Local Government and Transport Committee, 28 Mar 2006

Meeting date: Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Official Report 230KB pdf

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Accountability and Governance Inquiry

Agenda item 2 is a paper from the clerk on the Finance Committee's inquiry into accountability and governance. The Finance Committee has invited evidence from several parliamentary committees in connection with its inquiry into accountability and governance. The paper sets out the areas in which the Local Government and Transport Committee interacts with various regulatory bodies in Scotland, such as the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman, the Accounts Commission, the Auditor General for Scotland and the Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments in Scotland. The paper is a factual statement of the situation as it applies to the Local Government and Transport Committee, and it also sets out at paragraph 30 a series of questions that the Finance Committee has asked.

I am happy to take any amendments that members may suggest to the factual content of the paper. In addition, do members wish to respond to the Finance Committee's questions in paragraph 30?

I wonder whether it would be appropriate to mention the traffic commissioner for Scotland, from whom we took evidence on the Transport (Scotland) Act 2001—the buses act. I was concerned about the lack of integration between what that body was doing with regard to buses, some of the health and safety issues and its monitoring role, in comparison with what local authorities were doing. A fair bit of that activity needed to be decongested, for want of a better description. That is one area that we could suggest that the Finance Committee might consider. The evidence will show that other members shared my concerns at the time. The Finance Committee could look into that if doing so would be appropriate for this piece of work. Do you recall that evidence?

Yes. The problem was due to a lack of powers primarily, but it may also have been the result of a low level of visibility. For whatever reason, the traffic commissioners did not seem to be one of the more effective bodies. I am pretty sure that we could draw that out and add a paragraph about that body to the report that we will forward to the Finance Committee. Do members have any other points to draw to the attention of the Finance Committee?

There is one other area that might fit into the Finance Committee's remit—the work of the Improvement Service in comparison with work done by other arms of government and the links with the value-for-money exercise that is being undertaken by Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission. A heck of a lot of duplication seemed to be going on, in terms of who was responsible for what. I realise that the Improvement Service has a slightly different reporting mechanism, as it reports directly to the Executive, but other bodies are doing similar work. That is another area in which there seems to be a lack of rationale and added value being brought into the system. I cannot recall whether other members shared that view and had the same concerns.

I do not think that committee members felt so strongly about the Improvement Service issues as they felt about issues around the traffic commissioners. I am relatively open-minded, however, about flagging that up as an issue for the Finance Committee to consider, if that is what you want to do.

The committee touched on it, but we did not go into it in great detail. There was duplicity—I think that that is the word—in what was being done.

Duplication.

Sorry—duplication. Perhaps that came in when the Improvement Service was constructed.

On the question about "confusion or overlaps", although we can bring to that our experience as individual MSPs of relating to commissioners about specific complaints that may have been raised with us by constituents, fundamentally whether there is confusion and overlap can be shown only in the light of the experience of the ombudsmen and the various commissioners. In a sense, it is up to them to highlight where, over the past few years, they feel that there has been overlap. Whether I feel that there has been overlap is a result of my own dealings with those people, which, frankly, have not been significant on a constituency basis. I do not feel particularly well qualified to judge that.

On the budget question, I am not entirely sure how we are expected to say whether £6 million is too much, too little or just about right—it is almost impossible. That is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question. It all comes back to the work that genuinely has to be done by commissioners and ombudsmen whose functions do not overlap. That takes us back to the question of who is going to audit the work of the various commissioners to try to establish whether we are receiving value from them.

On finance generally—this relates to the wider issue of budgetary controls and the talk of common budgetary controls—is it the case that the bill for the commissioners for whom the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body is responsible, as part of the overall budget that is submitted by the SPCB, is simply presented and that we do not have much option but to forward it? Alternatively, is there a degree of negotiation around and justification of that budgetary proposal between the SPCB and the people involved? I do not know the answer to that. Do we just accept the bill, tick the box and add it to our overall request, or is there supervision? I think that there should be. We should not just have to accept any bill that is presented.

No. I agree with you. I do not know the answer to that question myself. Ultimately, the Parliament—whether through the corporate body or another mechanism—should be able to set the budget and not be merely the paymaster for a bill that is presented. I imagine that the Finance Committee is trying to look into the relationships between the Government, through the Parliament, and the various commissioners. The Finance Committee is obviously trying to find out how we can ensure that the commissioners are accountable while still giving them independence of operation. That will probably be a matter for detailed work by the Finance Committee as it gets the various organisations in and tries to scrutinise how they go about their decision making, in relation to the work that they undertake and how much that work costs the public.

We can probably indicate in our report that we agree that the Finance Committee should look at issues of duplication and how the funding relationship works. I suppose that the answer to the question of whether the commissioners give value for money can be judged only by someone with a good grip of the range of their duties and responsibilities and the work that they have undertaken over the course of their existence.

One of the other elements that we should consider is service delivery. I sometimes wonder whether someone in Springburn who had an issue that related to the role of one of the ombudsmen would have access to the relevant ombudsman. We discussed with Professor Alice Brown the fact that some communities have more engagement with the ombudsmen than other communities. Service delivery is an issue, given that most of the services that the ombudsmen provide are based in Edinburgh and other cities. The Executive might need to ensure that the ombudsmen engage with communities rather than be remote from them, as is sometimes the case.

Professor Brown showed a willingness to engage, but although everyone is willing to engage, I am not sure that we are being creative enough in examining how we engage. The traffic commissioner for Scotland is a good example of a role of which few people are aware. Even elected members in local government might find it difficult to clarify what that role involves. Service delivery is an issue. We must consider the multifunctional role and the one-stop shop that we talked about with Professor Brown.

Is there a code of conduct or practice governing which cases the ombudsmen and commissioners will take on and the role of members of the Parliament? I am sure that all of us have had experience of championing the cause of a constituent and getting a satisfactory result or identifying a wider public policy issue that we have highlighted in the Parliament. Is there not an element of capriciousness, depending on to whom someone complains? Is there not a case for saying that if someone has a grievance, in the first instance the appropriate channel for them to air that grievance should be through their MSP? The involvement of an ombudsman or a commissioner represents a step up from that.

I do not know whether there is such a code, but the present system seems quite capricious. There are plenty of examples of cases that we are capable of pursuing, but sometimes we might get brushed off and feel that we are hitting our heads against a brick wall. It would be quite useful if such cases went to an ombudsman or a similar body because that would add an additional dimension of clout. One could vary the workload significantly by declining cases.

You raise a fair point, but it comes back to what Paul Martin said—

Exactly. His point was about service delivery.

We need clarity so that people have a better understanding of what the ombudsmen are for and what they do. Someone might go to their MSP because they thought that they had been on a waiting list for too long or had been treated badly. In those circumstances, a letter from their MSP might be appropriate, but if they had a strong grievance because they felt that a procedure had been carried out in the wrong way and they wanted financial recompense, their MSP's involvement would probably be inappropriate. There needs to be clarity about what the ombudsmen and commissioners do. Paul Martin is right. I do not think that we have a good enough understanding of what they do and, if we do not, the public certainly will not.

There is probably a need for clarity about what the roles of all the organisations are and how they interlink. In the first instance, people who feel that they are not getting satisfaction from their public services should look to one of their democratic representatives—a councillor, an MSP or an MP—to take the matter up, depending on what it relates to. The advantage of taking an issue to the public services ombudsman, for example, is that that might allow them to take an overview of a range of complaints and to identify a problem with the provision of a service by a particular council. However, the public should go to their democratically elected and accountable representatives to resolve their problems before they go to commissioners or ombudsmen. Greater clarity on the issue would be useful.

Do members have any other points?

No.

Are members happy for me, in partnership with the clerks, to make the various amendments that we have discussed and then to sign off the paper and send it to the Finance Committee?

Members indicated agreement.

That brings us to the end of the public part of the meeting.

Meeting continued in private until 16:18.