Chamber and committees

Cabinet secretary, you might have picked up the feeling about audit from the evidence that we have taken. The overall feeling is that although, on the whole, we have introduced a social security system in Scotland that is considerably more caring, adaptable and flexible than that which was previously seen at the UK level, when it comes to the audit, some of the expectations seem to be quite harsh. Could you comment on that, to start with?

Did you say in your opening statement that you are open to, or are thinking about, stage 2 amendments in that regard? Did I pick that up correctly?

Thank you.

In an interview referred to on page 54 of your report, the interviewee starts by saying,

“The current government is very enthusiastic about commissioners”,

but then makes the point that

“it’s becoming very confusing what a commissioner is”,

adding that

“the phrase commissioner is starting to lose its value in terms of what it is.”

Is it an issue that the term “commissioner” seems to mean a lot of different things in a lot of contexts?

You said that you were sometimes limited by time and how much you could ask people, but I picked up that somebody had said to you:

“‘I don’t think that given the chance to start things from scratch you would choose to create the institutional landscape that you have now.’”

Did you explore that any further with them, or with anyone else? Did you ask what, if they were starting from scratch, they felt that they would do now?

That is fine.

You and we might understand the area that we are looking at, but there are some other commissions. For example, we also deal with the Scottish Fiscal Commission, which is completely different from any of the commissions that we are discussing today. However, we still call it a “commission”, and it has commissioners and so on. Did you pick up on the public—or even the organisations themselves—getting a bit confused by that?

The fact that they said that it would lead to a wide range of different leads seems slightly ironic to me, given that we are facing a wide range of different commissioners instead of leads. It sounds as though we are going in the same direction.

That has been very helpful.

You made the point to the convener that, when the commissioner changes in a certain commission—say, the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland—the new commissioner’s approach can be quite different from that of the previous one. Is that because we have given commissioners quite a lot of scope to work within? I suppose that if their role were more clearly defined, they would be more fixed in what they could do.