Chamber and committees

Good morning. My first question, off the back of the previous series of questions, is on the diversity of boards and public appointments. Mr Bruce, you will obviously be aware that, outside of this room, there is a much wider discussion and narrative on the use of diversity, equality and inclusion in public appointments, including those of board members and chairs. There is a large school of thought in either direction as to the importance or necessity of that.

I am not particularly asking for your view on the politics of all that but, as someone who has oversight of appointments to quite senior positions across 100-odd agencies, what is your view on that?

That is interesting. There is a valid debate around how far one should go to ensure diversity; again, there is a spectrum of views on that. I am sure that other members around the table have sat on recruitment panels for public appointments; I have done a couple over the years, and there was little diversity among the candidates that made it through the sifting process, yet there were good candidates who I felt would have added diversity due to not just their protected characteristics but what they would have brought to the table. People simply do not make it through due to the quite rigorous and specified points-based systems that we often use for such panels; they rule people out of the process early on, unfortunately, and I have not found that to be a good thing.

That is very helpful, and I think that members of the Scottish Parliament might be first on my list of people to invite you to talk to. We have obviously had a lot of board members in front of us over the years and we have seen some of the most egregious failures of boards, particularly off the back of reports from the Auditor General, and they tend to fall into one of two categories. One is where there is a blurring of relationships between boards, chairs, executive management teams, the agencies that work for organisations full time, and the Scottish Government sponsors and civil servants.

The other category is where there has been a complete breakdown of those relationships. What proactive work do you do to look at those relationships? What have you identified in any work that you have done?

Parliament has power to legislate in that area.

Is that a problem for you? It seems like a reactive role rather than a proactive one. You have already identified some patterns of issues in the NHS around turnover and the failure rate for chair appointments, for example, and the issues that certain boards are having in recruiting board members and so on. You have, over a longer period, a nice wide view of that. Would you like the power to have a more proactive role in digging into investigations in the same way that Audit Scotland, if it so chooses, can do a report on a particular body? Would you like to be able to do the same?

If there was an appetite or a need to give the commissioner’s office more power, we could do so. Is there a gap in the market for somebody to look at these 100 public bodies and how to reduce the level of complaints that come in? In other words, is there a gap for someone to look at improving best practice before it gets to the stage where things are going amiss?

Please do not take the next question as a difficult one, because I do not want to breach any confidences in your work, but how many complaints against board members—there will be nearly 800 people in this space—have you dealt with over the past year, and how many live cases are you working on? Are you seeing any common patterns or themes emerging from the nature of those complaints—again, without mentioning the specifics of them?

I think that you would find it very enlightening. We talked about that subject in great detail, and committee members raised the point that people jumping from one board to another could be seen as a revolving door, a reward for failure or the result of having a cosy club of chief executives who move on to another board for more money and leave others in the lurch.

It sounds as though there is a bit of movement of professionals within the Scottish health service or the health and social care arena who will go from an IJB to an executive role within an NHS board, from one board to another, or from a management position on a board into a non-exec position on a board. Again, I can see why there may be benefits to that. People will have experience and knowledge of how things are done in other areas. However, equally, does that perhaps point to some problematic areas? People have perhaps failed in one part of the service and are moving to another, or is the predicament that we do not have enough new blood coming from outside Scotland into the Scottish health service?

We also heard a lot in the previous session about some of the struggles that some of our more rural boards have in recruiting people. Indeed, the convener gave an excellent example of one board where some of the board members do not live in, or had never been to, the board area. Clearly, it is more difficult in a wide range of public bodies to recruit in more rural and Highlands and island areas, but how important is it that these people have local knowledge and understanding of the complexities of delivering health services outside the central belt?