Official Report 312KB pdf
Item 4 is the Finance Committee's inquiry into accountability and governance. I put the item on the agenda at this point because I did not want to prejudge the discussion about Scottish Water that we have just had with the minister. The committee received correspondence from the Finance Committee, which invites us to consider questions of accountability and governance in relation to the operation of parliamentary commissioners and ombudsmen in areas within this committee's remit. I thought that it would be appropriate to include the matter on the agenda, given that the previous item was partly about accountability and governance. Members have a paper from the clerk and if there are no further issues that members want to raise in response to the Finance Committee's letter and if members are happy for me to do this, I will write to the Finance Committee to give details of our scrutiny of the Water Services etc (Scotland) Bill, as is suggested in the paper. Given the comments that members made during the previous item, I do not know whether anyone wants to raise further issues.
The Finance Committee's evaluation of the situation is very much in line with our view on the Water Industry Commission for Scotland.
I want to be sure that we are all singing from the same hymn sheet.
The WIC came into being at an advanced stage of the development of Q and S III, when issues remained to be debated about the delivery of Q and S II. It seems that the WIC is not prepared to comment on such issues, which makes it difficult for us to believe that it can be held to account for its regulation of the water industry. As we heard, issues about Q and S II are continuing into the Q and S III phase. I want to put on the record my slight concern about that overlap. It might be germane for the Finance Committee to consider the matter as part of its inquiry.
Given the discussion that we had under the previous agenda item, I am inclined to respond to the Finance Committee in the terms that Mark Brough suggests and to attach to our response the Official Report of today's discussion. There are governance issues and some of the issues that we raised during our discussion are to do with scrutiny of the minister and the WIC and how accountability works in practice. That would enable us to pick up on the issue that Rob Gibson raised without repeating the discussion that we just had. The approach would allow the issues that we raised to remain on the agenda and to be passed to the Finance Committee for consideration. Shall we proceed on that basis?
Yes.
The list of commissioners in the Finance Committee's letter does not include the Scottish information commissioner. Is there a particular reason for that omission?
We could ask the Finance Committee why Kevin Dunion's office is not included in the list.
The omission might be because the information commissioner is appointed by the Executive and not the Parliament.
The clerk is telling me that the Finance Committee does not intend to consider everything about commissioners; it has chosen to mention certain commissioners in its letter to this committee.
I am interested to know why the Scottish information commissioner is not included.
I am fairly sure that the reason is to do with who appoints the commissioner. The letter refers to "parliamentary-appointed commissioners". I think that the information commissioner is appointed by the Executive. Perhaps we could check that.
The letter says:
The Scottish information commissioner has a role in relation to environmental information that is slightly separate from his role in relation to freedom of information in the wider sense. That is relevant to this committee's work.
If members have no further suggestions about how we should respond to the Finance Committee, I will write to the committee and attach a copy of the Official Report of today's meeting, which will provide a good example of how we scrutinise the work of the WIC in relation to the Water Services etc (Scotland) Act 2005.
Meeting continued in private until 12:49.
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