Meeting of the Parliament 31 October 2024
I thank Martin Whitfield for that intervention. I do not know whether he is referring to operational challenges, but those are not within our remit. Our remit is to provide the budgetary requirements and the governance scaffolding for each office-holder.
With regard to challenges around those governance structures, as we see an increasing number of office-holder posts being enacted by this Parliament, we ask, as we did during the Finance and Public Administration Committee’s evidence session, whether we have the proper capacity to carry out that role absolutely effectively. We carry out that role as best we can, but there are questions of capacity involved.
As a result of the shared services initiative, four office-holders are now co-located at Bridgeside house in Edinburgh, and there will soon be a fifth office-holder located there, when the patient safety commissioner for Scotland is recruited. That has resulted in accommodation savings. In addition, the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman provides back-office services to the other office-holders, including human resources and finance services.
The corporate body meets with the office-holders at least annually and officials in office-holder services meet with the office-holders and their staff much more regularly and frequently to share information and to ensure that there are no governance issues.
Over the past few years, particularly with the mention of proposals for up to an additional six new office-holders, the corporate body has raised concerns with Scottish ministers and the Finance and Public Administration Committee, and we are therefore grateful to the committee for holding an inquiry into the office-holder landscape.
I should make it clear that the SPCB does not take a view on whether a new office-holder should be established; that is rightly for the Parliament to determine. However, we have a vested interest, given how that would impact on our workload, our overall budget and the workload of the official whose job it is to liaise with the office-holders.
In 2009, when the Review of SPCB Supported Bodies Committee was established, the then SPCB brought forward a recommendation to merge the then six bodies into three bodies—a complaints and standards body, a human rights body and an information body. The proposal was about merging bodies with no loss of functions. However, instead of the six bodies each having its own back-office support, for example, there would have been a maximum of three back offices—and with the shared services agenda, there could have been even fewer. Two underlying principles drove those proposals: making access as simple as possible for the users of the services—in essence by providing a streamlined one-stop-shop approach—and achieving public services that provide the best value for money.
The then SPCB understood that it was a bold proposal and that not everyone would support it. However, the thinking behind the suggestion was that grouping bodies by synergies of their functions would lead to a more streamlined structure, provide greater opportunities to share services, especially if the bodies were co-located, and make it easier for the public to gain access to the office-holders through a single point of contact.
In addition, in proposing those three bodies, the then SPCB felt that its approach was consistent with the recommendations of the then Finance Committee, which had undertaken an inquiry into the accountability and governance of office-holders. It recommended that, in establishing new bodies, the first test should be that bodies with similar roles and responsibilities should be amalgamated wherever possible; that the potential to pool the resources of existing bodies, for example by sharing staff, should be considered wherever possible; and that unnecessary remit overlaps should be dealt with by removing responsibility from one of the bodies involved and adjusting budgets accordingly.
If the corporate body’s proposals had been pursued, it is unlikely that a number of the stand-alone office-holders that have since been proposed would be necessary, as there would have been an established body to which a specific cause could have been referred, which would have avoided the need to create a new position and the resulting additional governance structures and costs.
I turn to the Finance and Public Administration Committee’s report. The corporate body very much welcomes its findings and recommendations. We support the aim of bringing more coherence and structure to the landscape, as well as greater accountability, better value for money and enhanced scrutiny of performance.
The committee recommended to the SPCB three improvements to the current system, and we have written to the committee to confirm that we will shortly look at ways of further promoting our shared services agenda and will explore ways of increasing transparency in our governance and oversight arrangements. In consultation with the Conveners Group, we will consider whether improvements can be made to the written agreement between the corporate body and the Conveners Group, which sets out a robust governance role for the SPCB and promotes effective scrutiny by committees of how the office-holders carry out their functions.
I welcome the debate, and the corporate body stands ready to contribute to any on-going work on the issue.
15:17