Seòmar agus comataidhean

It is quite reactive.

Thanks very much.

Mary, you mentioned this a moment ago to Pam Duncan-Glancy, but the UCU submission contains proposals for more engagement at a national level between the SFC and unions on issues such as fair work. What outcomes are you looking for in that respect? You will forgive me, but one part of the system that I am less familiar with is the United Kingdom-wide collective bargaining aspects, and I am interested in how they would interact with a new national-level system, structure or framework in Scotland on issues such as fair work not just at an individual institution level but with the national funding body.

Are you looking for those discussions to result in the SFC mandating that, for example, a reduction in casualisation or zero-hours contracts be part of the outcome agreement for a university’s funding?

Could we legislate for anything to address the costs? Most of the time, cost issues are policy and operational matters, but they are still under our purview. Could we alter or amend anything in the bill to address some of those concerns?

I turn to Paul Campbell. In answer to the convener’s first question, Vikki Manson talked about the value of SAAB and the role that it plays in the current system. Working on the premise that the bill will be passed, are you clear about the status of SAAB during the transition period before we get to the new system? Has Government conveyed to you its expectations of SAAB during the transition period to the new dawn, whatever that may be?

Yes—there is definitely a way that we can rebalance the parliamentary week. That goes back to what I said about the value of chamber time. I absolutely agree on the importance of getting out of the building, not only for teamwork and team bonding but for the perspectives that we would get.

I almost pose this as a question, because I am not, and have not been, a committee convener—I know that there are multiple current and former conveners in the room. My understanding, having been a member of multiple committees in the past, is that the challenge in getting authorisation to go outwith this building is often in getting the Conveners Group to sign off on that. That has varied, depending on the composition of the Conveners Group over the decade that I have been here.

Very briefly, on defining committee roles, I think that we could do a lot more at the start of the session, both in how we define the committee roles and in the new member induction.

In its recent review of the Scottish Fiscal Commission, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development clearly recommended more training for all members of Parliament on issues of financial scrutiny. We have certainly been aware of that issue in the Finance and Public Administration Committee. Members on other committees realise that the financial issues around most of what we deal with in Parliament are difficult, but they think, “It’s fine—don’t worry; there will be a financial memorandum, and the finance committee will deal that.” We want every committee to be a finance committee.

We would err on the side of preferring a bit less chamber time and a bit more committee time. That could easily tip too far—if we ended up spending twice as much time in committees as we currently do and far less time in the chamber, there would come a point at which that would be impractical. For example, we are now at a point in the parliamentary session when we are considering a lot of bills at stage 2; we will quickly get to the point where there are a lot of stage 3 proceedings, for which there will be a necessity for more chamber time.

We could probably all acknowledge—certainly in private—that, at present, the topics for debate in a lot of our chamber time are not born out of necessity. We would skew towards having a bit more time allocated to committees and a bit less chamber time than is currently the case.

Equally, one could argue that there are simply more effective ways to use the chamber time. There is no shortage of topics that deserve chamber time but that are not currently getting it.

Scottish Greens certainly support elected conveners. The single biggest potential danger with it is that we could end up in a scenario—whether it be the reality or even just the perception—in which a majority Government was choosing who scrutinised it. I think that we can mitigate that by doing what Rhoda Grant has proposed, which is to allow only back benchers to vote and not allow anybody who is a minister at the point of convenership elections to do so. That would be a good middle ground.

We certainly disagree with the Conservatives’ proposal, which—as we understand it—is to take the ministers out of the d’Hondt allocation when deciding overall committee composition. I come back to my previous point about moving too far away from the election result and the democratic mandate that we have. However, removing ministers from the ballot for electing committee conveners would mitigate that. As for the point that, in the next session, Parliament would in some cases—in a number of cases, I would imagine—be potentially choosing from a field of one, I think that that would be no worse than the current situation, and it would certainly not take us backwards.

What we could have, at least for some committees, is a situation in which candidates had to lay out in advance how they would run the committee. When I think back to my experience in 2016, I would say that that would be helpful. At the start of the current session, there was only one candidate for Presiding Officer; in 2016, there were multiple candidates, and those candidates did the rounds of members, laying out to all of us what they would change about the operation of the Parliament. I thought that that was a really beneficial debate for us to have right at the start of the session. Committees are a microcosm of that, and we could have exactly the same debate about a lot of the issues that we are talking about this morning, such as how a convener would run the committee and whether they would have, say, questions from SPICe—to go back to a bugbear of ours.

There would be an advantage to such an approach. It might not result in every committee having an open contest with multiple candidates and different platforms for how they would run the committee, but if even some committees did that, it would still be an improvement on the current situation. That is no criticism of the individuals who are conveners in this session, but there is no opportunity, in advance of members being appointed as conveners, for other members to say to them, “How would you run the committee if you were chosen?”

On the question whether that should be for the parties or for the Parliament, I think the answer is that it should be for both. There are competing priorities in committees. Our party priorities or ideological priorities are entirely legitimate. As Karen Adam said, we have all been elected here, and we all have a democratic mandate to pursue a particular agenda. However, that is quite different from the more practical training that Parliament can support.

It was beneficial to get that induction in 2016. Part of it was about the legislative process, although there were other things that probably should have come in first. As I said earlier, there is very little legislation right at the start of a session of Parliament, so we have more time to train members on the bill process. Training in post-legislative scrutiny should probably come first, because we have time to do that at the start of a session. If a committee was having to deal with emergency legislation or whatever, those members could also get priority legislation training.

Some core elements are missing at the moment. I mentioned the Fiscal Commission review, which recommended that all MSPs get training in Scottish public finance, which is important. I also spoke to Revenue Scotland last week, which would certainly be keen for all members to know what it does. The folk who get elected here generally have some level of awareness of and interest in how the Scottish public sphere works, so there will be some public bodies that everybody is familiar with. I would be surprised if anybody got elected to the Parliament and did not know what the Scottish Qualifications Authority was, for example. Similarly, most people will probably have heard of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. However, a number of the people who are elected to the Parliament are probably not familiar with Revenue Scotland, because it is one of those background bodies yet is at the core of how everything in the Scottish public sphere works, because of its role in finance in particular. There may be a need to do a bit of mapping there.

I say that with a caveat, as I think that it was the Scottish Information Commissioner who said that, every time he looks, he finds another public body that he did not realise existed. It is therefore not quite as simple as saying, “Here is the list of every public body in Scotland,” because it seems that we keep finding new ones.

The SPCB-appointed bodies are really important. Ash Regan mentioned that. An inquiry by the Finance and Public Administration Committee led to the stand-alone committee that is working on that issue at the moment.

What we found from that inquiry was quite clear: there is, and has been, a lack of understanding across Parliament in relation to the bodies that we are directly responsible for. I do not mean bodies whose operations we are responsible for scrutinising but which are still accountable to ministers—or to local government, for example, and therefore accountable to other elected representatives. A number of bodies are appointed by and accountable to the Parliament, but they come under very little scrutiny—indeed, they come under less scrutiny than they would want. The evidence that we got from them is that they want to be brought in and grilled far more often. However, members were sometimes either not aware that they existed or were not quite clear that not only were they Parliament’s responsibility, but that the committees had clear portfolio responsibility for and a relationship with particular bodies.