Chamber and committees

Can I have some reflections from Allison Orr and Martin Avila about the risks that are associated with development trusts? I emphasise that they are a good idea, but I want to explore that a wee bit.

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. First, I apologise for not being able to give your office advance notice of this point of order, which I would have liked to do.

Earlier today, in the debate on supporting carers, I commented that Robert Kilgour, a well-known Tory donor, made contributions to the Tory party. Having now consulted the Electoral Commission website, I wish to apologise for underreporting the scale of the donations, so I would like to correct the record.

As an individual, Mr Kilgour has made 15 donations either to the Tory party or to Scottish Business Supports the Union, totalling £76,127.76. In addition, via his company, Dow Investments, he has made 37 regular donations to the Tory party, totalling £222,651. His most recent think tank, the British Civic Institute, has not yet registered with the Electoral Commission but, when it does, I will ensure that I make accurate figures available.

I forget the exact name of Robert Kilgour’s private care homes, but I think that he funds the Tory party to the tune of £220,000 a month. Perhaps you can ask him to make a contribution.

Will the member give way?

Before you come in, Dr Elliott, you specifically mentioned the Auditor General’s role in relation to accountability, which gets more complex when policy decisions bypass the Scottish Parliament and go directly to local councils without a clear line of sight on scrutiny and accountability, and just a promise to look at it later. Do you have any thoughts about the complexity of that? I noted with interest what you said about attributive accountability; that is an interesting theme.

Thank you, convener.

I perhaps take a different view from some of the committee members in that I was surprised that the work had not been started in the 10 years when it was known that the operating system had become obsolete. Provisioning for IT is invariably expensive and only goes one way in any organisation. That seems to have been quite a long time to wait to start the project. I would appreciate your reflections on that, Alan. As I said, everyone needs to understand that it is a continuing, risky, built-in cost to the Parliament all the time, because that is the nature of IT and digital services. However, I would like to understand why it took so long.

I am not surprised to hear that.

I will bring Susan Duffy in. There have been a few points at which we have talked about comms with the various governing bodies and the committee. Would you like to add anything to the record on what you would consider doing differently?

Good morning. I will touch on a couple of themes that have been peripherally discussed already. I am interested in the complexity that arises from Government accountability versus subsidiarity. The unwise or uneducated might say that it must be this or that, because they do not recognise the complexity. I will give an example.

As we know, there are many areas of critical change over which the Scottish Government has no say—fiscal and monetary levers and so on. It is on the record that the Scottish Government is trying to do something about child poverty through the Scottish child payment, but that that is clawed back via another route by the United Kingdom Government. My concern about that is not just from a political perspective but from an accountability perspective, because the Scottish Government is accountable for all these outcomes but does not have the control and the power to deliver on them.

I would appreciate the witnesses’ thoughts about that complexity, how we can start to square it off and the examples that I have read in your submissions about what you have seen of that happening elsewhere—in Ireland and Wales in particular, with regard to soft and hard powers, as Dr French put it in his submission.

Perhaps you could flesh out some of the complexities, because it strikes me that saying that it is this or that is too simple. I ask Jennifer Wallace to come in first, given that she has been looking at me and nodding, which I have taken as agreement.

You have now gone on to the bit that I was specifically asking about. In effect, your neck is on the block and we have heard various people say, “Well, I have never run an IT project,” which to me indicates a much higher risk with regard to scrutiny and the need for governance at the SPCB level. It is almost as if you are operating at board level, and any typical board would say that those are the projects that carry more risk and are therefore the ones for which we need greater scrutiny or capacity for scrutiny.

You have reflected that you will certainly look at the matter more carefully, but I now feel a wee bit alarmed that, for various reasons, the SPCB is not able to fulfil its role in scrutinising the workings of Parliament. I am not surprised at the fact that, guess what, IT projects are always complex and always go over budget and take longer—I know that because I have run IT projects.

To pick up on what Daniel Johnson has said, I personally would like to see out of this discussion a report that is produced on behalf of the SPCB and which the SPCB has signed off saying, from a governance perspective, what specifically will change in the light of this project and what we will learn from it.