Transparency on the influences and lobbyists upon the Scottish government and MSPs needs to be strengthened.
The first step to reversing the current trends of opaque government is to sort out the process of showing us who is talking to them. The Scottish Lobbying Register needs to be strengthened. How?
In the first instance, the Register only covers face-to-face meetings so anything said over the phone is exempt. The same is true for internet video calls assuming you turn your camera off.
Second, if the meeting is initiated by the politicians in question, any lobbying that takes place is exempt. I discovered this one while trying to register a meeting with a Minister a few years ago and had to press them to include it anyway because we’d much rather “over-register” our lobbying than hide behind exemptions.
Finally, there is a blanket exemption for all lobbying done by organisations who employ fewer than 10 Full Time Equivalent staff. It raises the question of how many other small (but powerful) organisations lean on this exemption to hide who they’re speaking to in Government.
The current Freedom of Information laws are woefully inadequate. The FOI itself should be reformed into a “Glass Wall” whereby all information that could normally be disclosed via FOI should simply be proactively published on a public website.
Scottish public bodies are often governed by boards that are either packed by the industries that they are supposed to be governing or that there is a “revolving door” between civil servants and those sectors creating an unhealthy relationship of tight cliques who know precisely who to call to get their way with things. We should also consider a “Stakeholder” model of governance for other sectors like financial or environmental regulation. This kind of Participatory Governance has been shown to provide much better outcomes for everyone