Chamber and committees

I will let David McGill start on that.

I am tempted to answer that question on a personal basis as well as on behalf of the corporate body. I return to the point that the corporate body’s responsibility is to enact the will of Parliament. It is a matter of public record that the Presiding Officer has raised the issue of office-holders with the Scottish Government. Last year, I made a particular point of raising the matter with the committee.

As a long-standing member of the Scottish Parliament who, in my first session in 2007 to 2011, was on a committee that had been charged by Parliament to rationalise the number of office-holders that we had at that time, for which there was an unabated enthusiasm among members in the Parliament, in this session of Parliament, I am struck—as are my colleagues in the corporate body—by the attraction to colleagues of embracing campaigns that will lead to the creation of additional commissioners. That has almost become the de facto or go-to response. The reason that we raised the issue last year in particular was because although we respect the will of the Parliament, we can see that the areas in which we are beginning to generate commissioners, if accepted by Parliament, could make it harder for Parliament to justify not creating commissioners in other areas where one could say that there was a similarity, either in their responsibility or function, and that could lead to an exponential growth of commissioners.

There is a question of democratic accountability in my view as to why we as a Parliament were set up in the first place and whether we are devolving from ourselves to others responsibility for matters.

My working knowledge in whatever walk of life I have been in is that when institutions of that character are created, they invariably grow in remit and in size, and that appears to be the case. Part of that is that as the public becomes more aware of such institutions, more inquiries are made and, therefore, the responsibility grows. As is also the case with initiatives that are being progressed by MSPs, perhaps in relation to matters such as freedom of information, we could, as a Parliament, take decisions that will significantly grow the responsibility of the commissioner to whom that responsibility has been devolved.

There is a big question for MSPs in all this as we look to the future. You will see, with the addition of the patient safety commissioner, which role was approved by Parliament in the past couple of months or so, that the increase in the office-holder provision in the indicative budget for next year is significantly ahead of the inflationary increase that we expect to apply to the rest of the Parliament. The overall cost of office-holders as part of our parliamentary budget is incrementally increasing, so there is a financial aspect and an accountability aspect.

I am sorry—that was a long answer, but I hope that it was helpful.

As we have identified, a significant part of our budget—80 per cent—is driven by the staff costs in the Parliament. In the previous parliamentary session, we took critical decisions, which were driven by this committee’s requests and by MSPs, to increase the resource made available to MSPs to run their offices and to the overall structure of the Parliament. We and committees felt that it was important that the resource existed to allow the committees to hold the Government to account. Obviously, we apply as rigid a discipline as we can.

We have operated from the principle that it is the responsibility of the Parliament and the corporate body to ensure that the Parliament can operate to maximum capacity in its ability to support members in holding the Scottish Government to account. It would be open to us to do anything differently only by compromising that ability, and the corporate body is not prepared to submit a budget that would do that.

As someone who has sat on the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body through more than one parliamentary session and who also sat on the corporate body when we went through very difficult financial times as a country, I know that we applied very rigorous controls to our budget, leading, at one point, to significant reductions in the overall cost of staff provision at that given moment.

I will turn to David McGill in a moment, but I come back to the fact that, particularly in this parliamentary session, we have been consolidating views expressed in the previous session that we were underresourced with regard to support for committees as well as very strong representations from parliamentarians, who felt that their offices were underresourced, too. In comparison with other Parliaments elsewhere in the United Kingdom, there was a reasonable case to be made in that respect, but embracing those changes meant a significant financial increase.

At this point, I should correct the record. I think that I might have said that 80 per cent of our costs as a Parliament are for staffing; however, I was thinking of office-holders at that point. The figure is 70 per cent. Even when that is the case, it is difficult to see anything other than a negative consequential impact on our ability to operate as a Parliament if we were simply to unilaterally adopt the principle that you have suggested.

It is back to where it had been. We had a higher budget last year, which, I seem to remember, I might have been responsible for advocating, because we were in a year in which we were uncertain about inflation. It is worth remembering that, when we presented last year’s budget, the forecast of the external bodies was that we would be in negative inflation by April this year, but that has proved to have been somewhat ambitious. At that point, the corporate body was slightly cautious about accepting that view, and it therefore chose to have a higher contingency to meet what looked to be a much more volatile position than was necessarily being presented. This year, we felt that it would be wrong simply to maintain that higher level of contingency, so we have brought it back to a figure that is more typical and similar to the one that we had previously.

We certainly do not have a window sticker that says, “You must spend your budget”. It is open to members to determine that.

Very often, the uptake happens because of in-year changes. Staff leave, and it then takes quite a period of time for them to be replaced. For example, in my own office, a highly paid member of staff left unexpectedly, and there was a period of time in which I reassessed whether I wanted to replace that individual in quite the same way. It has meant that, in this particular year, my own utilisation of the staff provision will be less than it has been in other years. That kind of reality will apply across most parliamentary offices, making it unlikely that we would ever have a year in which there would be a 100 per cent utilisation of the overall budget.

We have worked out that 93 per cent figure by looking at experience over the years, particularly the mid-years of a parliamentary session. Obviously, in the first year of a session, the figure will usually be less than that, because there will be a lot of new members who will not have any staff at all and will be in the business of recruiting them. It therefore seems relatively reasonable to look at the mid-years of the Parliament if we are looking to pitch things at the required level.

I do not think that there is ever a year zero in examining such issues. The process is on-going, but changes that we make often lead to consequential opportunities.

However, we have interrogated requests for additional moneys to fund particular projects, some of which we have asked to be deferred or to be looked at again.

Thank you for that trenchantly-put sequence of observations. I will come to David McGill in a moment, but the first thing to say is that percentage increases can look quite sensational in relation to some relatively small budgets.

As you know, the corporate body has discussed with the committee the overall expansion and principal understanding of what office-holders are doing, and we are grateful for the inquiry that you now have under way. However, the corporate body’s responsibility is not to editorialise, but to enact the will of Parliament; that is why, Parliament having decided that the office-holders shall exist, our responsibility is to ensure that they are able to undertake and dispose of their functions effectively. Some of them have had additional responsibilities applied to them and some have made budget submissions that Huw Williams and Janice Crerar, who operate with the office-holders on a daily basis, have interrogated, and which the corporate body has declined to accept.

It is therefore not the case that the budget before you has not been scrutinised, analysed, interrogated and, in some cases, declined. However, some of the office-holders still have relatively low overall costs such that, when you apply a percentage, it can look quite significant, although it could, in fact, be the case that just one additional employee or partial employee has been added to it.

I will allow David to expand on that.

You identify the two key issues. The latter is the one that I wrestle with, because it is not clear to me that any overarching body is looking holistically at the office-holder landscape. The corporate body’s responsibility is to enact the will of Parliament. The Scottish Government can propose the establishment of commissioners. Members of the Scottish Parliament can propose the establishment of commissioners through members’ bills.

In my experience, every one of those proposals has been considered in isolation in relation to the actual proposal before Parliament, but never in terms of the overall landscape. In the most recent debate, I, on behalf of the corporate body, tried to introduce that point into the discussion on the patient safety commissioner. It becomes very difficult in a debate about progressing legislation in respect of a particular commissioner, when everything in that debate is about the merits of the position in question, to have a wider discussion about what Parliament is doing in the round, seeking to do or prioritising. Even if you were to argue in favour of commissioners, we are considering those issues not in any structured way but on the basis of who is proposing what at any given moment in time.