Chamber and committees

I notice that a lot of our guests are very coy. So far, only MSPs have indicated that they want to come in.

Thank you. I now close the meeting.

Prior to stage 1.

Okay, who wants to go first?

Good.

Good morning, and welcome to the 16th meeting in 2024 of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. The first item on our agenda is a round-table discussion on Scotland’s commissioner landscape.

I am pleased that we are joined by Adam Stachura, associate director for policy, communications and external affairs at Age Scotland; Vicki Cahill, policy and public affairs lead for Alzheimer Scotland; Jo McGilvray, senior policy advocate at Carnegie UK, Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research at Common Weal; Allan Faulds, senior policy officer at the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland; and Rob Holland, director of the National Autistic Society Scotland. I welcome you all to the meeting. Thank you for your excellent, very detailed written submissions. Before you came in, we were talking about the amount of time that we spent over the weekend reading and absorbing them, which is a compliment to your hard work in putting them together.

I want to make it clear that this is not a situation in which I will sit and ask each of you questions. I will ask Adam Stachura an opening question that, I hope, will stimulate thoughts and conversation. If you want to come into the discussion, just let me know—put up your hand, nod your head or whatever—and I will let you in as and when I see you.

Without further ado, we move straight to questions. We expect the session to last for 90 minutes or so.

Adam Stachura, I will start with you simply because your name is first on the list and Age Scotland’s submission is the first that I have in front of me. One of the important issues when it comes to commissioners is why we need them and what difference they can make. In its submission, Age Scotland said:

“There has ... been a growth in public calls, policy initiatives and Member’s Bills for new Commissioners which address perceived gaps or inaction from government and public services on important matters.”

What do you consider those gaps to be, and why is a commissioner needed in order to improve matters?

Next, you said:

“We believe that this landscape should grow further”.

To what extent should it do so?

Okay. I have a final question and point. Obviously, we have had a detailed discussion today, as we had on 26 March, but it all stems from the fact that the Government presented to the committee figures that it knew were completely inaccurate. The costs of the bill have evolved hugely since we were given the figures. We are talking about one-off costs tripling from £800,000 to £2.356 million, and recurring costs more than quintupling from £613,000 to £3.443 million. Would not it have made the Government’s life a lot easier if accurate figures had been presented at stage 1?

I hear what you have said about stage 2, but you cannot build a house on sand. If the figures are not accurate prior to stage 1, it just means that they will be even more inaccurate further down the line. Surely, given that the committee is quite tenacious in interrogating financial memorandums, it would have been a lot easier if, knowing that the figures that were going to be given on 26 March were not accurate, they had been updated prior to that date.

That is quite common across the public sector, though. I am asking what it is about the commissioners or the office-holders that has meant that there has been such a significant increase in the current financial year compared to other organisations that are basically told, “This is your budget, make do and mend with that.”

Of course, some commissioners and commissions have been around for many years. I do not want to go into some of those questions at the minute because I am quite keen to get answers to the questions that I have. Why should the Scottish Parliament say, “We are going to have to restrict the amount that we give to front-line services because we do not have the money, but when it comes to the commissioners, we feel that it is okay to be much more generous.” That must make other organisations think, “How come they are getting between a 7 and 13.2 per cent increase in their budget and we are not?”

Yes.

The issue for us—you might not feel it from where you are sitting—is that it almost seems as though you have been insulated, relatively speaking, from the really hard decisions that are being made by the public sector across the board, given that, as I said, the Government’s cash uplift was 2.6 per cent and the minimum uplift of the organisations before us is 7.4 per cent. I think that the NHS and local government and the police would also say, “Salaries are a huge chunk of what we do.” I think that we are all in that position.

Some commissions and commissioners have been around for many years. I think, and I think some of my colleagues will agree with me, that when an organisation is set up there is a head of steam, a mission to accomplish, and a lot of things that it wants to do initially. One thinks of a big burst and then settling almost into a steady state, perhaps. Maybe I have this wrong, but that is why, when there are big jumps in terms of budget you think, “Well, why is that happening?”

I understand from the Information Commissioner’s point of view that the number of FOI requests is going up all the time and there is a real issue about that. We do appreciate that, but in other areas one wonders. Have other colleagues anything that they want to say?