First of all, good morning. I'm Jackson Carlo. I'm the convener of the Citizens Participation and Public Petitions Committee,

who have undertaken and published the report embedding public participation in the work of Parliament,

which we're here to review and discuss this morning. And I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Sabina Sebert from the Adam Smith Business School

and Dr Andy Williamson from the Centre for Innovation in Parliament and Inter-Parliamentary Union

to talk about the issues arising from the report, which will be the subject of a debate in Parliament

at the end of October just after we come back from the recess.

So where do I stand in all of this?

Well, as a parliamentarian, I came in as a healthy skeptic.

It's not as if we don't live or have a prejudice in our mind that we are undergoverned.

And there was this kind of sense, are we creating some whole new layer of government

by default? It's a criticism I have at the moment of the kind of lazy way that I think we're

beginning to create commissioners in public life and that we started with two. We've now got

seven and there are proposals for 15. And I think to

myself, well, this is a completely new level of government we are creating. And therefore, if we're

going to create something, we should have a very clear understanding of its value and its purpose.

So I think that the MSPs on the committee who were through the process and the

inquiry started as fairly healthy skeptics but have actually become quite convinced about the role

in which public participation deliberative democracy can play in our future. But I come from the

position, therefore, that my parliamentary colleagues are probably still somewhere where we were

before we began the inquiry and need to understand what it is that we might want to try and do next

and why we think that would be of value.

So the Parliament itself investigated all of this because in the previous Parliament,

...