Meghan Douglas AM, YMW�로, Can I welcome everyone to this? The fifth meeting of the standards procedure and public appointments committee in 2024 and indeed only the second time that this committee or its predecessor committee has sat on a leap day. I've received no apologies this morning an agenda item one is for the committee to take a decision on taking item three in private. Item three we'll be considering the evidence that we are about to hear from our witnesses today. y lle gyntaf hyn, ac yn f starts. Yn iawn, 2, mae'r prif erbyn sefyllio ar y cymaint mewn ysgol iawn. Y prif erbyn eich sefyllio, mae'r ceneddio'r cymaint yw yma, y ffordd y ffordd a'u bwrdd ac ymddewch ar y cymaint mwyaf ar y cymaint. Felly, mae'n gweithio i gyd o'r gweithio i'r Llanffordd, o'r MSP, ar 1999-2001, o'r cyfrifio'r seisio'r 1-5, ond rwy'n cael ei wneud yn y cyfrifio'r ysgolion o'r 4 cyfrifio'r seisio, ac y profesor Adam Tompkins, y cyfrifio'r MSP ar y cyfrifio'r 2016 ac y cyfrifio'r 2021, ac y cyfrifio'r Cymru. Rwy'n cael ei gweithio'r gweithio'r ddweud, ac rwy'n cael eu gweithio'r gweithio'r 5 menys I Could Help, wnaith imen 있을 i gw boxa digwydd i ferbywadau y dyvie, a hyn o'r com agre fulfil gwaethaf am flaenau pob gyffrain a bach I have also one story about how I conducted myself on committees I'm not always pretending that everything I did was a model bleyf a byddwn i wedi THEY On this, what I do do me by offer you is my experience I think that I'd want to instil at kind of important committees were in early days o wneud i how important they were regarded. It was an explanation of why we would have a unicarned model parliament. We would have the committees which would be very strong. That they would have a permanent membership, a membership that was solid, that it couldn't be changed at the time of the parties and so on. There would be an emphasis on accountability and responsiveness to what was happening. So, it was a seriousness about the committees. And I certainly took the view that the opportunity committee would provide If that would be for people external to the Parliament to be able to influence the thinking of the Parliament, you may want to reflect in the extent to which that has been successful or not but I think the idea that the committee was a place where politics was done differently where you are testing ideas and arguments as supposed to performing as a politician, I think, was something that it's worth reflecting on. I think that the big challenge for MSPs in this and it's not an easy thing to resolve. is how you as an MSP, as a committee member, manage all of the bits of yourself that you bring into the room. Nobody can deny their own party affiliation or their political priorities or the priorities of the party in the Parliament at that particular time. The truth is that we have to recognise those tensions, what your constituents might want you to do, what your party might want you to do, but there is a constitutional role in the Parliament that we need to give confidence to MSPs that they can conduct through this process. At very minimum, we know, my view very strongly, that committee members should not be whipped. They should not be disciplined for not doing as their whips within their own party would want them to do. I think that there is a question of confidence of people external to the Parliament to feel that when issues are being considered by the committee that evidence other than that that you agree with is being heard in a serious way, that written evidence is looked at, that oral evidence follows from the written evidence that is being contributed and that when witnesses come before committee it is not a simpler job for members to have an argument with the person giving evidence but to simply to reflect on what they are saying, to challenge yes but not simply to continue the normal political arguments through the committee process. My questions that I would want this inquiry to answer is how is the balance of work of the committee resolved. It is about accountability of the Government, it is about running your own inquiries, how many committees have introduced their own legislation which was held up as an important role before. What balance is in terms of the burden of legislative responsibilities and to what extent is the committee able to respond flexibly. So for example you will see at Westminster we don't always use them as a model there's a crisis something happens somebody comes before committee right away there are reasons why that can't happen so easily here but that's maybe something to think about. I think you also have to think about the capacity of MSPs to do their job seriously in committee and there is a question here which is maybe just something to flag up the balance between the power of the executive against MSPs and committees in particular. If a quarter of MSPs are government ministers what is that what are the implications for the governing party back benches filling committee responsibilities and I think that is something that we need to wrestle with because parliamentary scrutiny can't simply be about opposition scrutiny it has a legitimacy if it's all members sitting in a committee across party are arguing something but if the pressure on government back benches because only half your group can be sitting committee at all I think that tilts power balance way too much towards the executive and I would argue that's probably already too much and the final point I guess I would I think there are questions around pre-legislative scrutiny post-legislative scrutiny being honest about where we got things wrong having the intellectual curiosity to ask questions that your own party don't want you to to ask but my final point I guess is this that having thought about it the response you can't teach or indirect or regulate an MSP to be responsible committee member but we should celebrate it and recognise it's a fundamental role that you come into committee to a job on behalf of our citizens in our communities not just your own party and that does mean understanding managing the tensions in your own roles responsibilities thank you perfect timing Adam one of your challenges today convener is going to be to get Joanne and me to disagree with each other because I didn't there's nothing in what Joanne just had to say that I disagree with let me say first of all that I'm not appearing in front of you as a politician I'm not a politician anymore I'd carry the flag for no political party two of you might be upset about that three of you might be relieved about that I have been studying I was obviously a member of this parliament for a while before that I was an advisor to the house of lords constitution committee for a longer while so I've got quite a lot of direct professional experience of working in and with parliaments but I've also been a student of parliaments for 30 years I teach and write about about parliaments and so most of what I have to say to you this morning convener is going to be from that kind of professional perspective rather than any kind of party political perspective and I hope my evidence will be received in that in that spirit and I hope it will be useful I want to go right back to the beginning right back to basics in a parliamentary democracy parliaments exist to do three things I mean of course first and foremost they they're there to represent their their constituents and Joanne is always very strong about that I remember her last speech in the chamber when she was giving advice to anyone who was listening said you know follow your post back and I think that's exemplary advice and typical of Joanne so parliaments exist to of course to represent people but within that they have three functions the first is to debate issues of public importance facing the nation the second is to hold the government to account in this country we don't elect governments we elect parliaments and governments emerge out of and are accountable to parliaments so parliaments exist to hold governments to account and of course thirdly parliaments exist to make law you're all lawmakers you're all legislators so I think when you think about committee effectiveness effectiveness is not a freestanding value effectiveness to do what the effectiveness to achieve what and I think that that holding those three different functions of parliament in mind is a useful way of thinking about measuring effectiveness effectiveness committees don't really have anything to do with the first of those three functions committees don't exist to rehearse arguments that should be heard downstairs in the chamber or wherever it is yeah I think downstairs in the chamber debates about general matters of public policy or affecting the nation that's not the function of committees and I agree with what Joanne said that you know anybody who is using a committee meeting to rehearse some kind of you know party political debate is misusing that that committee but but committees do exist in order to help parliament with the other two functions committees are central in the task of trying to hold the government to account for its policies administer for its administration for its decisions for its mistakes for what it gets right as well as for what it gets wrong and of course particularly in this parliament committees exist to help parliament make law in fact the burden of legislative process in in this parliament is with committees stage one and stage two are both things that take place primarily in committee rather than in in the chamber all the other of course there are stage one debates but they debates about a committee report at least that's supposed to be debates about a committee report so this so when we're thinking about the effectiveness of committees I think we want to be thinking about the effectiveness of committees in terms of helping the god helping parliament to hold ministers to account and separately I think we want to be thinking about the effectiveness of committees in terms of helping to make good law my view in very general terms and of course there are exceptions to both of what I'm about to say but my view in very general terms is that committees of this parliament are lousy at helping to hold the government to account absolutely lousy and it is one of the great failings of devolution that we have after 25 years a parliament that really doesn't do that job very well particularly in comparison with what happens down south but that the I think this parliament should be proud of its record in terms of making good law of course there are occasionally bad laws that slip through there are laws that have to be corrected by the Supreme Court or and we can talk about that if you want but by and large I think the law making process in this parliament is really quite impressive I have one or two specific criticisms to make about it but they're not particular to committees but I think the law making process in this in this parliament is broadly speaking quite impressive certainly much more impressive than the House of Commons less impressive than the House of Lords the House of Lords is the best legislature that we have in the outer kingdom because it doesn't do anything else it doesn't really spend very much time holding the government to account it is really just there as a revising chamber for legislation and some of the things Joanne said about the absence of party loyalty or that not the absence but the fact that party loyalty is not so important the fact that very little is whipped in House of Lords certainly committees are not whipped in House of Lords just lends that air of being able to kind of think about legislative policy in its own terms rather than always being filtered through or distorted by a party political lens and when you look at the mistakes that have been corrected by the Supreme Court if I can put it like that when you look at the provisions of legislation that have been quashed by the Supreme Court they've been quashed not really because of any failure of legislative process in this place but because you know political will has carried the day in a manner that has allowed legislators to sign into law provisions that go beyond competence or infringe rights or whatever it is and that I think is not a failure of process it's a failure of politics so I hope that's helpful just in terms of just thinking about what it is we want committees to be effective for and I'm very gloomy about the prospects of committees in this parliament being useful in terms of one of those constitutional functions namely holding the government to account but I'm really quite optimistic about the other so a rather mixed picture is the one I would seek to paint. Thank you and I think both those introductions are incredibly helpful and I think just I'm going to suggest that we park the legislative process in a sense I hear what you say about it and the concerns that you have and perhaps others will will look at that because what we want to try and concentrate on although I know sometimes a challenge if you're not going to deal with some of the problems that have thrown up by it what we want to what we want to try and concentrate on is as I say that effectiveness of committees just before I throw you open to the the wolves of the committee for 10 minutes each or so on various questions I was just going to pick your brain about sort of committee numbers because it's interesting again to look back over the the previous five sessions where we've had 26 committees in the first session 27 excluding ad hoc committees 23 in session three 27 in session four and 29 in session five in this session we have 17 committees so the workload that falls on a smaller number of committees with and this is not a political point but an increasingly large government a smaller group of backbenchers who can deal with it um it would be helpful to explore explore your views on that so in essence is there a perfect number of committees which presumably the answer is no but is there something about committee sizes and committee numbers that either stifles or prevents good committee effectiveness or in fact lends to it because the number of members of committees is also something that changes session on session so we tend to have larger and smaller member committees whereas previous sessions have had more even well odd numbers but a narrower range of committee members so I suppose if I come to you first join because of your experience of a number of different type committees does the size of the committee does the workload the committees expected to pick up on have a direct influence on its effectiveness well I convened a public petitions committee which very small membership hugely effective precisely because a lot of the dynamics of an ordinary committee didn't apply the agenda is determined by petitioners the evidence comes from petitioners and as a consequence of that there's a lot of flu and people learned how to work together so it's not always about the size of the committee it is about the confidence of the membership about the capacity and certain circumstances to work together I would say perhaps people should be a bit more relaxed about the haunt in some areas of committee if you can get people buying into this they have a collective responsibility as a committee do we really need a 13 members in order to prove that it's all balanced because in a normal committee session we'll all have been there where you've sat through every single person asking their question when you know you could have half the number but that is a bit confidence of the membership of the parties to that they don't need an absolutely exact replication of the balance of representation so I think so I think it's about which committee doing which I think there's another question which is the extent to which the membership is constant so that the idea that whips can just jump in and out and move you about I think there should be a default there's an expectation that if you're going on a committee you're there for a reasonable length of time I'm old enough to remember when one party tried to remove their representative from committee and she wouldn't go now that's probably unheard of in recent times but that idea that your membership of that committee was important stability was important people working together was important and I just said to you on the question of legislation which I do think you should address and that is that people have to have confidence that when a committee is looking at legislation they're not buying to the notion that this is all about good intentions and we're not the responsibility committees to look at unintended consequence and if you don't have confidence looking into a committee that they're hearing from the people who want to talk about the unintended consequences rather than the good intentions that undermines the confidence in the committee process itself so I think there needs to be round size it should be a bit more relaxed about it being absolutely replicating you can get why some of the committees that would matter but it is actually possible if there's enough maturity across the membership that you can have quite small committees that can be hugely effective because you then have more influence on what's happening during a committee session than you might have otherwise. So I think I served on four committees in my time here I was the deputy convener of the finance and constitution committee for I think four years Bruce Crawford was the convener that had 11 members and I think that all of the other committees on which I served including the justice committee which I convened for about six months or so had nine members so I don't I don't think I ever sat on a committee that is as small as this with just five but I think I would agree rather boringly with what Joanne just said I think that what matters more than size is the commitment of the members of the committee to work together as a committee to leave as far as they can their party loyalty at the door and to recognise that they're here to kind of to serve something more than just party I mean there's always an extent to which that can't be done or I mean like you can't just you know but but and I do think that that's one of the things that does work really well in the House of Commons and partly it works well in the House of Commons Stephen Kerr of course is a former member of the House of Commons as his mutton is all right so I didn't know that I'm sorry I do apologize so you will know more than I do I've never worked in the House of Commons but you will know more than I do that one of the things that is different about the House of Commons is that the culture on the committee corridor is very different from the culture in the chamber and you can be almost sort of two things at once you can be a you know a party attack dog in the chamber and not behave like that in committees and I think that that's partly a function of size and it's partly a function of architecture and it doesn't happen to the same degree in this parliament people bring their party politics into committees more than they should I think and I don't know what the solution to that is I certainly don't think the solution is having more MSPs just interrupt on that but do you think that has been a characteristic of all of the committees from session one or is it something that has crept into the Scottish Parliament over the passage of time I think it's probably more likely to be the latter than the former I wasn't around at the beginning of devolution but my recollect from what I have read from what I remember there was a quite a collective spirit across the whole of the parliament about just making the damn thing work right and that certainly that certainly evolved shall we say over time so I think more than numbers it's the spirit of the committee that matters and that spirit can be set by the convener and deputy convener but it's something that every member of a committee is responsible for and and I also think that the point that Joanne made a few minutes ago about longevity of membership is really important so the first one of the first committees I was on at the beginning of the last session was a social security committee which is obviously a new committee at the time because social security had only newly been devolved and it was a hot political issue I mean welfare reform was a weapon that was being used by the Scottish government against the UK government at the time and the social security committee got caught up in the crosshairs of all of that but nonetheless despite all of that notwithstanding that very overheated in my view political climate that committee made unanimous reports on the child poverty bill and on the social security bill that its reports on the child poverty bill in particular changed the legislation and changed government policy as a result and that was I think a real moment of triumph for that committee why because there were members on that committee including SNP members who were prepared to work with opposition members to make what was not you know perfect legislation um shall we say you know substantially substantially better on child poverty notwithstanding the fact that there was a big political climate around you know this is not this was not you know an issue which was being debated in an empty room with no members of the public present this was this was a this was a big political deal this had real political salience but notwithstanding that notwithstanding that that committee managed to work together to make better legislation and I think that's a really important example of what can be done because the members of a committee decide that actually the politics of this is getting in the way and what we really want to try and do is to have as effective a piece of legislation on child poverty as we can get. John, I mean you experienced those first five sessions did you feel that the sort of party politics came in to committees more from that initial sort of session one where you've said you know in essence everyone was desperate to make the unicarnal system work the value of committees did you notice that change or is it something that's maybe more indicative of certain committees at certain times? I mean I wouldn't want to represent what happened in session one there's some kind of golden castle in the hill where everybody was hugging each other isn't it wonderful re-birth of democracy in Scotland it's fabulous it wasn't like that at all it was a very steep learning curve it was apartment born under siege I mean you have to remember that we thought everybody really wants this we came in and people went and it was just horrendous so there was a kind of a a bit of people coming together it's also true that people were coming from the thing we learned in this place there was nowhere to hide there's no tradition you couldn't say well we don't normally do it that way what do you mean we're now deciding now how we're going to do this and so what you discovered was and this is something we've lost I can remember both as a member of the committee and as a government minister as a government minister coming in and getting what I would call a right good kicking I don't think that happens very much now by government-backed ventures feel they have a responsibility to protect their minister there was a queue to give us a hard time and it was their own people who gave us a hard time first and I think that's something we've lost and we should go back to in terms of accountability also there was a debate I can remember very clearly internally where we were being told listen you have to understand we have a programme of government our expectation is use a committee member have a role in that and people pushing back and saying but no we have this role of independent scrutiny so on so that simply captured the fact that there was attention there I wondered if I would want people at least to wrestle with these different roles rather than it being kind of accepted that if you're a government-backed venture you're going to be advised what questions you should be asked you'll be advised what outcomes there are and the you know the best advice I ever gave when I was leader to I think to my own members was follow the evidence if you're following the evidence you're not going wrong if we're introducing legislation it's not going to work it'd be better to find out now than when we're sitting in front of the supreme court being humiliated so I think that that notion because there wasn't anywhere to hide there was no tradition the danger is that the Parliament has now got traditions round behind which people hide so I think we just need to go back I would like to be an assertion of first principles you have a role as a committee member this is not a platform you want a platform for your politics or somewhere else but fundamentally you have to ask the hard question that people don't want don't want asked but will have an obligation to answer if you're going to produce good policy and good legislation thank you just a question come here it's about the changes that occurred over 25 years and and certainly John you're very well placed to offer observations on this one of the things I struggle with in this Parliament is the level and degree to which parties control everything they control who's on the committees they control who speaks in the chamber they control just about everything is that how it was originally has that evolved has that stranglehold of party business managers party leaders has that evolved to what it is now or was it always like that from the beginning I think in truth it was always attention and it will always be attention there's not any point pretending that it's not there you know people can make their name by being a maverick there's nothing more annoying than having a maverick kicking about making you look bad if you're somebody trying to just do your job so I think it is always there I personally think that and I don't think I got this into the commission that Ken Mac towards the previous presiding officer convened that I think there's an issue about the haunt being a stranglehold rather than being a kind of a baseline I think I went and visited I think it was we went to visit a parliament in Brussels and they laughed at us in fact it's Quebec they laughed at the idea that government backbenchers would have a right to questions they thought it was ludicrous because they saw it as being government backbenchers asking patsy questions and you therefore fill up time until people ask the hard questions now I think you have a choice in committee and in the chamber and elsewhere you either say you're an accountable responsible MSP even although you're a government backbencher and therefore you conduct yourself in that way if it looks like you're simply going to do what you're told then actually you then have to revisit I think there's too much emphasis it becomes a burden on the process when you insist that you know everything's divided up by the nth degree by what people voted for four years ago but there has to be a relaxation around that so I think the tensions that existed in the very first parliament are still there the question is how I think actually being honest about recognising that balance of responsibility probably makes it easier but I know that from conversations I've had with people subsequent to my retiring their frustration that committees could convene and look at legislation without apparently engaging in any way with what was very current for people externally about what that legislation was is a problem for the parliament you might not agree with what people are saying about your bit of legislation you have to give a space and test the arguments rather than simply a bit too much of dismissing evidence and dismissing witnesses or not calling witnesses actually reinforces the notion that the parliament maybe is not taking concerns external to the parliament itself seriously I think that's right so Lee joins absolutely right to say that committees must follow the evidence but there can be a lot of politics around selecting what the evidence is that comes in front of the committee and that that requires strong leadership from conveners and and deputy conveners to ensure that the that the evidence pool does not get does not get distorted by a desire either to hear one particular thing that is convenient or not to hear one particular thing that is inconvenient to government policy. The parties themselves appoint the conveners so that you know that in itself is problematic from my perspective. Well my caveat to that would be I actually do think I probably unbalanced support elected conveners but you need to strip out the government payroll vote if you're going to do it properly it has to be a back bench vote now as someone who was leader of an opposition party I can assure you there are very few carrots and even fewer sticks so you can see from the point of view of leadership in any party then you want to have some kind of control you want to have some kind of capacity to determine what your own colleagues are doing but if you've got elected conveners who are going to be determined so the elect the strongest party gets to choose who the representatives of other parties are that's not fair either and also I think one of the things you may want to wrestle with or look at is the the possibility and again Ken Macintosh's group just didn't go there which was round paid convenership and I can see why they wouldn't but I personally think the idea that a quarter of all members of this parliament are government ministers is laughable and really you know it's something that should be looked at somewhere but the notion that there's some kind of progression in terms of your career that is different from that that you don't have to keep in with your own party leadership because you can build credibility across the parliament and then get elected to do a job you can see how different and how attractive that is so but that would be around elected conveners it cannot be that the leadership of any of the parties would direct its own membership at how they would then vote so that actually would mean you would need to strip out those people who were deemed to be front bench that becomes complicated in a multi-party system when you when a small party can have an awful lot of people on their front bench because they're just filling roles and I think that's a a different set of challenges. Evelyn, can I pass over to you? Yes, thanks, convener. And thank you for both joining us again after your initial comments about being away for a long time. I know that must seem quite strange and maybe a bit daunting but thank you for your initial comments so far. I'm interested in what a really effective committee would look like and from your comments previously obviously maybe some committees are more effective than others but what is a recipe for a really good strong committee strong on scrutiny strong on holding the government to account? What does it look like? I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer to that question. I really don't. The plural of anecdote is not data but I'm just going to give you a couple of anecdotes from my experience. I was on the Covid-19 committee from when it was set up in the summer early summer late spring whenever it was of 2020 during lockdown until I became convener of the justice committee. What that committee needed to do is entirely different from what the justice committee needed to do. To judge the effectiveness of the Covid-19 committee you'd be looking at very different metrics from what you would look at if you were judging the effectiveness of the justice committee. There's lots of reasons for that but the most important one is that the Covid-19 committee by and large was not considering primary legislation. It was considering lockdown regulations but it wasn't considering primary legislation whereas the justice committee was doing hardly anything other than considering primary legislation. I was only convener of justice for six months but in those six months we did three bills from beginning to end, stage one, stage two and obviously stage three. One of those bills was incredibly controversial and required a lot of committee time, a lot of parliamentary time, the hate crime act as it now is. I would just need to break that question down into the different components as I said at the beginning of what it is that committees are here to do and that they're not all here to do the same thing. The finance and constitution committee, as it was when I served here, the most important thing that the finance committee dealt with was the budget and the budget is of course legislation but it's not normal legislation and most of the time you're dealing with fiscal policy in the finance committee and what makes a finance committee effective might be very different again from what makes a Covid-19 committee or a justice committee effective. It's not very helpful answer but I'm afraid it's only answer I can give. The answer to your question is it really depends on what committee you're talking about and it isn't one size fits all. You said it may be daunting for somebody to retire and spend my life shouting at the telly and not being attended is quite nice to come somewhere but potentially something I see might have some influence on anything at all. A good committee is efficient, it's serious, so we don't have the kind of performative setting up gotcha moments against witnesses and all that kind of serious professional where all members are engaged, I'd be interested if you took a wee snapshot of some committees where folk are on their phones and are not engaged, they're not asking questions, they're not the people who are really, they're there, there's going to be trouble and there's going to be a vote. I also think that you can test the committee but I'm talking about being respectful to witnesses. I actually think in terms of government ministers although I didn't like getting kicked about the room, it didn't have concentrate in your mind because it meant I'm not going back in there, I'm not going to have that happen to me again. So that kind of robust accountability, that tough questioning, holding somebody properly to account for their responsibilities I think I would make an exception for government ministers but not government officials, I think they have to be treated differently. Purposeful, so there's an outcome, there's a sense of that it's not just what we've got to fill up this time because we're here but we're not you know, so there is carving out time for serious pre-legislative work, post-legislative work, if I had an observation of it my time in the Parliament too much of it became sending messages rather than being accountable for delivery. Like we can all hold up a poster, I was as good as anybody else at doing it, it's not any substitute for substantial policy making, what you can actually reach out and touch, that's where the differences were made in communities. I think if the committees have got that focus that can help. Now the Public Petitions Committee is different and I would put in here that I'm concerned that its remit has been broadened to somehow be the committee responsible for civic participation, that's where matter for all committees. If the Public Petitions Committee is only taking petitions it's doing a very very good job and that's precious and that should be held on to but it's a good example of a committee that's entirely driven by the agenda external to the committee and I think that you know that rigor is a good, if you wanted to look at a model for how people work together, how their focus is not but what you bring in but what other people bring in is a good example. I should also say that good committees are at their best when they're well served by their clerks and it's probably a resource that people acknowledge sufficiently. A good quality clerking team properly resourced can mean that your professionalism when your role asking questions in a stage 1 inquiry is very different from another kind of inquiry because you have to ask witnesses all the same questions, make sure areas are covered and I think that that would again a good committee will be well resourced by proper clerking time and it might be something the committee might want to, I don't know how they would do this, but engage with the clerking process about the extent to which it feels it's properly resourced as well. Thank you for that and in a similar vein inquiries, what does a good inquiry look like and how do we make sure that there's good outcomes from those inquiries? That's a really good question. The power that committees have is the power to take evidence. So call in people whose voices are not normally heard in the budget process or in the context of making criminal justice legislation or in whatever the context is. But the effectiveness of a committee is what it does with the evidence that it garners and the point that Joanne and I both keep going back to, the courage of committee members to follow the evidence rather than to follow the party line because we're all going to meet evidence that makes our party line a little bit uncomfortable. So what do we do with that? What makes a good inquiry is a group of people sitting around the table week in week out for some number of weeks focused on the evidence and on what they want to do with the evidence in the interests of the committee, the Parliament and the public rather than in the interests of the party line, I think, is the key thing. As I said in my introductory remarks, I think that there are really quite remarkably good examples of this Parliament doing that well, doing that job well, even in contexts which are very highly charged in terms of partisan rough and tumble. The early work of the Social Security Committee would be a good example of that. I think I hope that the work that I convened when I was the convener of the Justice Committee is another example of that, but that's not for me to say. So I don't think that committees can't work well when they're dealing with a matter which is very highly charged as a kind of partisan matter in the heat of the moment. I don't think that at all, but I do think that the real power that a committee has is to determine who they want to hear from. The test of a committee is the extent to which, having heard from the people that they've heard from, they really are following the evidence rather than allowing that evidence to be filtered through, that is to say, corrupted by the party line. I would say that one of the things that struck us in the early days of the Parliament, where there was a legislative lag, if you like, legislation that was required, but it wasn't possible for the House of Commons to get through.  So a good inquiry knows where there are people with expertise and it's not just the experts and the friends of the committee, and that's another area that would be worth looking at. I know that the conveners group did this at one point looking at who's called to evidence by sex, by ugeography, by professionalism, and I know that, for example, calling for evidence from people who are wholly funded by the Scottish Government, their evidence should be regarded in a different way from some use of volunteer groups, so that's something that might be worth just putting into the system. I know that people have argued with us that if you're coming before committee and you're funded by the Government, then that should be obvious. There are a couple of really good examples of inquiries in the Scottish Parliament in very early days around the contamination of blood. Actually, at Westminster UK level, they're probably now catching up with something that was compensation schemes and stuff that were being discussed in the first Parliament when the then health minister, Malcolm Chisholm, was saying, I'm not good, I can't stand in the face of this. Something has to be done, this is a scandal. Another good example is probably still working its way through the system that started off in the Public Petitions Committee, a great place to look for good inquiries that could be pursued. There was a whole question of mesh in the way in which women were treated because it was an issue. When people came in contact with it across party, I'm very proud of MSP colleagues who said, this cannot go on and pursued it over a long period of time. The feature of it was that those are not inquiries that were created in committee rooms by MSPs, but it's what the system, what it's telling. I would argue that if you're a good MSP, you're picking that up in your surgeries and so on. A good inquiry is not something dreamt up in here, but emerges out of people who already say this, and we want you to look at it in detail. A related issue to that is the extent to which MSPs know that they can attend other committees and are welcome to attend the Public Petitions Committee. There was another good example where there was a general interest in petitions, and we had a facility to ensure that other members would come along and ask questions. I think that that's something that ought to be encouraged if you want an energy around the deliberation of the committee. You want just this kind of process. It's a Wednesday morning, so I'm going to go along and look concerned about X. It drives more energy into the process if that's acknowledged as well. What are your views on pre- and post-legislative scrutiny? I'm a reasonably new MSP, but I see a lot of pre-scrutiny. I haven't seen a lot of post-scrutiny. What's your view on the balance of that? Do you think we should have more post-scrutiny? Pre-legislative scrutiny would mean that the post-legislative scrutiny, easy for me to say, would be a lot happier process. I'm a question that I would ask again is the extent to which a head of stage 1 consideration of a bill, for example, is there serious pre-legislative scrutiny by committee? It seemed back in the date that it was something that took up a lot of time. A head of a bill being published, there was work done by committee. I know various committees of the Parliament, including the Audit Committee, again highlighted the need for post-legislative scrutiny. It would be quite good to know that legislation that everybody celebrates ascending a signal actually made a difference to repeat myself from earlier, and a bit of post-legislative study rather than just, oh, well it ended up in the Supreme Court, but that didn't go well. It would be good to know what has worked well and learned lessons from it. You need to think about how that process is managed. Everybody says that it's a good thing. I don't think that anybody has ever quite got to the place where they worked out how you would do it in a serious way. That's right. Post-legislative scrutiny is one of those things that people like the Hansard society, people like the study of Parliament group, they're always saying that Parliament needs more post-legislative scrutiny, and it's a mantra in the scholarship and in the literature. I don't know of a Parliament anywhere in the world that does post-legislative scrutiny particularly well. I don't think this Parliament does it particularly badly in comparison with any other Parliament because I don't think any Parliament does it particularly well because the agenda moves on and politics is always about what's next and never about what happened two or three years ago. I think that chasing after world-class post-legislative scrutiny might be a bit of a chimera, not to say that we shouldn't nonetheless chase after it, but it might be one of those aspirations that's never reached. Pre-legislative scrutiny, I think, matters much more. The reason why I think it matters much more is because parliamentary scrutiny of Government policy is at its most effective when the Government is not too deeply dug in. You can have really good pre-legislative scrutiny in this Parliament even when there's no formal stage of it if the Minister proposing the bill comes to the committee and says, this is work in progress. There might be things here that we haven't quite got right. I'll give you an example of where that went well and it was the way in which Gene Freeman handled the Social Security Bill. When Gene Freeman came to the Social Security Committee with the Social Security Bill, she opened the door to all parties, all five parties were represented in that committee and all of us were invited to talk to her about what was good, bad and ugly in that legislation. There wasn't much that was ugly in it, but what was good and bad in that legislation and the atmosphere of the way in which that committee was able to do its early deliberation on what became the Social Security Act was kind of pre-legislative and that wasn't anything formal or anything structural, it was the way in which the responsible Minister decided that that was how she would handle the process and she won the Scottish politician of the year as a result of getting this Parliament to vote unanimously for her legislation at the end of the stage three process because of the way in which she handled that process and that's the last time I'm going to be nice on the record about my friend Gene Freeman. There's a serious point here which is that whether you call it pre-legislative scrutiny or not, you can have effective pre-legislative scrutiny if the Minister responsible for the bill comes to the committee that's doing the stage one work in that kind of frame of mind. Another example of where it went well was the hate crime bill. One of the reasons why we were able to make so many changes to the hate crime bill is because the Minister responsible for it knew that he was going to have to make changes to it as the current First Minister of course, Hamza Yousaf. I think the legislative process that led to the enactment of the hate crime act was really impressive, was really good. I would say that wouldn't I because I was involved in it. I think your concerns about the hate crime bill are not about the process, they are about the substance of what was actually in the legislation, which is a different issue and I didn't vote for the legislation either but we're talking about process and committees and pre-legislative scrutiny. I think a lot can be done by committees in this Parliament when it is understood that bills are not the last word and that the government isn't necessarily dug in or whoever's proposing the bill whether it might be a private member's bill, whoever's proposing the bill whether it's a minister or any other member of the Scottish Parliament isn't so dug in and committed to every clause and every provision or even every aspect of policy that is reflected in that legislation. I think you can have really effective stage 1 scrutiny. It doesn't always happen but it can happen. My observation on the hate crime legislation is not to dwell on personal grief. There's a difference between somebody listening to you and actually paying attention and changing. I think you're right if your pre-legislative work is done early enough where it's not regarded as a disaster if you've changed your position. I took through legislation back in the day when there weren't very many ministers. The deputy ministers, it was their job to go to committee and to work through and to feedback. You're not going to win that one. We're going to have to shift in that and I took through quite complicated legislation and would say, for example, I never lost an amendment. Now, by saying I never lost an amendment, what meant was we'd made the changes before I was going to lose the amendment. So there's a kind of a flexibility that's built into it, which I think is essential. That's a mindset thing. If you set something up as a disaster of your beating, you end up digging your heels in in support legislation that's ineffective and there's been a couple of good examples of that, I think, in the Parliament. The system needs to be open to the possibility that even if you're well-intentioned, there are consequences to this that are really very poor. I think that that notion that you don't circle yourself to something and then not contemplate the possibility, there might be an unintended consequence that nobody thought of that somebody is now flagging up to you. The last thing in those circumstances of Parliament should be doing is waving that away because somebody else will live with the consequence even if it's not not you. I think that that rigor, we should not be afraid of rigor, we shouldn't be afraid of debate, we shouldn't be afraid of—I can't think of specific examples, but I do recall way back in the day, in the very early days of the Parliament, folk coming to the committee and giving them and saying, well, you might not have thought of this, and it's not a very huge issue, but this is going to be a problem. And as a committee, both informally, and I know this happens with Government-backed benches, we would speak to a minister informally through the committee, you could say, you need to address this again. Nobody lost face if you can then—it's the same as a proper stage 1 report with proper recommendations, nobody loses face by accepting these recommendations. I mean, we're 25 years here, I think there's a reasonable expectation that people could be matured, but the things we can have a ding don battle about, not about something like this, where digging of heels into legislation, where other people will live with the consequences, is something that good parliamentarians should resist, I think. I'm going to do that, not as convinced as pre-printed bit at the top of the script. I am conscious of time. Anything else? Anne, do you want to come in and I know that Stephen has a comment to Anne? Yes, yes, thank you very much. It's good to see you both back, it's been a long time but it's good to have you back. I've just got a couple of remarks here and a couple of questions.  How could we make that better and what's holding us back from if there's a crisis happening? How do we make sure that we can get them in as soon as possible? I'm also looking at work, committee workload and all that, but should there be a process to call them into committee to question them? How would that work? That, in a sense, is just a process question and it's a matter maybe for discussion with clerks. One of the things, again, that Ken Macintosh Group looked at was the possibility of committees meeting at the same time as the chamber. I can't see why that's a problem if it's a debate, which is that there's not going to be a division. Frankly, if we were capable of people sitting at home on Zoom being engaged, we should probably cope with people being in committee at the same time. That would open up time but there's a question of resource there. In a sense, that provision is much more about the public. You see the post office crisis.  That has never happened here.  That public role is probably quite important. How you actually do it, again, if something needs to be spoke to professional admin expertise, but wanting to do it is quite important. It's like the only place in the universe where the thing that's been discussed everywhere is not being discussed as in the Parliament because we're still having... This used to drive me bananas back in the day when we would be having a three-hour debate about whatever when the rest of the world was going to hell in the hand-cat. We didn't seem to be capable of saying, well, you know what, let's find a way of just putting that to one side or cutting that debate, having an honesty about what, you know, providing five speakers on something where we can all agree with each other for three hours is a waste of time and energy as well. So there is an element about people cross parties having to be, I think, been pretty rigorous about saying, you know, that's an indulgence. We've got this other stuff that we need to talk about, but, again, you would have to have respect for the professional administrators who are managing that process. You don't want it just simply to be... Either the committees or the Parliament basically being buffeted by whatever's going to be on the six o'clock news either. Your inquiry is about the effectiveness of committees, right? But if you absolutely understand that, but the really ineffective bit of this Parliament is not the committees, it's the chamber, for all of the reasons and more that Joanne talks about. The committees are much more effective than the chamber. Okay. We have a very interesting interest of report about the chamber and the procedures there, and it is a journey. Say no more than that at the moment. At the very basic level of there being nowhere to hide, if you're in a committee and I've been that soldier, you're sitting there, you're going to get asked another question and another question. Whereas we formalise it so much in the chamber, we just go blah blah blah for long enough. The clock's run down and the world is moved on. Not that I would ever have run down the clock thing, but anyway, that's why the committees I think need to take even more seriously the capacity and opportunity and power they have to bring a Government minister in and be relentless with them because there isn't any risk to refer to your notes when somebody's got you in their sights. Thanks very much for that. The other thing is well, and I think you touched on this as well, Joanne. Do we think that we always have the same people in to give witnesses to the same committee? I know I was on the Equalities Committee for four years and I knew exactly what was going to be in front of me every other week, but we never heard the voices of We Bet If, Broome Hill or whatever. I know we're trying to do this better in the Parliament, but how can we, as committees, listen to what people are saying that they want us to do and their views on certain criteria that we are looking at, especially in things like equalities, finance, housing and local government? A lot of those people feel too far away from the committee, but we need to hear those voices in order for us to make good legislation and put forward good reports to the Government. One of the things that committees do is instead of waiting for people to come here, go and see them. Again, when I was on the Social Security Committee we went to Jobcentus and talked to people who were claiming universal credit. We didn't wait for them to come to us. We went to see them. I would encourage committees to think more creatively and to think more about that. Of course, there are budget implications, but committees in all parliaments struggle with the problem of the usual suspects. There are deeply embedded entrenched lobby interests and voices that represent those lobby interests that come before committees year in, year out. It's not just the gender balance that needs to be thought about in terms of committee witnesses, it's frequency. You might even want to have a quota that, once you've appeared in front of a committee a couple of times in a session, that's it. We'll try and hear from somebody else. Obviously, one would want to make exceptions to that, especially for former members of the Scottish Parliament. The problem that Annie has landed on is a very real one. I know that the clerks that I worked with worked very hard to try not just to go back to the usual suspects, but there's a reason why the usual suspects become the usual suspects, and that's because they're good at doing what committees need. You don't want lectures from your witnesses even when they're professors. You want evidence that you can use and not everybody has the communication skills that allow them to convert their lived experience or their professional expertise into something that is usable by a committee given all the other constraints on your time. Usual suspects become usual suspects, not just because we're all very lazy and we like hearing from the same people all the time, but because some people are good at helping committees do their work and be more effective. It's a problem that we need to be mindful of and working to push back on all of the time. The usual suspects themselves have changed a bit. I think that one of the observations that I would make from this very long time when I was here, even more ancient than I normally feel, is that organisations that were engaging with the Parliament, whether it was charities or very powerfully in the early days groups around learning disability, had really powerful things to say. I suspect we look at these organisations a lot of them now. We'll now be employing COMS experts, so your usual suspect is somebody who's developed an expertise in communicating, as opposed to being the families of a disabled child who, in the very early days, for example, in education, one of the early bills in education, where they won an argument round presumption of inclusion. I don't think that it didn't feel at the times of professional communicators. It was very powerful. It was families, parents and so on that they were speaking. That professionalism has not just been about who we're asking to speak, but the organisations themselves have felt the need to engage in a particular way, which I think can be a problem. I would reiterate the point that Adam Smith made about being creative about going out and speaking to people and taking your evidence in a different way. I made the point earlier about groups and organisations that are fully funded by the Scottish Government. Two things have been suggested. First, that that should be clear, that you don't use the validation of your position, the organisation that you're funding to validate your position, but that there should perhaps be an accountability of those organisations if they're funded in that way. Is there a process in the Parliament for bringing these groups in to talk about what they do, because a lot of what they will do will be very good, but to what extent are they constrained? In my experience, we took evidence, for example, on the Education Committee from Education Scotland SQA, which was a joy. I can remember other members, and I wouldn't have said this, but they felt that this was happening every year, and the same frustrations and nothing really changed. The extent to which there has to be a kind of attention, a pressure around that process as well—it's not to say that you shouldn't do it, but that there should be a degree of skepticism or challenge by committee members around that as well. It should be anything that feels like the committee is doing it by rote. This is a month that we see X, then you're missing the point of what the committee might be able to do. I've got one other question, convener, and I was going to come on to the Government funding, but because I think it is important that, if they are coming to committee, that they are up front, and maybe there's a declaration they make at the beginning, if they're giving witness statements or they're contributing just to say that they are fully funded by the Scottish Government. The last one for me, and it was something that, having been back now a second time, I've dealt with one on the way in, one on the way in and one on the way out, legacy reports. I think that it's one of Jo-Anne's colleagues, Mary Fee, who was on the Equalities Committee. When I came in 2016, there was a legacy report on Gypsy Travers. I think that when Mary left in 2021, there was a legacy report on Gypsy Travers, and I'm sure there will be another one when we go in 2026. So, how can committees look at the legacy reports and actually go back and, and we should be able to go back and see what the Government's doing, because we've given them the report, they've seen the legacy report, but we still seem to get the same questions every time Parliament changes. I just don't know whether is it valuable, and it's only valuable if we actually properly scrutinise it and do something with it on the first session that the committee gets reconstituted? What the legacy report is saying, Annie, is that the legacy report that my clerks prepared on my committee's behalf when I left as the convener of the Justice Committee was the principal point, as far as I recall, was that the Justice Committee doesn't have any time to do anything apart from look at Government bills, because it was, you know, it was big bill after big bill after big bill that was coming to the Justice Committee, but the action on that doesn't rest with the Justice Committee, probably doesn't even rest with the Government. It rests with the people who are sitting around the table at the beginning of a new Parliament designing what committee structure that Parliament is going to have, and how many committees, and I know that one of the things that happened in this Parliament that wasn't the case in the Parliament in which I served is that there are now two Justice Committees, one on criminal justice and one on civil justice, maybe that was because of what we said in the legacy report, maybe it wasn't, I have no idea. But it's not always going to be the case that the actions, the points you make in a legacy report are points that a committee can deal with. They might be a set of issues for somebody else. If you have the same substantive policy area being kind of just kicked into the grass by Parliament after Parliament, then that's a failure of political will. Just because there are, for whatever set of reasons, there just is not the political will to address it, we all know that it's an issue that needs to be addressed, but none of us want to do it. It doesn't matter what committee structure you have. That's not a structural problem, that's not a systemic problem, that's a political problem. I'll let you and I reset me just adding on to that as well. Committees meet once a week, sitting days, Tuesdays and Thursdays. We do have a lot of legislation that comes in front of us. We do have legacies that we want to look at. We have things that come up and we want to do our own sessions on it. We want to interrogate people or whatever. I don't think that we have enough time on committees to do all that, especially Thursday morning committees, when we do need to stop. I know that Joanne, you were saying that Ken Macintosh had looked at committees sitting at the same time. I just feel that you get quite frustrated when you are doing the same thing over and over again and you don't get to go and work planning days, business planning days for committee and sometimes we never get to the real bit that we want to do. Should we do committees Monday to Friday and the Monday to Friday could those be days that we could be out and about in the community to do a bit of evidence gathering or what? Or do we still keep to the structure Tuesday to Thursday on sitting days? I know that's I just want your thoughts on it, that's all. The problem is that committees are slotted around the chamber, not the lower round. I would just turn it upside down. The least important thing that happens in this building is what happens in the chamber because most of it is scripted, most of it leads to nothing, most of it is not even, most people on the outside don't pay any attention. It matters much less than you think it matters when you are in MSP. When you are in MSP you think that the chamber is the kind of the heart of the thing, it's not, it's not. If chamber business was at the convenience of the committees rather than committee business being at the convenience of the chamber, I think that we would have a much more effective Parliament without sitting on Mondays and Fridays. Can I just make a couple of points? First of all on the question, we're going to go back to us around funded groups. I think that it should be transparent. I think that what has changed, when we were in government, we funded organisations to challenge what we were doing. It never occurred to me, for example, that these organisations would just do my bidding. I used to go to conference and get kicked up and down the room by whatever my housing organisation or women's organisation and be anxious and worried about actually going. There's a cultural thing that has shifted there, so it's not too much that they're funded, but if they're funded then directs what they are able to say about a piece of legislation. I really don't want to know that the group that has been funded by the government 100 per cent agrees with the government and that that is given any validity and nobody else is giving a space in it. It's not always the case, but it is sometimes the case. On the question of legacy reports, committees need to be serious about what they actually want. They shouldn't just give a big list of all the things that would be really good if somebody else did next time round. What were the things that were most frustrating to committee members and make that your legacy and make that a pressure point? You talked about gypsy travellers. I ended up at one point while I was a minister being responsible for gypsy travellers and we set up a working group. It was very effective. There's a question about whether you keep developing good policy and it's never implemented. That's not about either legacy or what happens in here. It's an incapacity organisation to make real in the world what the policy debate is. Legacy should be taken seriously. Committees need to look at it when they're reconvening and have respect for it, but I suspect that in that example, less is more. The last point that I would make is really around the role of committees. I think that too much or not enough time is taken, for example, in secondary legislation. I used to get into trouble because I had questions. I said, well, I'm sorry, I'm boring you, but this is our job as legislators. The danger is, again, I've probably been there, where as well as secondary legislation we can get that past the committee quite easily. People need to be very alive. Quite important decisions can get made around secondary legislation, so you need to have a committee and support from clerks. It's a fleet of foot in that regard. The final point is that around time, if what you're doing matters, then the time needs to be found. Clearly, Adam is completely right. The balance is not right at the moment when you can have a couple of hours of wearisome, tedious consensus around X, when, in fact, there is a really important issue that needs to get wrestled with, and the committee is the best place to do that because it's a different kind of forum. Even though, laterally, I was a list member, I would hold on to the notion of the importance particularly. It used to be that it wasn't two constituency days. It was one constituency day, but you did parliamentary work in a different way. I can't remember which was which, which was Monday or the Friday. It's entirely reasonable that a committee could be doing work on a Monday if it involved going out and engaging with folk. I think that notion for getting the balance right in terms of your work as a parliamentarian, being serious about your local community constituency work, should be recognised in the parliamentary timetable. Thank you very much, convener, thank you very much. Thank you, and again, I'm conscious of time. Stephen, can I? With a conscience of time, I'm afraid. You've said that three times in relation to my section, so that's okay. I get the message. I've got as concern about power and the power imbalance between the executive and this parliament. There's been a number of references to the feature of this parliament was to be its powerful committees. They were to be in place of a second chamber. So let me challenge something that Adam said. He was critical of the scrutinising powers of the parliament in relation to this power balance, but then you were quite full of praise about process, but a process that leads to law being designated ultra-v rays. Surely that's a failure in the process. No, I don't see it like that. I think it's baked into the devolution settlement. This is not a sovereign parliament. It's not a parliament of unlimited competence. It is a parliament of limited competence and its competencies are limited by law, and the only people who can ever have an authoritative word about whether those competencies have been exceeded or not is a Supreme Court. Not even a law professor is a more important voice in that argument than a Supreme Court judge. So no, I don't think it's a failure of devolution at all. I think this is an example of devolution working. Now, you might not like devolution. You might want something else, but we have devolution for the time being. Devolution means that we have multiple parliaments in the Etude kingdom. They can't all do everything that they want to do. Some of them have limits imposed upon them by the law, and those limits must be tested and ultimately enforced by courts. But there must be something amiss in the process if, during legislative process, the Parliament, the committees, whatever it is, doesn't come up against this idea that actually this is probably outside of the scope of the authority of the Parliament. Well, surely that is a process-related defect. I see the force of that argument, but I'm not sure that—I'm not sure—well, first of all, I would say that even though the number of cases that the Supreme Court has invalidated provisions of acts of the Scottish Parliament has increased of late and not decreased of late, it's still tiny. So most legislation passed by this Parliament is not challenged by the Supreme Court, and even if it is challenged by the Supreme Court, it's not necessarily invalidated by the Supreme Court. There are very well-known examples of where the Supreme Court has taken a view about legislation, which is different from the view that this Parliament took, not because the Parliament ignored the question of competence, but because the Supreme Court just took a different view. The continuity bill would be a really good example. There's a lot of debate in this place in 2018 about whether the continuity bill was within competence or outwith competence, not least because the then Presiding Officer certified that in his view it was not within competence, but the Parliament proceeded to enact the legislation anyway, and then it went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court invalidated certain provisions of the bill on grounds very different, actually, from the grounds that the Presiding Officer had identified as his reasons for thinking. The outcome was that large parts of the legislation were invalidated, but the process was that Parliament enacted legislation fully with it in mind that we were running up against the limits of competence, but the ultimate decision maker on this was not for us, it was for the Supreme Court. That, to my mind, is devolution working, devolution within the law working, and not a failure of the parliamentary process. I said that it would be a challenge to find a difference between the two of us, but the one difference between the two of us is that I was intimated in an earlier remark that it was some kind of embarrassing failure to lose a case in the Supreme Court. It's not. The definition of a case that goes to the Supreme Court is a definition that's plausibly arguable either way. Otherwise, what's it doing in the Supreme Court? It's no embarrassment to lose a case in the Supreme Court. It's a reflection of the fact that within a parliamentary democracy that is committed to the rule of law, powerful courts, appeal courts are there to ensure that even institutions as prestigious as this one act within and not beyond the limits of their legal competences. I think that that's perfectly normal. Right. Can I just say what is embarrassing is if you're told that people have argued that there is an issue with this legislation and it's been waived away? So it's not that the Supreme Court found it. It was that they already knew and chose not to pay any attention to it. And I think, you know, we all know that they've been controversial. Because of time and trying to rose back to committees. I'm just very conscious of time and I know there's still another member. Interesting as this discussion is. I think it does relate to the nature of committees, particularly in relation to the legislative scrutinising responsibilities. So very briefly then, to please the convener, who I like to please. I was a member of the select committee in House of Commons. The chair of that committee was Rachel Reeves and Rachel was a brilliant convener because she said at the outset, in chairing the meeting, when people come in front of the committee and they leave, they need not to have thought once about what the party affiliation of the person in the committee was. They shouldn't be able to tell the difference between us. And that is not the case clearly from your evidence this morning, from your reflections. That is not the case in our Parliament. I want to understand why that is the case. Is it a reflection on the calibre of our MSPs? Yes, partly. It is. It's partly a reflection of political culture in Scotland, which has become over the course particularly of the last 10 or 12 years much more dominated by party loyalty than perhaps it was in the first period of devolution. It's partly also a function of size. I am not in favour of the Scottish Parliament growing in terms of its number of members. I think there should be fewer elected politicians in Scotland, not more elected politicians in Scotland with all respect to those in the room who have been elected. I do think that the fact that it is easier in the commons of 650 members to be a maverick and to make a career as a maverick and to make that career on the committee corridor without worrying too much about what happens in the chamber is harder here because there are fewer people to start with. It's partly a function of calibre, partly a function of size and partly a function of the changed nature of Scottish political culture, which has become much more driven by party loyalty. It is beginning to break down and not before time, so I am optimistic that things will get better rather than worse. I think that it's worth saying that you can't ignore the fact that, for the last how many years, every discussion has been a proxy for a big discussion around the constitution. Even if you don't particularly agree with a policy, you don't want to be seen to be on the wrong side of that big divide in terms of your own party and divide. I think that that has concentrated people's minds, its focus people's minds, is maybe inhibited people's capacity to disagree because it is then given more significance than otherwise. I also think that party discipline in a multi-party system devised by PR then your rebellion makes an awful lot more of a change. We learned this very early on where there was an accidental rebellion, I've had a call, on something to do with ferries in the very first Parliament, where people thought, well, we can't possibly support this. None of us had discovered they had beaten their own government by accident on something they hadn't quite realised. It was quite such a serious matter. I think that that's part of it as well, and I think that that's allowed it. Just to finish a point round, if you were asking a lot of people around organisations and people I work with now about the faults of the Parliament, we've had to have grassroots organisations develop to do the work that they thought a committee would ask. Women's organisations are an emerging women's movement against Scotland, which has almost entirely come out of a frustration that the system is not asking the questions that they weren't asked, and they're not demanding answers that they weren't answered. There's a whole structure of people doing really serious policy work, and their frustration is that they're doing it on a voluntary basis when the system should be doing that. That is a challenge. Is that a reflection of calibre? I can't, I mean, don't ask me to judge anything. Adam was only too happy to say, do you have a view? How does calibre, what is, it's not to me? Let me put it this way, I don't think the capacity for people to be serious about their jobs remains the same. The reward for being serious about your job and independent of what the parliamentary process is and your leadership and your party and all the rest of it is maybe different, and that's why you have to take it back to basics about ultimately is about elected members being serious about their job and stop outsourcing some of your thinking to somebody else. Take it seriously. You said that the Parliament has continually expressed concerns, quite publicly aired, that too many of our parliamentarians have only ever lived in the bubble of politics, and therefore their ability to do what you've said is impinged by the fact that they have no hinterland. Well, and it can also be that the consequence of disagreement is massive. So, yes. So, if somebody had said to me when the Parliament was established, my big thing about the Parliament ultimately wasn't something I, in my era, my youth was in favour of because I thought Scotland's a diverse country stopped pretending all Scots are the same as each other, coming from the kind of background I did. However, seeing how distant Westminster was from people's lived experience, the kids that I was teaching in class, I believe they bring power closer to people. I have concerns, as maybe somebody can develop another point, about the system now sitting atop that we have created jobs, we have created roles, we have created functions for people to do that job, but you've lost that connection. It's nothing inevitable out of it because it's about how people do their jobs, it's about how seriously they do it. The idea that any politician would write to somebody and say, I'm not meeting with you because I don't agree with you, I find that astounding. I just find that astounding because what are you fearful of that you're going to maybe learn something you hadn't thought about before? So, I think that notion that actually some of this is not legislatable or regulatory, can't regulate for the mindset people have, but it doesn't mean that inevitably just simply because the folk who are in here came from a different journey from mine, that they haven't got the capacity to do that, that would also be wrong. I would just say on this question of Calabar. Calabar is a problem, but it's not the cause of the problem, it's a symptom. The underlying cause is the question of political culture and in particular party political culture. Who do parties want to be their representatives? Because parties don't regard you or us as representatives of people, they regard them as representatives of themselves. Who does the party leadership? Who does the party hierarchy want to encourage to become an MP or an MSP? That's the underlying cause of the problem. Focusing on the calibre of individuals, it's a bit like playing the person rather than the ball. It is part of the problem, but it's a symptom of the problem rather than its underlying cause. Its underlying cause is political culture. I'm going to start by drawing a line under it, but it's interesting that in this, of course, the 25th year of this Parliament much of these discussions are very worthy and need to take place particularly this year, but I'm going to drag us back to committees and I'm going to look to Ivan to see if there's anything that you'd like to cover as we move to the last part of it. Welcome to witnesses this morning and thanks to your open dialogue and wide-ranging input to this very important subject. I was quite taken, Professor Tomkins, by your outline and your introduction about the role of the Parliament and the three functions there. That's a very helpful way to think about it. I'm going to slightly take issue with your one aspect and I'd like to explore that a wee bit more. You said that, you both said that the role of the committee wasn't to debate issues and understand what you mean in terms of a grand standing opportunity to make political points, but I think that there is an issue perhaps round about the role of committees in allowing issues to be raised that otherwise wouldn't be raised. I'd like to get your reflections on that. The petitions committee clearly is one structure manifestation of that, but clearly in all committees the opportunity arises there because I'm certainly taken by the fact that when you meet people or encounter people outside the Parliament, if they're coming to give everything to the committee for them, that's a big deal and the fact that they're engaging with the process through that. I suppose that the following from that is an existential question, but what is the outcome then of that? Is it just that people will come in and make their views known to committee as evidence or a part of inquiry or whatever, but then it doesn't necessarily go anywhere? I think that the point that Annie Wells made on legacy reports, and certainly me coming back to committees after a five-year absence, a minister and you're still talking about the same things. You were five years ago, the same people are coming in and we're asking the same questions and what's actually changed, so I suppose a follow-up then you're what does change as a consequence of that. So when I said it's not the role of committees to debate matters of public interest that all of the work in that sense is being done by the word debate, right? It's not the function of committees to stage debates, it's not the function of committees to deliberate in that kind of way that happens in the chamber. It's absolutely the role of committees to bring issues in from the outside to Parliament's attention, issues of public concern, and it's of course much easier for committees to do that than it is for the chamber to do that because of the issues that I was talking about in response to Evelyn's questions about what makes an effective inquiry, what makes an effective committee, the power that committees have is the power to take evidence and the power to choose who to take evidence from. Absolutely, I wasn't meaning to imply by my opening remarks that I thought that committees should somehow be immunised from or insulated from matters of public debate, but it's not the function of committees to debate in the way that it is the function of MSPs in the chamber to debate. That's really what I meant by what I said there in my opening remarks. In terms of your more existential question, what's the outcome? Again, that's the responsibility of committees, isn't it? We've talked about this all morning. You can take whatever evidence you want, but what do you do with it and do you use it in a way that adds value to the parliamentary conversation, if I can put it like that, or do you diminish its value by inserting it into a part of the conversations already there as if nothing of value has been added by speaking to all of those people from the outside who you wouldn't otherwise have spoken to. That's always the choice that committees have, it seems to me. I think that both Joanne and I have been giving you all morning examples of where we think committees have done that job well in this Parliament by adding value rather than simply replicating things that would already have been said even if the committee had not bothered to get out of bed that morning. On the question of issues that wouldn't be raised elsewhere and really going to reflect maybe the point that was made earlier, there's a danger that the system simply, you know, people lobby for things to go into manifesto, the manifesto published and it says that and then you spend the next four years talking about those things and it's not really relating in any way to the priorities of constituents. I would probably draw the parallel for example the way my own attitude to surgery work, particularly when I was a constituent member, that you try to help somebody with the problem, try to understand what is it in the system that's caused the problem as opposed to the individual experience. Is there something in the system that's caused that problem? Then take that into the political process and I think that people are doing their job now. The best comparator with that in the Parliament I think is the Public Petitions Committee. The Public Petitions Committee, we would routinely deal with those petitions which were on the big issues of the day, which we've been argued about all the time, the constitutional question is a good one. The Public Petitions Committee did not spend time on that because we knew it was going to be discussed elsewhere. You discussed the issues and I think that's a test for a committee. Are we looking at this because nobody else is looking at it? We're looking at it in a different way and it's not lived experiences anecdote, the danger with lived experiences is I know this really poor person, this really terrible thing happened to him, isn't that a shame? If you say, well that has happened to him and we can understand the barriers that have caused that, the institutions, the systems that have created that and we're going to do something about that, that is worthy of a committee's time. I think that the Public Petitions Committee is a good example of that stripping out, being honest, we're going to be debating the constitution in the chamber in the new. So let's talk about other things that also matter. I think that that would be a reasonable kind of test. Is it the point that you make is exactly that? Yeah, you're still asking that question. I went away from this committee four years ago and you're still wrestling with it last because some questions are really tough, but sometimes it's because you can get locked into a system. So I think that the challenge, I guess, political for all of us, but particularly for committees, is not just to buy into what the usual suspects politically want to talk about. There's a huge opportunity and a privilege to talk about things that they don't. We gave a couple of examples earlier. The mesh one is a classic example of an injustice done to women, but sheer force of campaigning activity brought it into the public domain, but once it was there you saw a whole series of politicians and committees really doing their job seriously and just refused to let it go no matter what people it was getting difficult and awkward in. Yes, it went on for a while, but it was because there was all sorts of strands to it and I think that's a good model. You talk about things that I'm not going to get talked about otherwise. The point that I was making earlier about making, having a political debate, what was, the way in which the committee was in the early days used, where you told a journalist, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to say X and then you go in and say it and then you go back out and you get reported having said it, that was bouncing, it was like a trampoline effect, that's not serious and I think a lot of that has gone, but it is all that time and energy and seriousness that committee members bring, it's a way of thinking about bringing it to bear on issues I've not already, they might not get the same focus as otherwise because I think it is that kind of relentlessness that a committee can offer that a Parliament debate can't do, a chamber debate can't do. Thanks. One other point on the second, your point is that I'm holding government to account with that, a lot of good discussion I think this morning about the value of committees and inquiries and raising issues, evidence, legislation and the two way street that can operate effectively there. I don't know if there's anything you want to highlight as a good example of committees holding government to account. It's harder to think of good examples of that in my view. I suppose the finance committee did a lot of that because the finance committee was a committee that was not overwhelmed with legislation, from time to time there would be legislation of course and every year there was the budget which as I said before is a form of legislation but has its own bespoke procedure. Quite a lot of the finance committee's time was taken talking to finance ministers, particularly the CAPSEC obviously, about budgetary matters. Whether the committee ever managed to make much difference to government policy given that that is an area where it's very difficult for any cabinet secretary, any finance secretary to come in front of that committee and say well I'm not really quite sure about my tax policy yet. I'm open to the committee's views and that's a bit politically unrealistic even by my standards right. So whether there are really, whether you can, how you would measure the effectiveness of accountability in a context like that, I'm not quite sure to be honest, I think it's quite difficult. But the best examples I can think of are all about the way in which responsible ministers handled legislation. In terms of accountability for actions, policies and decisions, I think that this Parliament's got a lot of work to do. Thanks. My final point, I think that John has already kind of commented on this, was round about elected conveners and your thoughts on that. Was the caveat that it should be elected by your peers? Because the danger is that you say well you've got a majority, so we'll choose the weakest candidate from amongst the opposition. Forgive me for being thinking bad thoughts, but you can see how a well-intentioned process can be distorted. We've seen this a wee bit, I would argue, with some of the decisions around. Presiding officers and so on, that the majority party gets to choose who the Labour's person is going to be in the finance committee. I think we could see what the convener would be. It's clear that if it was easy it would have been sorted by now, but I do think that that sense, and we are seeing it. I'm noticing that the convener of the finance committee has been saying quite a lot of quite strong stuff, as far as I can see. We know that some committees, the community is absolutely charged with doing that kind of job, so those things are there, but there's not an easy fix to it. I'll go back to it, but I do think elected conveners should need to strip out the payroll, otherwise it just gets completely distorted, but that sense of parliamentarians of their own role, which is that I'm not here simply just to sit and nod my head. I'm equally not here just simply to constantly I'm as tribal as I get, so my tribal role is only part of my job. Actually it's kind of a serious thing. There's lots to be gained by parliamentarians understanding that that is just an important job in itself. At one point I suggested that parties should not get short money if it was evidence that they were whipping committee members or disciplining committee members for how they're conducting themselves in committee. That's probably taken a step too far, but culturally I think we should be saying to parties have the space and confidence in your members that when they go into committee they follow the evidence and nobody, how could anybody be the worst for that, but the caveat on that is you need to make sure the evidence that people are presented with has not been filleted before you actually get to committee. The committee's needs have confidence to hear from more than people's going to agree with them as well. Adam, on that, one of the things I said at the beginning was that we don't elect governments in this country, governments emerge out of and are accountable to the parliaments that we do elect. I think it's really important always to bear in mind that it is the government that is accountable to the parliament and not the parliament that is accountable to the government. I think that this parliament doesn't always bear that properly in mind in terms of the way in which the bureau functions, in terms of the way in which elections for PO are run informally. I don't think this is about rules, I think it's about culture. I think if you had a parliament of 129 MSPs or even if you had a parliament of 100 MSPs who thought that their job was to hold the government to account with 29 MSPs perhaps taking a different view, then you'd have a different political culture and you'd have different structures and different procedures and it might even be that you would end up with less legislation being quashed by the Supreme Court as a result. I don't know. I said all of that stuff at the beginning because I think where you end up is determined by where you start from. If you start from the right principles and you absolutely understand that it is the constitutional function of a parliament to hold the government to account and never the other way around, then you wouldn't necessarily end up after 25 years where we've ended up here. Thank you. Thank you for a very interesting morning, very thought provoking. I know we have an offer if we have additional questions to contact you. I was just going to rather use the convener's privilege, particularly on the last point that you raised, Adam, that the three criteria that the bureau should take in recommending to the chamber committee members is, as we've already discussed, the party balance but also the interest of a member to serve on a committee and also the member's qualification and experiences and as indicated by that member to serve on a committee. I think you've raised a lot of questions. Can I thank you both very much for your contributions this morning? I am sure you will follow our inquiry with interest, which is also good because it means we're being held to account by those who were formerly here but now outside but whose view and opinions are most welcome. Can I thank you very much and can I now move this into private? Thank you very much.