Holyrood Committee reforms are a step forward where several steps are needed
The Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee has published a report reviewing the effectiveness of Parliamentary Committees in their role providing oversight and scrutiny of legislation and of MSPs in Holyrood. They have come up with several recommendations - many of which echo our own calls for reform of the scrutiny system.
The issue with the current system is that in the absence of an Upper Chamber in Parliament (Holyrood doesn’t have an equivalent of the UK’s House of Lords and nor does it have an elected Senate or appointed chamber common in almost all democratic parliaments), MSPs are left to scrutinise the legislation that they themselves have produced. In too many cases in recent years, Committee votes have been split on party lines (though it must be said that in many cases the committees are where real cross-party work also occurs) and there have been issues where the party of Government - by dint of being the largest party in Parliament - has exercised too much control over key committees via appointing their conveners.
The headline recommendation to Parliament is that the convener of a committee should be elected by MSPs. Given that the largest party in Parliament rarely has an outright majority, this would force a level of cross-party negotiation across the committees. This is a system that has worked well in Wales where chairs of their committees became an elected position a number of years ago.
Other recommendations are that committees are made smaller to reduce the need for MSPs to sit on multiple committees and to increase the use of legislation-specific committees that form and dissolve rather than sit for the entire Parliament and scrutinise all legislation that falls under a certain topic. The advantage of the legislation-specific model is that some legislation - such as the ill-fated National Care Service Bill - was so wide in scope that it ended up being scrutinised by almost all of the committees in Holyrood even where little scrutiny could be done such as when the Finance Committee complained that they were expected to scrutinise legislation that had massive financial impact but no actual financial details within it.
This recommendation, however, may sit at odds with others in the report. One of the complaints in the report is that there is too much “churn” between members of a Committee but also not enough MSPs given the chance to build up some experience within committees.
Two key recommendations appear to be missing from proposals though. One, again from Wales, is to recognise that the current Holyrood Parliament is a lot more powerful than it was when it was reconvened in 1999 and thus MSPs have both to create more legislation over areas that previously were not devolved and it is incumbent on them to ensure that legislation is produced to a higher standard (again, our complaints over the National Care Service Bill and its shortcomings are a pertinent example). Wales has attempted to solve this by enlarging their Parliamentary Chamber. While “more MSPs” may not be a popular solution, it may be one that Scotland needs to grapple with sooner or later to ensure that what we don’t end up with is just “more burned-out and overworked MSPs passing bad legislation”. Whether this conversation starts now with a view towards expanded responsibilities under devolution or whether it is undertaken with respect to an independent Scotland taking on all the powers of a modern nation-state doesn’t make the problem go away.
The other option is to remove much of the scrutiny from the committees themselves and to form an Upper Chamber for the Scottish Parliament. Rather than a House of Lords or even an inevitably party-political elected Senate, we call for a “House of Citizens” - a Citizens’ Assembly whereby all adult residents of Scotland may be called to serve for a year or so as part of the scrutiny body for the elected Parliament. The Assembly would be decided by random draw (much like Jury Duty) but modified by balancing the chamber along demographic lines such as age, gender, geographic location and income. You can read about our proposal for the House of Citizens here and here.
All Governments must be held to account and modern democracies must be flexible and adapt to new needs. The recommendations in this report are largely welcome and should be quick enough to implement by the time we know the results of the elections next year but they do only represent a step forward where several are needed. Scotland can choose, at any time, to make more fundamental changes to improve our democracy and our Parliament. We should do it now.