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The third section is on public involvement in parliamentary business. Gillian Ruane has been sitting patiently. Gillian and John will lead on this section.

Thank you very much. Ronnie Paterson, Paul MacDonald, Gillian Ruane, John Sultman and Maria Schwarz, thank you all for joining us. I thank you and your colleagues for participating, and I know that your kind thanks to the many officials who were involved in assisting with the process will have been noted and appreciated. We look forward to discussing the report and to having further consultation and discussion on it with our colleagues. I hope that you will feel that, in due course, it produces results that you feel are worth while.

We will now move into private session.

Is Paul Sweeney or David Torrance prompted to ask any questions on this section?

Thank you. That brings us to the final section of the report, which is “Communication and Education”. Paul MacDonald and Gillian Ruane will lead on this section.

I am struck by the conflation of the Parliament and the Government. Sometimes, people in the Government might cynically think that the Parliament is part of the Government, but it is not.

It is interesting that, on reflection, most of the communications that people receive are from the Government—for example, they might be mailings to households relating to the pandemic, when the Government felt that it had to communicate, or national Government priorities—or from individual MSPs, potentially by way of an annual report. Such reports should not be party political, because the Parliament does not fund such things, but I know that some members find it difficult for those not to be just a collection of photos of things that they have done, given that there is a limit on what they can describe about their activities.

People also receive leaflets from political parties, which are, of course, much more pejorative. Given that we live in a United Kingdom with two Parliaments, those are often directed not at anything in particular in terms of institutions, but at politics elsewhere.

I am struck by the fact that, through the exercise that you were all involved with, you very much felt that the blurring of the lines between the Parliament and the Government affected how you thought about the Parliament as an institution, separate from the Government, with which the public can engage directly. Is that correct?

Welcome, everyone. This is our first opportunity to talk to you. I was very pleased to join the group when all its members looked rather nervously at one another over their first something to eat at the start of their work. However, I know that the work has been a tremendous experience in which everybody has really found their feet and that they have enjoyed it enormously.

Before we go into a discussion of all of that work, we will go around the table and allow everyone to introduce themselves.

I am Jackson Carlaw, and I am the convener of the committee.

Thank you. Does Paul Sweeney or David Torrance have any questions on this section?

That is a cautionary note. It suggests that we should not just blunder forward but think carefully about how we progress with the recommendations.

Ronnie, you seem to be the bus advocate. That idea has caught a certain amount of media attention. We will see what colleagues think about it. Do members have any thoughts?

Surely not!

Yes. We have had examples of some engagement buses that go around the country, be it on behalf of major power companies or in relation to health. There are buses that cover diet and how people might live better; one came to the Parliament not so long ago that focused on liver function, and people went out to visit it. Many of those buses can expand out the sides and the whole thing can open out to create quite a big working space. We have had engagement with organisations that have invested in such operations.

However, a key point for me relates to Maria Schwarz’s point about doing more research and so on. The worst thing would be if we spent a lot of money on a bus and then sent it out to find a purpose, rather than our having an idea of what the purpose should be and then validating it through research with people on what they would like the bus to do when it was in their community. We would not want it to become a white elephant, for want of a better description, or a purple and white elephant. We would want it to do something.

I am intrigued that you see the bus as being about more than just saying, “Here’s what happens in the Parliament,” and that it would also involve saying, “We’re discussing issues in your community today and we’d like you to come along and participate in that discussion.” We would have to be careful; it could not really be a constituency surgery bus, because we could not have private conversations with people about highly personal issues that they might be struggling with. However, it could certainly be a space where we could have more open discussions.