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Do you mean enhancements of commissioners by parliamentary committees?

We do not want to confuse effective service delivery with how good advocacy groups are at doing their job, because that is what advocacy groups do—their job is to raise the profile of the group that they represent. We expect them to do that, and it is right and proper that they do that. That is different from whether there is a service delivery issue. An efficient, effective and streamlined public sector body landscape that is as simple as possible is the most effective and efficient way to deliver public services full stop.

We can read too much into the fact that a specific advocacy group is not named in a ministerial job title. If every minister’s responsibilities were all listed, you would see that we are all responsible for 10, 15 or 20 different things, and we are not going to put all of that in the job titles, because, frankly, it would be unmanageable. The job titles are fairly broad-reaching and cover a range of areas. The Government website provides a much fuller list of all the things that each minister is responsible for, which, in most cases, is just half a page or a page of things. If people are asking which minister is responsible for something, that information is on the Government website.

When correspondence comes to Government on a specific issue, the response unit will take a view on which minister should answer it, based on which responsibility it falls into. The fact that something is not listed in a ministerial job title does not mean that it is not a big part of the way in which the Government approaches and considers different issues.

Broadly, across the public sector landscape, yes, of course it is. An assessment of whether it is better to spend money on creating a new public body or commissioner, or on front-line services, is hugely important. I would take that further and say that the work that we are taking forward at the moment represents recognition of the fact that we already spend too much money on back-office functions, compared with how much goes to the front line. That is very much the direction of travel.

“Worried” is probably not the word that I would use. I have been very clear; indeed, this is my third time of saying that, from my perspective, my responsibility is to assess very robustly the need for any future commissioners and what they add to the landscape. Do they add more clutter, cost and confusion, or do they play an important role that needs to be carried out and which is not done by anybody else? Finally, are they value for money? You can rest assured that I will carry out that process to make sure that we do things as effectively as possible.

As for being worried, I do not lie awake at night, worrying about how many commissioners there are. It brings me back to my point—and your ridiculous example. Even if we had another 50 commissioners, the fact is that, if they all cost the same as the average of the smaller commissioners in place at the moment, that cost would be roughly the same as that of an average-sized public body, of which we have about 130.

You have to consider it in context. If I am looking to save hundreds of millions of pounds, I will look at where the big money—not the small money—is. That does not mean that the issue is not important, but I would not be doing my job properly if I spent all my time worrying about half a million pounds for a new commissioner when I should be worrying about the half a billion being spent on back-office costs somewhere else.

Again, we have to look at it in a broader context. The Scottish Parliament’s budget of around £140 million comes from the Government, so we are talking about a percentage of that number, in the context of a broader Scottish Government budget of £47 billion or £62 billion, depending on how you count it and whether you include all the non-cash and other items. Again, therefore, it is a very small percentage of the total budget.

I heard the SPCB’s evidence in relation to how it sees that. When a new commissioner is created, the SPCB will have a conversation with the Government as part of the budget process, in which it will say, “We’ve now got a new commissioner, so we need another £500,000 or £1 million to support that commissioner.” That will be part of the discussion with the Government about funding the Parliament. That funding should flow from the Government to Parliament and then on to the commissioner to support that. That would be the way in which that would normally work.

The point that I am making is that it is not the case that the Parliament will have to do less of other work because it has a commissioner that it needs to find space for. That money should flow through to it from the Government.

I am not able to speak for the Government on that. Obviously, the new First Minister will bring forward his programme for government. Of course, that has been delayed until September, because of the election period. I am not in a position to comment on that proposal.

That would be a question for the First Minister as part of the programme for government process.

That is absolutely possible. We are looking at that as part of the review. Clearly, every portfolio and every situation is different, but there is a series of questions to ask about whether, in order to improve efficiency, bodies are minimising their back-office costs through the shared estate strategy and the shared service programme for information technology, and addressing duplication between them and the Government. We are taking steps directly with public sector bodies to understand how we should go forward. In a scenario in which more than one public body is fulfilling a particular function, we will, of course, ask questions about why that is the case.

You and I have experience of seeing the situation that you describe in other large organisations in our earlier careers. It is fair to say that there is always a risk that people, wittingly or unwittingly, fall into seeking to make organisational change in order to create the illusion of progress. That is par for the course and is therefore always an issue that we need to be conscious of.

People, for good reasons, will think that they are doing the right thing by highlighting an issue that they think is important. One way in which they can do that, self-evidently, is to propose and create a commissioner. However, the next question must be whether that is the most effective way to deliver both for that group and across the broader system. That goes back to what I said earlier: keeping things simple is a very effective principle, and we want the organisational structure and the landscape of public sector bodies to be as simple as possible with as few moving parts as possible. That is how you get the most cost-effective solution and the most effective delivery, because people will not be falling over each other as they try to do their jobs, and it will be much clearer who is responsible for what and whether they have delivered.