Although further transparency must be an objective for civil Scotland, I will discuss the bureaucracy aspect of the act.
RNIB Scotland represents the interests of blind and partially sighted people. Our small team covers 13 or 14 substantive policy areas of the Scottish Government’s programme and the Scottish Parliament’s work, and we engage regularly with MSPs and senior civil servants on a whole panoply of Government policy issues.
If we had to report further on the communication methods that we employ to do that, it might go some way towards achieving greater transparency, but it would also place a bureaucratic and administrative burden on RNIB Scotland, which is essentially a charity. Although we are a large charity, most of our staff do service work and not public affairs work, which means that there would be a lot of pressure on our small public affairs team.
If the reporting requirements were extended much further, we would have to consider how we could afford to meet those, and we would also have to find a way of costing that work. We would not want to reduce our main activity in order to find the staff resource to cover such administration, but we would have to find a way of doing so.
Many activities that are pertinent to blind and partially sighted people in Scotland are carried out by local authorities. We therefore regularly bend the ears of councillors and council officials, and we spend an awful lot of time engaging with them. If the direction of travel is to extend the act at some point, we would assume that its application to local authorities would have to be considered, because a lot of lobbying goes on in that regard. If we were to go down that route, we would have to set up a whole cottage industry of monitoring officers and organisations to cope with all the bureaucracy.
I flag that up not as a reason not to extend the act’s reach, but to highlight that it would have an impact on RNIB Scotland and, I would imagine, on an awful lot of other organisations. How would we service those requirements, and to what end? We must ask to what extent the public go and scrutinise such information, and what they get from that.
I have one suggestion, which might not be popular with committee members. We might want to consider whether there is a way of publishing MSPs’ and senior civil servants’ work diaries. If they were to be put in the public domain, they would show, for example, that a certain MSP, in their meetings with RNIB Scotland, had discussed issues relating to a transport bill.
Rather than organisations having to administrate all their own reporting, the information could, with a bit more resource, be gathered centrally by pooling all MSPs’ records. That would make for a smoother system, although I appreciate that putting members’ diaries in the public domain might cause other issues. It is just a suggestion.