Dear minister, you know quangos work for you?

Robin McAlpine

I was reading a news story in the Herald and saw a phrase I was so familiar with that for a second my mind just jumped forward onto other things. The phrase was 'that is an operational matter for [QUANGO NAME]'. Usually that just means 'we're not answering so good luck FOI-ing that out of a Scottish public agency', which means it's best to stop thinking about it. Then just for a second I asked 'why?'.

Seriously, why is this an operational matter for some quango or agency and not the responsibility of the person with the legal responsibility? And why do the rest of us put up with this nonsense?

The story concerned was one I don't really know a lot about (the marking of history exams by the SQA). I don't know the rights or wrongs of this. What I do know is that whatever has happened, people lost confidence in exam pass rates in history and it was as a result of an operational matter by the SQA.

Except I didn't elect the SQA to be responsible for delivering reliable exam results, I elected politicians to do that and they used my votes (one way or another) to form a government. That government is responsible for the integrity of the exams system in a 'look, it just is, legally, the buck stops there, there's no-one higher up to blame' sort of way. 

Let me give you an analogy. Imagine I have asked my teenage daughter to insure my car for me. Imagine the conversation I would have had with the DVLA over this. Imagine me answering the phone, them telling me I'm going to get fined and me saying 'nope, not speaking to you, this is an operational matter for my daughter'. How would that have gone?

You know why I'm having to rely on analogies? It's because, as a result of Scotland's governmental structures both at a local and national level, we have assimilated the idea that this is all normal, that ministers set aims and goals and it's then unelected bodies that write policy. That isn't how things are supposed to work.

An important distinction needs to be made here. There absolutely are some operational matters that you do not want politicians directly involved in, with 'deciding who police are going to arrest' and 'assessing whether a pupil has or has not given a good answer about the Italian Renaissance' being the sorts of things that should be the responsibility of a specialist, not a politician.

But that distinctions has been eroded, because the basis on which a police officer does arrest someone and the integrity of exam marking across a fully-aggregated data set of the year's exam candidates are 100 per cent the responsibility of the politician.

I can speculate forever about who moved the line – was it pull from the unelected-but-powerful figures who now set policy and run services through membership of some quango, board or public body, or was it push from politicians whose desire to avoid scrutiny trumped having the ability to actually change the country?

That is genuinely what's happening here. The structures of government are literally taking crucial governmental powers and making them 'arms length' (in the case of an aleo) or 'quasi-autonomous' (in the case of a quango) or 'outside the department' (for a NDPB) or 'with agency transferred away' (literally in the case of a public agency).

And do you know the name for one of your tools that you can't get access to? Someone else's tool. Worse than that, you've not just prevented yourself from accessing your tool, you've set in place a structure that makes it really hard for you to get your tool back. I mean kind of literally, in that you've constituted the power as lying with the quango and not with you.

It means if a quango does something a minister doesn't like then a minister can do one of four things; metaphorically scowl at the quango and hope it changes its mind, abolish the quango, wait until its board is up for reappointment and change it, or suck it up.

The unaccountability of quangos is the problem. The question which drove their creation was 'but what if a politician uses the bounty of their powers to gain personal or political advantage?'. The answer should always have been 'so we have an independent media and plurality in the parliament so they are held to account, and if we don't like it we can vote them out'. 

The question 'but what if an unelected body uses the bounty of its powers in a way that isn't in the public interest?' has been shown to have only one answer: 'that is an operational matter for the unelected body'. 

How often is this a problem? Well, I'd been collecting stories in the Scottish media in real time to give examples for this piece, but I got delayed by a week and by then there were too many tabs open and I had to close them. That was just three weeks' worth.

Let take an example. It now seems generally accepted that something went badly wrong at Rape Crisis Edinburgh, but there hasn't been enough discussion about why and how. Support centres for women who have been raped or sexually abused are delivering a crucial public service and responsibility for the policies operating in these spaces is a public policy.

There were concerns raised about the agency well before it changed its policy, and in a normal democratic structure that would have required a government minister to answer to that policy. That would have forced the politician either to defend or change the policy and they would have then been responsible and could be removed from office by voters. At every stage democracy would be able to intervene and the accountable person would have no one to hide behind.

That's not what happened. The current official story is that the Scottish Government had no say over the policy because it was an operational matter for Rape Crisis Scotland and Rape Crisis Scotland says it was misinformed by Rape Crisis Edinburgh which operated a service with a different policy from Rape Crisis Scotland.

This has nothing to do with what is or isn't the right or the wrong policy, this is about the desperate need to have proper democratic accountability at every stage, clarity, transparency and consistency across the public realm. It is certainly not supposed to be a Russian Doll of ever-diminishing accountability.

This is about the structures of government. The post-devolution era was never meant to turn into a feudal system of nested fiefdoms, each insulated from the transparency and accountability nominally radiating from the one above.

The madness of this system in Scotland is never-ending. Basically every government minister is now a 'Minister of Vibes'. They set out the kind of vibes they want to achieve (happier, healthier, more productive) and task the feudal empires to make it happen. They do their thing. The politicians then turn into spokespeople for the feudal empires, trying to persuade us that whatever the hell it was the empires did has created precisely the desired 'vibe'.

I mean, who is working for who in all of this? I find, increasingly, the Scottish Cabinet gives the impression of being the marketing department for the quangos; the quangos hold much of the operational power, the politicians just make speeches about it.

If you take the big failures in government just now you will find that in almost all of the instances the body with operational responsibility is not a government department but some sort of non-governmental entity. For ferries CMal and CalMac, for education reforms Education Scotland, for various NHS scandals and cover ups, health boards, for controversial policing guidelines, the Scottish Police Authority, for arts funding, Creative Scotland.

In fact, right now the latest debacle is that the Scottish Government is trying to take care out of local democratic control and put it into a new quango and everyone has had enough. Seriously, everyone everywhere is sick of this. From a social worker to a struggling artist, from a college lecturer to a resident of a Scottish island, quango culture blights the lives of communities and frontline staff everywhere.

Of course, if you ask why the pissed off people don't do something about it, we get to 'but what?'. We quickly find ourselves back at 'unaccountable'. It's ludicrous; one of the strongest arguments put forward in favour of the Scottish Parliament was that it would create a democratic structure to sweep away all the unelected quangos that ran Scotland under minority Tory rule.

Instead Scotland has led the world in innovating new ways to cut democracy out of delivery. (I just discovered that an Arms Length Executive Organisation is a purely Scottish invention apparently mainly designed to facilitate second incomes for councillors.)

So the next time you hear someone in government shrug off responsibility for something which is their responsibility with words beginning 'that is an operational matter for...', stop and remind yourself that it isn't, its an operational matter for our democratic politics and it is time we stopped accepting the pretence otherwise.