Chamber and committees

You have said that the Government would welcome a discussion on having a parliamentary review of commissioners in the broadest terms. Would it pause the creation of further commissioners pending such a review?

The legislation has gone through under your Government, so it is something that you have asked them to do, but they do not have the capacity to do the thing that you have asked them to do, do they?

I will continue in the same vein for a short period, if that is okay. The idea of assessing the outcomes is important. Jackson Carlaw said that MSPs would not be able to describe the activities or outcomes of a commissioner. It seems, from the evidence that we gathered, that the commissioners themselves are not particularly able to describe the outcomes of what the commissioners do either, and neither are some of the advocates who are asking for new commissioners. It appears, from the work that we have done, that the relationship between outcomes and the commissioners is a slightly vexed one.

On your earlier point about transparency, there is, in my view, no real transparent, vigorous holding to account of commissioners for outcomes, is there? You are telling us that when they come to the corporate body and ask for budget and you do not drill down into what they have done with the money that they have been given. Are you saying that that should happen in other committees, but it simply does not?

That is certainly stood up by evidence that we have had from the Scottish Information Commissioner, who told us that he has to deal with complaints, and it depends on how many complaints he gets—

The last area that I want to address is the relationship between the politics and the process in the Parliament. Listening to you talk this morning about what mechanisms might be put in place—and we are all keen to know—I reflect that we all arrive here with manifestos, as was highlighted by Mr Carlaw, some of which will say that we will have commissioners, because the people writing those manifestos will have listened to third sector organisations that have been campaigning for them. Would you, as the corporate body, consider writing to the party leaders to set out some of your concerns to them ahead of the manifesto process for 2026, and state to them the problems that are going to present in relation to manifestos if they are approached by bodies outwith the Parliament?

It is not really up to him in that regard.

As we have gone through this process, looking at what is almost a taxonomy of the different forms of commissioner and, at the start, rejecting the word itself as being pretty useless—it does not really describe the landscape, which is, as John Mason pointed out, so diverse—we have focused quite a lot on issues of advocacy and rights-based areas.

We also have technical commissioners, in particular, the Scottish Biometrics Commissioner. In evidence to the committee, Dr Brian Plastow said:

“I have been in post for three years. I have been called before the committee once in three years and that was to discuss the passing of the statutory code of practice back in 2022. In those three years, I have submitted seven reports to Parliament: two annual reports and accounts, one operational report, a code of practice and three separate assurance reviews. My expectation would have been to have been called before the Criminal Justice Committee more often than I have been”.—[Official Report, Finance and Public Administration Committee, 30 April 2024; c 14.]

Do you have any reflections on that with regard to whether the system is fit for purpose?

There is a point here about technical expertise. To my mind, there is a distinction where Parliament is establishing a commissioner to deal with something that we would not necessarily have the technical expertise to deal with, but which is required to analyse something. For instance, I could easily see a role for a commissioner for artificial intelligence, which would be in the public domain, to understand where closed algorithms are used within public services and how that relates to public policy and a time-limited group of things that we cannot do. There is also a question there about whether we have the technical capacity to scrutinise.

In giving that quote earlier I was not being critical of the Criminal Justice Committee. We all recognise the scale of the legislative burden that it has before it at the moment. Similarly, for a committee that was scrutinising the performance of the patient rights commissioner, say, the budget for that is likely to be £2 million or a little bit less, whereas it might also have somebody in front of it from the national health service talking about spending of £22 billion. There is a question there about the level of function that a committee should give in proportion to the scale of expenditure from the public purse.

Some people would be asking the Finance and Public Administration Committee why we are so concerned about £18 million when we have a budget of £30 billion for the various parts of the public services that we should be scrutinising: £18 million is a small proportion of the overall budget.

Have you had these conversations with the new First Minister? Have you told him that there will have to be significant spending reductions? Is that what the Parliament should expect to hear from him when he gives his update on his programmes?

You have set out the external factors, and the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill has been mentioned. The bill’s original financial memorandum that was presented to the committee projected the cost as being between £644 million and £1.2 billion over five years. Thank goodness that the committee, before I was a member, knocked it back, because we subsequently received information that showed that, had the committee allowed things to go forward as they stood, the cost would actually have been between £1.8 billion and £3.9 billion over 10 years. We are talking about cost control and scrutiny. That does not sound as though there is reasonable scrutiny of the policies that the Government is producing, with it being given the advice that it requires.