Chamber and committees

It seems to me that, if we have a reasonably fixed pot of money—I know that we can change the budget a little bit—that means that either the Parliament or the local council would shift resources to wherever the louder voice was. If disabled people have not had a voice, they would now have a voice, and councils might take money out of schools and put it into more services for disabled people—or money might be taken from colleges or from somewhere else. That is where we are going and then, presumably, we would need a commissioner for schools, colleges or other areas, because everybody would feel that their voice was not loud enough. Where do you think we are going with all this?

Yes, that is one argument.

I understand your argument, and the committee will look at its wider report in due course. Unfortunately, there are other groups. Women are 50 or 51 per cent of the population, but I do not think that they have a commissioner as yet.

I will move to another specific area. The Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service has predicted—if I understand it correctly—that there will be a low number of prosecutions. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Do we not want lots of prosecutions?

The committee will have a view on that. As has been mentioned, there are lots of strong advocacy groups out there—RNIB and lots of other groups—that are doing really good work. I get your point that that work could be more joined up, and that could be one of the reasons for having a commissioner.

The other thing that you mentioned is investigations. I wonder whether you could explain a bit more. I do not think that there is a huge budget for investigations, so can you explain what would be involved in that? Would it be quite limited or extensive?

If we take that forward, so that the commissioner produces a report that says that day services have been cut and that is a bad thing, I presume that councils and others would comment in the investigation and there would be a bit of a cost there, but where would we go then? The commissioner would have no powers to enforce. Would the idea be to embarrass the local authorities so that they had to spend money on day services?

I have no relevant interests.

To be a little cynical, if families get a lot of advice about debt and other things, and they manage to keep their homes, does that not just mean that another family will be sitting longer on the waiting list?

Ms McGoldrick, are we just moving people around the system, as in we have the same number of people homeless but just different people?

Mr Doris got 20 minutes.