Chamber and committees

The figure could easily become 15 per cent. It is 12 per cent of our budget. We are spending £18 million on the current raft of commissioners and the amount is only going to get greater. You have to ask yourself whether those people—who are not elected—are being properly held to account. Was there a proper structured architecture by which they were appointed in the first place? That is what we should be considering putting in place.

You will notice that the percentage allocated for commissions in next year’s budget increases by considerably more than any other headlined increase, because we will have to fund an additional commissioner.

I sound a note of caution on the point about a sunset clause. I had thought that that would have been achieved through the inquiry conducted by the committee that was set up in 2008, but the problem that we found was that, when there is any suggestion that a commissioner might not be renewed or that it could fall, MSPs find themselves lobbied considerably about not allowing such a heinous act of violence to be visited on the very valuable individual’s work. That is the obstacle that I think that colleagues would face.

You have probably exhausted the potential to draw the corporate body’s experience and views out any further. However, I am grateful to you for this opportunity to give evidence to the inquiry, particularly given that it arose from an initial approach to you, through the budget process. We very much welcome the fact that it is taking place. I do not know how else it would have happened, and it is taking place in time for a proper conclusion to be reached that could have implications for the next session of Parliament. I very much hope that that is the case.

I will comment briefly, just to add to what Maggie Chapman has said.

I certainly would not begin by reverse engineering the position that we have just now. Equally, although I have listed the different advocacy commissioner roles that there could be, it is not the corporate body’s responsibility to decide whether those would be a good thing. Nevertheless, given what I said earlier, I think that the corporate body would welcome the Parliament’s establishing the architecture by which these things could be properly evaluated and deciding what it would like in that respect.

As for your question whether some commissioners could be merged, in the conversations that we have been having in our meetings with them, the existing commissioners themselves have indicated where they think there is potential for mergers. It might be that you first establish the architecture to judge whether and how future commissioners are appointed and subsequently look again at the existing commissioners to establish whether they comply with whatever that architecture has evolved into after a certain period, when it has been properly tested.

I would say that the common thread in everything, when I have been on the ground floor of any decision that has been made, is that the people who make the decision move on, and other people come in behind them, who, in turn, are succeeded by other people again. Those people who understood the what, the why, the where and the when have disappeared, and the agenda of the people who are there subsequently is different.

There are lots of things in public life that any one of us might have been involved in, and we might look at what is being done now and think, “That’s very different from anything that was going on when I was involved in it. I’m not sure that’s why it was there or what it was there to do.”

I think that that is just the natural process. The Parliament is not a fixed body; it is a body of parliamentarians. As I have observed before, I think that we had 50 new parliamentarians in 2016 and 40 new parliamentarians in 2021. Of the 129 current MSPs, very few of them were here before. The number who were here when the Parliament was created, or even when any of the decisions about commissioners were taken in 2006 or 2008, is very small. I do not think that people are reminded of the institutional memory of Parliament in any respect whatsoever. Everybody just lives in their current stream and operates within it. That is how we function. That is not to be recommended, but it is as it is.

I think that I have suggested a phased approach. My first step would not be to reverse engineer the system but, in any structure that I created, it would be understood that, at some point, the existing appointed office-holders would be required to fit within that new structure. However, that would not be my starting point.

The point that I have been trying to make is that Parliament itself now has to take a role in that. By that, I mean the politicians in Parliament who discuss these things in a transparent and open way and not the corporate body, whose job it is simply to execute the will of the Parliament. As a Parliament, we need to consider what the architecture of those positions should be.

The leadership for the actual political execution within public services comes from Government. It should be holding the public services to account and politicians should be holding the Government to account to ensure that those public services are held to account. To my mind, that is the democratic route for taking forward these things. I have always been concerned that, with this raft of commissioners, we are creating a new level of Government that did not exist when the Parliament was established. It is not elected, and it is not properly accountable, but there is a danger that the elected representatives who are challenging the Government are saying that it is not their job but the commissioners’ job to take these things forward, and we are all then left wondering what we do in that regard. Parliament has to understand the beast that it is creating, because it is Parliament that is creating it.

David McGill was hoping to come in.

I do not know that the corporate body would have a view about that in particular.

You are asking me to draw on nearly 50 years of involvement in politics.