Under-fire ethics quango handed budget boost as frontline services face black holes

SCOTLAND’S under-fire ethics body, which was censured for failing to properly investigate complaints about MSPs, has been awarded a 40 per cent budget increase – as frontline services struggle to fill financial black holes.

The office of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland (CESPLS) is responsible for probing complaints made against MSPs, councillors and quangos.

Yet it was at the centre of a transparency row when it was accused by auditors of struggling with a ‘disturbing’ number of problems, including a lack of scrutiny.

In a damning report in 2021, Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, said issues at the commissioner’s office had led to a decline in public trust in it and made 22 recommendations for change.

On Thursday, the Scottish parliament said Ian Bruce, who took over as acting commissioner after the investigation, will take on the role full-time. Now The Scottish Mail on Sunday can disclose that, despite the body being accused of having ‘no effective scrutiny or challenge’, it will be given a bumper budget boost this year.

During an exchange at the latest finance and public administration committee meetfunding ing between the SNP’s Kenneth Gibson and former Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw, it was announced the CESPLS cash allocation will go up by 40.5 per cent. There will also be a £463,000 increase in salaries for the department in 2023/24.

The rises come despite forecasts that for public services is set to fall by 1.6 per cent in real terms this year compared with last year, following Deputy First Minister John Swinney’s Budget before Christmas.

TaxPayers’ Alliance chief executive John O’Connell said: ‘Time and again public bodies are being rewarded for failure. While frontline services splutter, this quango is seeing a bumper budget rise.’

Scottish Tory chairman Craig Hoy said: ‘Given the state our public services are currently in, the public will be asking serious questions as to why the budget for the commissioner has enjoyed such a rise.’

CESPLS said that, after the external audit in 2021, ‘we conducted a comprehensive workforce planning exercise which showed we had insufficient staff. The outcome of the exercise and resulting evidence-based business case for additional staff was submitted to the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body in May 2022 and agreed by it in October 2022.’

‘Public bodies are being rewarded for failure’