Chamber and committees

On the question whether that should be for the parties or for the Parliament, I think the answer is that it should be for both. There are competing priorities in committees. Our party priorities or ideological priorities are entirely legitimate. As Karen Adam said, we have all been elected here, and we all have a democratic mandate to pursue a particular agenda. However, that is quite different from the more practical training that Parliament can support.

It was beneficial to get that induction in 2016. Part of it was about the legislative process, although there were other things that probably should have come in first. As I said earlier, there is very little legislation right at the start of a session of Parliament, so we have more time to train members on the bill process. Training in post-legislative scrutiny should probably come first, because we have time to do that at the start of a session. If a committee was having to deal with emergency legislation or whatever, those members could also get priority legislation training.

Some core elements are missing at the moment. I mentioned the Fiscal Commission review, which recommended that all MSPs get training in Scottish public finance, which is important. I also spoke to Revenue Scotland last week, which would certainly be keen for all members to know what it does. The folk who get elected here generally have some level of awareness of and interest in how the Scottish public sphere works, so there will be some public bodies that everybody is familiar with. I would be surprised if anybody got elected to the Parliament and did not know what the Scottish Qualifications Authority was, for example. Similarly, most people will probably have heard of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. However, a number of the people who are elected to the Parliament are probably not familiar with Revenue Scotland, because it is one of those background bodies yet is at the core of how everything in the Scottish public sphere works, because of its role in finance in particular. There may be a need to do a bit of mapping there.

I say that with a caveat, as I think that it was the Scottish Information Commissioner who said that, every time he looks, he finds another public body that he did not realise existed. It is therefore not quite as simple as saying, “Here is the list of every public body in Scotland,” because it seems that we keep finding new ones.

The SPCB-appointed bodies are really important. Ash Regan mentioned that. An inquiry by the Finance and Public Administration Committee led to the stand-alone committee that is working on that issue at the moment.

What we found from that inquiry was quite clear: there is, and has been, a lack of understanding across Parliament in relation to the bodies that we are directly responsible for. I do not mean bodies whose operations we are responsible for scrutinising but which are still accountable to ministers—or to local government, for example, and therefore accountable to other elected representatives. A number of bodies are appointed by and accountable to the Parliament, but they come under very little scrutiny—indeed, they come under less scrutiny than they would want. The evidence that we got from them is that they want to be brought in and grilled far more often. However, members were sometimes either not aware that they existed or were not quite clear that not only were they Parliament’s responsibility, but that the committees had clear portfolio responsibility for and a relationship with particular bodies.

Absolutely, and that was the experience that we had in 2016. It was about the Parliament as a whole, with multiple candidates laying out what they would do—for example, extending First Minister’s question time. FMQs used to be half an hour; it is now 45 minutes, because that was part of the platform that Ken Macintosh pitched to members.

The more I think about what Rhoda Grant has proposed, the more I think that it would be important for ministers to be taken out of that ballot. It would ensure that we did not have a situation in which Governments were choosing those who led the scrutiny—if it were a majority Government, of course.

There are wider challenges to having more time for committee meetings than simply how we structure parliamentary committees, as Willie Rennie has touched on. We need to have what would be a challenging conversation, for obvious reasons, about whether 129 members is still the right number for a Parliament that was set up that way in 1999 but now has far more responsibility than it did at that point.

There is a fundamental capacity issue. As much as I enjoy our constituency and casework, I think that we end up doing far more casework than parliamentarians in many other European countries, because local government in this country is so weak. If local government was stronger or if we had more local government representatives, far less individual casework would come to members of the Parliament. Colleagues whom I have spoken to in Scandinavian countries, for example, find the amount of individual casework that we do extremely unusual. You could argue that that makes us better when we come to the Parliament, because we have an understanding of things on the ground, but there is still a massive capacity challenge.

In the building, there is also a tension around the amount of time that we spend in the chamber for debates, of which we could all question the public value. We often have debates that are a bit bland or of which the point is not particularly clear, and we know that that is the case because of political management—the Government not wanting to lose votes, or Opposition parties wanting to avoid difficult issues.

Perhaps we could reach a collective understanding that the chamber does not need to sit every afternoon during parliamentary sitting periods. We could agree that, once a fortnight or once a month, the chamber would not sit. If we knew that far enough in advance, committees could schedule extra meetings during that time, which would give us a bit more time for important committee work, and it might allow us to better balance the workload.

You could also make a counter-argument that we should be spending our time in the chamber more effectively.

You could do that when you know that a bill will have 600 amendments to it lodged. The flipside of that is that it is probably an advantage to have the expertise of people who have sat on, for example, a committee dealing with civil law for a number of years before you get to the point where a bill is so contested that 600 amendments to it have been lodged.

To marry that up, you could have more than one post-legislative scrutiny committee—you could have post-legislative scrutiny committees by portfolio, with a general understanding that that is how they would operate in the first half of the session. Once you got to the point where lots of bills were coming through, you could phase out those committees and move towards a bill committee structure. In that way, the number of members required to sit on committees would be broadly even across the whole of a parliamentary session.

I am quite attracted to the prospect of bill committees, based not only on the Westminster experience but on the past experience of this Parliament when we took that approach. There is an advantage to it. However, it then becomes a question of how you manage committee membership and the role of individual members across a whole session of Parliament, because bill committees would be overwhelmingly needed in the second half of a session, when lots of legislation was coming through. Perhaps, in the first half of a parliamentary session, quite a lot of members would not be on a committee or would be on only one. I think that the idea of being on only one committee is attractive to us all—and I say that as somebody who has been on two committees for all the time that I have been here. However, we need to balance that across the whole five-year term—or four-year term, if it ever ends up going back to that.

Would we reduce the size of the standing committees for the period of setting up bill committees in the second half of a session of Parliament? We have occasionally done that in the past. In the previous session, some committees had 11 members, but the health committee started off at 11 and was reduced to nine, by agreement, halfway through the session. That was not to set up a bill committee but because the Government had so many ministers that the SNP did not have the back-bench spaces and asked whether one Opposition party would be happy to take a member off the health committee if it took a member off it, too. That was agreed. There is a question of how we balance that.

As we have seen, we could set up bill committees at the start of a term on the basis of what the Government has said that its legislative programme would be, but a lot of those bills might not come forward. Even if they did come forward, it would take a couple of years and we would have a bill committee with not a lot of work to do. The alternative is a very uneven distribution of members sitting on committees across the whole term of the Parliament. I am not totally sure how we would manage that—not that we cannot usefully occupy our time in plenty of other ways.

The convener can dictate who the committee’s witnesses are only if the committee lets them do that. There is an element of interpersonal dynamics to that. It is easier to disagree with some conveners than with others, and it is easier to disagree with some members, whether they are conveners or not, than with others. I have seen situations in which conveners have—in my view—been trying to bounce the committee into agreeing with what they want to do or to present something as if it is a fait accompli by saying, “By the way, note this,” and then they move on.

A bigger problem is when members of the committee do not come prepared to make alternative suggestions for witnesses. We do not set a clear or high enough expectation on committee members that every one should come with proposals for whom we take evidence from. That goes back to Douglas Ross’s point about the size of the country: essentially, there are professional witnesses, because there are some organisations that we need to hear from on some topics and they always send the same people. That creates the groupthink that the Parliament and our wider political sphere is often accused of having. There should be a challenge to all committee members: whether we agree or disagree with the convener’s approach to the selection of witnesses, we should all be expected to come forward with proposals of our own.

Perhaps we should set an expectation that we should come forward with proposals to seek evidence from people who have never given evidence before. On that, we might need to be more relaxed than we often are—for good reason—about whether somebody has submitted written evidence before they are called to give oral evidence. If we are trying to get a more diverse range of views, we should consider that perhaps someone did not provide a written submission because they feel so distant from the Parliament, so we should make the effort to invite them to come here.

Yes.

I understand the nervousness that a lot of members have because the perception of us spending public money and forever leaving this building is often down to misrepresentation and manipulation. However, we need to be brave enough to say that there is a necessity for that and that the range of advantages in doing that is vast. My understanding is that that would require a change in what has been the dominant culture of hesitation in the Conveners Group towards authorising such outward-bound activities. I do not know whether that is the case right now, but it has certainly been the case over the time that I have been here.

However, that is a responsibility on all members, not just on the convener.

That is part of it.

I remember hearing one anecdote—I will not mention what session or what committee it was in—in which one convener could not get authorisation to go to Coatbridge but the next convener got sign-off to go to Brussels. The first convener felt rather bruised by that, and it was observed that it was perhaps the showmanship of the presentation of the value of the second trip that swung it.

We all know the underlying nervousness there. Money is finite, and we should be effective stewards of the public finances. Every committee trip is subject to a freedom of information request—each gets FOI-ed. We had a recent Finance and Public Administration Committee trip to London for the meeting of the interparliamentary finance committee forum, which does what it says on the tin. There is a necessity, once or twice a year, for all the finance committees of this country’s Parliaments to come together. However, it still ended up as a Daily Express story in which all of the committee’s collective spending, which came to about £3,000, was attributed to me personally, because the Daily Express loves a Ross Greer headline, apparently. I did not mind that—

I do not think there is much to add, because Douglas Ross has summarised it well.

My only other point is that members can be elected with a particular interest that may not appear to be the issue of the day or that may not seem topical at the time. If members are aware of a particular topic, they can suggest it for an inquiry and bring it into the process of planning the committee’s work. That has, in the past, led to some really effective inquiries that have resulted in change. I do not think that that is more important than legislative scrutiny, but being able to bring topics to the table, even though they have not appeared on “Reporting Scotland” the night before, can also be an important part of the role.