Chamber and committees

I may come back in after Edward Mountain’s line of questioning about welfare, but I will end for now as I started, by thanking you and your team for the improvements that you have made to the organisation so far in a relatively short time. It is important to put that on the record.

I appreciate that.

I think that Mr Mountain alluded to the welfare of MSPs so, keeping time constraints in mind, convener, I will hold back on that and ask a supplementary question later. At this stage, I will ask about the process for complaints about MSPs. If someone complains today—and I know that some unique cases can be complex—should they expect admissibility to be established within weeks?

Can I start by welcoming you to your permanent position and thank you and Ms Glen for the hard work that you have clearly been doing to turn the organisation around? We should put on record what you say in your report about “rebuilding a plane in flight”. You have had to do the day-to-day job and the bigger-picture stuff at the same time, so I think that the committee would agree that thanks are required.

That said, I will now scrutinise various aspects of current performance. Your website says:

“Current initial review time: 8 months.”

We know that that might come down to seven months. Then it says:

“We are very sorry that it can take up to 8 months to conduct an initial assessment of your complaint. We are doing everything we can to reduce this time.”

However, we heard from Ms Glen that that is not the case for complaints about MSPs. That is not clear on the website, nor does the website give an average time for an initial complaint to be assessed as admissible, so it gives a misleading picture of the performance of the organisation. That is unfair to the organisation, but it is also misleading to members of the public, who may be deterred from making a complaint about an MSP. I would welcome some reflection on that before I move to my next question.

That is helpful. It gives me some assurance that you do some modelling on that, although there will always be some outliers.

I know that we are not looking at councillor complaints, convener, but there is a direct connection between them and MSP complaints—a positive one, I think. I read that the entire investigatory team is now trained to handle MSP complaints, whereas there was more of a silo arrangement previously, in which not all investigators were trained in MSP complaints. Clearly, then, any backlog of councillor complaints could theoretically have a knock-on impact on the disposal of MSP complaints. Could you say a little bit more about whether that makes your organisation more fleet of foot? Or are you content that the backlog in councillor complaints will not compromise your performance in MSP complaints?

I think that what you are saying is that the KPIs are tailored to each circumstance, so you cannot give a baseline report about whether performance on the time that it takes to investigate each case is improving or deteriorating, because each case is so specific and unique—or can you? What baseline data about the speed that the office is operating at to make a determination on a complaint could the committee look at?

That is very helpful.

If I am reading my scribbled notes right, I think that you report the number of active cases. If you cannot give me this information now, do not, Mr Bruce, but I am trying to be clear about what can and cannot be provided. How would the committee monitor the number of active cases relating to MSPS, if that is in the public domain? It might not be our job to do so—I do not know.

I will be brief, because Mr Mountain made the points that I was hoping to make. I want to take a slight step back to consider all MSP cases—not just cases such as Mr Mountain’s, in which there is no admissibility, but those in which the most significant breaches are found. Breaches can be incredibly minor—there have been a few of those already in this parliamentary session—or they can be really significant and attract a lot of media attention. It is, of course, for your independent investigation to rule on them and for this committee to agree to those rulings, as appropriate, and decide what sanctions might look like.

Within all of that, there still has to be a duty of care for the individual who is complained about, irrespective of what they have or have not done. I would welcome your general reflections about where that duty of care sits, Mr Bruce, because the committee is grappling with that. It is not your primary role, so where does the duty sit, even in those cases in which an individual has quite clearly done wrong and is sanctioned deservedly? Does the duty of care sit with the commission? The Parliament has to reflect on that. Do you have any thoughts about it?

The comments have been helpful, although they do not relate directly to the statutory instrument. It is helpful to highlight the fantastic work that the Scottish Government has done on free school meals and the approach to universality. The substantial increase to the school clothing grant has made a massive difference to constituents across the country.

Mr Kerr is right that we need to maximise uptake. Any correspondence to the Government that draws attention to the successes of those policies and asks what we can do to enhance take-up will be really welcome. We always welcome the qualifying criteria, which Mr Marra referred to, being kept under review—budgetary considerations to one side. On that basis, I am happy for us to write to the relevant minister.

I apologise for cutting across you, convener. I would never normally do that, but Ms Callaghan made an important point about automatic enrolment. We might want to draw the matter to the attention of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. When I sat on the Social Security Committee and convened it previously, it looked at the automation of benefits. Given the connection between our interest in the issue and that committee’s interest, it might be worth making it aware of any correspondence that we have. Apologies again.

I want to drill down into the numbers a bit more. Scott Richardson-Read, from the Association for Real Change Scotland, talked about what the number of young people in the school estate who require transition plans could be. In 2019, 128,000 young people were capable of leaving school between S4 and S6, and 47,500 did so. He estimated that about 20 per cent of young people leaving school are likely to have some form of additional support need and, therefore, potentially qualify for a transition plan. That 20 per cent would be known to education and other services, but up to 37 per cent could require a transition plan. Those figures are dramatically higher than those in the financial memorandum—there is significant disparity. Do you have any comments on that?