that the budget is not enough and I need more, I will make an application, I will justify it and I will see what Parliament says. I am not yet at that stage. I do not have the track record and I am trying to cut my coat according to the cloth, as people say.
On the one hand, I feel that the committee is saying, "Well, if we just left you alone you could come up with a figure of £5 million," but on the other hand, I feel that you are also saying, "Well, actually, with just the present amount, you are never going to achieve what you want to, so you really need £5 million." I am not quite sure where I stand. It is legitimate for me to start from the basis of Parliament's expectations and to see how that works out in the future.
With respect, commissioner, we are saying that it is not up to you to decide what your budget is. Ultimately, it is for Parliament to decide that.
Yes.
There is a worrying tone in what you suggest about how your budget should be arrived at, which is the suggestion that you decide the parameters rather than the Parliament.
I am trying to work within the parameters—the only guidance that I have—that were discussed when my post was originally set up. I have also considered the experience of other similar organisations. If you can suggest another way in which I should have gone about things, I would be very happy to consider it. At the moment there is no guidance and I could come up with a figure of £5 million.
Difficult issues arise to do with the boundary between the need for financial accountability—a need with which I completely agree—and the independence of my office. That issue is much broader than just my role, and I am sure that it will come up again in the Scottish Commissioner for Human Rights Bill. There will be a good opportunity to discuss such issues in the light of the experience of existing commissioners and ombudsmen. I would be very happy to be part of that debate. It is a complex debate and a difficult one in which to engage in this particular context.
I have tried to justify what I have proposed and to explain why I am doing what I am doing. I hope to obtain the support of the committee in doing the job that Parliament has given me.
Okay. I do not think that there are any further questions, so I thank you very much for coming along and speaking to us.
Thank you.
Meeting continued in private until 13:04.