Chamber and committees

Would that have been good enough reason not to have put that important information into the public domain?

I want to go back to a point that Michael Marra raised. Minister, you said that the costs of preparing for the national care service were £1.6 million in 2021-22 and £12.3 million in 2022-23. A written answer that I got from the Government on 1 October last year said that the total cost to that point was £28.7 million—that is, effectively, £30 million for a project that, in large part, is not going to happen. Can you provide the committee with an update today on what that figure stands at?

What is it projected to be by the end of 2025-26?

On more recent issues, it emerged over the weekend that you want to get civil servants back into work. It was also, and somewhat regrettably, reported that, at present, you cannot quantify how many civil servants are seeking to watch Netflix or surfing pornography on their work devices because the number is so high. On the culture of the public sector reform programme, how ambitious will you be about getting civil servants back to work or about ensuring that they are more productive wherever they are working? There seems to be a gap in that the additional investment that you have put into the civil service has not been met by a commensurate increase in productivity, perhaps because civil servants are getting up to things that they should not be doing.

You talked earlier about making sure that targeted outcomes are driven by your spending choices. Recently, it emerged that the total cost of Government spin doctors has reached £100 million over three years—I concede that that figure includes spending by health boards. Will that kind of Government and associated departmental expenditure be included in your public sector reform programme? Before you allow such a significant increase in the future, would it be better to tie that expenditure to a public service outcome target? What could the public service outcome target be for increases in expenditure on spin doctors as opposed to doctors, for example?

My final question goes back to the convener’s question about large in-year transfers. I want to close this one issue down. A number of stakeholder bodies that have come to the committee have said that they would like what the convener described to happen and that it happens elsewhere. Are you saying that it is impractical, undesirable or impossible? Which is it?

I hate to dampen your optimism, but the other problem is that, when we look back at other Parliaments and other public inquiries, we see that they, too, carried out retrospective analyses that identified the shortcomings that we are identifying here.

For example, the Thirlwall inquiry looked at past recommendations on healthcare issues and found that many had not been acted upon; subsequently, we have seen the same issues happening. The Grenfell tower inquiry recommended that there be

“a publicly accessible record of recommendations made by select committees, coroners and public inquiries”,

which the Government was to use to track the progress of implementation or, otherwise, explain why it had failed to implement recommendations. That has not happened. Moreover, only last year, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee held an inquiry similar to this one, which came to some of the same conclusions that we will, rightly, come to.

One element, which you identified in relation to Jersey, is the scepticism about Government engagement with public inquiries once they are established. However, there should not be a similar level of scepticism about parliamentary engagement in oversight. We do not want to make work for ourselves or be accused of a power grab but, on the basis of your experience so far—not that I want to short-circuit our inquiry—do you think that the Parliament is the solution to some of the problems that we see here? Instead of the Government being in the driving seat, once an inquiry was established, the Parliament would have oversight and an on-going commitment to observing what was happening.

Good morning, Professor Cameron.

I have been looking back at the use of royal commissions in the past, and I counted that, in the 1970s, there were 12 such commissions. Now they are very rare; presumably, the Government, the Parliament and the public weaned themselves off that form of inquiry and found different ways of making those big decisions. Is that the kind of seminal tipping point that we have got to now, do you think? Should we be looking at a fundamental alternative to public inquiries?

On the issue of royal commissions, it is very like Sir Humphrey Appleby in “Yes Minister” to call for a royal commission to kick an issue into the long grass. Do we need greater engagement with the public on such matters? Their first demand will be for an inquiry, and a judge seems like an independent person, but the outcome is that, 10 or 15 years later, nothing has happened; people have died; and victims are left without answers. Should the conversation be more inclusive than it is at the moment and should we level with the public that such an approach is not working for them?

Mr Marra probably tested the convener’s patience with his line of questioning, so I will not seek to do that, but, in your letter to the Scottish Affairs Committee, you clearly asserted that full control over spending and tax—full fiscal autonomy—

“would create a fairer system that would protect public services and allow investment in our economy.”

What is your evidence for that? From whom did you commission that evidence to allow you to make that statement on the public record?