Thank you for providing a more detailed report than we have had in previous years. It is very much appreciated. I saw a wee glint in your eye when you first mentioned office-holder costs, which no doubt will be touched on as we progress, and, despite your extensive labours in that respect, I am not convinced that the MSP salary increase will be put into its true context when it is reported.

I want to start on a positive note. From the Auditor General for Scotland’s report, I note that, by 2024-25, the Parliament had achieved a 68 per cent reduction in carbon emissions compared with the 2005-06 baseline, exceeding its interim target. That is something to be welcomed. Moreover, the outturn for 2024-25 was £2.1 million lower than was anticipated, and it is also important to point out the high level of member satisfaction in the services and facilities that are provided to support participation in parliamentary business—it stands at 90 per cent—and the fact that there have been no complaints under the culture of respect policy, reflecting a positive workforce environment and commitment to staff. It is important that those are put on the record, and I commend everyone on the SPCB and Parliament staff for those magnificent achievements.

It is reported that the Parliament welcomed 175,686 visitors in 2024-25. How does that compare with previous years—before the pandemic, for example?

Yes, indeed.

Let us move on into the report. One of the things that you highlight is

“continuing to apply a 5% vacancy”

rate, which you say improves efficiency. How does it improve efficiency? I would like you to explain how that works. Is it 5 per cent across the board? Is it just the first 5 per cent of vacancies that occur? There must surely be certain circumstances in which a vacancy must be filled. It seems odd to me; if you can work with a 5 per cent vacancy rate, you surely have 5 per cent more staff than you really need. Will you talk us through how the vacancy rate works and how it makes the Parliament more efficient?

As part of our scrutiny of the budget for 2026-27, we are taking evidence today from the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body on its budget bid for 2026-27. I welcome to the meeting Jackson Carlaw MSP, who is a member of the SPCB, and the following Scottish Parliament officials: David McGill, chief executive and clerk; Kerry Twyman, director of finance and resilience; and Andrew Munro, head of internal audit.

I intend to allow up to 90 minutes for the session. Mr Carlaw, would you like to entertain us with a brief opening statement?

For some of those organisations, staff salaries account for about 80 per cent of spend. In future years, it would be interesting to see detail on what has been rejected and why they need additional funding, as we see only the bare figures.

The cost of salaries at the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman went up from £6.437 million to £6.770 million. I looked at how many staff it has, and found that it has a whole-time equivalent of 80 staff. That means that the average salary is £80,000 per year. I do not know who is employed there, but some folk will be doing fairly mundane jobs and some will be in senior positions. That seems like an awfully high average salary for such an organisation.

Incidentally, it deals with about 5,000 cases per year, so, looking at its total budget, that means it costs about £1,500 per case. Some of the cases might be detailed, but when I think about the myriad cases that members’ offices deal with daily—and there are dozens every day, never mind how many we get each week or in a year—I wonder at the huge staff complement that it has to deal with a relatively small number of cases; it deals with 1.5 cases per week, per person.

I am picking at that organisation, but it seems that one organisation each year has an inflation-busting increase in its budget, and most of the costs seem to be related to salary. The cost of that organisation is now going to be £8.5 million.

I appreciate that. I understand that the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee takes evidence from the ombudsman, for example, as I was on that committee. However, the corporate body provides the cash and I think that questions need to be asked about what is happening in the structure of the organisations that means that they need significant increases in funding.

I did not mention the Information Commissioner, because we know that a tidal wave of freedom of information requests have come to it, so one could say that the figures for it are reasonable, but for other organisations, I struggle to see the justification for some of the figures. That seems to apply across the board, with the exception of the Ethical Standards Commissioner, where the increase is 2.5 per cent. However, the rest are well above inflation.

Every other front-line service is likely to face challenge when the draft budget comes out, so it seems that office-holders are almost immune to the same pressures that everyone else in the public sector faces.

The point that I am trying to make is that, rather than have a 5 per cent vacancy rate, would you not be better to say that we will have 5 per cent fewer staff? Basically, you would base the figure on what is required by each department and then, when a vacancy comes up, you would fill it as soon as you can, as is normal in most organisations, one would have thought.

You have a 7.1 per cent turnover, so, if there is a 5 per cent vacancy rate, a wee sum in my head suggests that the average vacancy is about eight months long. Is that right? That is how it reads to me.

The SPCB did not really touch on this issue in its report, so I am wondering how it works with the Scottish Government on what the Government has described as

“a managed downward trajectory for the devolved public sector workforce in Scotland (0.5 per cent per annum on average over the next five years)”.

That seems to me to be incredibly modest compared with what you are delivering on the vacancy rate, which effectively means that you are permanently operating at 95 per cent capacity.

Are you happy about the cost, though? Three hundred thousand pounds per committee room seems to be an awful lot of money.

Right. Let us go on to office-bearers, which I know is always the most exciting part of the session in some ways. Thank you for providing us with some detail on that, albeit in four-point, which must be the smallest typeface that I have ever seen in the Parliament. Nevertheless, I got my magnifying glass out and was able to read some of the detail.

I take on board a lot of what you have said about the Electoral Commission for next year. Let us look at other office-bearers: there is a 9.4 per cent increase for the Standards Commission for Scotland, a 6.2 per cent increase for the Biometrics Commissioner, an 8.9 per cent increase for the Scottish Commission for Human Rights and a 7.1 per cent increase for the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman. We know fine well that, when the draft budget comes out next week, it is unlikely that any area of front-line service will get anywhere near those kinds of increases. One or two might—one never knows—but it seems to me that, yet again, increases for those office-holders are well above inflation.