THE secret advice used by Scottish ministers to make the biggest decisions in government ought to be public from now on, according to the country’s former top civil servant.
Speaking to the Sunday Herald, Sir John Elvidge called for a new regime of openness, with civil service advice to ministers published as a matter of routine.
Such advice is jealously guarded at present, and is rarely released even under Scotland’s freedom of information (FoI) regime, only emerging via the national archives after 15 years.
Sir John, who advised Jack McConnell and Alex Salmond as Scotland’s permanent secretary from 2003-10, said national government ought to be more like local government, where advice from officials was published shortly before councillors made a final decision.
The Scottish Government traditionally refuses to release such information under FoI, arguing it would inhibit civil servants from giving full and frank advice to ministers.
However Sir John said greater transparency would “reinforce the professionalism of civil servants” as they would have to give all sides of an argument, improving decision-making.
He said: “I favour getting all that evidence and analysis – and the civil service’s judgment about the evidence – in the public domain contemporaneously with the decision. That puts everybody on the same information base. You can see on what basis decisions have been made.
“But you’ve still got a political space in which judgments are made about the right way to respond to the evidence, and ministers then defend the judgment they make.”
He went on: “One of the things that goes wrong in political debate is that, either some of the the participants don’t know some of the evidence, or they try to push it aside.
“It’s in the interests of good government and democracy if everybody is operating off a common basis of understanding of the evidence, which, because it’s in the public domain, is exposed to scrutiny from people outside government.
“You’d start with the bigger things. Government takes 100 smaller decisions every day and you wouldn’t design something so process-heavy for small decisions, it would be disproportionate.
“But for all the really significant decisions, you would do that.”
He said advice and evidence currently went to ministers in a sort of “running conversation”, and it would have to be packaged in a more compact format for public consumption.
“I’m attracted to openness because I think it would make it very difficult for advice to be poor or selective, because it would make it obvious if you had left out of the advice some significant factor which ought to have been included.
“Openness would reinforce the professionalism of civil servants because it would require them to be able to demonstrate, to informed communities of interest, that they had properly captured all of the evidence that ought to be brought to bear on a decision.
“That might not always be comfortable, but it must be right.”
A LibDem spokesman said: "The Brexit and independence campaigns were full of wildly optimistic projections about the cost of breaking from the EU and the UK. It's about time we could get better facts and advice in the public domain so the public can avoid the folly of big change with flimsy and shoddy evidence. Sir John Elvidge is right. We should follow his advice."
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “The First Minister has committed to leading the most open and accessible government that Scotland has ever had.
“Ministers are accountable to Parliament and the government seeks to proactively publish as much information as possible. Scotland also has the most robust FoI regime in the UK.
“It is our aim to ensure that this continues, and that our principles of openness, transparency and accountability set an example for other nations to aspire to.”
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