SCVO Response: Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee Inquiry into Committee Effectiveness

About our response

SCVO welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee’s stakeholder survey on committee effectiveness. 

Question 12: Can you highlight any pieces of committee scrutiny or work which have stood out to you as effective scrutiny, and can you briefly say why it was effective?

Last year, the Social Justice and Social Security Committee undertook its budget scrutiny 2025-26 with a focus on third-sector funding principles. As stated at the time, the committee had “heard of concerns about funding challenges faced by the third sector” and wanted to “examine how the Scottish Government’s approach to fair and efficient funding can contribute to the continued effectiveness of the third sector”.

Over the last few years, SCVO has consistently called on the Scottish Government to implement our Fair Funding principles and asks, ensuring a fair, sustainable, flexible, and accessible funding landscape for voluntary organisations. During that period, we have also sought to highlight the funding-related barriers faced by the voluntary sector, amplify the experiences of voluntary organisations, and provide data through the likes of the Scottish Third Sector Tracker to support our calls.

The Social Justice and Social Security Committee took a proactive approach to this work. Clerks met with members of the SCVO policy team to gain a greater understanding of the funding issues facing the voluntary sector in Scotland, before then preparing for and progressing with the inquiry, including from the beginning extensive information on not only the barriers faced by the sector, but also SCVO’s Fair Funding asks - asks supported by a consistently increasing number of voluntary organisations.

This proactive approach, ensuring the committee had a good level of knowledge and understanding prior to the inquiry itself, allowed the process to be far more efficient, giving voluntary organisations and independent funders an opportunity to have their voices heard in circumstances where the questions being asked by committee members were informed and varying, seeking to garner relevant information on the very real issues facing the sector.

This approach also ensured that, when the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice gave evidence, the committee was able to ask some of the questions that the sector needed to be asked, something only made possible by both the preparatory work to ensure the committee was informed and the resulting evidence sessions where committee members were able to build on their knowledge and understanding by asking informed questions. This included being able to highlight that the Scottish Government’s commitment to Fairer Funding, although welcome, will not tackle the majority of barriers facing voluntary organisations.

The committee’s resulting report was comprehensive, shining a light on the wide-ranging issues facing the sector that go beyond simply a need for longer-term funding and more timely grant notifications, highlighting the urgent need too for aspects such as inflation-based uplifts and greater levels of core funding.

It remains to be seen what impact the committee’s work and report will have, if any, on further development of the Scottish Government’s Fairer Funding commitment. However, for a sector that regularly feels like an afterthought within the legislative process, this was a prime example of how seeking to understand the sector and using that understanding to approach an inquiry with the required level of detail, while providing a platform for those who understand the sector best to openly discuss these issues, gives a strong voice within parliament to organisations who often feel ignored.

SCVO, and the voluntary sector in Scotland, continues to push the Scottish Government on ensuring Fairer Funding mirrors our Fair Funding calls as closely as possible, and the committee’s inquiry on third-sector funding principles has helped show how urgently this is required and how the Scottish Government cannot ignore what is needed, essentially helping to add “Fair Funding” to parliamentary lexicon in the ongoing discourse.

Ultimately, the committee’s work in this area has been a positive example of a parliamentary committee highlighting the issues that need to be highlighted, asking the questions that need to be asked, and giving a voice to the organisations who need to be heard.

Question 13: Can you describe any pieces of committee work which have been less effective or have not achieved what you expected, and briefly explain why?

Despite the positive example provided in the previous answer, SCVO continues to be frustrated at times with the lack of movement on the recommendations that result from scrutiny by committees, once inquiries have been completed and reports have been published. We recognise that there can be mitigating factors, such as policy cycles and a lack of parliamentary resources, but note that this is something that committees themselves have raised in the past yet there does not appear to have been any positive change in that regard.

As a result of the recent pre-budget scrutiny by the Social Justice and Social Security Committee mentioned above, we now have a report with a number of recommendations that SCVO, and the wider voluntary sector, supports. And yet, despite this allowing the sector to feel like voices from within it have been heard within the walls of parliament, it seems unlikely that the Scottish Government’s Fairer Funding commitment will see the implementation of these recommendations, beyond the likes of more timely notifications and a two-year multi-year funding pilot, both of which were in development prior to the committee’s report. And so scrutiny and the resulting findings can be hugely accurate and relevant but, too often, it feels like the process ends there.

Of course, the example given above is recent and so the timescales involved, it could be argued, have not allowed enough time for further recommendations to be considered and implemented. This is fair and we will continue to ask, and hope, that further recommendations do indeed find their way into the Fairer Funding commitment. But there are numerous other examples of where this disconnect between committee recommendations and policymakers is prevalent, even when there is a much longer time period within which to act.

For example, the 2019 report - Looking ahead to the Scottish Government’s Draft Budget 2020-21: Valuing the Third Sector - published by the Equalities and Human Rights Committee, states clearly:

“The issues highlighted in this inquiry are similar to those raised at the Committee’s earliest stakeholder evidence sessions in 2016 and limited progress has been made. To effectively provide for their communities’ needs, public bodies must better understand their communities and continue to innovate”.

This report from 2019 highlighted many recommendations that are still valid today, in terms of the funding and status of the voluntary sector in Scotland. We shared some of these learnings in subsequent years with other committees, such as the Finance and Public Administration Committee during its inquiry on the Scottish Government’s decision-making process. But the fact remains that little progress has been made since 2016 – almost ten years – and we believe that this is quite telling in terms of the actual efficiency, and indeed relevance, of inquiries and scrutiny undertaken by parliamentary committees.

In order for those who participate in the work of committees - be it responding to consultations, giving evidence, or any other engagement – to see the real value of doing so, there has to be an acknowledgement that the relevance of this work is often limited. As outlined in the previous answer, sometimes shining a light on particular issues can be hugely positive in its own right, but there often remains a barrier to progress beyond this, where a committee’s recommendations, as agreeable and as important as they may be, regularly fail to go beyond words within a report.

Furthermore, from the perspective of SCVO, voluntary organisations, and wider civil society, there are limitations to how much can be contributed to committee scrutiny and parliamentary processes. If we are to use the Budget as an example, many organisations, like the parliament itself, are closed over the Christmas break, limiting the amount of time available to engage with the Budget delivered in December, and to prepare written and oral evidence which is often requested early in January.

Similarly, committee pre-budget scrutiny tends to take place over the summer break when many voluntary sector staff, like those across all sectors, are on holiday. And committee pre-budget scrutiny consultations often open and close at very similar times, resulting in voluntary organisations needing to prioritise which committees to engage with due to capacity issues, particularly at a time when capacity may already be lowered. It is, therefore, important to recognise that, for specific legislative processes, the timescales involved and subsequent opportunities for engagement that are made available, are not conducive to eliciting the highest quality responses and evidence from Scotland’s voluntary sector.

Question 14: If there’s anything else you’d like to say about your experience of committee scrutiny, please do so here.

Committee scrutiny does not just provide the opportunity for the committee itself to scrutinise, it is the chance for those impacted by decisions and those with first-hand experience to have their voices heard and feel like those voices are valued. By proactively approaching the subject matter and having a level of understanding that allows the committee to ask informed questions, those participating in the process can feel listened to and understood. But
when a committee’s work fails to lead to any tangible progress, it can give the impression that those voices have not been heard by policymakers.

That then is the challenge for the Scottish Parliament. Committees must be able to proactively draw out the crucial details and experiences that should then influence decisions taken in parliament, but there then has be a tangible route forward that allows that information that has been gathered, and the conclusions that have been drawn, to actively and demonstrably influence the decisions being made in parliament.

Our experience would suggest that committees are capable of undertaking and producing proactive, informed, and valuable pieces of work but how that work then connects with the wider parliamentary process and leads to tangible action and the implementation of recommendations continues to be questionable. In order for the time and energy that goes into the scrutiny undertaken by committees to be worthwhile, and to ensure that participants who provide their expertise and experiences through consultations and evidence sessions continue to feel that it is a beneficial use of capacity, more work has to be done to ensure that committee scrutiny can be seen as truly relevant and significant within the parliamentary process.