Chamber and committees

When you say “national”, do you mean “reserved”, in effect?

I want to follow up John Mason’s questions and come back to the size of the public sector, before we move on. I represent the Highlands and Islands, so I understand that costs to deliver public services could be higher there. Is there a comparator for those figures for the size of the public sector in Wales, Northern Ireland and similar countries across Europe?

So the Scottish Government could defer it. Is it just for one year?

Good morning, Jeremy. On the points that you have just made, I was contacted by constituents about local roads in their area that were not suitable and were preventing them from leaving their homes, because of their limited mobility. I contacted the council and, remarkably, the council went out and sorted the situation. As you have been in many cases, I was the advocate, and I got that situation sorted out. Do you hope that a commissioner would deal with larger, wider and more general issues, and that we would still be the advocates on the smaller level? Large charities already come together on issues such as shared surfaces, so why would the suggested approach be a more effective way of dealing with those larger issues?

I do not want to put words into anyone’s mouth, but when we were talking about staff salaries earlier, Liz Anderson suggested, almost, that this was standard and that this would be the number of staff that people thought would be needed. What roles would those staff play?

In earlier discussions or exchanges, you talked about the number of new commissioners that have been suggested or which might be taken forward. However, there are concerns about how they will deliver. How will you measure outcomes in that respect? Will there be a process by which, say, the disability commissioner will say in a report at the end of each year, “This is what we have achieved, and this is how we have made things better”? Moreover, how do you think things will have changed by the end of the commissioner’s eight-year term?

Should measurable outcomes be included in the bill? Should those be very clear before the bill is passed? As I have said, that has been a concern with other pieces of legislation.

Would you expect them to come from the charity sector?

I have a final quick question—there was not really any order to my questions as I scribbled things down. You talked about the relationship between charities and others. Do you have a concern that, unless the disability commissioner takes forward an issue, that issue might be ignored by the Government?

I get your earlier point about taking a more holistic approach, but a lot of very good third sector organisations that are obviously specialists in their areas are already working together, as we have said, and they will be far better resourced to do that work than this role will be. We are talking about a disability commissioner with only four staff, whose roles are still to be determined; I imagine that there will be a communications person in there to get messages out, as well as an office administrator, but that starts to reduce the number of people doing direct advocacy and investigation. How will they be able to deliver more than far better resourced third sector organisations?