Seòmar agus comataidhean

Scottish Greens certainly support elected conveners. The single biggest potential danger with it is that we could end up in a scenario—whether it be the reality or even just the perception—in which a majority Government was choosing who scrutinised it. I think that we can mitigate that by doing what Rhoda Grant has proposed, which is to allow only back benchers to vote and not allow anybody who is a minister at the point of convenership elections to do so. That would be a good middle ground.

We certainly disagree with the Conservatives’ proposal, which—as we understand it—is to take the ministers out of the d’Hondt allocation when deciding overall committee composition. I come back to my previous point about moving too far away from the election result and the democratic mandate that we have. However, removing ministers from the ballot for electing committee conveners would mitigate that. As for the point that, in the next session, Parliament would in some cases—in a number of cases, I would imagine—be potentially choosing from a field of one, I think that that would be no worse than the current situation, and it would certainly not take us backwards.

What we could have, at least for some committees, is a situation in which candidates had to lay out in advance how they would run the committee. When I think back to my experience in 2016, I would say that that would be helpful. At the start of the current session, there was only one candidate for Presiding Officer; in 2016, there were multiple candidates, and those candidates did the rounds of members, laying out to all of us what they would change about the operation of the Parliament. I thought that that was a really beneficial debate for us to have right at the start of the session. Committees are a microcosm of that, and we could have exactly the same debate about a lot of the issues that we are talking about this morning, such as how a convener would run the committee and whether they would have, say, questions from SPICe—to go back to a bugbear of ours.

There would be an advantage to such an approach. It might not result in every committee having an open contest with multiple candidates and different platforms for how they would run the committee, but if even some committees did that, it would still be an improvement on the current situation. That is no criticism of the individuals who are conveners in this session, but there is no opportunity, in advance of members being appointed as conveners, for other members to say to them, “How would you run the committee if you were chosen?”

On the question whether that should be for the parties or for the Parliament, I think the answer is that it should be for both. There are competing priorities in committees. Our party priorities or ideological priorities are entirely legitimate. As Karen Adam said, we have all been elected here, and we all have a democratic mandate to pursue a particular agenda. However, that is quite different from the more practical training that Parliament can support.

It was beneficial to get that induction in 2016. Part of it was about the legislative process, although there were other things that probably should have come in first. As I said earlier, there is very little legislation right at the start of a session of Parliament, so we have more time to train members on the bill process. Training in post-legislative scrutiny should probably come first, because we have time to do that at the start of a session. If a committee was having to deal with emergency legislation or whatever, those members could also get priority legislation training.

Some core elements are missing at the moment. I mentioned the Fiscal Commission review, which recommended that all MSPs get training in Scottish public finance, which is important. I also spoke to Revenue Scotland last week, which would certainly be keen for all members to know what it does. The folk who get elected here generally have some level of awareness of and interest in how the Scottish public sphere works, so there will be some public bodies that everybody is familiar with. I would be surprised if anybody got elected to the Parliament and did not know what the Scottish Qualifications Authority was, for example. Similarly, most people will probably have heard of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. However, a number of the people who are elected to the Parliament are probably not familiar with Revenue Scotland, because it is one of those background bodies yet is at the core of how everything in the Scottish public sphere works, because of its role in finance in particular. There may be a need to do a bit of mapping there.

I say that with a caveat, as I think that it was the Scottish Information Commissioner who said that, every time he looks, he finds another public body that he did not realise existed. It is therefore not quite as simple as saying, “Here is the list of every public body in Scotland,” because it seems that we keep finding new ones.

The SPCB-appointed bodies are really important. Ash Regan mentioned that. An inquiry by the Finance and Public Administration Committee led to the stand-alone committee that is working on that issue at the moment.

What we found from that inquiry was quite clear: there is, and has been, a lack of understanding across Parliament in relation to the bodies that we are directly responsible for. I do not mean bodies whose operations we are responsible for scrutinising but which are still accountable to ministers—or to local government, for example, and therefore accountable to other elected representatives. A number of bodies are appointed by and accountable to the Parliament, but they come under very little scrutiny—indeed, they come under less scrutiny than they would want. The evidence that we got from them is that they want to be brought in and grilled far more often. However, members were sometimes either not aware that they existed or were not quite clear that not only were they Parliament’s responsibility, but that the committees had clear portfolio responsibility for and a relationship with particular bodies.

There is potentially a danger. As much as I favour having smaller committees as a default position, there is the proportionality issue that we talked about earlier, especially if we look ahead to what the composition of Parliament in the next session might be. If we have six parties but a number of five-member committees, we are, by default, going to have at least one party not represented on each committee. It is never going to be perfect. Across the whole Parliament and across all the committees, we need to ensure that there is that balance.

However, if each party regularly has only one or, at best, two slots per committee, the other potential danger relates to who the party puts forward to be on the committee. The dissenting voices or those who are more independently minded might find that their opportunities either to sit on a committee at all or to sit on the committee that they would add the greatest value to are reduced as a result of party management decisions, and the Parliament misses out as a result of those people being kept off a committee. With larger committees, by necessity, parties need to fill those slots so it is harder to keep people off a committee, even if party whips might think that that would be beneficial for the sake of internal harmony.

I want to address Willie’s last point, that a Government without a majority is forced to look outward in Parliament—not that I am complaining, as I think that it is good for the Government to work with other parties in Parliament. However, my experience, from when our party was in government, is that, although the Government’s stable majority gave it less incentive to look around Parliament for broader support, it gave it more time to engage with people outside Parliament. With less time spent on winning votes in Parliament, more could be spent engaging with other key stakeholders in society. Although Parliament has an absolutely critical role, it is not the only stakeholder for Government. That is a bit of a counter-argument.

On committee size, I agree with Willie on the issue of proportionality. I do not want to predict the next election result, but polling shows that there will be six parties in Parliament in the next session, none of which would have fewer than 10 MSPs. To refer to Karen Adam’s point, there is a challenge in setting up a committee system of smaller committees while maintaining a degree of proportionality. The further we diverged from the result of the election, the more uncomfortable I would get. Because of their size, committees will never perfectly mirror election results, but we would lose democratic legitimacy if we tried to engineer something that moved even further away from them.

We need to balance the two things. In purely practical terms, there is a clear argument not only for smaller committees but for more of them. If we are going to have smaller committees, we should have a few more of them. Justice is the one area where that has happened repeatedly—in the past, we have needed multiple committees to cover justice. We have had the Justice 1 Committee and the Justice 2 Committee and, in the current session, we have distinguished between criminal and civil justice, which is probably a more useful distinction. There is definitely a lot more to do.

We have diverged quite far from the question that you asked, Rona.

We would try to match up the individual in our group who we think best suits that portfolio with the convener role, but the reality is that, for the smaller parties, the single most important factor is timetabling workload capacity. For example, when we were in government, there were seven Greens, but two were in government, so only five of us could sit on committees. Of the committees that were allocated to us, five sat on a Tuesday, so we all had to be on a committee on a Tuesday. If anybody was ever unavailable, the substitute had to miss their own committee meeting to attend, for example, a stage 2 meeting, which you really cannot miss.

In this parliamentary session, we were allocated the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee to convene. The single most important factor in deciding on our convener was the timetable of when all the committees met and who was actually available to convene the local government committee at that time.

It is not just the committees—other responsibilities also fall disproportionately on smaller parties. I am not complaining, but, for example, in each session, the four largest parliamentary parties have to nominate members to sit on the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, the parliamentary pensions board—whose title I have just got wrong—and a range of other bodies that are not parliamentary committees, but that parliamentarians have to sit on. That is fine if you are choosing from 20, 30, 40 or 50 people, but we have to choose from seven people. At one point in the previous session, six of us were—between us—sitting on 13 committees and, I think, nine other bodies.

I agree with Rhoda’s point that, out of everybody in the Parliament, we most want party spokespeople to be subject specialists, and being on the subject committees has clear advantages for them.

Willie laid out why leaving party hats or affiliations at the door is important for scrutiny in order to challenge all sides of an argument. When it comes to the point at which members have to vote in committee, such as at stage 2 of bills or on Scottish statutory instruments, there is a balance to be struck. We were all elected on particular platforms and we have a mandate based on our manifestos. It is legitimate to say that, on the basis of evidence that is collected, we might come to a different conclusion from what is in our manifestos. For example, our manifesto at the last election said that we would support legislation to improve disabled young people’s transitions into adulthood. We ended up voting against a bill on that topic because we did not believe, on the basis of the evidence, that that particular bill would achieve that outcome.

We need to make sure that there is a balance, because, ultimately, we are all here because people voted for us to be here, and they did so because they thought that we would pursue particular policy agendas. Those agendas are all legitimate, and we have that legitimacy because people voted for us. It is not as simple as saying that, in all circumstances in committee, we leave our party rosettes at the door. For scrutiny, absolutely—99 times out of 100, that should be the case. However, we legislate in committee just as much as we do in the chamber—actually, there are more votes in committee than in the chamber—and our default starting point for that should be our democratic mandate to be here. If we varied from that on the basis of the evidence, the public would understand why, but if we were to start going into committee and constantly voting against the promises that we made to get here, there is a wider point about democratic legitimacy that I would be worried about.

Absolutely, and that was the experience that we had in 2016. It was about the Parliament as a whole, with multiple candidates laying out what they would do—for example, extending First Minister’s question time. FMQs used to be half an hour; it is now 45 minutes, because that was part of the platform that Ken Macintosh pitched to members.

The more I think about what Rhoda Grant has proposed, the more I think that it would be important for ministers to be taken out of that ballot. It would ensure that we did not have a situation in which Governments were choosing those who led the scrutiny—if it were a majority Government, of course.

There are wider challenges to having more time for committee meetings than simply how we structure parliamentary committees, as Willie Rennie has touched on. We need to have what would be a challenging conversation, for obvious reasons, about whether 129 members is still the right number for a Parliament that was set up that way in 1999 but now has far more responsibility than it did at that point.

There is a fundamental capacity issue. As much as I enjoy our constituency and casework, I think that we end up doing far more casework than parliamentarians in many other European countries, because local government in this country is so weak. If local government was stronger or if we had more local government representatives, far less individual casework would come to members of the Parliament. Colleagues whom I have spoken to in Scandinavian countries, for example, find the amount of individual casework that we do extremely unusual. You could argue that that makes us better when we come to the Parliament, because we have an understanding of things on the ground, but there is still a massive capacity challenge.

In the building, there is also a tension around the amount of time that we spend in the chamber for debates, of which we could all question the public value. We often have debates that are a bit bland or of which the point is not particularly clear, and we know that that is the case because of political management—the Government not wanting to lose votes, or Opposition parties wanting to avoid difficult issues.

Perhaps we could reach a collective understanding that the chamber does not need to sit every afternoon during parliamentary sitting periods. We could agree that, once a fortnight or once a month, the chamber would not sit. If we knew that far enough in advance, committees could schedule extra meetings during that time, which would give us a bit more time for important committee work, and it might allow us to better balance the workload.

You could also make a counter-argument that we should be spending our time in the chamber more effectively.

You could do that when you know that a bill will have 600 amendments to it lodged. The flipside of that is that it is probably an advantage to have the expertise of people who have sat on, for example, a committee dealing with civil law for a number of years before you get to the point where a bill is so contested that 600 amendments to it have been lodged.

To marry that up, you could have more than one post-legislative scrutiny committee—you could have post-legislative scrutiny committees by portfolio, with a general understanding that that is how they would operate in the first half of the session. Once you got to the point where lots of bills were coming through, you could phase out those committees and move towards a bill committee structure. In that way, the number of members required to sit on committees would be broadly even across the whole of a parliamentary session.

I am quite attracted to the prospect of bill committees, based not only on the Westminster experience but on the past experience of this Parliament when we took that approach. There is an advantage to it. However, it then becomes a question of how you manage committee membership and the role of individual members across a whole session of Parliament, because bill committees would be overwhelmingly needed in the second half of a session, when lots of legislation was coming through. Perhaps, in the first half of a parliamentary session, quite a lot of members would not be on a committee or would be on only one. I think that the idea of being on only one committee is attractive to us all—and I say that as somebody who has been on two committees for all the time that I have been here. However, we need to balance that across the whole five-year term—or four-year term, if it ever ends up going back to that.

Would we reduce the size of the standing committees for the period of setting up bill committees in the second half of a session of Parliament? We have occasionally done that in the past. In the previous session, some committees had 11 members, but the health committee started off at 11 and was reduced to nine, by agreement, halfway through the session. That was not to set up a bill committee but because the Government had so many ministers that the SNP did not have the back-bench spaces and asked whether one Opposition party would be happy to take a member off the health committee if it took a member off it, too. That was agreed. There is a question of how we balance that.

As we have seen, we could set up bill committees at the start of a term on the basis of what the Government has said that its legislative programme would be, but a lot of those bills might not come forward. Even if they did come forward, it would take a couple of years and we would have a bill committee with not a lot of work to do. The alternative is a very uneven distribution of members sitting on committees across the whole term of the Parliament. I am not totally sure how we would manage that—not that we cannot usefully occupy our time in plenty of other ways.