Examination of Witnesses (Questions 70-79)
24 MARCH 2004
MRS CAROL
DEVON AND
MS ROSEMARY
EVERETT
Q70 Chairman: Good afternoon and thank
you very much for coming down from Edinburgh. This session will
be quite informal. I am very grateful for the memo that you sent
in, which gave us an idea of what you do. Can I apologise for
the fact that there will be a vote in about five or six minutes?
We will just canter through and then rush off, come back as quickly
as we can, and carry on. We have colleagues from the London Assembly
joining us at the back to listen to you; so you have an extra
audience. Can I begin by asking you what you think is distinctive
about the Scottish Parliament's approach to engaging with the
voters, compared with what you know happens down in Westminster?
Mrs Devon: First of all, we try
to mainstream throughout the organisation the idea that we want
to engage with the public. You will be familiar with the background
to the Scottish Parliament, the consultative steering group on
the Scottish Parliament, and the four key principles behind it,
which include openness, accessibility and participation. They
do genuinely influence the work that we do in Parliament. From
the point when committee clerks think about how they will conduct
an inquiry, they have those principles in mind. When we are looking
at public information, looking at leaflets, et cetera, we are
driven by trying to be as accessible as possible and trying to
engage as many people as possible. We are constantly trying to
review what we do and to improve that. In terms of specifics,
we are really improving now on our participation work, and trying
to move beyond the usual suspects, if you like, in terms of who
comes along to committee events and to participative events. We
are trying to work through community groups, to reach those people
who would normally be disengaged from the democratic process.
Rosemary, who heads the Participation Services, can say a bit
more about that. We have made particular efforts in recent committee
inquiries to try to involve people in various community organisations
and community groups. We also get community groups to do work
for us, in gathering views and pulling them together for us, because
they have the network of contacts at ground level. Those are probably
the major differences.
Q71 Chairman: Would those community groups
be pensioners' groups, neighbourhood groups—all sorts of
community groups?
Mrs Devon: Yes, and social inclusion
partnerships or like the Greater Easterhouse Partnership. They
can be geographical or they can be sectors of society that we
target. They could be the elderly, housing associations, disability
groups; they could be a whole range.
Q72 Mr McLoughlin: Can you remind me
what the turnout was at the last elections and what they were
at the first elections? That is one question, and I think it does
bear on connecting with the public. What do you do about accessibility
from the remoter areas of Scotland? I suppose that there will
be a lot of interest in the new building when it is finally opened,
for all sorts of reasons. What are the sorts of visitor numbers
that you get at the moment?
Mrs Devon: Visitor numbers at
the moment are about 70,000 to 80,000 visitors a year. We had
some market research done about two years ago, which is now being
updated. That suggests that it will increase tenfold, to about
700,000 visitors a year to Holyrood. The reason we are getting
it updated is to give us a bit more of a breakdown on where those
people will be coming from. The 700,000 includes people who are
coming from schools for education. It includes witnesses. It includes
people who are coming to engage in the business, and also people
coming from Scotland just to look at the building and find out
what their money has been spent on. It will include a lot of tourists,
particularly in the summertime. Again, we are trying to get a
breakdown as to how many might be from elsewhere in the UK, elsewhere
in Europe, and then from outside Europe, from the States, because
we get a lot of American visitors to Edinburgh. We are also trying
to get a handle on how many visitors would be additional to the
visitors who would be going to Edinburgh at present. It is quite
a big challenge for us, because when the specification was made
for the building, it was originally spec'ed as a parliament building.
At that point we did not know that it was going to be designed
by a Spanish architect and turn into an iconic building. So it
has not been designed as a visitor attraction. One of the challenges
for us is how we will handle these numbers of visitors coming
through a building which has a small public café and few
public toilets, for example. It is therefore a big challenge for
us.
Q73 Mr McLoughlin: And turnouts?
Mrs Devon: Not off the top of
my head, no.
Q74 Mr Shepherd: Up or down?
Mrs Devon: Down.
Q75 Mr Kidney: Could I ask about the
work with the media, which is mentioned a couple of times in your
paper but there is no detail. Clearly a lot of people will get
their information of the Parliament through what they read, hear
or watch. How exactly does the Parliament, as distinct from the
Executive, engage with the media?
Mrs Devon: What you say is true.
We have had some research done to find out attitudes to the Parliament
and where people get most of their information. The top three
places where people get their information are TV news broadcasts
first of all, then local press and then national press. Very few
are getting it direct from Parliament through public information
leaflets or through the website, so we need to work at that. Clearly
we need to look at how we are engaging with the media on how they
get the story across to people; but we also need to look at whether
we want to go behind the media and try to do more public information
work ourselves. Our media office has eight members of staff, two
of whom are on fixed-term contracts. They are dealing with the
increase in media enquiries in the run-up to the opening of Holyrood.
One of them is also a part-time photographer. They take about
100 calls a week from the media, so a lot of their work is reactive,
trying to correct stories before they get to the press; trying
to find out what is the background to the story and trying to
get the facts out there, to influence any stories that are to
appear in the press. We do try to have a Scottish Parliament line
in any story that we know is appearing about the Scottish Parliament
in the press. It is very rarely that we say we are not going to
comment on something: we would try to have a line appearing in
the press. Increasingly, however, we are developing a media strategy.
We work with committee conveners, for example. At the beginning
of every month, we sit down with the conveners, decide what are
the key areas that they are looking at this month; where they
think the story lines will be, who are the interesting witnesses,
et cetera. Then we try to get that placed with the relevant media.
We have a media plan for committee work. We now have over 100
journalists on our database, both from Scottish newspapers and
London-based newspapers, where we know what their specialisms
are and what stories they are likely to be interested in. We also
work with about 70 trades journals and we will place stories there.
That is on the committee side. We have a dedicated member of staff
working with conveners on that. Clearly the Holyrood building
is taking up a lot of the media and press at the moment, particularly
in Scotland. We have a strategy developed for working with that,
looking at where the milestones are in terms of when major sections
of the building are finished and coming on line; when we are getting
equipment put into various parts of the building, et cetera; and,
again, some careful placement of stories, some photo calls. If
there is a photo call, then we will always follow it up with a
local interview on the radio or something, depending on who the
member has been.
Q76 Chairman: That is quite an impressive
approach, but do you find yourself getting into areas of party
political controversy? Is your role as a kind of interface for
all of that?
Mrs Devon: No, we do not really,
to be honest. Say there are two different views being expressed
in a committee, or there is a committee report where a couple
of members are taking a different view from the main committee
report, we will leave that entirely for the members to talk to
the press on. Normally we would just support a committee convener
or, where there is a committee and they are jointly launching
a report, then we would assist in that launch; but we would not
get into the political side of it.
Chairman: We have to adjourn the Committee
at this stage, as I warned.
The Committee suspended from 4.16 pm to 4.38
pm for a division in the House.
Q77 Chairman: We will make a start. I
know that we are still missing some members but, given the way
that the time has been disrupted and to give maximum opportunity
to our witnesses, I would now like to hear more from you. Rosemary,
perhaps I could ask you to tell us about how you go about these
outreach meetings, if I can describe them as that—as it
were, mobilising public participation, rather than just allowing
it to happen, if it does at all?
Ms Everett: We do it in a number
of ways. Sometimes we target events through our committees, both
in terms of their going out and around Scotland, and we will send
out public information or public participation members of staff
who actually work with the committee.
Q78 Chairman: They visit different centres,
do they?
Ms Everett: They do indeed, yes.
For example, our Education, Culture and Sport Committee went to
Stornaway in the Western Isles to investigate public broadcasting.
So we sent our educational staff up there to lead a session with
the local schools, including a question-and-answer session with
the members when they had a break in the committee proceedings.
We also send people out just to target community groups. We have
a network called the Partner Library Network, which is 80 local
authority libraries across Scotland. We are increasingly using
them as venues to encourage people from local community groups
to come into the library for a half-day session—usually
an information-giving session rather than actively trying to engage
them.
Q79 Chairman: With your staff there?
Ms Everett: My staff will go along,
yes, and they will give presentations to deliver information about
the Parliament and how it works. We will try to get members to
go along as well, because obviously meeting MSPs is a really popular
part of what these sessions are about. We are expanding out the
audiences that we try to encourage to come in to those sessions
now. So we are trying to reach grassroots community groups. We
recently had an event in Ibrox, in the partner library there for
example, where we invited black and ethnic minority communities
to come along, asylum seekers, and then other community groups
picked up on the idea. We had people from quite diverse backgrounds:
people who were campaigning for more rights for grandparents to
have access to their grandchildren; groups from the edges of organised
civil society, who are coming along and engaging with Parliament
through these sessions.
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