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I am happy to work with the Electoral Commission, because all of us—politicians and the Electoral Commission—have responsibility for the issue. I am quite happy to work with the commission to find a way to get the detail and data that we need, so that we can break that down further and I can sit here in front of you and say, “This is the issue, and here is my solution.”

Ironically, for the past half hour, we have been discussing barriers to people being able to vote, and now we are talking about another barrier. I am still not convinced that the way forward is to use voter ID. Anecdotally, as an activist in the election, I was aware of a level of confusion among many voters as to how they were going to exercise their right to vote. However, I will bring in Iain Hockenhull to give you the details from the officials’ point of view.

If I may be brutally honest, I have had conversations with special advisers in particular because the fact that special advisers are part of the problem with making progress has been noted in numerous reports. However, to be fair to them—you do not often hear people say that with regard to special advisers—there was a point when a lot of FOIs were coming in and there was no leadership in Government dealing with it. A request would float about the organisation for a while until it appeared on someone’s desk with 24 hours to go. That has changed, because we have case handlers who are constantly following up matters. It is as simple as saying, “That is your FOI for your directorate; you need to get that done.” We have managed to keep moving on that as well.

Special advisers probably do not get anywhere near as many FOIs as they did previously, because of some of the things that have been brought up in the report and because they are dealt with at Government level within the directorates and portfolios themselves. Things have moved on and we have taken on board many bits of advice. It comes back to me again. My conversations with the commissioner are to discuss when we come out of special measures and move forward, because we have created a system that is getting better as time goes on. As I mentioned, the commissioner said at a recent meeting that he thought that the Government was an example of an organisation that had struggled with FOIs but had turned that around.

Well, I do not like to say that it is all about me—

Yes.

I know that. Some of the things that have been said over the past couple of weeks about that seem strange to me because, in my time in Government, basically every decision has gone through the Government’s SCOTS information technology system on my Government laptop. If I have a meeting with Jill McPherson and I say, “You’ve given me three options. I’m taking option B,” she will send me an email that will say, “Minister, at our meeting, we had this discussion and you decided to go for option B. Is that still your thought?” That is a simplistic way of saying—Mr McKee, as a former Government minister, will back me up on this—that it ain’t going to happen if it’s no in the SCOTS system. Nothing will get done unless it is done in that way.

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.