Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am possibly less sanguine about this, in as much as it is important to remember that most, if not all, of these commissioners are part time, not full time. It has been quite a challenging period for human rights, and the common feature over the past few years is that, when additional responsibilities have been allocated, it has been quite a milestone for the organisation. In the event that such an architecture was deliberately put in place, with a proper design for how things might operate, it would have to be introduced on a phased basis over a particular timeline. I do not think that we could say, “From January 2025, you are going to do this”—I do not think that that would work. Indeed, if we are talking about having rapporteurs and a more expanded human rights commission, some of the part-time nature of its activity might have to be reviewed, because it would have a much larger and more important function.

Therefore, I do not think that it would be safe to say that we can move from where we are to where we might be, simply by allocating immediate responsibility to the existing infrastructure. I am just not sure that it would cope.

It is important to say that the budget for that commissioner at inception was £640,000. In my eight years of experience on the corporate body, no commissioner has ever come to me and said, “I think I could cut my budget in half.” They have always said that the demand is such that they need to expand, and I can see the patient safety commissioner being a case in point. What they effectively mean by that is additional staff, and it is very easy to see how such budgets can multiply quickly.

I think that I have suggested a phased approach. My first step would not be to reverse engineer the system but, in any structure that I created, it would be understood that, at some point, the existing appointed office-holders would be required to fit within that new structure. However, that would not be my starting point.

The point that I have been trying to make is that Parliament itself now has to take a role in that. By that, I mean the politicians in Parliament who discuss these things in a transparent and open way and not the corporate body, whose job it is simply to execute the will of the Parliament. As a Parliament, we need to consider what the architecture of those positions should be.

The leadership for the actual political execution within public services comes from Government. It should be holding the public services to account and politicians should be holding the Government to account to ensure that those public services are held to account. To my mind, that is the democratic route for taking forward these things. I have always been concerned that, with this raft of commissioners, we are creating a new level of Government that did not exist when the Parliament was established. It is not elected, and it is not properly accountable, but there is a danger that the elected representatives who are challenging the Government are saying that it is not their job but the commissioners’ job to take these things forward, and we are all then left wondering what we do in that regard. Parliament has to understand the beast that it is creating, because it is Parliament that is creating it.

David McGill was hoping to come in.

I do not know that the corporate body would have a view about that in particular.

You are asking me to draw on nearly 50 years of involvement in politics.

Again—I am looking at Maggie Chapman here—that is not something that the corporate body has discussed, but I have to say that the idea that you articulate is a very interesting one. It would create the advocacy opportunity that you have identified, but perhaps with a beginning, a middle and an end in terms of clear accountability through the committee structure. You have presented a very interesting alternative way of considering how the advocacy functions might be taken forward.

In the previous session of Parliament, we did everything that we could to rationalise costs by bringing together as many of the commissioners as possible. From memory, we saved about £0.5 million through that work.

I know that additional space has become available and that there is the possibility of consolidating. That would work, because it would allow the commissioners to share some back-office functions, which would certainly save money. One or two other commissioners are located in places with quite long leases attached to them, so it will be longer before those can be looked at again.

We are pretty rigorous. The corporate body does not roll over and say, “You asked for another £1 million, how about £2 million?” We are more inclined to say, “Hang on a minute: you asked for another £1 million but can you explain why?”, and we have declined some requests.

It is also the case that some commissioners have had additional responsibilities placed on them that come with a consequent requirement for additional staff so that those can be fulfilled. I come back to the fact that it is the corporate body’s responsibility to ensure that office-holders who have been established by the will of Parliament are adequately resourced to undertake their functions. It would be difficult to apply a fixed budget, given that, even as we speak, additional responsibilities are being attached to the commissioners that we currently have and that those responsibilities will bring additional burdens with which they will have to cope.

I would hope not. There is a characteristic history of legacy reports from one parliamentary session to the next, with those legacy reports forming the basis of understanding as to how Parliament will proceed. I do not think that there is any political ill will on that point, but nobody has actually thought about it. The control that there was previously, with the Government being very reluctant to facilitate the establishment of such bodies, has changed. Therefore, if there was an agreed architecture, most MSPs in a future Parliament would be quite happy to operate within whatever that architecture was. That is my own view.