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On regulation, has a formal process been put in place for identifying and removing regulations that are no longer required?

As there are no more questions from members, I thank the minister and his officials for joining us. That brings the evidence session on the LCM to a close. I briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.

I thought that that was going to be a quick supplementary from Kevin Stewart on the back of my question. I was going to bring in Murdo Fraser, who wants to follow on from my questions on tangible delivery. I will bring him in and then come back to the deputy convener—unless your question is a supplementary, Michelle.

Okay. I will let the deputy convener in first.

My question is for both Dr Malik and the Deputy First Minister. You have talked about processes and the need to change them, but what are the tangible, business-related outcomes, as opposed to the processes, that have come from the new deal? What has significantly changed as a result of the new deal?

As a committee convener, I get that committees have a lot of workload challenges—as a member of the Economy and Fair Work Committee, which I chair, you know that full well—and we have difficulties every time we discuss our work plans. I happen to believe that need to do more at the committee level of what we might call routine scrutiny than we currently do. Often, there is a desire to do inquiries into lots of things, but are we getting routine scrutiny correct?

As I mentioned earlier, there are a host of bodies beyond the commissioners. Even in my committee, we look at Consumer Scotland, enterprise agencies, the Scottish National Investment Bank and all sorts of other organisations. A piece of work should be done that considers the full extent to which committees are effectively scrutinising all those different bodies. When it comes to how committees are structured, that should be a higher priority.

For the stage 1 process, my proposed bill is to go to the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee for scrutiny. In the case of commissioners, I believe that a scrutiny process should happen annually. The committee in question would scrutinise the commissioner’s work, whether their annual report has delivered particular outcomes and how effective the outcomes are. Those—if you like—service committees would have a role to play over and above that of the SPCB. That would take the weight off it, which is why it should happen. It would not be done too regularly, but nothing is wrong with the relevant commissioner lodging an annual report. All committees should be regularly scrutinising commissioners over and above the SPCB’s work.

No, it would not necessarily do that.

To gain the support of older people, the commissioner needs to be a specialist older persons organisation, it has to involve older people in all aspects of its work, and its priorities must be informed by older people. There is a strong case for a stand-alone older persons commissioner. Currently, the Human Rights Commission does not carry out that particular role. There is a strong case for commissioners in all these areas to work together under an umbrella of shared services and shared research facilities. However, to reform the Human Rights Commission effectively, we would still have to create distinct commissioners within that structure for older people, disabled people and children. We might come to do that eventually, but at the moment, there is a strong case for a stand-alone commissioner for older people. That role cannot be carried out simply by tweaking the Human Rights Commission.

Yes, absolutely, I consulted the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission. You will not be surprised to know that part of those discussions was whether we could change the role of the Scottish Human Rights Commission to incorporate a lot of the proposed work.

My engagement with those commissions highlighted that, in my view, there is still a gaping hole when it comes to older people, but it also demonstrated the importance of putting in place proper processes so that work is not duplicated. In my consultation document and proposals, I have set out that it is important that we do not duplicate work, that the Scottish Human Rights Commission and others carry out distinct work and that an older people’s commissioner would carry out different work. We should not have duplication.

I also looked closely at the effectiveness of the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland—I think that that office is very effective—and at the work of the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales and the Commissioner for Older People Northern Ireland. There was an extensive look at a number of organisations, including specific consultations with the Scottish Human Rights Commission and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, before I made my final proposal.

It is important to put the issue in context. At the moment, there are seven SPCB supported commissioners with a budget of around £15 million—the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman accounts for half of that—so I do not think that we are being flooded by commissioners. We have 191 so-called quangos with a budget of £6.6 billion, which is maybe more of an issue than commissioners.