Chamber and committees

That is a fair point, and that is why I think that Parliament has to decide on and design the architecture of all this and, by a deliberate act of policy, identify the very point that you make and thereby decide, if that type of commissioner is created, what the accountability route should be. At the moment, everything is simply consequential on a commissioner being appointed without proper thought having been given before the post is created to what the commission would do or how it would be properly held to account.

I would very much welcome this committee taking a lead in that regard, which I am sure the corporate body would be happy to endorse.

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 do not think that it comes as a surprise. Whenever a new cohort of MSPs is elected, as it will be in 2026, they do not come through the door beating their breasts, saying, “I’m looking forward to holding the commissioners to account.” They come here on the back of their respective manifestos, and then they go into committees, where they get confronted with whatever the Government’s legislative programme is. A committee might want to initiate an inquiry on a particular area of policy, and the clerks will probably then tell the members, “Oh, and by the way, you’re responsible for some commissioners, too.” I say this with the greatest respect, as I do not know whether the public know that all these commissioners even exist, but I suspect that some newly elected MSPs are bedazzled by the commissioners that there are, and by the fact that, suddenly, they are responsible for them. Their first question will probably be, “What do they do?”

Given that, we do not have a proper, structured way of scrutinising the work of commissioners. I do not know—you might have been on committees where you have been presented with a commissioner—but I suspect that it is a case of “How quickly we can get through this item and on to the one that we are all more enthusiastic about?” That might be unduly cynical of me, but I fear that that is the current level of genuine scrutiny of the commissioners. I am therefore not altogether surprised to hear that some of them feel that they have not been asked to present terribly much by way of information on what they do.

Sorry, but could you expand on that slightly? I do not want to waffle, so I had better understand exactly what you are asking me.

As convener of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, I can say that we received a petition that sought a review of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman, because the articles under which that office was established included a provision that there would be a review. We were quite surprised that the Scottish Government acknowledges that but does not want to have such a review. Rather embarrassingly, I think, the ombudsman has said that she would welcome a review.

It comes down to the issue of transparency. That is the case even within the existing architecture. I should say that the objectives of the petitioner and of the ombudsman herself in relation to what that review might achieve might be very different. Nonetheless, that points to a reluctance to look in detail at what we have created and how it is functioning. If it was envisaged that a review should take place, then a review should happen.