Chamber and committees

That is a fair comment.

No. The change of leadership is irrelevant to the situation. There has been an on-going programme of improvement and moving things forward. As Jill McPherson has already said, there was a conversation between the political and civil service leadership, which was between me and JP himself. Earlier this year, I told him that I was not happy with the way that things were, that it was a problem, that we could not continue like that and that things had to change—

I will answer your question as carefully and concisely as possible. We still believe that citizens assemblies are a way forward. Do we have financial constraints? Yes, we do. The level of citizens assembly participation that we were looking for will need £2.8 million to set up. That is challenging at this time, as you will be aware. When everyone in every portfolio and across portfolios is looking at their budgets, it is difficult.

Are we engaging with the public in other ways? That is why I asked a question in return. We are using other panels involving the public to ask the same questions and to engage at a smaller level. The enthusiasm is still there; the question is whether I can get the funding. Obviously, funding has moved and it will now be from the individual portfolio that is asking the question of the citizens assembly. We are looking at individual portfolios to deliver, and they are looking at that, but they also face challenges.

My opinion about citizens assemblies in general and how we go forward with them is that we should do what other nations have done and keep the questions pretty simple. The first two questions that we asked were wide-ranging: how do we save the planet and what is Scotland’s future? Those are big questions and it is difficult to find out what we could deliver from those reports. The Republic of Ireland used citizens assemblies to deal with questions that its politicians found difficult to discuss in their Parliament: they were able to use the public to push them forward. For example, a citizens assembly was used to discuss abortion. Assemblies provide an opportunity to really look at a subject.

We have committed to look at council tax and how local government is funded, and it would be interesting to hear what the public said when they got all the facts and figures in front of them. We politicians have kicked that question around for all the time that I have been in the Parliament and it would be an interesting subject for a citizens assembly. Our main issue, at this stage, is getting funding for the assemblies, but we are still engaging with the public through other means to answer such questions.

I will bring in Doreen Grove. This is one of her pet subjects and she will be able to give you a more complete answer than I can.

I was just going to say, after Doreen’s very public pitch for more funds, that she engages with colleagues across the world. There are yearly events: there was one in Rome last year and one in Tallinn this year. I did not manage to make it to those, incidentally. For the Rome one, I was in Aberdeen at the Scottish National Party conference, because I know the right thing to do. For the Estonia one, I had to be here to deal with the programme for government. However, it is important that we have those engagements, because we do not believe that we have every single good idea or right idea. It is about seeing how those other models might fit with us.

When you say “citizens panels”, I assume that you are talking about the assemblies.

There are other—

The direct answer to that is no, at this stage, but it is something that we have in mind to work out. One of our responses to the IPDD working group was that we are looking to get a central unit within Government that will be able to go out to the various directorates and quantify that cost. The whole point is to make sure that the very idea of open government is at the heart of each portfolio and directorate, so that they think that it is a normal part of their day-to-day work and not just something extra that has been added in from above. However, I understand that we still need to get a centralised team that is able to correlate all the information, so that I can come to you and say, “Well, that costs £X”.

Okay. To answer your first question very quickly, as I said, the £2.3 million is not our budget for public participation, so that is not the case.

How do we manage to bring it all together? As I said earlier, one of the things that came out of the IPDD working group was the fact that a lot of good work was happening in pockets all over Government. It was a case of us finding a central group that would bring all that together—how much the costs are and what we are doing—so that I can sit in front of you and say that we are doing X and Y in various directorates. We have decided that we are going to put that team in place, in order to make sure that we have that information and can do that. Can I tell you right here and now what is happening in various other places? Probably not, and definitely not off the top of my head. The whole idea is to get the culture of public participation into every part of Government. You will understand that, in an organisation of the size of the Scottish Government, that can be quite challenging.

I have experience of that, because freedom of information requests are part of my portfolio. I have seen what happens when you make such a culture change, as we have done recently, and you make sure that such activities are pushed as part of the day-to-day work of Government and not an addition. Getting the mentality of, “This is what we do. This is part of the job,” into the organisation as a whole is extremely important.

Do these things happen overnight? No, but I as minister, and Doreen Grove and her team, push for that in Government all the time. We have committed ourselves to having a centralised team. At a time when we are looking at taking resources away from various places, we will invest in that team in order to make sure that we get the detail.

Again, we are talking about a mix-up of terms and everything else with this subject. The budget line entitled “Public Information and Engagement” refers to marketing and communications, rather than public participation. That is at £2.3 million for 2023-24, compared to £2.8 million in 2021-22 and £2.7 million in 2022-23. That is not the budget for public participation; it is the budget for communications and marketing. It is nothing to do with citizens assemblies or anything like that.