Chamber and committees

In your statements, you talked about the challenges that you face. Councillor Evison talked about fair funding packages, the idea of involving the community and ring fencing. You see all of that as potential opportunities for your organisations and for individuals.

What are some specific and focused asks that you would like the Scottish Government to look at? Are there budget areas that are real priorities for you? It could be about charging and the revenue that you can obtain, or about how your budgets are processed and the timing of that. You have touched on those issues already.

If I could get a short answer from each witness, that would be helpful.

I am also satisfied with the statement of reasons and vote yes.

What about the involvement of the third sector?

There is a lot of discussion in the programme for government about participation and ensuring that we get democratic participation across the country. What will the Scottish Government do to ensure that it increases the level and the quality of participation in the budget process?

I want to tease out slightly more about engagement and participation. Each one of you and your organisations are actively involved and you are supporting the Parliament, the Government and MSPs, so we can learn a lot from what you say about your participation. How do we expand that participation and ensure that we get the accountability and transparency.

You have mentioned other countries and areas that have active engagement. Some of them have the citizen budget and some of them develop some of that role to ensure that there is much more inclusion. However, we find that there are barriers to that, and you have identified today that the process is complex and we need to be quite forensic about how we manage that. Things can be misrepresented or they can be hidden in the process of trying to see how it all works.

I would like to tease out from whoever wishes to answer how you feel we can break down those barriers and engage. We think that we are engaging but, obviously, that is not everyone’s opinion. Our engagement is slightly less than that of other countries and regions, but at the same time we are all trying to get as much information out there as possible. It be good to hear your views on what we need to do more of to engage and ensure that we get that transparency, participation and scrutiny.

I will stick to what I asked the first panel of witnesses about participation and engagement. It would be useful to hear from all the witnesses about the degree of engagement and participation that they and those they represent have experienced. Has there been a good exchange with the Scottish Government about what its intentions are and in relation to its attempts to progress matters?

We have already talked today about barriers in the sector. Has your organisation experienced barriers? Have your client base and service users experienced barriers? It would be good to get a flavour of what you believe can be done to improve the transparency and scrutiny of the whole budget process.

I echo the comments of the convener and others about being impressed by the dedication of those who ensured that the elections took place—it would be hard not to be impressed. I commend and congratulate all who supported that.

This year was the first time that a Scottish Parliament election allowed qualifying foreign nationals and prisoners serving 12 months or less to vote. I will ask about qualifying foreign nationals first. How many were registered to vote? You have talked about barriers to accessibility and trying to remove those barriers. What are your reflections on how foreign nationals participated in the election and what lessons, if any, have you learned?

It would appear that one of the biggest barriers was the size and length of the ballot paper. Can that be looked at in the future?

That is excellent. I ask Andy O’Neill to cover the barriers and how accessible voting was.

The commission’s report shows that people with disabilities or long-term health conditions were slightly more dissatisfied and found it a bit more challenging to identify chosen candidates or parties on the regional ballot paper, for example. Those ballot papers were extensive—that is the best way to describe them—and were much more challenging for individuals in such categories. How were they supported to manage that? How are you reflecting on what can be done in the future? I do not see things changing dramatically at the next election or beyond, so a mechanism is needed to identify individuals with disabilities or long-term illnesses for support.