To make politicians take recommendations seriously, someone must watch over them

Today the Scottish Government confirmed what many may have expected – it doesn't actually have any legal requirement to implement any of the recommendations that come as the conclusions from public inquiries. They are legally required to receive a report from the inquiry but that is the end of their legal responsibility.

This was revealed in a response to the question of how many of the 200 recommendations that have been put forward by inquiries have been followed up or enacted. Given that, since 2007 there have been inquiries totalling over 50 years of work and costing over £200 million, it is difficult to see how the cost can be justified if what is produced is treated as little more than 'loose suggestions'.

In its answer the Scottish Government explained that it considers the responsibility to be that it builds action in response to recommendations into future action plans. But in effect that means that the group of politicians who may have been responsible for error in the first place are also wholly in charge of whether they are investigated at all, who does the investigating and then whether the recommendations which emerge from the investigation are followed or not.

This has sadly become something of a punchline in Scotland with a recent administration promising that 'lessons would be learned' with a regularity which stretched credulity. Certainly there hasn't appeared to be a lot of learning demonstrated in the day to day operation of government.

Is there anything that can be done about this? The most obvious response is to speed up the process of inquiries themselves. It is often a leisurely gap between the events in question and the final report of an inquiry which allows the urgency to drain from the issue as it moves down the public priority list as time passes. That is why Common Weal proposes a shift to a Public Investigator model which would be significantly faster.

But however recommendations appear and however long it takes, what expectation should we have of politicians once they are made public? This is not as easy as it appears. Compelling politicians to act on what are often effectively policy value judgements by (generally) senior legal figures is problematic.

We cannot hold to account a judge who runs an inquiry, and in a democracy we are supposed always to be able to hold lawmakers to account. Even where an inquiry chair makes procedural or operational recommendations, how much power should unelected appointees have in changing how government is done? There is a reason they are called recommendations.

But if there are problems with unelected appointees being given too much power to alter public policy, policy procedures or the implementation and operation of policy, there are clearly also problems if our system allows politicians to hold inquiries and then ignore the results.

The solution to this isn't legal compulsion but a system which at every stage properly holds politicians to account for what they do, and equally for what they don't do. In the current context it does not seem to be the political opposition which is able to do this. The nature of the current form of adversarial politics in Holyrood means little seriousness attaches to inter-party exchanges.

This is why Common Weal strongly supports the idea of establishing a second chamber of the Scottish Parliament to be made up of 100 ordinary Scots chosen at random. In our model it this Citizens' Assembly which would commission reviews and inquiries and it is to that body that the final report of an inquiry would be delivered.

The Assembly would then have the power to call in and grill the politicians on exactly how they plan to respond to the inquiry's findings. This will force politicians to explain their plans in public and they could be cross examined if Assembly Members are not happy with their answers.

But even more powerfully, the Assembly could recall politicians at any point and as many times as they want to pursue them on progress. If the Assembly felt politicians were not showing sufficient seriousness in responding to recommendations they could call them back in and grill them about it, and could do so repeatedly.

It is risky to compel politicians to act in certain ways by using laws. But it is also risky to allow politicians to mark their own homework. What we need is vigorous, effective scrutiny and the incentives to act honestly that come from that. There is no better way to achieve that than to have a permanent watchdog monitoring our politicians and not taking no for an answer.

You can find out more about our proposals here.