Chamber and committees

Excuse me? A faster pace? It took three or four years to develop the website.

I think that, in relation to normal procurement in the real world outside this building, a website can usually be produced in a week or a month—when I look around, I do not see anyone saying that it will take three or four years. There seems to be a lack of reality here compared to the rest of the world.

Jackson Carlaw talked about having a website that makes it easier for users who are less familiar with parliamentary processes, such as members of the public, to find and understand information. However, as an MSP, I find the current website more difficult to manage than the one that we had before. The very fact that you have to go to the old website to look at the Official Report is a complete nonsense.

What do people in this Parliament and in the general public actually want to use the Parliament website for? They want to look at the Official Report, committee reports, questions, motions and parliamentary bills. You tell us that this is an incredibly complicated and sophisticated technological solution to some indecipherably complex problem, but people simply want to know who submitted a motion on what, who asked a question on what, and what bills are coming up. Are we really expected to believe that we got value for money in a £3 million project that took years to complete and is, frankly, a camel—that is, a horse designed by a committee. To me, it is a mess, and I know that other colleagues feel the same way. Is this really the best that we can do for the huge amount of investment that went in?

I will bring in Liz Smith, who will be followed by Michelle Thomson.

Surely if the Official Report was more accessible online, most people would just access it online and would not have to have it sent to them every day. We will leave it at that.

I have a final question. Michelle Hegarty said that we need to “eke out the life” of equipment. However, this very day, there are IT people in my constituency office and in my office upstairs telling me that the laptops, which some staff have had for less than a year, need to be replaced and so on. We discussed retaining some of the technology, because it all works pretty well as far as we are concerned—it certainly works a lot better than it did a few years back—and we would rather not lose any of it. What is the necessity of that project? What will the overall cost be? We might want to further scrutinise that project later in the year.

There are some things that we can afford, but it does not necessarily mean that we have to buy them.

Thank you. We will certainly discuss that in private.

Thank you for your helpful opening statement. Committee members have great interest in the issue, so I will restrict myself and will try not to ask myriad questions. However, obviously, I will kick off with a few.

The committee has a focus on a couple of areas, one of which is our scrutiny function and how the website relates to that. The cost itself is, of course, also a major issue for us. I do not pretend to be an expert on websites either, but, as you said, simply Googling websites shows that you can buy one for just a few hundred pounds. We realise that this is a complex organisation, but, again, I understand that, for major organisations, the cost of introducing a website is considerably less than what the Scottish Parliament appears to have paid—by a number of zeros. The timescale for developing it is also a matter of concern.

The committee was sent a list of the cost of other websites, including, for example, those of various UK Government departments. The cost varies from £14,000 to millions of pounds. However, we do not know whether we are comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges because we have not been provided with a great amount of detail.

The Parliament’s project began in 2017, with cost and delivery spanning subsequent years until 2021. However, no specific costs are provided against the web project for each year. I am keen to find out why that is.

A response from the Presiding Officer states that

“The web project budget was put forward by the Digital Strategy Board, as part of the overall project portfolio bid which comprises part of the SPCB’s annual budget bid from 2017/18. SPCB approves the Parliament annual budget bid and its indicative bid for the next financial year”,

as we know. However, we are also advised that

“Officials have also recognised the need to provide increased detail on major multi-year project costs as part of the annual budgeting process to the SPCB and Finance and Public Administration Committee.”

Therefore, the obvious question is why the committee was not previously provided with that detail. When did the realisation dawn that we should receive that detailed information? When did SPCB members become aware of the on-going costs of the project? I have heard a number of views that they were not necessarily au fait with the details.

Okay. Having covered the issues of costs and scrutiny, I will cover one other issue, which is quality. My question relates to a comment that Alan Balharrie made earlier. We had the referendum in September 1997 to set up this Parliament, and 20 months later, the Parliament was established. It had a functioning website that served us for many years. I recall that there were many IT problems—for example, our email inboxes only had a capacity of 50 megabytes, and there were other issues—but I do not remember many difficulties with the website.

I think that we all accept that we have to evolve, because more than 20 years have elapsed. There have been some upgrades, but this was a mega one. When Michelle Thomson talked about the trade-offs between time, cost and quality, Alan Balharrie said that we had to give a little on the quality. Surely if you take more than three years to develop a project, and spend more than £3 million, you should not have to concede anything on quality. Where have we conceded on that quality?

My final question before I open questions up to committee members is to Ms Wallace.

We were in Dundee last week. Although there was a lot of enthusiasm there for the NPF, one individual said to me that the problem that they had with it was that it was yet another series of things that Government expected them to do. We spend a lot of time having meetings and we have this and that set of objectives. They can be overlapping and not quite contradictory, but a huge amount of energy is taken up in asking what we prioritise. How do we cut through the Gordian knot of all the different objectives that have been given to local authorities and other organisations so that people can see more clearly and help effectively to progress the aims of the NPF?

The next item is to take evidence on the Scottish Parliament’s website as part of our scrutiny of the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body’s budget.

We are joined today by Jackson Carlaw MSP, member of the SPCB. He is accompanied by Scottish Parliament officials Michelle Hegarty, deputy chief executive; Alan Balharrie, group head of digital services; and Susan Duffy, group head of engagement and communications. Good morning and welcome to the meeting. I invite Mr Carlaw to make some opening remarks.