Chamber and committees

If the SHRC were to be given more powers and had different departments, would that make the whole system more joined up than it is with separate commissioners?

That is a nice simple answer, thank you.

Ms Killean, you said that you have quite a good relationship with the Education, Children and Young People Committee. Should we, as MSPs, be doing more of the work that you are doing?

Okay. Ms Agnew talked earlier about independence. I do not know whether you saw that we had the Scottish Biometrics Commissioner in. I asked him the question because he had made the point about other commissioners, some of whom are appointed by the Government, such as the Scottish Veterans Commissioner and the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner, which you mentioned. Does it make a difference if commissioners are appointed by the Government or Parliament?

Okay. I will switch to the other witnesses.

One of the things that I have thought about, and is why I have been asking about this, is whether we can put everything into the SHRC and merge things. I asked the previous witnesses, as well, and they were resistant to that. One of the issues—if I am not mistaken—for the children’s commissioner and the SHRC is that international obligations make it impossible to put folk together in one commission.

Okay.

Finally, in your submission, you talk about the need for adequate resources to widen access to front-line advice and so on. Do you need more resources now and, if so, how much more? Is it 50 per cent more or twice as much?

I was once suspended for nine months as a councillor. At the time I had not even realised that there were two separate organisations—if there were at that time. It just seemed like all one process. If it had been one organisation it would have made no difference to me.

Dr Plastow, I picked up in your submission—I think you have mentioned it already—that some of the other commissioners are not legally separate, such the chief inspectors of constabulary, prisons, and prosecutions. Are they less independent than you and your colleagues are?

Are they less independent?

That has been covered. It is more the independence bit that I was interested in.

I think that it was Ms Savage who mentioned that the words “commission” and “commissioner” mean a lot of different things to different people. Is that a problem? We understand that things are the same internationally, in that many countries have a somewhat complex landscape. Is that a problem? Should we be trying to define “commission” and “commissioner”?

I will come to Ms Agnew in a moment, because she has touched on the independence question. I asked this question of the previous panel. Is it more important that the commissioner is independent in themselves rather than in terms of what they are called and whether they are answerable to the Government, Parliament or whatever?