Chamber and committees

Do you feel that that commission is efficiently and effectively delivering what it is responsible for at the moment? Is that the SPCB’s view? If we are talking about the SHRC becoming the core in future, it is interesting to look at where we are at present in terms of what it is delivering.

This meeting has already generated so many questions and I am keen to let my colleagues in, so I am not going to ask many more.

Your point about a sunset clause is one that I brought up with the SPCB some months ago. I have always thought that a commissioner comes in with a big head of steam and all the ideas, wanting to deliver this and deliver that. One would have thought that, over a period of time, the bulk of what they were set up to achieve would either be achieved or they would hit a wall and not be able to take their role forward. To me, it has always seemed bizarre that commissions, once established, seem to go on for ever. When we ask the commissioners about a sunset clause, they say that it costs so much to set them up, so it is more value for money if we just let them roll on. Understandably, they have some self-interest in that.

Incidentally, on the financing, I do not think that the commissioners that we have spoken to are happy about the £18.2 million spend. Just so that you know for when the next budget bid comes through, they think that they could spend a lot more than that if they were given the opportunity to do so.

I think that we are aware of that.

I will finish my questions by asking about scrutiny. From what I am hearing, I do not think that the SPCB is particularly enthusiastic about having such a role. Certainly, the evidence that we have been given is that committees should be more widely involved.

Could you take us through how you scrutinise these roles? When we have taken evidence from the SPCB in the past, we have been told that the body has only one-and-a-half people who can fulfil the scrutiny function. When we look at the depth and breadth of work that some of the commissioners do and the number of staff that they have, it seems as though they are not scrutinised as well as they could be, although they will tell us that they are scrutinised in a robust way. How do you scrutinise the commissioners? Perhaps David McGill is the best person to provide us with an idea of that.

David, do you wish to say anything?

Thank you very much for that. We will continue our evidence taking next week with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, so watch this space. I thank the witnesses very much for answering our questions, and thank colleagues, too, for asking them.

We now move into private session to allow our witnesses and the official report to leave.

Is that you, Patrick? My God—I thought that you would be asking questions for a good 10 minutes yet. It is clear that you are new to the committee.

When Jackson Carlaw was talking about summits and tsars, he did not talk about the need for some MSPs to feel that they have a legacy. That used to be from members’ bills. I remember that, in the last few weeks of the previous parliamentary session, a number of colleagues brought forward a member’s bill, and I was the one who volunteered on behalf of my party to say to some esteemed colleagues who were retiring, “I do not actually think that your bill is that great and it should not progress.” I hope that someone else will take on that role in this session.

I am making a serious point. In a private session, we heard from a couple of former commissioners who had proposed, for example, a victims and witnesses commissioner and an older people’s commissioner, and who are now of the view that those should not progress, having looked at the matter from the outside. Are we at the cusp now where, as a Parliament, we should be deciding that, for example, on advocacy, we should perhaps pull up the drawbridge and say, “No, that really is an issue that should be addressed by ministers, the Parliament and individual MSPs,” rather than expect someone else to fill the gap that you talked about, which is almost a cop-out from what we as MSPs are supposed to be doing?

Is it not already welcoming and inclusive?

Is that diversity based on ethnicity, gender, social class or a combination of all those?

There are a lot of areas that I have not been able to touch on, because of time and colleagues needing to come in. My final question is: how has transparency improved over the past year?