Commissioner's report

Officeholders

Ian Bruce was appointed as Commissioner and Accountable Officer from 1 March 2023 for a period of six years.

Senior Management Team (SMT)

The Commissioner leads a senior management team which oversees the operation and development of the office. During 2024/25, this comprised:

Register of interests

The Commissioner and members of the Senior Management Team (SMT) must declare any interests. No significant company directorships or other interests were held which may have conflicted with their management responsibilities and neither the Commissioner nor any member of the SMT had any other related party interests which conflicted with their responsibilities.

Corporate governance

Accountability report

Corporate responsibility

Environmental matters

We recognise that our activities may have both positive and negative impacts in Scotland and further afield. The Commissioner operates a hybrid working system with staff primarily working remotely. The level of commuting to and from the office and to external events remains low, reducing car mileage and road use. The use of electronic communications has completed the transition to a near ‘paperless’ office. Our policies and procedures have always encouraged the use of public transport wherever practicable and reduced reliance on paper copies and postage.

Social, community and human rights issues

The Code of Practice for Ministerial Appointments to Public Bodies adopted in October 2022 includes a principle of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” which requires appointment practices to be inclusive for people from all walks of life and backgrounds. The Code also includes a principle of Respect and associated provisions. These require applicants to be accorded the respect that they are due for their interest and their efforts and appointees for their contribution to public life. The ESC strategic plan for 2024-28 includes an objective to refresh “Diversity Delivers”, a strategy intended to increase the diversity of Scotland’s boards such that they better reflect the communities that they serve. The strategic plan also includes a commitment to making the office more accessible to a wider range of people; the plan itself has been published as an Easy Read version.

Our activities are intended to ensure high levels of ethical standards on the part of elected members and those appointed to public office by Ministers. We also work to ensure fairness, transparency and equality of opportunity in the appointment process. Our strategic plan for 2024-2028 includes a set of values that reflect our approach to our interactions with the public and our stakeholder organisations. We have made a public commitment to treat each individual who comes into contact with us with kindness, empathy and respect. The conclusions that we reach on whether councillors, board members or MSPs have breached the rules that are applicable to their conduct are always reached having taken cognisance of the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights.
 

Authorisation
 

Ian Bruce
Accountable Officer
Date: 03 October 2025

Financial performance

Background

The Commissioner is an independent office-holder and receives all of his funding directly from the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB).  The Commissioner operates against an annual cash-based budget that is reviewed by the SPCB and subsequently approved by the Scottish Parliament.  The budget may also include access to contingency funding. The accounts are prepared on an accruals basis but the body is funded on a cash basis and management closely monitor financial performance on a cash basis.

Funding

In March 2024, the SPCB formally awarded a budget of £1,818,000 to the Commissioner for the financial year 2024/25 (2023/24: £1,606,000).

Following confirmation of the annual pay award, this was revised to £1,792,000 in September 2024.

Following detailed assessment of our anticipated expenditure, the Commissioner surrendered £50,000 to the SPCB in December 2024 and a further £30,000 in February 2025: £80,000 in total.

Total funding available for the year was £1,712,000 (2023/24: £1,556,000). Of the funds awarded £1,709,000 was drawn down (2023/24: £1,554,000).

The Commissioner earned no income in 2024/25 (2023/24: £Nil).

There was a £25,000 increase in cash during the year (2023/24: Increase of £28,000). Cash held at the 31 March was £171,000 (2023/24: £146,000) reduced by current liabilities to £67,000 (2023/24: £40,000).

Expenditure

The accounts are prepared on an accruals basis meaning that expenses are recognised in the year in which they were incurred, rather than when the cash payment is made.

Including adjustments for accruals and prepayments, expenditure was £1,701,000 (2023/24: £1,540,000). 

Expenditure against budget

Revenue expenditure is prepared on an accruals basis but the body is funded on a cash basis. The table above allows a comparison between the two.

The cash budget was underspent by £97,000 (2023/24: £74,000 underspend). An analysis of spend in key areas is given below.

Staff costs were under budget by £64,000. 

• This variance is attributable to a vacant Public Appointments Officer post which had a budgeted cost of £64,000 for the 2024/25 financial year. The post was not filled and was formally surrendered in September 2024 as part of the 2025/26 budget process.

Staff related costs were under budget by £14,000. 

• The £14,000 underspend sits in the staff training budget. Spend in this area as £6,500 against a budget of £20,500. This was due to a range of factors predominantly lower than expected costs and a shift towards free, discounted or shared training options.

Professional fees were under budget by £26,000.

• Legal fees were underspent by £17,000. This was achieved by bringing presentation at hearings back inhouse and was allowed by the stable staffing position and training regime now in place.
• PAA oversight of public appointment rounds was underspent by £11,000. Travel costs were underspent by £7,000 and fees by £4,000. This may reflect the increased number of rounds open at the year end and a continuing move away from in person interviews. Savings of £2,000 were diverted to additional work on the Diversity Strategy.

Depreciation fell to £11,000 this year (2023/24: £13,000).

A further breakdown of expenditure is given in note 6 to the financial statements. 

Payment of creditors

The Commissioner has committed to the CBI Prompt Payment Code for the payment of bills for goods and services received. Payments are normally made as specified in the agreed contract conditions. Where there is no contractual position or other understanding, they are treated as requiring to be paid within 30 days of receipt of the goods or services. Payment performance for 2024/25 was 99.1% (2023/24: 99.4%). 

Providing guidance

Enquiries and reports arising from scrutiny

The following tables summarise substantive contacts with the ESC office during the reporting year. As this information is gathered by ESC, it is reported by financial year.

[1] PAAs have always provided reports at the conclusion of an appointment round, but the figures were only reported in the annual report from 2023/24.
[2] Panel chair end of round reports are new to the 2022 Code of Practice.  Only 2 were provided in the 2022/23 year (due to the Code only recently being in place) and so had not been recorded formally in the 2022/23 annual report.

Changes to the code of practice

There were no changes made to the Code of Practice in the year 2024/25.

Guidance on application of the code

The Commissioner’s office provides Code interpretation guidance, primarily to officials and PAAs, on a very frequent, ad hoc basis. Where trends are identified, the Commissioner seeks to provide general and/or statutory guidance with a view to improving on practices and increasing understanding.

No new such guidance was provided during 2024/25.

Complaints

No complaints were received by us in 2024/25.

Material non-compliance

No directions were made, nor were any reports made to the Parliament in relation to material non-compliance in 2024/25.

Monitoring and reporting

All information under this heading relates to the Commissioner’s statutory duties to monitor and report on appointment activity and to provide guidance on application of the Code.

The Commissioner’s remit extended to 793 posts on the boards of 101 public bodies at the year end (770 posts across 100 bodies in 2024). In the case of a proportion of these bodies, such as regional colleges, only the chair appointments are regulated. Additionally, some bodies are statutorily included in the Commissioner’s remit even though they are either abolished or no longer active.  

A list of the regulated bodies is available at https://www.ethicalstandards.org.uk/regulated-bodies.

How many appointments did we oversee?

Appointments are made through a process called an appointment round. During the financial year 2024/25, we were active in overseeing 90 appointment rounds.

Multiple appointments can be made through a single appointment round and the Scottish Ministers can run more than one round in a single year per public body. In certain circumstances we allocate a Public Appointments Adviser (PAA) to oversee all or part of the round. We report on these allocations rather than the number of appointment rounds as this better reflects our actual workload. This year also included some shadow rounds for the new PAAs that we contracted with. 

Number of allocations made

^Admin error uncovered since last year’s report - figures were shown last year as 62 and 24.

Number of reappointments and extensions

During the year to 31 December

Satisfaction with PAA contribution

Any comments or constructive suggestions made are acted upon by the Commissioner as appropriate. 

Applicant views

An interim applicant survey report containing the views of those who applied during 2023 was published in June 2024.  This was an interim report due to small sample size as there were limited closed rounds under the 2022 Code.  The first full report is due to be published in 2025.

Performance against Diversity Delivers targets 2024

The following chart shows the percentage of applications and appointments in 2024 by each target group as set out in Diversity Delivers. This information is provided by the Scottish Government and relates to a calendar year.

Performance against Diversity Delivers targets 2024

Applications and Appointments by Target Group

Key: 
Applications ➊, Appointed ➋
^ Values for fewer than five have been supressed to decrease the risk of disclosure of information about individuals.
* Unless otherwise stated, all population figures are extracted from 2022 census data
** The target for the BME population is inclusive of people from non-visible minority groups. Up until 2017 the figures reported on have related to visible minority applicants and appointees. From 2017 onwards, the figures have been provided for both visible and non-visible. For this latter category the monitoring form question responded to is “Other white” and includes those who selected “Irish”, “Polish” or “Other white ethnic group”. 
*** Scottish population aged 18 to 49 as a percentage of whole population 18 and over.
¹ This figure was presented as 40 in the 2023/24 annual report.  This was an administrative error uncovered following publication of the report. 37.6 is the correct number.

Public Appointments

Improving diversity on the boards of public bodies

We have a statutory duty to use our powers with a view to ensuring that appointments are made fairly and openly and that as far as possible everyone has an opportunity to be considered. As part of our work in this area, the Commissioner agreed targets with the Scottish Ministers in the strategy document “Diversity Delivers” (published September 2008), intended to encourage applications from as wide a range of people as possible. The strategy also included a range of recommendations, agreed with the Scottish Government at the time, intended to improve on the diversity of Scotland’s boards. Progress against the recommendations is available on our website. During the year, contractors, Leading Kind, successfully tendered to undertake a review of the Diversity Strategy and began consulting with interest groups and conducting initial research.  A “State of the Nation” report is due to be published in the Autumn of 2025.

The following tables and graphs show the extent to which Scotland’s board members at the end of 2024 reflect the population of the country as a whole and how it has changed over time. Historically, we have reported that the demographic profile of board members did not include those who did not make a declaration. With the provision of this year’s data from the Scottish Government, we have discovered that this has not in fact been the case and that the data they were providing to us previously included those who did not make a declaration in the total number of members. We have agreed a new approach with the Scottish Government to ensure like for like figures are provided from now on.  

Whilst this will have an impact on historic data, we do not believe it to have had a significant impact on overall trends over time. From this year onwards those who did not make a declaration are not included. This finding does not relate to applications and appointment where those not declaring are recorded separately

Current demographic profile of Scotland's boards

^† All board members inclusive of the chair unless otherwise stated. Percentages do not include those who did not make a declaration in 2024 but do include those who did not make a declaration in 2023. As such, the change in board membership profile is higher than would have been expected if the calculation had been made on a like for like basis.
^†† Black and minority ethnic figures reflect people from a non-white minority ethnic background.
 

* Scottish Population based on 2022 Census data

Socio economic information

From February 2023, the Scottish Government introduced a socio-economic background question to the diversity monitoring form; the style of the question is based on evidence from the UK Social Mobility Commission which suggests that if you are to ask one socio-economic background-related question, then parental occupation is the most effective one for determining status.

As this information is still very new in being collected, figures for the overall demographics of those on boards (only including those appointed from February 2023 who were prepared to answer the question) were too low to report this year.  The situation should improve year on year as successful candidates continue to be asked the question and we will seek to report on this as soon as the numbers are significant enough to provide meaningful information. We have been able to access information about applications and appointments related to this question and have provided the limited available information here instead.  This information relates to appointment rounds conducted in 2024.

The question asked of applicants is “What was the occupation of your main household earner when you were about aged 14?”  The high level of “not stated” responses has been attributed in part to the fact that the question did not begin to be asked until part way through the year.