Chamber and committees

The other element in relation to value for taxpayers’ money is what is done with an inquiry report. In your submission to us, you argued that, effectively, the reports can

“sit on ministers’ shelves gathering dust”.

What could be done in the future, either by the Parliament or by an external body, to ensure that the lessons that should be learned are acted upon?

Dr Ireton, are there international examples of Governments putting in place a better mechanism to ensure that lessons are learned and then implemented?

Did I hear you correctly? Did you think that it was unreasonable that Transport Scotland did not release the figure or that it was unreasonable that the figure was released?

This question has partly been answered, so I will not dwell too long on it. Ms Dunlop, you identified public inquiries as becoming “the gold standard”, but there is an issue now. Even in relation to the tragic events in Liverpool last night, we can see that levels of public distrust, scepticism and anger are at a relative high, historically. The British social attitudes survey last year showed that the level of trust in Government and institutions is at a historic low.

Is there a case for going back and looking at the Inquiries Act 2005 or the guidance on when the act can be used to trigger a public inquiry in order to find a way that can perhaps better serve the public, rather than the public asking in this atmosphere of distrust for a public inquiry because that is the gold standard? As you rightly identified, we could look at John Sturrock’s review of NHS Highland or Lord Bonomy’s report on infant cremation, for example. Do we need to level with the public and say that there are better ways of doing this, or is it time to go back to the original legislation and the guidance to set a new threshold for the triggering of a public inquiry?

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 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?

On the issue of judge-led inquiries, Sir John Sturrock, in his submission, bemoans the fact that there is a “judicial, detailed forensic approach”, which he calls “overly legalistic”, and which he says leads to an adversarial system. However, it does not have to be that way, does it? Presumably, we can smash that approach and start again.