Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Chamber

Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2011

03 Mar 2011 · S3 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

“Session 3 reports of the Public Audit Committee—key themes”

McAveety, Mr Frank Lab Glasgow Shettleston Watch on SPTV

That exemplifies the difficult nuances with which we are dealing. When we have, with that understanding, probed some of those folk who have appeared at committee in the past few months, we do not quite get those responses.

However, that is a general issue in Scotland. As a small country, we still need to ensure that those who speak on our behalf—whether they are directed by ministers or operating in a broad policy area—reflect the direction of travel for which ministers are ultimately accountable, as Mr Swinney is aware.

The second issue around governance was something that arose from a number of key inquiries. It is clear that the gathering was a difficult inquiry overall, but a key issue was information sharing, and the question of who took responsibility and when they did so. I always use the metaphor of Scottish country dancing at school: people know what the rules are, and they have been told that they have to do it, but ultimately they are not too happy about who they will be dancing with; I am sure that the feeling is mutual across the room.

The issue is that we do not get a sense from those organisations about how the Government should work. I wanted to put one particular question to the finance secretary—I apologise that I cannot be back for general questions because of my previous commitment. In the very complicated discussions on the trams, one issue was whether there were any discussions with ministers, prior to the tram money being acquired by a decision of the Parliament, on a policy of good governance, so that Transport Scotland—the key Government agency—would step back from the day-to-day activity of the trams project board because it had previously been involved in the board.

I did not quite get the answer that I was looking for the other day, but I am sure that John Swinney will respond to that in an honest and transparent way, and we will get a clearer answer.

I want to touch on two other things, although I am conscious of time. One is the issue of what we do with regard to the investment programme. We have had honest disagreements about the Scottish Futures Trust, but it is clear that a vehicle exists there that has been doing some work, although it is perhaps not as public in its delivery as I would like it to be.

There is an issue around utilising better ways of pulling together capital investment in Scotland. It would be helpful to have some transparency in relation to the structure of an organisation such as the SFT and how it will get to the next stage, to which I understand the minister is very committed.

As a final point, I went over to the United States a couple of years ago as part of a parliamentary delegation. We saw the core model for Scotland performs, which was based around the state of Virginia’s modelling for data collection. It was very impressive, but people said the same thing that we are hearing in today’s debate. How do we get beyond those statistics to change the way in which things are delivered on a day-to-day basis? It is much more complicated than people initially thought.

Search Hansard contributions

Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2011

In the same item of business