Hansard

I am delighted to speak on behalf of the Finance and Public Administration Committee. As members know, the SPCB Supported Bodies Landscape Review Committee was established by the Parliament in response to the FPA Committee’s “Report on Scotland’s Commissioner Landscape: A Strategic Approach”, which was published on 16 September last year.

One year on, we see the culmination of a comprehensive piece of work by the two committees, and I pay tribute to Ben Macpherson and his team for completing the report by June this year, as requested by the FPA Committee. My colleagues and our excellent clerking team, roared on by the SPCB, put in a huge amount of work in preparing our initial report, and I thank them for that. I am confident that our work will bring real and substantive change in creating a more strategic and coherent commissioner landscape that is fit for the future.

I will revisit some of the concerns that prompted our inquiry back in December 2023 and comment on how we approached our work and arrived at our findings. I will also reflect on the review committee’s report, which the FPA Committee unanimously endorses.

Our inquiry followed concerns that a growing number of proposals to create advocacy or rights-based commissioners could lead to the SPCB-supported body landscape almost doubling in size by the end of the current session of Parliament. That would have significant implications for the SPCB and the overall Scottish Parliament budget. The committee wanted to establish the extent to which a more coherent and strategic approach to creating and developing SPCB-supported bodies was needed and, if it was needed, how that might be achieved. We therefore sought to establish how the model was working in practice and the drivers for the increased number of proposals to create new commissioners. Possible alternative models were also considered, as was the case for a review.

We found that experiences of and frustration with public service delivery failures are reasons given for supporting the establishment of new advocacy or rights-based SPCB-supported bodies. Others felt the need for a champion to represent particular groups in society who might feel overlooked. There was strong evidence of overlap between and duplication of commissioners’ work in the wider public sector, and accountability and scrutiny mechanisms were found to be wanting.

Interestingly, in evidence to the committee, former Labour MSP David Stewart and former Scottish National Party MSP Alex Neil both said that, having pursued the establishment of commissioners during the previous session of Parliament, they no longer considered that to be the best way forward. The FPA Committee therefore unanimously concluded that it was time to pause and take stock before any new bodies were added to an already complex and disjointed landscape.

We asked the Parliament to agree to a root-and-branch review being carried out by a dedicated committee similar to the Review of SPCB Supported Bodies Committee, which was set up in 2008. The purpose of the review was to design a clear strategic framework to underpin the landscape and provide more coherence and structure to it. It would also aim to enable more effective accountability and scrutiny mechanisms to improve delivery outcomes and value for money.

We are grateful to the Parliament for establishing the review committee and for agreeing to a moratorium on the creation of new SPCB-supported bodies or the expansion of the remits of existing bodies while the review was under way. The FPA Committee is pleased that the review committee built on the evidence that we received, with its report echoing many of our findings. It is also important that, in doing so, it met the ambitious reporting timescale of June this year, showing us all—including the Government—that it is possible to produce excellent work by set deadlines.

We share the review committee’s key finding that the SPCB-supported body landscape should not be expanded to include new advocacy-type commissioners. Indeed, the FPA Committee’s report concluded that that trend is not sustainable and that

“this advocacy role is for MSPs to undertake, with Parliament holding Government to account on how it seeks to improve the lives of specific groups of society or develop and deliver effective policy, with the third sector continuing to play a crucial role.”

Our report went on to state:

“We also believe that the funding for new supported bodies would be better spent on improving the delivery of public services ‘on the ground’, where greater impact can be made.”

The FPA Committee agrees with the recommendations to enhance and formalise criteria for creating new SPCB-supported bodies, including that that must happen only as a last resort when all other models and approaches have been exhausted.

We also agree that a parliamentary committee should be given specific responsibility for the accountability and scrutiny of SPCB-supported bodies for a fixed period of time, as a pilot exercise. That is a sound suggestion. It is clear that the current model of governance and scrutiny is not working, so it is time to try something new in the next session.

As the committee that is responsible for public service reform, we share the review committee’s view that SPCB-supported bodies could and should do more to adopt a more proactive and preventative approach. We whole-heartedly agree that such an approach would not only enhance the effectiveness of the bodies but help to avoid failures in public service delivery and complaints being made in the first place.

Many of the recommendations, such as the sharing of services and offices, could easily apply to the wider public sector. We therefore welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to carry out, as part of its reform programme, a strategic mapping exercise to identify the functions of all Scottish public bodies and where those functions overlap. The review committee rightly pointed out that that would be helpful in informing decisions on future size, structure, and coherence across the public sector.

Given the unanimity of both committees, the Labour amendment is deeply disappointing. Some months ago, Martin Whitfield circulated a paper calling for parliamentary committees to be respected and strengthened, but now he calls on the Parliament to ignore—no doubt for cynical reasons of internal party management—the unanimous view of two committees following two years of hard work. That is shameful.