Public Appointments (Parliamentary Approval) (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at 3:32 pm on 7 February 2002.

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Photo of Alex Neil Alex Neil Scottish National Party 3:32, 7 February 2002

I will pay tribute to and thank four sets of people: first, those who drafted the bill; secondly, the Parliament's non-Executive bills unit, which is one of the Parliament's biggest assets; thirdly, the clerk to the Local Government Committee; and fourthly, the clerk to the Equal Opportunities Committee. I will not offer gratitude to the majority members of each committee, who I think fell down at the last hurdle.

The aims of my bill are twofold. The first aim is to increase democratic accountability and transparency for public appointments in Scotland. The second aim is to put an end, once and for all, to the practice and culture of cronyism, which has pervaded public appointments in Scotland for far too long.

My bill seeks to give the Parliament the power to vet and, in extreme cases, to veto public appointments. If enacted, it would give the Parliament a duty to scrutinise the nominations for the chairs of quangos and would give the Parliament the power to scrutinise other nominations without necessarily going to confirmation. Experience elsewhere shows that only 0.1 per cent of the other nominees would ever come in front of a committee for scrutiny, but the very existence of the power will mean that ministers will think twice before they put their pals forward for the cushy and lucrative numbers in the quangos.

We are talking about ensuring parliamentary control of a set of people who have enormous power in Scotland. There are 114 quangos and more than 900 people are involved. Next year, those people will spend about £9 billion of public money in Scotland. That is a huge sum of money. One quango spends nearly £700 million of public money, so the Parliament has a duty to ensure that the person who is in charge of that organisation has the ability, expertise and experience to do the job.

There have been many red herrings and I have no doubt that we are about to hear more of them this afternoon. The first red herring is that the bill will politicise the process. After last week, who in their right mind—unless they have been living on Mars or in East Kilbride—could believe that the process is not already political? Is not every appointment made by a minister? Is not every minister a politician? Does not that make the process political?

Despite the fact that the number of Labour party activists—currently falling quickly throughout the country—represents about 2.2 per cent of the population, Labour party representation among the chairmanships of the water boards is not 0.2 per cent but 100 per cent. If we examine all the public appointments for which a political affiliation has been declared, the proportion of Labour party members is not 0.2 per cent but 66 per cent. If we consider the independent assessors—the word "independent" must be used fairly liberally and certainly not accurately—we find that 50 per cent of those who were nominated last week were Labour party supporters. I would say that there is already a touch of politicisation in the process.