Chamber and committees

You say that the charter is appreciated, but I wonder how widely people are aware of it. There is a suggestion that among the users—the clients—and the staff, are people who are not terribly familiar with it.

I am sure that we will hear more about that in due course, but that is fair enough.

You have also talked about OSCR online, and I had a quick look at your website. I see that there are 2,839 charities in Glasgow, of which 50 have an income of more than £10 million, so it is quite easy to find some of that kind of information. Do you want to tell us a bit more about OSCR online, why it was produced and what difference you feel that it has made?

That ties in with what you mentioned earlier about how you try to adapt, depending on whether you are dealing with a big charity or a small charity. Is the word “charity” just covering too big an area?

To go back to the performance report, it appears that you have met quite a lot of your targets. How, then, do you set the targets for the following year? Do you increase them all, and who approves that? To be frank, some organisations make their targets very easy, so that it then looks as though they are doing really well.

Thank you. Convener, if there is time at the end, I might come back to that.

You come across as fairly relaxed about having a few more commissioners.

Following on from some of my colleagues, I note that you have already stressed that it is for the Parliament to decide on new commissioners, and the Government will have a voice in that, albeit just one voice among others.

One of our witnesses said that it was independence of thought that mattered most, more than whether a body was a Government body, a Parliament body or something else.

I get that, but I was taken by your phrase “set the tone”. It is a good one, and I think that a public statement about restricting the number of commissioners would send a message more widely.

A number of witnesses suggested that the Scottish Human Rights Commission could be strengthened and expanded and that, instead of our having lots of separate commissioners, we could give that body a bit more clout and allow it to look at individual cases. There could be, as with, I think, the United Nations, a system of rapporteurs—that is, people who report; they could concentrate on children for a few years and then on, say, older people for another few years. It would mean that you would have one organisation covering all those topics. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Okay—you are more relaxed than I am, anyway. I fully take the point, which everyone has made, that the Parliament has to decide on a case-by-case basis, but the question is: where are we going in the longer term?

Another point that you made was that the money saved from abolishing one commissioner or even all the commissioners would not be that huge. Again, I agree with that, but what if the number got seriously bigger? What if we got to, say, 50 commissioners? When I asked the previous First Minister whether he would be worried if we got to 100 commissioners, he agreed that he would, so I will now try 50. [Laughter.] Would you be worried if we got to 50 commissioners?