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I would very much like to pay tribute to Huw Williams and Janice Crerar, who are hugely experienced staff and on whose experience we fundamentally rely as the commissioner landscape grows. They have done a first-class job on behalf of the Parliament, liaising with the various commissioners and assisting in informing the corporate body.

Let me take that away and see what the arrangement is. As it happens, whoever is in charge of cleaning swung by my office this morning to ask whether I was completely satisfied with the cleaning, to which I said that I was. However, I take your point that it is not a case of tidying offices. I think that it would be beyond anyone’s ability to do that, having visited some colleagues’ offices.

Can you illustrate that with a product that you have in mind?

Where there were six sales.

I am sorry—which costs?

Yes, it would be fair to say that that is the view of the corporate body. Further, it would be fair to say that we are of the view that this is something that members should try to wrestle with and resolve in this session of Parliament, because the difficulty could be that a new cohort of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ might accept the landscape as they find it and simply seek to expand it further without those considerations and longer-term perspectives being reflected.

Indeed.

I will let David McGill start on that.

I am tempted to answer that question on a personal basis as well as on behalf of the corporate body. I return to the point that the corporate body’s responsibility is to enact the will of Parliament. It is a matter of public record that the Presiding Officer has raised the issue of office-holders with the Scottish Government. Last year, I made a particular point of raising the matter with the committee.

As a long-standing member of the Scottish Parliament who, in my first session in 2007 to 2011, was on a committee that had been charged by Parliament to rationalise the number of office-holders that we had at that time, for which there was an unabated enthusiasm among members in the Parliament, in this session of Parliament, I am struck—as are my colleagues in the corporate body—by the attraction to colleagues of embracing campaigns that will lead to the creation of additional commissioners. That has almost become the de facto or go-to response. The reason that we raised the issue last year in particular was because although we respect the will of the Parliament, we can see that the areas in which we are beginning to generate commissioners, if accepted by Parliament, could make it harder for Parliament to justify not creating commissioners in other areas where one could say that there was a similarity, either in their responsibility or function, and that could lead to an exponential growth of commissioners.

There is a question of democratic accountability in my view as to why we as a Parliament were set up in the first place and whether we are devolving from ourselves to others responsibility for matters.

My working knowledge in whatever walk of life I have been in is that when institutions of that character are created, they invariably grow in remit and in size, and that appears to be the case. Part of that is that as the public becomes more aware of such institutions, more inquiries are made and, therefore, the responsibility grows. As is also the case with initiatives that are being progressed by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, perhaps in relation to matters such as freedom of information, we could, as a Parliament, take decisions that will significantly grow the responsibility of the commissioner to whom that responsibility has been devolved.

There is a big question for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ in all this as we look to the future. You will see, with the addition of the patient safety commissioner, which role was approved by Parliament in the past couple of months or so, that the increase in the office-holder provision in the indicative budget for next year is significantly ahead of the inflationary increase that we expect to apply to the rest of the Parliament. The overall cost of office-holders as part of our parliamentary budget is incrementally increasing, so there is a financial aspect and an accountability aspect.

I am sorry—that was a long answer, but I hope that it was helpful.

As we have identified, a significant part of our budget—80 per cent—is driven by the staff costs in the Parliament. In the previous parliamentary session, we took critical decisions, which were driven by this committee’s requests and by ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ, to increase the resource made available to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ to run their offices and to the overall structure of the Parliament. We and committees felt that it was important that the resource existed to allow the committees to hold the Government to account. Obviously, we apply as rigid a discipline as we can.

We have operated from the principle that it is the responsibility of the Parliament and the corporate body to ensure that the Parliament can operate to maximum capacity in its ability to support members in holding the Scottish Government to account. It would be open to us to do anything differently only by compromising that ability, and the corporate body is not prepared to submit a budget that would do that.