Chamber and committees

Yes, indeed. We have the SPCB before us next week. If you were in our shoes, what questions would you put to it?

Our next agenda item is to continue to take evidence as part of our inquiry into Scotland’s commissioner landscape. Before I welcome our witnesses, I apologise for the fact that they have been kept waiting for almost an hour by the question and answer session beforehand. That was not anticipated, and we will try to ensure that it does not happen in future. I want to formally apologise for the time that you have been kept waiting.

Our witnesses are Lynda Towers, convener of the constitutional law and human rights committee of the Law Society of Scotland; Dr Ian Elliott, senior lecturer in public policy, centre for public policy, University of Glasgow; and Professor Alan Page, emeritus professor of public law at the University of Dundee. I welcome you all to the meeting and I will now open up the session to questions from members. I intend to allow around 75 minutes for this session, depending on colleagues’ questions and of course your answers.

I want to start by asking about something that I found intriguing in the Law Society’s written submission. Basically, it is about the comment that

“The recognition of a fourth branch of government in addition to the three traditional branches—the Legislative, Judicial and Executive—has been occasionally proposed in constitutional law literature.”

That is, the integrity branch, which includes audit offices, independent corruption commissions, ombudsmen and parliamentary committees. Ms Towers, will you expand on that a wee bit?

Yes. One thing that I thought about when reading that point about a possible fourth branch—an integrity branch—is that it almost consolidates commissioners and so on as part of the landscape. I do not know that committee members are necessarily all too enthusiastic about that, given the issues of democratic accountability, costings et cetera. Professor Page, what is your view?

Do you think that we do?

I know that you are going to bring in Jackie McAllister, but just before you do, how concerned are you about optimism bias? What I mean by that is we all, I think, get pretty fed up when ministers stand up and say they will bring in a plan, a strategy, a statement, blah-blah-blah, by, say, the end of May—we had an example of that this morning with the medium-term financial strategy—and then, lo and behold, it is June or it is next September. They never seem to say that they are going to bring something forward in May and then they actually bring it forward in April. It never seems to happen the other way around.

It always seems to me that there is this drag whereby—it is not that stuff never happens on time but things often seem to drag. We then stand up in the chamber and say, “This was meant to have happened two months ago. We are still waiting on it. Minister, when will it happen?” and we never seem to get a date. For example, one of the most annoying phrases is “in due course”. When I ask for something, I want to know when it will happen. I do not want to hear “in due course”.

I was talking to a colleague earlier this morning and I said that when I was at university, I never handed an essay in late, but I never usually started them until the day before. The position is that if you have a deadline, you always meet it. I worked in the private sector. I cannot remember ever not meeting a deadline because your head would have been on a chopping block if you had not met it. Even if it meant you had to put all the hours in, you met that deadline. That does not seem to happen here a lot of the time. Whether it is ministers or civil servants or a combination of the two, we get a lot of drag in statements, policies, plans, strategies, whatever. I realise that that is all at a bit of a tangent from what I asked earlier, but could you say how that is being addressed?

Therefore, when you get things that are compounded by repeated delays—ferries barely require a mention because that is probably at the forefront of everybody’s mind, particularly my own since the ferries will serve my own constituency—it is about minimising that. It almost becomes part of the culture that, when ministers say that a statement will come next month or the month after, it will not happen the next month or the month after. That is one of the concerns I have.

Yes, indeed. The Government was pushing back on that. It was basically saying, “Oh, no, it was introduced in June 2023 and that should be the figures you scrutinise.” We thought that that was nonsense, because there has been a completely different set of figures since then.

I just want to try to tie that down so that, in future financial memoranda, the figures that are presented to this committee for scrutiny are the most up to date possible, not from way back when the bill was introduced, whenever that might have been.

Thank you very much. I will open out the session now, at long last. The first colleague to ask questions will be Michelle Thomson.

Lynda, you were nodding when I talked about rapporteurs.

My God. [Laughter.]