Chamber and committees

This is a really interesting discussion. I was particularly taken with Dr Childs’s points about the technology that we have today. The immediate is not the future, and Dr Childs and Dr Williamson were very strong about looking forward to where we want Parliament to be.

One of the things that we want Parliament to be is more accessible, including for existing MSPs, and I will come on to people who might stand for election. There is a whole list of groups that we could talk about, including women, carers, parents, disabled people, those who are in remote and rural areas, and black, Asian and minority ethnic members of the community. I am keen to get a flavour of what both witnesses think are the opportunities for current MSPs with those characteristics to get a better balance in their lives and to have greater access to Parliament as things stand or perhaps in the future. I should note that the committee paper talks about unintended consequences as well—with every upside there could be a downside. Any comments from both witnesses about that would be very helpful.

I am pleased that I pushed on that issue, because we got some valuable evidence from Professor Russell and Dr Fox. Thank you for your responses.

I have a more general question. It is clear that some form of hybrid Parliament will remain, and this committee’s task is to touch, feel and smell what that would look like and make recommendations to the Presiding Officer and Parliament about that. I am guessing that that will be an iterative process, so whatever the committee comes up with and Parliament agrees to would not be the end point.

Professor Russell has helpfully talked about monitoring some of the dynamics at Westminster. Whatever reforms we recommend and implement in the Scottish Parliament, we will initially want to monitor those. How can we monitor hybrid and virtual proceedings to measure how interactions have changed and whether that has been beneficial, what the benefits have been and what the drawbacks have been? We will want to monitor whatever we recommend on an on-going basis—that will not be the end of the story—so any suggestions that you could make about how we monitor the quality of those interactions and the negatives, as well as the positives, would be very helpful.

I thank both witnesses, as it has been a very interesting discussion.

One of the things about virtual meetings—this meeting is a kind of hybrid version—is that, when I make a facial expression or twist uncomfortably in my chair, the witnesses cannot read my body language. A lot of the commentary has been made through a Westminster lens on a Westminster culture, and I think that things are very different in the Scottish Parliament. First of all, there are 129 members of the Scottish Parliament. I think that, across parties, it has been understood that it is much easier to get access to ministers and to feed in views extremely quickly. For example, we are in a hybrid meeting but I could see Edward Mountain shaking his head. It is a positive strength of a hybrid meeting that I could read Edward Mountain’s body language.

Before I move things on a bit, Professor Russell said a lot about equality, but there are various strands to that. There is equality of opportunity as well as equality of access. If some women are deterred from getting into Parliament in the first place because they do not see it as being family friendly, that means that they do not have the same opportunity as men have to be elected representatives. There are questions of equality of opportunity for carers and for dads—I have a young child in the house, so I know about this—to still have contact with their young children from time to time.

I think that this Parliament is talking about having a hybrid Parliament rather than a virtual Parliament and that there is a cross-party will to not put the hybrid Parliament that we have now back in its box, but to get right the balance between inclusion on the parliamentary campus and the dynamic that Professor Russell and Dr Fox explained extremely well, while ensuring that we do not deny underrepresented groups the opportunity to participate or to be supported as members.

Do you think that, for people to have opportunities to be elected representatives in the first place or to sustain their incumbency as an elected representative—for example, some women gave up being an MSP in the previous session because they did not see it as being family friendly enough—it is important that the hybrid arrangement endures, rather than being thrown out? I put that to Professor Russell in the first instance.

I have one final question about the unintended negative consequences of hybrid working. I was at a hybrid conference where we used a platform called Remo. I will not go into it, but the platform was fantastic in allowing people to table-hop and mingle with each other. However, what might the unintended negative consequences of hybrid working be, and how can those be mitigated? We have heard a lot about informal chats that cannot happen unless people are face to face. Nothing replaces face-to-face interactions, but mitigations can be put in place. What mitigations can be put in place to combat negative consequences?

Also, I meant to ask in my initial question—it was remiss of me not to do so—whether the reforms will make it more likely that people from underrepresented groups will stand for election.

Thank you.

I do not think that I was in any way creating a false concept of participation. This is a hybrid meeting that we are involved in. We are having such interaction at the moment.

It took me a long time to get there, but the question that I was asking was whether you think that the advantages of a hybrid Parliament from the point of view of the opportunities that it provides for underrepresented groups far outweigh some of the limitations that you mentioned, which I note seem to have been observed through a Westminster lens and seem to relate to a Westminster culture.

That is helpful. Dr Williamson, it would also be helpful to hear in your response whether, going forward, we should conduct equality impact assessments. If so, should that happen before we evolve our hybrid Parliament, or, as you have mentioned, should that be an iterative process whereby we measure those things in real time?

Dr Fox, I am not sure whether you have finished, as your connection was intermittent.

Yes.

I want to look at evaluation of PEF. I was struck by something that Jim Thewliss said at the start about the longitudinal study in relation to the impact of PEF over a number of years. I have raised that at committee before, and the convener mentioned it this morning. I will give two encouraging statistics. This year, there were record high positive destinations for pupils from secondary schools, which is quite outstanding, given everything that we have been through with Covid. The hard work for that will have been done this year, but a lot of the work to get young people ready for the wider world and the world of work will have been done in previous years. We are told that we are not very good at measuring that.

Also, in the two years before lockdown, literacy went up 3.1 per cent and numeracy went up 2.7 per cent. That is a two-year snapshot in time. There is need for longer-term research and evaluation. I am interested in hearing briefly—more briefly than my question, perhaps—from Jim Thewliss about what such research might look like: should it follow a cohort of students over their school career? I would like to hear a little bit more about that because, if we are to make recommendations on that area for the longer term, we would like to better understand what a robust research process would look like.