Secrecy is becoming too expensive in Scotland

In theory it should be possible to work out how much government secrecy is costing Scotland. The fact that it will run into millions of pounds raises serious questions about the legitimacy of officials using money which is not their personal resources to protect their personal interests in ways which are not linked to the public interest.

Today's example of this is the inexplicable time and effort politicians are expending trying to get basic information out of CalMac about an equally inexplicable severance deal which saw a payment of £170,000 going to someone who only worked for the first three days of the year.

This payment appears to breach the Scottish Government's own rules but was kept secret for two years. Although it has now been known for a number of months, CalMac still does not seem to be cooperating with politicians to explain what happened and why.

To a lay person this is inexplicable. The line of accountability for CalMac is not ambiguous; it runs to Scottish Ministers. And accountability for Scottish Ministers is equally unambiguous – once every five years the public holds them to account and the rest of the time it is parliament, with the scrutiny of the media to provide information. None of this is working properly.

Not only does this fail democracy, it creates a morass of time-wasting, bureaucratic bloat and needless legal expenditure. Worse, the time that legislators spend trying to drag out information which should be freely available means that time is not spent on matters that require attention. Wasting parliamentary time is most certainly not cost free.

The chain of failure is complete here. First is the nature of Scotland's agencies and their degree of insulation from democratic scrutiny. This is an utterly unnecessary setup created by officials, for officials. It is explicitly designed by a ruling class for a ruling class. No agency of Scotland's public sector should have any latitude whatsoever in providing information immediately to parliamentarians.

Second is the asymmetrical attitude to privacy in government. Surveillance of the public appears to increase all the time (with putative compulsory digital ID only the latest step) but the rules which block information about senior staff is a luxury they grant only themselves.

If you have tried to get information out of government you will quickly find that it is generally very difficult to find out who was involved in decisions. The Scottish public sector has taken data protection laws and weaponised them against the public. For example they claim that public sector pay is off limits for public knowledge as it is a private matter.

This is false; Finland, Norway and Sweden operate under the same basic data protection laws but they publish tax (and therefore pay) data on every single citizen. Redaction culture in government is largely self-serving choice, not legal necessity.

Most public agencies should be abolished and brought in house where there is greater ability to scrutinise actions. In the limited cases where there is a legitimate case for arms-length protections there should be a duty of candour. All information should be provided to politicians on every occasion, unredacted. Immediately.

In turn, the powers of the Scottish Parliament's committee system need to be strengthened. It is sometimes difficult to watch when legislators are forced to throw up their hands and say 'we pay them but it turns out we can't compel them to turn up and answer questions'. If you work in the public sector or receive public money you should have no discretion over this.

But there is a more straightforward step which would prevent this; hard-and-fast rules. There should be a pay structure in the public sector which does not allow for interpretation. One of the reasons officials like quangos is that entirely unacceptable practices like 'performance-related bonuses' (£300,000 of which went to the managers of the calamitous CalMac) are not allowed in government.

There should be severance rules which are not there to act as a starting point for the negotiation of a bespoke settlement. And increasingly it seems that Scotland needs a 'redaction agency'. At the moment officials can simply blank out any information they want and tell you they had no option. The Information Commissioner appears to be in a permanent battle to overturn these.

There is an increasingly strong case to reverse this; if officials want redactions they should provide the full text to an independent agency not appointed by the people who it protects, and it should be for that agency to redact the minimum necessary to be compliant with the law.

The accountability system in Scotland is broken, and it is wasting crucial time our democracy needs to deal with big issues. It should not have to spend months and years to find out basic information about how public money is spent.