COMMISSION ON THE POWERS AND ELECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS

of the

EVIDENCE OF:

THE PERMANENT SECRETARY OF THE SCOTTISH EXECUTIVE

SIR MUIR RUSSELL KCB

held at

The Scottish Parliament

on

Thursday, 13th February 2003

PROCEEDINGS
 
LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much for coming. May I just say two words about what we are trying to achieve in this Commission. We have been charged with looking into the powers of National Assembly for Wales and particularly to see how it’s emerging, whether Parliamentary legislative powers should be vested in the Assembly or whether basically the structure should remain the same. It is very helpful for us, to look at the mechanisms by which the Scottish Parliament actually operates within a different system, other than the Welsh one. What I invite you to do is give us perhaps your reflection on the impact of devolution on the work and how it has gone. Has it worked?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: That is a big question. Well Lord Richard thank you for that, just to say at the beginning it is a great pleasure to be here and thank you for asking me along. I plan to be of any help that I can be. I don’t have any memorandum to offer you and perhaps not so many facts and figures as we get into a discussion but if there are issues we need to follow through we would be very happy to do whatever work we can to help with the supplying of information and any follow through that you need. On the question what has it been like, has it worked, how has it worked, how has it felt? I think from where I sit the impression is that the devolution settlement that we worked out for Scotland has come through really in many respects pretty much as planned and has really worked quite successfully. I was Head of the Scottish Office for the last year of its life, 1998-1999, and looked after the constitutional stage of work with Robert Gordon for some years before that. I think that the sort of broad concepts we were seeing developing and that were involved with the referendum and the Scotland Act have worked pretty well. I think we are proud of the way we have taken what was a typically small to medium sized government department with a Parliamentary Secretary of State at the top into a Cabinet structure with a First Minister and Cabinet colleagues, and also with the way in which the Office supporting that has began to work in a way that has a department supporting their individual ministers and all the support process that goes with supporting the sheer mechanics of cabinet business. I think that works pretty well. At the same time the agenda that we have had is to try to maintain as corporate an approach as we can. So round my Management Group table we are constantly trying to review things like the issues of the day and of the week, forthcoming cabinet agendas, issues that colleagues will need to work on with individual ministers, things that we can help solve collectively in the final group before it gets to the Cabinet corporate view as and where we can within that disaggregated structure, and on another view increasingly federal structure that we have got, that is a big part of our agenda, which is making it work. It is cohesive, albeit it’s quite clear there is always more to it and to improve on. We are engaged in a variety of management initiatives at the moment that are designed to achieve that improvement, so far as the gross outcome of what happens.
LORD RICHARD: Can I just interrupt you on that, where are the elephant traps, there must a few around?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Well there are things that don’t go as perfectly as you would like. Ministers have differing views and they have to be argued through. There are obviously the straightforward mistakes and disappointments that we have had and all of those who have been involved with the London government will recognise it’s about relationship and behaviour as much as anything else and we are polishing away at that. If I may look back and share some of the things we are thinking, what have we learned over four years? We have learned about getting close to Ministers and about understanding what we bring as an administrative department, and what Ministers bring from the political hinterland. We have learned a bit about the relationship that they expect to have with the rest of the body of politicians, and with local government, where ideas come from and how to try to synthesise them, and we have learned quite a bit about working with individual political events and political performance more close up. It’s more pressurised, it’s more immediate, in many respects it’s more confrontational than when we worked in the London scene and these are the things we have had to cope with as part of the system changing, the way officials work and changing relationships with ministers and seeing Ministers develop their comfort with the world that they are in which for most of them is a new world.
LORD RICHARD: We have heard yesterday and indeed this morning that there is a strong consensual element of Parliamentary opinion and what has just occurred to me is how much of that consensual element depends upon the fact that because of the Parliamentary arithmetic there has to be a coalition. If one party has overall majority you think you could maintain, you have the structures to maintain that sort of consensual approach?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I think it is hard to say really, it’s not been approached in the Westminster world where one is used to majority governments and strong whipping. It certainly seems to me that the nature of the closeness that all members have to their roots, to their constituents, to the pressures that there are on them in a variety of ways, probably makes it more difficult. There is a very strong opposition in the Scottish Parliament, it is consensual in one sense in that there is a lot of commitment to things happening and making progress but there is a good opposition that you would recognise. It hasn’t all just been warm bath territory by any manner of means. Ministers find it quite testing, and challenging in the way they have to respond to the Parliament and in the short time they have to do it. I remember Scottish questions in London were every four weeks and issues came up with a very quick return time. Things are much more immediate for us here. Ministers are expected to respond very briskly.
SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: I would like to ask the effect on the Civil Service of the changes. It was being suggested to us yesterday that there was considerably more work and there are more bills, there are more policy initiatives and far more questions and much higher work load. There are more civil servants. What have the effects been on the morale of the Civil Service for career structures and that sort of thing and what is the consequent effect upon all costs which, I remember from reading a white paper years ago, was a very low estimate of the cost of devolution. I am just wondering what the effects have been in practice?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: You are right about the work load. People will have told you about the number of bills compared to what we had taken previously through London and the number of Parliamentary questions and the fact there are 17 committees compared with one and the number of ministers that we support and what that means in terms of ministerial activities of meeting with people and engaging with the rest of Scotland. All of that in a sense is what people voted for. I will put my hand up and acknowledge that the volume and the intensity of it is greater than we thought. I remember the kind of policy in Parliament questions over the first summer recess, the shutting down of Westminster at the end of July and the chance to clear things away and start again. The first year of devolution we didn’t have that and so there has been that effect. You asked about morale, we conduct staff surveys every year just about this time of year. We have done three so far and in each of them the job satisfaction figures were coming in around the mid to high 70%, which I believe is a good figure. The bench marks in that area are notoriously difficult because people ask different questions but that is the sort of number we have kept up for a number of years. The other question that we ask that may be relevant is ‘has your job improved’ and I would have expected people to say in the first year, yes this is great, fantastic, it’s what we always wanted. 75% of people said that and the same percentage in year two and year three say we are getting something happening that is developing people’s satisfaction and commitment and enthusiasm: the job is better in each of the three years. The other thing the survey has given us is some information about stress and this is where the format of the questions gets tricky, but in terms of significant stress we were seeing 32% to 33% in the first year and we knocked that down to under a quarter in the second year, then held there. We have not got it any further down. It is actually the heads of division in the senior Civil Service where the highest proportion of people are feeling stress. That was to do with the initial exposure, the intensity, with the fact they are very much focused on a lot of the things that are new, and accountable. We try to help through eg, conventional things such as counselling and trying to give people an understanding of what leadership means and how you work with colleagues and staff. We have expanded the organisation, full-time staffing numbers this January were 4,250 which is 1050 more than before devolution in April 1998. In fact that is quite a big increase – a quarter maybe a little more than that. It’s actually less than the peak that we reached in 1993/94 at the end of the last Conservative government. That is comparing like for like and looking at the structure we have got now and comparing it with the new numbers we have now. In terms of cost the administration budget now is about £220 million in round terms compared with 160 million in the last year of the Scottish Office in real terms. That is, however, a smaller proportion of the Scottish total budget than previously. Within that increase we have been targeting some areas to strengthen the areas where people do analysis work, where they collect evidence, where they are involved in the interaction with the openness and transparency agendas. This is because we discovered there was a particularly heavy overload there. The average person was working an extra day a week, a mixture of coming in Saturdays and working late and so on. We have been doing this by conventional promotion boards and also bringing people in at these levels. We have recruited as well at head of division level, which is what used to be called assistant secretary, Grade 5. So we are quite open and my judgement is that in this way you change the style of the organisation, you get people with different views of their careers with different styles, different experience. It’s a slow process but I am pretty sure that change is happening and that might explain the situation I was telling you about earlier.
MR ROWLANDS: Thank you those figures were very useful. You say the percentage has been coming down as a percentage total of budget from the figures we were given by Mr Kerr from 1.2%. Isn’t that a factor, there is a huge increase in the budget and even the administration cost I know rose as fast and as rapidly as, would that be a factor or is it in fact a saving on staff and cost?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I’m not pretending to achieve a saving on the staff, I was making the point that we are a relatively small overhead. It does take people to spend money and people are developing new policies all the time – making sure of effective control and management. The various mechanisms we have put in place are quite intensive and have to be paid for.
MR ROWLANDS: Part of the remit, as LORD RICHARD said is to consider whether or not we should seek to transfer certain functions over from Westminster and also the question of appropriate legislation. You said earlier that you went from two to three bills a year to 60 in four years, that is a huge increase and you identified the difficulty was the increase in expenditure and staff that you have got other than just Parliamentary draftsmen. Have you any idea of the cost of legislation - we need to try to get a feel for the cost of legislation.
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I could tell you about the number of lawyers that we have had. We have doubled the head count in what used to be called the solicitors office. We have expanded the Lord Advocate’s department. I would be happy to try and see whether there was anything we could produce for you about our Bill Team costs because when doing budgets for departments people always say I have got extra, that they need more resources for Bill Teams. We try to monitor this but it is not easy to always do so accurately.
MR ROWLANDS: You never take it back out.
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Exactly, you have been there before.
MR ROWLANDS: So you have a Bill Team cost.
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I’m not promising but we may be able to find something on that.
MS MCALLISTER: I want to ask you about the relationship with the Whitehall Department, whether there had been any noticeable significant aspects. When we took evidence from some of the Welsh Ministers we heard in particular that they had some liaison and communication issues particularly relating to the Home Office. I just wonder whether you could give us a picture on how that has worked from this end and whether there’s been any noticeable shifts since devolution?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: This would be pretty anecdotal. There are different models operating in different departmental relationships. I think of agriculture which was also managed in a kind of lowhanded way, with MAFF in the lead, and involvement of Northern Ireland, Welsh and Scottish departments where issues would sometimes have to be sorted by way of ministerial correspondence at Cabinet level. You have heard all that stuff, that is one where I think it would be commonly agreed that the need to run this properly after devolution through official mechanisms that were a little bit crisper than they had in place before, was immediately recognised and it’s my impression that that worked pretty well. You could almost say that it was a better set up than had been the case before. Not many folk would have expected that but I think that would be a fair argument. I also notice that quite a number of my senior colleagues turn up at management boards of Whitehall departments, occasionally making presentations about what is going on and learning and discussing. There is a lot of work continuing on that. Jon Shortridge would have told you about how he’s handled or is developing that. So it is a mixed picture, you are going to be able to find cases where things manifestly don’t quite work and you read the newspapers and see there had not been a huge amount of notice given on issues before devolution and there were occasions when things would happen that you didn’t know a huge amount about. So I suppose the answer is that we think that the liaison with Whitehall is working pretty well most of the time, both at the level of bi-lateral agreements with the relevant Whitehall departments and also with the help of the Scotland Office where we need it. I think we are increasingly grown up about the fact there will be the odd occasion when it doesn’t work as well as you would like, and you learn about something in not as much time as you would have liked.
MS MCALLISTER: One of the reasons and I don’t know whether you can answer this, it was suggested to us, was that in the case of liaison with Scottish affairs they are relatively clear in the schedule of Scotland Act and in the case of Wales we got the impression that what the Minister was implying was that it was due to the status of Wales and lack of clarity that caused difficulty with liaison relationships. What would your opinion on that be, is it easier for Whitehall to relate to the Scottish committees than opposed to Wales?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I don’t know whether it is easier but obviously different in the sense that we have a parliament with primary legislative powers over things that are devolved. I guess it is may be a shade harder in Wales. You may have a point but I’m not in a position to judge.
MS SUGAR: Can you describe for us liaison with the Scottish Office, how does it actually work?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: They have their own smallish group of staff who are organised to look at specific policy areas and certain constitutional matters. The Advocate General covers a wider front in terms of advice to Whitehall. We look to them to keep us in touch with things that are happening in Whitehall, where as you can imagine, the Secretary of State will know about developments even if not in huge detail and where we can also provide support through helping to provide briefing. This is not to supplant the bi-lateral relationship with the Whitehall department I was talking about, because I don’t think it is going to be fruitful for everything about Scotland to be routed through the Secretary of State, since on many occasion we have a government to government relationship between here and London.
MS SUGAR: Are there formal arrangements where it would be routine for you to have a monthly meeting with the Head of the Scottish Office for example - How does it actually work?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: It’s pretty informal in my terms, I am in London most weeks and we just converse really, I go and see them occasionally and we try and keep in touch on that basis. There are formal liaison arrangements I think, for example around guidance on the emerging legislation programme in London and whether that is going to impact on the Sewel convention – where we need to have a view on and decide whether to get on the bandwagon or do something different. There are frequent contacts between the Secretary of State and the First Minister. Obviously meetings are sometimes political, but they have contact on a regular basis. So a mixture of liaison mechanisms exist.
MS SUGAR: Can I ask this about the location of staff, there is a lot of pressure in Wales to devolve the civil servants within Cardiff I wonder if you could tell us what approach there is in Scotland?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: The Executive’s Glasgow office which had been in historical terms the old DTI office for Scotland, going back to the 1970’s looking after enterprise matters generally, was built up post 1999 with the creation of the integrated Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Department, so that operation is quite a bit bigger than it was before. The other main headquarters offices are in Edinburgh. There is a policy of looking at the possibility of relocation from Edinburgh with a presumption in favour of moving out of Edinburgh where you create a new body, or when a property lease expires. We have a division within the central core of the office, who look after our buildings who are involved in this area and make sure that the proper analysis has been done and that Department’s are reviewing options on a sound basis, taking account of Ministers. We have had quite a number of new entities set up outside Edinburgh e.g. in Fife, Stirling, Aberdeen, and one significant move with the pensions agency moving to Galashiels. It is not huge numbers, I’d be talking about hundreds rather than thousands and I am not talking here about core departments, having moved.
MS SUGAR: What success have you had in using new technology to improve communications between the First Office in the centre and have you had comparisons and things like that, is there anything we can learn from your approach?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I don’t think we’ve done anything that you would not get elsewhere in terms of video conferencing or whatever. We have always had what I would now recognise as e-mail which has worked awfully well and built that up within the conventional electronic office system. We would not want to claim we have got anything state of the art.
SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: To go back to the question I asked in the recent report of the constitutional committee of the House of Lords, there is a sentence that says it offers no explanation for this discrepancy. I am sure there is a rational explanation and I just wondered if you were able to provide it?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: A discrepancy in what?
SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: The size of the staffing in the Wales Office and the Scotland Office, that is paragraph 67 of the second report.
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I think it has to do with the judgement taken by the then Secretary of State in 1999, based on his view of the range of policy involvement that he wanted to have post devolution, and the contribution he felt he wanted to make, together perhaps with a different role in reserved areas. There was no agreed plan between us and the former Welsh office on such matters. The way this happened was very much settled on what incoming politicians thought was required. I don’t think I could route it more accurately in terms of the size of the devolved area of responsibility though there must be something in that. I thought for a moment you were asking about the longer run and the difference in size of the Scottish Office and the Welsh Office which is also an relevant.
MR PRICE: Actually your last remark causes me to invite you to develop that, that is a more general question I was going to ask you to follow that up in a moment. Perhaps you could utter the thoughts that were obviously passing through your mind just now?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on it. Apart from population size, I think there was always a feeling that the Scottish Office had a wider portfolio of responsibilities and more to spend and of course capacity to support the making of primary legislation – we always did some Scottish Bills, we always had significant Scottish input to GB legislation, so we were set up just to operate that on a slightly larger scale and we have been at it slightly longer than the Welsh office as well. It is the sort of thing that evolved over time and I think it just reflects that.
MR PRICE: Earlier you talked about the staffing impacts which were unacceptable. In certain practices there was a greater demand than you had originally foreseen, if we take a further step back and look at the whole devolution settlement and how it has worked out in terms of the pattern of it and the impact of it comparing what you had expected as somebody who had been involved in the planning and had a clear view at that time and how it has actually worked out, what would be your overall assessment?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I think the point I was trying to get over was that in constructing the model, considering the things we would have to do process wise, procedurally and in legislative terms, and the broad shape of how things would work in terms of accountability and transparency, it has all worked out pretty much as we thought. The intensity of activity involved, especially the political intensity has perhaps been rather higher than we had thought. The other thing I should have mentioned is the 500 consultation papers issued over the four years – having to get out front on a whole range of issues and talk about them to people. It was a measurable step up I think from what we had expected but I don’t think it is out of shape with the type of process that we had predicted, it was just the amount of it. There was I think, something of an expectation about making it more consensual for new politicians, but as I said it has been a very effective climate of political challenge and opposition is certainly as sharp as you would get in London.
MR PRICE: To what extent has policy formation become a much bigger role of the Civil Service in Scotland, the extent to which you might previously have taken a Whitehall lead and now you are developing policy and in that how much sharing has gone on and to what extent have innovative ideas here been taken up in Whitehall or indeed their thinking been piggy backed in what you are doing?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: The need to be able to take a justifiable recognisable Scottish position of things is a factor. So that the need to master more of the wider front ourselves has been a real one and I think that might be part of the stress factor you are talking about in respect of increased policy formulation levels and the subsequent demands on staff and the fact therefore that we need more of them. I don’t think it is possible to divide ourselves from the way in which things are working and developing in Whitehall. It would be crazy if we tried, because those are big departments and they have a lot of professional support and ideas developed in them subsequent to political debate arising throughout the UK. You need to know how to respond, to know what is going on, to understand it and react to it. We do, I think, go off in a different Scottish direction when that is appropriate, sometimes conspicuously so. People mention to me the work on tuition fees and for example, some of the things done around fishing and care of the elderly. There will be a lot of examples where we have just been more different than we would have been in traditional terms in Scottish legislation. We always did things differently in different administration structures, but we have been a little bit more different than that. That puts an extra burden on the organisation, but it is only to be expected, that people thought things would move on in that way.
MR VALERIO: One of the differences between Scotland and Wales and the devolution process is that Scotland has had for centuries this separate legal system, to what extent do you think that is an essential pre-cursor to the devolution of primary powers?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Not being a lawyer I can’t immediately say that it would be. It probably made it more natural in the sense that it felt right, it can help make a case for the Scottish settlement being a legislative one and a lot of people have worked very hard to maintain a statute approach at Westminster over the decades, where legislation always had a Scottish part, or almost always. So that will help make a case for it, but I don’t know whether it’s a necessary condition, I wouldn’t think so.
MR VALERIO: Useful but not essential.
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Useful, well I guess in making the case.
MR VALERIO: Another question which is totally different altogether, are you able to identify the support costs for MSPs?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: What I can give you - and it came out of our overall budget figures - is numbers about revenue costs of the Parliament in the current year. I think we are talking something like £57-58 million. You would have to ask the people earlier this morning for any more detail of that. It is separate from anything that was quoted in the earlier conversation and is not part of the Scottish Executive administration.
MR ROWLANDS: My colleague asked about primary legislation in the four years and you referred to schedule 5 as being a clear and still quite complex schedule in the areas of broadcasting and transport and we heard a story of the Parliament yesterday, are there arising or emerging grey areas where you will be seeking a meaningful transfer from Whitehall?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Within the present political framework I don’t think that I can point to any meaningful further transfer to put it back to you in those terms. You could assemble an agenda I guess of things people have said could or should have been devolved: You have mentioned broadcasting as being one area. In terms of tidying up the boundaries of schedule 5 we have done one or two things within the mechanisms that are available in the Scotland Act. The constitutional settlement was defined to be able to cope with new things that come on the horizon rather than being snapshotted by reference to particular legislation.
MR ROWLANDS: What about OFCOM and things like that? We took some evidence on the Welsh context now there is a devolved government administration, a UK body like OFCOM, exercising members of the Welsh assembly. Is it exercising you because you have not got any powers over OFCOM, I don’t think you have anyway?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I think that is right by and large, I think we would want to discuss with the people developing this new policy the issue of what the right degree of Scottish involvement was, for example, whether there should be a board member nominated by the Scottish Ministers, whether there should be an office in Scotland or what the consultation arrangements would be about the major policy statements or major decisions. I think you would be trying to tailor something pretty well ad hoc and sometimes there would be a role for the Secretary of State in securing appropriate Scottish input.
MR ROWLANDS: That is where you would expect the Scottish Secretary of State to be, punching or monitoring or making the statement?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Yes, playing the appropriate role, yes, that is the way I would see it coming through rather than tackling these things instinctively as a competence issue.
MS DAVIES: Any areas of uncertainty in the executive powers, for example, in the overlap of the reserved and devolved powers, and if so, what problems do they present to the Civil Service?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: When you became a civil servant you work out fairly quickly what powers you have, and you know just what you could do and the things you should talk through with the lawyers. I think one of the features of devolution has been that we check with the lawyers a lot more often. People are finding out what the limits are, and that’s governed to a much greater extent than before by those kind of legal judgements. We have not had very many issues where we thought we had the power to do something and then barked our shins, I am just trying to think off the cuff here about many issues where I would say that we proceed down the road and then discovered, whoops we couldn’t actually be doing this at all. That is partly because we are talking pretty early on and we operate to clear and well-understood mechanisms, where you know you are going to have to get the Lord Advocate to sign something off and you know that the Presiding Officer has to be satisfied. In these circumstances, you are going to check pretty soon before you punt a proposition round.
MS SUGAR: I wonder if I could ask a question about the money? Could you describe the budget setting process for us in particular the role of the Finance committee of the Parliament and if you could talk us through the year what happens when and secondly, I wonder if you could describe to us your responsibilities as the Accounting Officer whether there are any differences here compared with the relationship to the Assembly in Wales?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I will do the best I can. The key thing was that a finance group worked through the pre-devolution period to define what would be good practice for setting budgets and moving away from the system of estimates that you had in London, and for all practical purposes from budgets being an administrative act to something that did involve the Parliament. We have a Budget Bill each year and there are some constraints in the way it can be amended. This group was called FIAG. So now we publish a
Draft Budget to which the Parliament’s Committees and individual MSP’s can propose amendments to the Executive’s spending plans. The Budget Bill then goes through the technical processes of the Parliament, and its Introduction is timed to ensure that it is passed an Act before the start of the financial year to which it applies. This is quite a public process, and one that imposes more discipline than we may have had before in relation to changes, for example, shifts between headings. It is a slightly more modern process. In terms of the work that we do internally, ministers have to take their decisions on the spending review of 2002 which led to the announcement in the autumn. That was based on our response to the last public spending decisions that the Chancellor took in London and what the priorities were for Scottish Ministers. The Finance Minister played a key role in all of that and our document "Building a Better Scotland" sets out serious and high level outcome targets on which we will report yearly from now on as we have reported on targets in the past. This is slightly different in form, but less in substance from the PSA targets that you heard about in London but it works essentially the same way; it targets where money goes and what you are doing, and it is accompanied by a cascade of substantial documents that Ministers will produce as they go into the financial year. This is a more accountable and open process than we have had.
MS SUGAR: How is that structured?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I formally delegate to Heads of Departments and they account for their departmental budgets. They give evidence to the Audit Committee, produce the general reports and give that to the finance people who give evidence. I do not delegate the administration budget so if there was a question about that, it is me they talk to. I would have the finance people with me but the Principal Accountable Officer must really make sure people function in the right place and are competent. We have two non executive directors on my board who are main members of our Audit Committee.
MS SUGAR: Can I just ask would there be any circumstances where you could be called to the Finance Committee to answer questions about the administrative budget for the financial year or would it be the Finance Minister who would speak to the Finance Committee?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: I think it would depend on the nature of the report that they were working on if something had gone wrong. I would expect to be called, in classic PCA terms if we were talking policy, the judgements that were made and the things being provided, how much was going on administration and so on.
SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: I asked something before and there was a very full reply about the better financial procedures which are in place, but there is no accountability for the raising of money, I mean, as it’s done elsewhere, and it does seem intellectually at least a flaw in the arrangements which are at present in place.
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: That is intrinsic to the arrangements that were set up and I can’t comment on that since it is a political judgement. You could do it differently, but you would have a different settlement.
SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Did you regard it as part of the settlement and therefore so to speak and to be in tandem but not to be discussed or talked about but in evidence we have been told quite often that the arrangements are questionable?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Without wishing to be smart about it, you are entitled to that view and you are entitled to comment on that but professionally I do not have a view on it.
MR ROWLANDS: The Budget Bill, that is an interesting creature because Westminster budgets are Finance Bills, aren’t they? There is not a Budget Bill as such, what is contained in this Bill is it giving effect to the allocation of expenditure?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Yes.
MR ROWLANDS: Why does that require legislation. That wouldn’t necessarily span legislation and individual Bills might have a financial memorandum but not a Budget Bill incorporating the whole of the Scottish based settlement. What does the Budget Bill have?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: It sets out what the Scottish budget is and how the Scottish Ministers propose to spend it. It gives them the authority to spend it. It provides an opportunity for Parliament to approve the expenditure plans and to suggest amendments within the framework and to know what is going on if spending authorities change. It provides a basis for the Auditor to comment on the way people have spent within or outwith the spending authorities. It is another way of doing estimates but it’s a way of doing it before the year begins on the basis of people actually debating the substance.
MR ROWLANDS: It’s a kind of appropriation.
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: Those would come up from the 6th of July and there would be six successive Tuesday and Thursday mornings debating matters of policy. At the end of that you would formally draft the estimate for several hundreds of millions which generally related to the topic you discussed. You discussed economy on an estimate, which was tiny for the Scottish Office Industry Department in those days, and so it is different. If you look at the FIAG report you will see what we are trying to do differently.
MR ROWLANDS: But it is a piece of legislation?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: There will be four Bills over the course of a Parliament.
MR ROWLANDS: American style really then, cross European is it?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: These approaches were all looked at.
MR JONES: Can I ask a couple of questions to how much pressure is put on your staff and has that changed from the beginning to now in terms of information they give to Non Executive members of the Parliament, - do they give information free and easily or do they draw back and as the Parliament teams become developed. And secondly, do Members of Parliament for Scotland presumably will also be seeking advice and information from your Ministers and therefore from your staff, is that a big or small workload?
SIR MUIR RUSSELL: To take the last point first, my impression would be that it is a fairly small workload. Obviously I don’t see all the correspondence that comes out from the system but it’s not my impression that there is a great flood of correspondence in providing to Scottish Westminster MPs. Coming back to your first point, I think there is no doubt that the formal structure that we have today here is the one you are familiar with at Westminster. Within that broad context the system that we have got is designed to give more opportunity for proper briefing and proper exchange of information so committees can get briefed by officials on the policies they are about to get into and if there is an inquiry they can have a session publicly or privately right at the very start. Most of the committees have briefings from my senior colleagues. We provide a lot of information through what is called SPICE, the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, which is the equivalent of putting things in the Library. The research assistants who work in SPICE know how to approach staff for help if they want factual information in the same sort of way library staff in Westminster do. Our staff directory of middle to senior managers is available to MSPs and their research assistants and they can phone up or contact them by e-mail with factual questions. That is used to a varying degree and we have protocols regarding questions and e-mails. We aim to ensure consistency in what is said and encourage openness and participation by officials.
LORD RICHARD: Can I thank you very much indeed. I am very grateful to you for your time and for the information you have given us and the insight you have given us. Its been a helpful and very useful meeting from my point of view, so that you very much.