Seòmar agus comataidhean

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.

The convener can dictate who the committee’s witnesses are only if the committee lets them do that. There is an element of interpersonal dynamics to that. It is easier to disagree with some conveners than with others, and it is easier to disagree with some members, whether they are conveners or not, than with others. I have seen situations in which conveners have—in my view—been trying to bounce the committee into agreeing with what they want to do or to present something as if it is a fait accompli by saying, “By the way, note this,” and then they move on.

A bigger problem is when members of the committee do not come prepared to make alternative suggestions for witnesses. We do not set a clear or high enough expectation on committee members that every one should come with proposals for whom we take evidence from. That goes back to Douglas Ross’s point about the size of the country: essentially, there are professional witnesses, because there are some organisations that we need to hear from on some topics and they always send the same people. That creates the groupthink that the Parliament and our wider political sphere is often accused of having. There should be a challenge to all committee members: whether we agree or disagree with the convener’s approach to the selection of witnesses, we should all be expected to come forward with proposals of our own.

Perhaps we should set an expectation that we should come forward with proposals to seek evidence from people who have never given evidence before. On that, we might need to be more relaxed than we often are—for good reason—about whether somebody has submitted written evidence before they are called to give oral evidence. If we are trying to get a more diverse range of views, we should consider that perhaps someone did not provide a written submission because they feel so distant from the Parliament, so we should make the effort to invite them to come here.

Yes.

I understand the nervousness that a lot of members have because the perception of us spending public money and forever leaving this building is often down to misrepresentation and manipulation. However, we need to be brave enough to say that there is a necessity for that and that the range of advantages in doing that is vast. My understanding is that that would require a change in what has been the dominant culture of hesitation in the Conveners Group towards authorising such outward-bound activities. I do not know whether that is the case right now, but it has certainly been the case over the time that I have been here.