Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
RT HON
DES BROWNE
MP, DAVID CAIRNS
MP AND MR
DAVID MIDDLETON
24 JUNE 2008
Q60 Mr MacNeil: Can I ask you about
the financial resources that have been put in to the Calman Commission?
What resources are you aware of that have gone towards the Calman
Commission?
Des Browne: I am aware of exactly
what Kenneth Calman told this Committee, and which is recorded
in the minutes of his evidence. I do not remember the detail of
it all, but we have a commitment. He has given a commitment to
the Committee to account to the Committee, among others, for any
additional resources other than what he has already explained.
People know that the Scottish Parliament, because it has endorsed
the Commission, has devoted certain resources to it, including
support for people. We have, having accepted that we have a role
to play in this process, and the UK Government, the responsibility
to provide resources, and between us we have provided facilities.
Over and above that, the members of the Commission themselves
are not taking any fees for that. I think Kenneth Calman told
you that he, because of his age, enjoyed a travel pass that allowed
him lower fares than would normally be charged. It will probably
be travel expenses and reasonable expenses for conducting the
consultation. As they develop through the process of the working
groups and the decisions, what they want to do to carry forward
this exciting and quite legitimate process of consultation with
the Scottish people—legitimate to the extent that it has
the support of the Scottish Parliament, unlike the other one—then
we will be able to account. Do you know, by any chance, how much
the national conversation has cost?
Q61 Mr MacNeil: I do not.
Des Browne: No.
Q62 Mr MacNeil: Given what you have
said about your wider role as Scottish Secretary of State—do
you see a role perhaps within your remit, within your desire,
to be supportive of decisions of the Scottish Parliament?
Des Browne: I am a democrat, yes,
as I am sure you are, so I encourage parliamentary decision-making,
which is why I am encouraging your party to bring its national
conversation before Parliament to get Parliament to endorse it.
Q63 Mr MacNeil: As Scottish Secretary,
do you find when you are dealing with Westminster that you—on
certain occasions you must feel you must enunciate the case for
the Scottish Parliament or decisions the Scottish Parliament has
made which maybe need wider representation?
Des Browne: I have already alluded
to this, Mr MacNeil, but I am almost certainly arguing for devolution
for Scotland and for its parliament and I have been supporting
this parliament for longer than you have been doing so.
Mr MacNeil: We will give you a length
of service medal! Thank you.
Q64 Mr Devine: This is Galvety time
in West Lothian at the moment. You are meeting four or five thousand
on a Saturday; there have been various meetings on a Sunday and
various other meetings that I have been at. I have only been here
less than three years: not one person has ever come to my surgery
and said to me: "What we need to talk about is more powers
for the Scottish Parliament to resolve this problem." What
people come to talk about is jobs, health service, education.
You have been here a lot longer—I just wondered if that
was your experience!
Des Browne: I can never recollect
any individual constituent coming to me and asking me for more
powers for the Scottish Parliament. That is not to say that in
the 11 years plus I have been here somebody has not, and if anybody
hears this broadcast and is that person and identifies themselves
it would not surprise me, but it is not at the forefront of discussions
on the doorsteps of Kilmarnock and Loudoun or in my advice surgeries,
no.
Q65 Chairman: How would you describe
your relationship between the Scotland Office and the Scottish
Executive over the past year?
Des Browne: I think it has been
productive. On occasions it has been interesting. I have to say
that on a day-to-day basis the Minister of State, David Cairns,
has more dealings with members of the Scottish Executive than
I have, and that is inevitable. He has developed good relationships
with members of the Scottish Executive actually over that time.
David Cairns: The Secretary of
State mentioned in response to your first question the number
of Sewel motions, as we still think of them, or LCMs[10]—I
think we are up to nine. That is from a situation where the SNPs
vote against them on principle to now actively pursuing them—and
I am not criticising them for that—"the sinner repenteth"
I think is an occasion for rejoicing! Some of these have been
marginal, let us be honest—some of the Sewel motions have
always been marginal. However, some of them are really tricky
issues, things like carbon capture and storage in relation to
the Energy Bill, which has been a very controversial issue and
a topic that is right at the heart of the political debate going
on about what we do about energy in Scotland. I know I certainly
answered questions about that last time and there are further
questions to come. On a day-to-day basis I think it has been mostly
constructive. It is always regrettable when grandstanding goes
on and people use documents that were obviously shared in confidence
in press conferences and so on; but thankfully that has been the
exception rather than the rule. As I have said all along, the
Scottish people will not thank any politician who is more interested
in playing politics than addressing the issues that affect them
in their jobs, energy, their health, whatever. That has certainly
been at the forefront of my mind in the last year. To be fair,
it has been at the forefront of most of the ministers and the
Scottish Executive as well—but, sadly, not all the time.
Q66 Mr Davidson: Following on from the
point made earlier on about the cost of the Calman Commission
and whether the Secretary of State can let us have in due course
an indication of the expected budget for Calman—together,
just for comparison purposes, with an indication of the costs
to date of the national conversation, can we also possibly have
the costs of the Jenkins Commission on broadcasting, just so that
we are aware of the ballpark figures for these things?
David Cairns: I know that the
Scottish Broadcasting Commission has a budget of half a million
pounds.
Q67 Mr Davidson: Goodness me! Will
Calman be as much as that?
Des Browne: I think we need to
wait and see how Calman intends to take forward the consultation
part because it would be that that would cost the money because,
as we know, none of the commissioners are charging any fees, so
they are going to have to engage with the people of Scotland,
and necessarily you will know yourselves from public meetings
I am sure you conduct in your own constituency that putting these
things together costs money. Once we get an indication of what
they intend to do, then we will be able to put a figure on it.[11]
Q68 Mr Davidson: On the principle
of commissioners not charging fees, the Broadcasting Commission,
for example—is that one for which fees are being charged?
David Cairns: I do not know. This
is a creature of the Scottish Executive. I know that when they
announced it they said it would have a half-a-million-pound budget.
How that is broken down in terms of being allocated to individual
people, I simply do not know.
Q69 David Mundell: I am surprised
Mr Davidson has not sought assurance that none of these people
were paid expenses in euros! That was a significant concern in
relation to the Gould report. Sir Kenneth Calman advised us that
a group had been established which would specifically look at
the relations between the Scottish Parliament, the Westminster
Parliament, the Scottish Government and the UK Government; and
it was encouraging—although we did not get a great deal
of detail—that the First Minister had indicated a willingness
to participate in that aspect of the process. I presume, obviously,
that you will be participating positively in that group's work
in terms of being in the best position to provide some evidence
to it. Have you any initial thoughts in relation to how the mechanics
of the inter-governmental relationship could be improved?
Des Browne: I saw that Sir Kenneth
Calman referred to correspondence he had had with the First Minister,
which he was quite positive about. If you interpreted that as
the First Minister intends himself to engage with the Calman Commission,
then you may be disappointed, but I certainly, if I am asked by
the Calman Commission, to engage with them on any aspect of the
work they are doing, will be happy to do it personally. I will
make sure that they get access to those people in my department
whom they need to in order to understand any aspect of the work
that they are doing. They have not yet asked me to do that. To
my knowledge—they may have written to the department and
there may be a piece of correspondence in the department, but
I can tell you now that even without them writing to me they should
know that I would be prepared to co-operate with them. What was
the second part of your question?
Q70 David Mundell: I wonder whether
you had initial thoughts from your own experience over the past
years in terms of the mechanics of the relationship, whether there
are obvious things that could be improved.
Des Browne: Can I just say to
you that we can all play politics with this stuff, but the serious
point from the point of view of the Scottish people is that I
do not think we should jump to any conclusions from the experience
of having an SNP-controlled executive in Scotland for a year plus
and having a UK Government controlled by another party. There
is almost certainly in my view going to be, in that unusual environment,
in the sense that we have never experienced it before, a lot of
working out. Underlying this, the people of Scotland should know
that lots of stuff is done day in and day out. The politics that
some people play at the surface of all of this, which I am far
too busy to do, I have to say, to be fair, is given the lie to
by a lot of the stuff that goes on underneath. I know from talking
to David the degree to which people at the end of the day operate
in the best interests of the people of Scotland together. That
would be my very strong message to Kenneth Calman; we should find
some way of giving that more visibility. It might undermine the
politics of grievance that some people wallow in, but that would
not be a bad thing for the people of Scotland, to be honest.
Q71 Mr McGovern: On the subject of
the relationship between the Scotland Office and the Scottish
Executive, if a dispute were to arise—unlikely as that may
seem—over for example the level of block grant to Scotland,
what mechanism, if any, is there in place to resolve such a dispute?
Des Browne: The position is very
clear in terms of the devolution settlement in the way in which
public spending is fixed. Public spending in Scotland is fixed
by the formula that we discussed earlier, the Barnett Formula.
It is a transparent and simple formula. There can be no dispute
about it. Scotland gets it share. It is transparent; it is clear;
it gets its share and always has got its share, certainly as long
as we have been in charge of government. I do not know the detail
of anything before I was a party to the mechanics of this process.
Scotland gets its share, and that is why public spending in Scotland
has essentially doubled since Donald Dewar was the First Minister.
Scotland, in that sense, has never had it so good. At the end
of the spending review period the Scottish Executive will have
£30 billion to spend on providing services and investing
in infrastructure in Scotland. How does any department of government
or any public spender resolve these issues? They resolve them
with the Treasury to the extent that they have anything to need
to resolve. I know that Treasury ministers are available to Scottish
Executive ministers to discuss and resolve these issues to the
extent that people think that there is some issue that they need
to raise. Only today I was in a meeting in which the Chief Secretary
of the Treasury reiterated her willingness to meet ministers from
devolved administrations to discuss any aspect. The other thing
that probably many people in Scotland will not know, is that there
is a thing called the quadrilateral finance ministers' meeting
which meets regularly across the United Kingdom. When I was Chief
Secretary I used to attend it. It meets regularly. Finance ministers
from all the devolved administrations, ministers from the respective
territorial departments and the Chief Secretary meet and discuss
issues. Despite what people say, these meetings, in my experience
and I understand the experience of the current Chief Secretary,
are quite often meetings in which people agree substantially among
themselves.
Q72 Mr McGovern: Secretary of State,
on the subject of end-year flexibility, what control and influence
does the Scotland Office have over the Scottish Executive's draw-down
of end-year flexibility? Do you at the Treasury require justification
for that?
Des Browne: End-year flexibility
is a very good thing. Government used to settle public spending
on a year-to-year basis. You got this phenomenon that we all used
to see, which is that when it came towards the end of the financial
year all sorts of things started to get done—railings got
painted and roads got paved. People tried to spend the money on
the basis that if they did not that would be the starting point
for the settlement the next year and they had to justify it all.
I think quite a lot of people were offended by that, and I certainly
know that a lot of my constituents were. They would say: "There
is never any money to do anything until it gets to February, and
then suddenly all of these things get done and they are running
about looking for things to do." When we came to government
we moved to longer-term settlements. Three-year settlements are
quite challenging for government, but we had to have three-year
settlements because you have to predict a degree of stability
for a period of three years in terms of your income in order to
settle spending. Within that three-year envelope you need to allow
people the opportunity not to have to rush to spend money at the
end of the year. That is why we introduced end-year flexibility.
If you have a complex capital investment programme and you cannot
get it finished in a year and do not spend all your money, you
do not have to find something to do with it—you can keep
it. In public spending terms, one department's end-year flexibility
is another department's additional spending because Government
will try to spend its money in its resources to the best effect.
In the context of the settlement between any department—and
the devolved administrations deal directly with the Treasury in
terms of the settlement, so I am not saying the department but
in any spending authority, any spending executive and the Treasury
there is a discussion about access beyond the spending period
to what you have accumulated in end-year flexibility. Of course,
the Treasury manages that in relation to the macroeconomic position
and the fiscal position. On this occasion the Scottish Executive
allowed access over the spending period of £900 million of
end-year flexibility. I think that is the right figure. They made
arguments presumably as to what they would spend it on. The Treasury
accepted those arguments and said: "You can have access to
that amount of end-year flexibility over the spending review period."
We are not party to that because we are not party to these discussions.
We have our own discussions with the Treasury about the meagre
and frugal spending of the Scotland Office.
Chairman: Funding for the Commonwealth
Games!
Q73 Mr Devine: What is the Government's
estimate of the likely cost of the Commonwealth Games?
Des Browne: I will refer to my
athletic colleague!
David Cairns: The government does
not have an estimate of the likely costs of the Commonwealth Games;
the government is not running the Commonwealth Games; it is a
matter for Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Executive. They
put together the budget and they will manage and oversee the budget.
I understand there is a new big Lottery fund that has been set
up fairly recently as well to feed in to that mix. We do not have
an estimate of that that we have done. We have accepted—we
recognise the estimates that Glasgow City Council has done.
Q74 Mr Devine: Have we got any agreement
on what proportion would be the Scotland Office, the Scottish
Government and Glasgow City Council—the detailed—
David Cairns: I can get that for
you. It is really a matter for them. It is not an issue that we
have taken any involvement in. Our involvement in this—obviously
we lent our support to the bid. Lots of people were rushing out
to Sri Lanka to be part of the whole thing. We decided on balance
that probably was not a sensible thing to do. We will play a part.
Here, we will have to introduce very small legal changes around
copyright issues; but the issue of the budget, the management
of the budget, the setting and running of the budget is entirely
a matter for Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Executive.
Q75 Mr Devine: So we will not be
contributing!
Des Browne: No. I think I remember
a figure in excess of £200 million—£288 million.[12]
I think the split between the Scottish Executive and Glasgow City
Council is 80% and 20% respectively of the anticipated budget.
It does not appear that great an amount of money for an event
of this size, but that is because a lot of the infrastructure
already exists in Glasgow and there is not any big build necessary.
Q76 Mr Davidson: Can I seek clarification
about what happens if there are cost overruns: is there any liability
for the Scotland Office or the UK Treasury?
Des Browne: No. This is entirely
a project that the Scottish Executive and Glasgow City Council
are committed to. They have not come to us and asked us for any
money. I have had no approaches from anybody—I will just
check with the head of my office—and I am not aware of any
approaches being made. I think a big Lottery fund announcement
was made this week about an amount of money related to—it
may well be performance and related to the Commonwealth Games;
and no doubt at some stage there will be other bids to the Lottery
particularly for athletes and performers. There is a very clear
budget line in this and there is no indication of anybody expecting
to come looking for money from anybody else. The Commonwealth
Games has in the past had an unhappy history of budgeting.
Q77 Mr Davidson: Indeed, and that
is what I wanted to be clear about whether or not there is any
liability and, should the Commonwealth Games be mismanaged by
those running it, whether or not there will be a liability, a
bill presented at your door or your successor's door.
Des Browne: We had a very unhappy
time in Scotland the last time the Commonwealth Games were in
Edinburgh in terms of funding, as I think people will remember;
but more recently the Commonwealth Games in Manchester were a
success. There was a difficulty at the beginning but ministers
became engaged in assisting, and latterly they were a success.
I am pretty confident that Glasgow and the Scottish Executive
have learnt from that. The big advantage that Glasgow has is that
there is so much existing sporting infrastructure. The sorts of
things that drive these costs up, which are inflation and large
building projects—there will be some building projects but—
Q78 Mr Davidson: In terms of the
Olympics costs, one of the things that has driven up the costs
of the Olympics is security and so on. Is that a UK liability
in any way, or does that all fall upon the Scottish Executive?
Des Browne: You will of course
remember that in relation to the Olympics bid, we won the Olympics
and then the day after there were the dreadful bombings in the
transport infrastructure of London on 7 July, and of course that
changed. That had quite a significant effect on this city and
its response to security, quite rightly. That has played through.
We regret that we have to spend all of this money on security,
but people would expect us to. The Glasgow Commonwealth bid was
made a significant time—when it came to fruition a significant
time after that, so the budget was known and you would have expected
people to take that into account. Security is the responsibility,
presumably, principally of Strathclyde police and the Scottish
Executive.
Q79 Mr Davidson: In terms of the
Barnett consequentials can I ask you about the increase in security
expenditure on the Olympics, whether or not there was one?
Des Browne: There was not as far
as I know. I say that with maybe more confidence than I ought
to, but I do not think there are any Barnett consequentials for
Olympic spending. I think that is the Treasury's position.
10 Legislative Consent Memorandum Back
11
Ev 22 Back
12
Correction by witness: £298 million Back
| 
