Finance Committee, 14 Sep 1999

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 14, 1999

Official Report 96KB pdf

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Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Bill: Finance

The financial memorandum, which appears from page 47 onwards in the explanatory notes, is less precise than the financial memorandum that we looked at last week, relating to the Mental Health (Public Safety and Appeals) (Scotland) Bill.

Which is saying something.

Yes, indeed. You will have noted that with the exception of the section on the cost of Audit Scotland, there are no precise figures. There is a section on the Auditor General, but by and large the memorandum is necessarily speculative. I suspect that that is almost always going to be the case with financial memorandums. Does anyone wish to comment at this stage? We also have the financial resolution in front of us, which is written in very wide terms. We are required to approve that.

I apologise for harking back to a subject I harp on about almost every time the committee meets, but paragraph 166 of the financial memorandum says that

"the Executive has already noticed an increased number of Parliamentary Questions on financial matters since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament."

That does not surprise me, because it is a subject of great interest. A swift solution to the problem would be to make available, regularly, the financial data that the committee has asked to be provided with. That would allow us to avoid burdening the civil service with parliamentary questions and to do our own research with the available data.

That information would also help us to address the issue that is raised in the paragraph and allow us to contribute to the debate on the objective—which I firmly support—in the first line:

"a rigorous financial management regime under the control of the Scottish Parliament".

I do not agree with John. Parliamentary questions are parliamentary questions and are on the record. If we are provided with data, they are not necessarily for public circulation. Parliamentary questions are a crucial part of the way any Parliament works. If the Executive has underestimated the cost of running the Parliament—as one sees in the papers—that is its pigeon. It was clear from the start that we were going to do far more, more quickly, than had been anticipated—and that includes parliamentary questions. The administrative costs have been grossly underestimated. Certain people have to take responsibility for that, but I am not going to reduce the number of parliamentary questions I lodge as a result.

I wondered whether you registered an interest at the time.

That is not really the general issue that I am raising. We need access to information to allow the committee to play its part in the formation of

"a rigorous financial management regime under the control of the Scottish Parliament".

If I cannot receive certain information from publicly available sources, I will ask a series of parliamentary questions. I have spent two years in the House of Commons doing exactly that. I would far rather have access to information that allows me to undertake my own research so that I can suggest initiatives about, for example, the budget process.

The bill's framework will allow us to consider other policy options. Committees of the Parliament might suggest ideas that differ from the Executive's proposals and we will need to assess the financial viability of some of them. If we can do that only through a plethora of parliamentary questions, we will not be as effective as we might be in judging different proposals.

I do not want members to stop asking parliamentary questions, but we need to have access to information that allows us to perform our job properly.

John, I just want you to clarify your point. Are you suggesting that the committee should request information as a body, or should individual members of the committee do that?

I do not understand why we cannot have access to much more of the information that underpins the annual publication of "Serving Scotland's Needs", which outlines the Government's expenditure plans in Scotland. If we were able to access the data and the management information that support the document, that would address my point. That information—which I suspect is held on computer anyway—should also be available to any MSP to dip into as he or she sees fit. I do not think that it would cost very much to do that.

I do not disagree with John, but I am not going to fall out with my Labour coalition partners. As John well knows, the figures and statistics in "Serving Scotland's Needs" are sometimes rather obscure and it helps to ask Parliamentary questions to pin down the Executive's intentions.

Whatever we decide today, there is no restriction on you or any other member asking questions.

Keith was not in the chamber when I asked my question about parliamentary questions. We need to strike a balance. If John or any other committee member feels that the Executive is not giving us enough published information, the committee should investigate the matter. As part of the examination of parliamentary questions that I called for, we should find out what information is not being made available. I agree with John. We should constantly monitor the boundary between what information we can obtain through parliamentary questions and what should be readily available to us. No member should have to ask regular parliamentary questions to obtain that information.

Keith will have missed the fact that, since the start of the Parliament, 1,300 questions have been asked at a cost of £130,000, which is excessive by any stretch of the imagination. The system of parliamentary questions is not being used appropriately at the moment, but that is probably because we are in the first flush of the Parliament. Although no member should ever feel that he or she cannot ask a question, answers to many questions could have been obtained through reasonable research. However, John is right to point out that if those answers cannot be obtained through research, we need to examine why that information is not available and whether we need to address the issue of the boundary that I mentioned.

I agree with the direction of Richard's comments. At times in the House of Commons, I have asked many questions only because I could not access the amount of detailed information that I needed. I—or a researcher—would have been happy to examine that information, but it was not available. The process of asking questions means large costs to the public purse and much inconvenience to civil servants, who still jostle past me in corridors because of the amount of questions that I have asked. It is important to find out what information is at our disposal to evaluate proposals or initiatives that might be laid before the committee during the budget process.

At the committee's successful financial seminar, John and I queried the level of headline figures and concluded that the level was not low enough: the figure 1.4 sticks in my mind. We need to reduce that figure a little more. It would help many MSPs if SPICe could make such information available.

On the number of parliamentary questions being asked, members have a responsibility not to try and score brownie points by getting their name on the business bulletin 12 times in a row. Within those 12 questions, there might be only two real questions. MSPs should not be prevented from asking questions, but there should be a system that does not allow them to ask a question in five or six different ways.

At Westminster, there is a culture of secrecy in the Treasury and the civil service. However, all the evidence suggests that this Parliament will not behave like that and the Administration has clearly stated that intention. Jack McConnell, the Minister for Finance, has shown a willingness to present the figures that we need in a way that we can understand. It is the committee's duty to maintain that policy, but the signs are that the Scottish Office's culture of secrecy will change.

Perhaps we should test that. I would be unhappy if I felt that committee members had to lodge parliamentary questions to get information in order to perform the committee's work. The committee is a body, not a collection of individuals, and we, as a committee, should be entitled to ask for information that we need. Perhaps we should ask for information that we need. If we do not get it, we will investigate other ways to achieve our objective. However, I repeat that I hope that we will not have to resort to committee members asking ordinary parliamentary written questions.

Perhaps the Parliament could follow Westminster's example and not allow written questions to be lodged during the recess. That is where we differ from Westminster. This Parliament's system means that MSPs tend to do research through parliamentary questions rather than in other ways.

With respect, Keith, that is not the issue. The question is whether the committee has access to information that it needs to do its job properly. John has suggested that the system needs to be tested by, for example, our requesting details behind the bald figures in "Serving Scotland's Needs". Should we test the system by deciding what extra information we need and then asking for it? If we get what we want, fine; but if we do not, we should investigate other ways of ensuring that we are properly resourced with the information we need to do our job.

Could we invite someone from a relevant department to talk to the committee about where we can access information that we need? That still leaves us to do our work as MSPs; but as committee members we would have a better understanding of where to look for such information.

Yes. We also need to have signposts.

Shall we ask the clerk to find out about who could speak to us about the information that is available? We can then take the matter from there.

Thank you.

We are moving to a system of resource accounting and budgeting, which will change reporting on financial matters and make finding out what information is available now and what will be available in the near future even more worthwhile. It is difficult to present financial information in an easy-to-understand form, but that can be facilitated by improved financial systems on modern IT systems, which appears to be the direction in which we are moving.

That is an important point. Our briefing should also give us information about the changes to the system.

Andrew mentioned the form of accounts. A briefing note from the finance department talks about preparing accounts in a form directed by the Scottish ministers. I would have thought that the committee will play a role in agreeing any such layout.

Can you identify the document?

When I was up in my constituency, I received a faxed quick guide to the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Bill. Page 4 of the fax deals with section 18 of the bill. I think that the text is taken from another document.

Item 6 in Jack McConnell's letter of 3 September deals with that point. The letter says:

"I am happy to give you an assurance that I will consult the Committee about the format of the accounts of the Executive Departments before the initial Directions are issued; or on any revisions that make substantial changes. The format of the accounts will be closely connected with the format of documents to be put before the Parliament in support of the Budget Bills."

Thank you for that.

The last sentence of item 6 in the letter also states that drafts of the format of accounts will be brought forward during stage 2 of the bill.

The problem is when that will happen.

Jack McConnell says that it will happen during stage 2, so I would expect that to happen in the next month.

I have two points which relate to paragraphs 166 and 167 of the financial memorandum. Paragraph 166 states:

"The Executive has already noticed an increased amount of Parliamentary Questions on financial matters since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament".

I think that we should discourage financial memorandums being used to make political points for the Executive. The campaign against parliamentary questions is regrettable. The Executive has noticed no such increase in questions, because the Executive did not exist before the Parliament was established. Furthermore, because the issue does not affect the cost of the bill, I see no reason for that glib aside to be included.

Paragraph 167 refers to costs of auditing Scottish Administration-related accounts, which were previously met out of the UK consolidated fund and to the fact that, because of that, there will be no change to the Scottish Administration's audit costs. My question is a request for clarification, because I could not find the information in the documents with which we have been issued. Will the money that is currently paid into the UK consolidated fund for the work of the National Audit Office now be translated by the Barnett formula into the Scottish consolidated fund? If we have not been notified of such a change, that is a problem.

We will arrange for your second question to be asked.

I am not quite clear about your first point on paragraph 166. I understood that the comparison was being made between the period up to 2 July and the recess period. Keith made the point about questions being asked during the recess. I have no particular view on that, but perhaps there is more need to ask written questions during the recess when there is no opportunity to question ministers. I did not take the comment to be a political point; I thought that it was an admission that the matter had developed in a way that had not been foreseen.

Fine.

I agree with Andrew's point. The comment about questions in paragraph 166 has an undertone. I believe that we should be allowed to ask parliamentary questions, and that is that. The situation is only to be expected because the Parliament has just been set up and the Administration has never been as accountable as it is now, with its plethora of committees and with weekly oral questions. The number of questions will probably trickle off after a while, but the Executive should have expected the situation.

With respect, Keith did not get the point. Nobody wants to stifle parliamentary questions—that would be quite inappropriate. David made a point about discipline. I would be appalled if someone disciplined me for asking questions, but I apply self-discipline when asking questions and there is a lack of that at the moment. We have a responsibility to be frugal with public funds and there is no excuse for asking unnecessary questions that cost £100 each.

The Executive has agreed to publish an audit of the questions that have been asked, arranged by subject and by MSP. It has agreed to my request that it find out whether the requested information was already in the public domain. That will not stop anyone asking questions, but it will hold members accountable for the money that they spend.

I do not want to prolong this discussion as it is not part of our agenda. Andrew Wilson made a point about paragraph 166 and Keith Raffan supported him. That has been noted.

Unless there are new items relating to the financial memorandum, I would like to close the meeting. Are we agreed that the provisions are reasonable? We are agreed.

That concludes today's business. Thank you for your attendance.

Meeting closed at 10:16.