Alison Hardie, Scottish Political Correspondent in the Scotsman, 29 th January 1999.
| 'A luxurious office complex for Westminster politicians will cost the taxpayer £1.2 million for each of the 200 MPs who will use it, building industry experts predicted yesterday. The bill for Portcullis House, being built in the shadow of Big Ben, will make it the most expensive building constructed in Britain, according to the trade magazine Building. Alison Hardie, Scottish Political Correspondent in the Scotsman, 29 th January 1999. | |
Getting a truly open democratic and responsive structure of Scottish Government is more important than any particular policy issue. If we can get the structure right, good policy decisions will follow. Compared with Westminster, the Scottish Parliament must have much more power and the Minister much less.
A good example of the bad old ways we must change is the way the Holyrood site was chosen for the Parliament. This was never debated by MPs. The choice of the Holyrood site was made by the Secretary of State, influenced by his advisers.
The great weight of informed opinion was in favour of Calton Hill. A scheme was proposed to use the old Royal High School, St Andrew's House and a new Chamber for the Parliament between the two, all well within the £50m limit.
This was rejected, depending on your source, either because the Secretary of State thought Calton Hill was somehow related to the SNP or because EDI, the proposers of the scheme, somehow upset him and the senior civil servants.
Instead we are lumbered with a site, which involves erecting an interim home for the Parliament with the consequent dislocation and a rising cost for the whole enterprise of approaching £100m. The Minister is slow in replying to my written questions on costs.
The Scottish Parliament must ensure that it was the last big decision of the bad old politics. Never again should one man's whim cost us all £50m, years of delay and traffic chaos.
The Parliament has one great opportunity to assert itself right at the start.
In whatever discussions take place before a First Minister (alias Prime Minister) and his/her colleagues are appointed, a structure must be agreed to enshrine the real powers of the Parliament. Whether these discussions lead to a coalition or a minority government, any agreement should include an all-party committee with specific powers over the relationship between Ministers, MSPs and civil servants.
This may become a vital decision for the Liberal Democrats. It is widely expected the party will have a choice between a coalition with Labour, or being a constructive opposition to a minority government or, depending on the numbers of MSPs each party has, a coalition with the SNP.
If ensuring that the Parliament is truly democratic and has control over the executive and an open partnership with the civil servants is top of our list of objectives, are we more likely to achieve that, working as the smaller partner within a coalition or working outside the government along with other opposition parties to compel a minority government to operate in the democratic style? In order to come to an informed decision, the Liberal Democrats may first have to consult all parties, not just their possible coalition partner.
The role of the civil servants in all this is crucial.
If the Scottish Parliament is to provide the new open accountable democracy, which the people of Scotland have been led to expect, and if the specialist committees and regional committees we are proposing are to have any real powers, the role of civil servants will have to be very different from their role in the Westminster-Whitehall system.
Currently civil servants work for their department and for their Minister; they work against all other MPs (and in truth other departments). MPs are not allowed any direct contact with civil servants dealing with policy matters or answering questions.
This ludicrous system leads to the time-wasting game in which the MP has to compose a Parliamentary Question which meets the rules of the House and the civil servant then tries to give away as little information as possible in the reply, which is a defensive departmental exercise. Information which might be damaging is either "not collected centrally" or is so out of date as to be of little value.
Apart from the Treasury Select Committee, none of the Select Committees of MPs has any support from the Civil Service.
Information is power. The Ministers and their civil servants have a monopoly of a lot of the information and keep it secret to retain their power. Clearly civil servants have a particular relationship with their Minister and the Government as a whole to advise them, help to plan their future initiatives and develop their policies.
However, they could keep this special role and still be much more open with other MPs than they are. As a comparison, in local government, when it is well run, the senior officials advise the political administration, but give full factual and policy briefings to all political groups and will meet all councillors face to face to discuss, often with remarkable honesty, local or policy issues of concern to them.
The Scottish Parliament should, in this regard, copy good local government practice and not Westminster's secretive ways. It should be established that the civil servants work for the Parliament and not the Executive. They should keep confidential their dealings with Ministers, their formulation of future policies and internal Government discussions.
In all other ways they should be available and open to question by MSPs.
If the civil servants work as full partners (apart from voting rights) with the Parliament Committees - both the specialist Committees on Education, Housing etc and the powerful Regional Committees we are proposing - they will be helping the MSPs to formulate new policies and to interpret policies in ways to suit their local communities. They will have to interact with a number of MSPs with varying ideas, not just one Minister or a small team of Ministers.
The Scottish Office civil servants will still be part of the UK Civil Service, but the Scottish Parliament should establish that this different, more open way of working is essential. The Parliament should only endorse a First Minister and Executive who will promise to work within such an open system and not recreate Westminster secrecy at Holyrood.
It should also only choose a Presiding Officer (alias Speaker) who will stand up for the rights of the Parliament to have full access to information, the full co-operation of the civil service in its work and the means to press Ministers where replies are evasive or untrue.
At Westminster, while the Speaker and her team all do an excellent job within the rules and conventions, as they interpret them, the result is that MPs often have no redress when Ministers do not give information or are evasive.
The Parliament will have to make a strong stand on this issue right at the start and then continue to be vigilant in defending its rights. Westminster-trained politicians in Ministerial posts will try to operate in Westminster ways. Because power does corrupt, Ministers and civil servants will try to ease back into comfortable ways of secrecy and they will try to keep the MSPs at bay and in ignorance. MSPs will be patronised with the odd crumb of information. The trade in glass beads to gullible natives lives on in our political system.
Related to this is the atmosphere of spin and media manipulation in which the Government of the UK is conducted. The Scottish Parliament must work on an open basis. Ministers must report to Parliament, not to morning radio programmes.
Briefings to the media must be open and attributable. Documents must be available in time for intelligent comment and Ministers and civil servants available to brief MSPs on them when they are launched.
The "joined up government" we hear so much about must include honest government public relations and intelligent and informed debate. - March 31
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