Chamber and committees

I agree with that. I would add to Willie Rennie’s point that the turnover of committee members can exacerbate one of the problems with Scottish Parliament information centre questions that we highlight in our submission. If a member has been on a committee for a short period and is going to be off it within a couple of months, there is less incentive for them to become familiar with the topic at hand. Turning up, reading two SPICe questions, switching off, doing your emails and then leaving for another week is not effective scrutiny.

As Rhoda Grant said, committees offer the opportunity to take a really dive deep into an issue, which is what we want from that process. The SPICe questions are there as a broad guide, but they are too often used as a script, and they will get a scripted answer, particularly from a Government minister, in response. That might happen for quite understandable reasons. When non-Government witnesses come to committees, they are given a pretty good idea of the specific questions that they will be asked, because we want them to feel comfortable in the setting. However, that results in scripted questions and answers, and I am not convinced that it makes for particularly effective scrutiny.

I have also been on committees for which very high-quality SPICe papers have been prepared but the convener’s decision has been that no questions should be provided in the papers. It is then up to members, based on the SPICe briefing, to decide what they want to talk about, and that improves committee effectiveness.

My other point, based on the clear consensus that we do not do enough post-legislative scrutiny, is about use of the full parliamentary session. The first half of a parliamentary session is often spent doing topical inquiries into committee members’ various areas of interest, and the second half is spent on an incredibly pressured legislative timetable—it is often bill after bill—so there is no space to do topical or reactive work. That is partly because, at the start of a Parliament, a strong steer is given that not many bills will be introduced in the first couple of years. That should be the time when committees have the opportunity to do post-legislative work, particularly on everything that was passed in the previous session, as it will have had a couple of years to bed in.

It might be worth considering the guidance that we give to individual members, particularly as part of the new members’ induction, but also to committees ahead of their first work planning session in the recess after an election. We probably cannot build a rigid structure—that should always be up to each individual committee, and a lot of discretion should be given to conveners—but there should probably be a bit more guidance. It should be, “Here’s what you can realistically achieve over a parliamentary session, but bear in mind that, in the second half, you’re going to be able to do far less of what you want, and your work is going to be largely dictated by the legislation coming forward.” In that way, in the first half of the session, committees can plan to do all the other work that members collectively agree is necessary but is not happening.

Yes.

Yes, our options are extremely limited. It is often not really a choice.

Having been on the education committee for nine years now, I agree. I think that my party’s position would be, as you would expect, that the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee is the most important for us.

There is potentially a danger. As much as I favour having smaller committees as a default position, there is the proportionality issue that we talked about earlier, especially if we look ahead to what the composition of Parliament in the next session might be. If we have six parties but a number of five-member committees, we are, by default, going to have at least one party not represented on each committee. It is never going to be perfect. Across the whole Parliament and across all the committees, we need to ensure that there is that balance.

However, if each party regularly has only one or, at best, two slots per committee, the other potential danger relates to who the party puts forward to be on the committee. The dissenting voices or those who are more independently minded might find that their opportunities either to sit on a committee at all or to sit on the committee that they would add the greatest value to are reduced as a result of party management decisions, and the Parliament misses out as a result of those people being kept off a committee. With larger committees, by necessity, parties need to fill those slots so it is harder to keep people off a committee, even if party whips might think that that would be beneficial for the sake of internal harmony.

I want to address Willie’s last point, that a Government without a majority is forced to look outward in Parliament—not that I am complaining, as I think that it is good for the Government to work with other parties in Parliament. However, my experience, from when our party was in government, is that, although the Government’s stable majority gave it less incentive to look around Parliament for broader support, it gave it more time to engage with people outside Parliament. With less time spent on winning votes in Parliament, more could be spent engaging with other key stakeholders in society. Although Parliament has an absolutely critical role, it is not the only stakeholder for Government. That is a bit of a counter-argument.

On committee size, I agree with Willie on the issue of proportionality. I do not want to predict the next election result, but polling shows that there will be six parties in Parliament in the next session, none of which would have fewer than 10 MSPs. To refer to Karen Adam’s point, there is a challenge in setting up a committee system of smaller committees while maintaining a degree of proportionality. The further we diverged from the result of the election, the more uncomfortable I would get. Because of their size, committees will never perfectly mirror election results, but we would lose democratic legitimacy if we tried to engineer something that moved even further away from them.

We need to balance the two things. In purely practical terms, there is a clear argument not only for smaller committees but for more of them. If we are going to have smaller committees, we should have a few more of them. Justice is the one area where that has happened repeatedly—in the past, we have needed multiple committees to cover justice. We have had the Justice 1 Committee and the Justice 2 Committee and, in the current session, we have distinguished between criminal and civil justice, which is probably a more useful distinction. There is definitely a lot more to do.

We have diverged quite far from the question that you asked, Rona.

We would try to match up the individual in our group who we think best suits that portfolio with the convener role, but the reality is that, for the smaller parties, the single most important factor is timetabling workload capacity. For example, when we were in government, there were seven Greens, but two were in government, so only five of us could sit on committees. Of the committees that were allocated to us, five sat on a Tuesday, so we all had to be on a committee on a Tuesday. If anybody was ever unavailable, the substitute had to miss their own committee meeting to attend, for example, a stage 2 meeting, which you really cannot miss.

In this parliamentary session, we were allocated the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee to convene. The single most important factor in deciding on our convener was the timetable of when all the committees met and who was actually available to convene the local government committee at that time.

It is not just the committees—other responsibilities also fall disproportionately on smaller parties. I am not complaining, but, for example, in each session, the four largest parliamentary parties have to nominate members to sit on the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, the parliamentary pensions board—whose title I have just got wrong—and a range of other bodies that are not parliamentary committees, but that parliamentarians have to sit on. That is fine if you are choosing from 20, 30, 40 or 50 people, but we have to choose from seven people. At one point in the previous session, six of us were—between us—sitting on 13 committees and, I think, nine other bodies.

I agree with Rhoda’s point that, out of everybody in the Parliament, we most want party spokespeople to be subject specialists, and being on the subject committees has clear advantages for them.

Willie laid out why leaving party hats or affiliations at the door is important for scrutiny in order to challenge all sides of an argument. When it comes to the point at which members have to vote in committee, such as at stage 2 of bills or on Scottish statutory instruments, there is a balance to be struck. We were all elected on particular platforms and we have a mandate based on our manifestos. It is legitimate to say that, on the basis of evidence that is collected, we might come to a different conclusion from what is in our manifestos. For example, our manifesto at the last election said that we would support legislation to improve disabled young people’s transitions into adulthood. We ended up voting against a bill on that topic because we did not believe, on the basis of the evidence, that that particular bill would achieve that outcome.

We need to make sure that there is a balance, because, ultimately, we are all here because people voted for us to be here, and they did so because they thought that we would pursue particular policy agendas. Those agendas are all legitimate, and we have that legitimacy because people voted for us. It is not as simple as saying that, in all circumstances in committee, we leave our party rosettes at the door. For scrutiny, absolutely—99 times out of 100, that should be the case. However, we legislate in committee just as much as we do in the chamber—actually, there are more votes in committee than in the chamber—and our default starting point for that should be our democratic mandate to be here. If we varied from that on the basis of the evidence, the public would understand why, but if we were to start going into committee and constantly voting against the promises that we made to get here, there is a wider point about democratic legitimacy that I would be worried about.

Paul Grice mentioned the potential for intervention. The ultimate stick that the SFC can wield is to claw back funding. In reality that does not happen because, in the situation that may give rise to that intervention, taking money out of that institution is probably one of the worst things that you could do. Some other stakeholders have raised the concern that that is not really an effective stick to wield. It is not an effective enforcement power. Last year, I believe, the previous chief executive of the SFC gave evidence and she hinted that there was a need for the SFC to have a wider range of enforcement or intervention powers. Presumably, you will never want money to be clawed back from your institutions. What would other effective enforcement powers look like from your perspective? What would provide an incentive but still be a realistic option for the SFC in those worst-case scenarios?

Phiona, I am keen to hear your thoughts on this, too, just before we move on.