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No—it is up to the Parliament to figure out what it needs to do.

The officials can correct me if I am wrong, but I suppose that if the organisation employs staff, has a building and a budget, is spending money and has accounts, it can clearly be audited as an entity. If we are talking about an inspector or a group that does not have that back-office support—its support is provided by the Government—and does not run its own budget line per se, that will be consolidated in the Government accounts and the process will be different. That would be the determining factor as to which category the body would sit in, but the level of scrutiny through whatever route should be just as effective.

Not specifically with regard to audit, but more generally with regard to reporting requirements and information gathering. We are working through the public sector reform strategy with public bodies to see whether there are opportunities to make the requirements more proportionate and effective and to ensure that we are gathering the right information and checking the right things in order to make a difference, not just collecting information for the sake of it or going through processes that add cost but no value.

If there are any examples of audit falling into that category, I will be willing to look at them. However, we need to bear it in mind that audit has, for very good reasons, its own regime in terms of the legal processes that we need to go through: what we need to check, why we need to check it and how we need to do it.

Do you want to add anything, Aileen?

Well, those working in the relevant portfolio—such as communities, equalities or whatever—would obviously have a close relationship with those bodies, as well as with relevant stakeholders, which would allow them to take a view. The matter that you raise is not something that I am personally aware of. If there is a specific issue, we can check in with the relevant portfolio and write back to you.

This has been a great conversation in which lots of things have been drawn out, which has been really helpful. I very much look forward to the committee’s conclusions and recommendations, which could be very helpful in the work that I am taking forward. As I said, I know that the committee’s remit is tightly drawn around SPCB-supported bodies, which, from memory, account for £18 million of the Government’s total spend of £60 billion. That gives a sense of the scale of that spending compared with that on the rest of the landscape. Far be it from me to direct the work of committees, but, if work was done to look at the wider public body landscape, that would not be unhelpful in supporting the work that the Government is taking forward in that regard.

It is up to the Parliament to decide how it wants to configure that.

Thank you very much for the invitation to talk to you this morning. I am looking forward to the conversation.

It is worth saying at the outset that the Parliament-supported bodies are clearly in that space for good reasons, which we can talk about. There is a limit to how appropriate it would be for the Government to influence or be seen to be influencing that, because such bodies are not in the Government’s space for good reasons.

You hinted at the fact that those bodies sit within a much broader public body landscape, convener, which I am happy to engage on if the committee wants to go down that route, although I understand that it is not, strictly speaking, within your fairly tight remit.

The existing bodies have grown up over many years in response to requirements that were felt to be necessary at that time. I watched with interest some of your earlier evidence sessions, in which there were conversations about whether some of the bodies should be more closely aligned or amalgamated or whatever. That is a welcome discussion, but, as I said, it is not for the Government to take a view on how the bodies should be organised.

It has come out in the evidence that there have been two types of bodies in the Parliament space. There are the bodies that are separate for very good reasons—those that consider information or ethics or other compliance issues, whereby it is hugely important that they are separate and are seen to be separate from the Government. There are also the advocacy groups, if you want to call them that, which are a more recent phenomenon.

As you will see from the ministerial control framework, there now is very much a presumption against creating new public bodies. Indeed, the public service reform strategy that we will publish next month will set in train some work to review how many bodies we have and whether we need that many. That is very much the direction of travel, rather than that of creating new bodies in response to every need. The MCF lays out a process whereby we would go through various gates to check whether a new body was necessary. However, you are right to say that there are a number of bodies for which the process was set in train a while ago.

I do not want to speak for members or others who feel that they need to make those proposals. I know that a number of members are seeking to bring new commissioners before the committee.

In system design generally, if more layers and more bodies are added, it does not make the process simpler, it makes it more complex and I suggest that there is a relationship between the complexity of a system and its ability to deliver. By making a system more complex, you run the risk of making the problem worse, because it means that there are more people in the space to be engaged with and in the process, which makes the delivery process more complex. As a general rule, simplicity is probably the best design principle when it comes to looking for effective and efficient delivery. You clearly need checks and balances within that, and they are an important part of the landscape, but it is important to recognise that as a principle.

I suspect that you might be right that people feel that having a commissioner elevates the status of the group that they are advocating for. It gives them more people to talk to and more opportunity to get the issues that they want to be raised in front of the Government or the Parliament. That might well be the case, but, in terms of how effective specific groups or the system as a whole are, you are better looking at why the system is not performing.

I would argue that delivery can always be better. Of course, there are challenges out there, some of which will be fiscal challenges and other impacts on society and the economy. However, just because everything is not as good as people should expect it to be, it does not necessarily mean that a new commissioner is the answer.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.