Meeting of the Parliament 20 June 2018
That is absolutely right. I am sure that he bought a different pair of tartan trousers when he went to Qatar, because the other ones were not good enough.
I was intrigued by what the minister said in response to a question from a Labour member about whether the Government has ever broken the law. He dodged the question, which was intriguing. He gave an answer that was not quite an answer. I would like him, in summing up, to be clear about whether the Scottish Government has ever broken the law on freedom of information, because the dodging of the question told a bigger story.
The report is quite damning, because it shows that journalists and members of the Scottish Parliament were prevented from doing their jobs and from carrying out the scrutiny that we are elected to this Parliament to do: asking for and getting information from the Government and exposing the performance not just of ministers but of the Government as a whole. Special advisers were overruling officials to ensure that information was not being made public. Information was missing. There was a disregard for the statutory guidelines. All of that speaks to the addiction to secrecy that I mentioned.
I want to see the action plan, and I want to see progress on the action plan. Edward Mountain’s amendment is absolutely right.
Getting that right and sorting out the addiction to secrecy is not enough. Because of the expansion of outsourcing by the Government, the exposure and coverage of freedom of information legislation has been reduced. We spend about £11 billion on public procurement in the public sector. A lot of that money is spent on private companies, on which we have made some progress in the most recent set of changes although there are still a lot of private companies that are not subject to the scrutiny that they should be subject to.
I am pleased with the Government’s amendment. We worked on that amendment with the Government yesterday to ensure that it would not be defeated in Parliament today; nevertheless, it is progress. I want not just a consultation but real change and a commitment to real change, because we should be following the money. We should be following taxpayers’ money through a freedom of information regime that covers all public spending, not just what is spent strictly within the public sector.
I welcome the move today, and I welcome the fact that we are able to make some progress, but we need to make much greater progress if we are to change the addiction to secrecy that has got hold of the Scottish Government.
15:08