The 'revolutionary': Presiding Officer Kenneth Gibson's reform mission

“I talk a lot,” says Kenneth Gibson. Indeed, the veteran MSP built a reputation as one of the Scottish Parliament’s most outspoken figures. Now as presiding officer he is, in his own words, a “repentant sinner” who has set Holyrood on a course of “permanent revolution”.

Change came swiftly. No sooner was Gibson elected than he had rearranged the parliamentary week, splitting FMQS in two, bringing in strict speaking time limits and getting tough over what is or is not a point of order to cut down on “mischief-making” by colleagues. 

His reforms are working, he says – he’s got the stats to prove it – and there’s yet more change to come.

“I don’t mean that in a destabilising way,” he says of his revolution. “What I mean is in terms of innovation and creativity and ideas, and making things more efficient, more impactful. Because what are we actually here for? We’re here to deliver for the people of Scotland. 

“I’m very keen on reducing the tribalism,” he goes on. “Some are more up for it than others.”

Presiding officers, of course, are not allowed to be tribal, and like his predecessors Gibson has given up his party whip. It’s no small change for a man who joined the SNP on his first day of university, became a councillor in Glasgow in 1992, and was one of the Scottish Parliament’s original intake five years later. 

Paisley-born and a graduate of the University of Stirling, where he read economics, Gibson has served in all but one parliament since 1999. When he lost his Glasgow region seat in 2003, he went on to win Ayrshire’s Cunninghame North at the next time of asking and is now the third presiding officer to come from the ranks of the SNP.

His tenure follows that of Alison Johnstone, whose time in the hotseat saw her accused by former Tory leader Douglas Ross of bias – a charge she denied – and included the introduction of new rules for visitors after weeks of protest and disruption from the public gallery.

She stood down before the election and there was much speculation about who would succeed her in what is now a six-party parliament. Gibson emerged as an early frontrunner, as did Liam McArthur of the Liberal Democrats. By the day of voting, the SNP’s Claire Haughey and Stuart McMillan had also entered the contest. In the final round, Gibson defeated Haughey by 74 votes to 54. 

He was “very confident” at the time. “Not over-confident”, he says, but “I thought I was the best candidate, so I thought the members would” too. “I knew there was machinations to stop me from certain parties,” he goes on, “but you know, that’s politics, isn’t it?”

Where it had been speculated that Haughey, a former minister, was the government’s favoured choice, repeat rebel Gibson was seen as a more challenging figure. 

As a backbencher he broke the party whip on votes over Brexit and gender recognition reform, while as convener of the Finance and Public Administration Committee (FPAC) he led on the production of a number of critical reports highlighting inadequacies in government budgeting and planning.

“Over the years I have obviously clashed with authority within the SNP itself, because sometimes they’ve gone down a road that I’ve never been happy with,” he reflects, but he’s not about to tell tales today. “I don’t publicise my clashes with other members of the party of which I used to be a member,” he says. 

It’s been reported that there was little enthusiasm from the SNP to the prospect of Gibson becoming PO, and that it offered scarce support when the time came, with as few as “three or four” of the party voting for him. “That’s nonsense”, he says, and all candidates had backers from across the chamber. “A big chunk of the SNP voted for me – probably about half of the SNP members – and people in all the other parties.”

Still, there will be no favour to former party mates, he says – not even his wife Patricia Gibson. Elected in May after stints in Westminster and local government, her Cunninghame South constituency borders his, but he says there’s no blurring of the boundaries between the personal and the political. “I’ve always lived that dichotomy [between] your private life and your political life – your elected life,” he says, and claims visitors to his home would struggle to work out what job he does. “There’s no pictures on the wall, no political memorabilia, flags, rosettes, posters, pictures…

“I look at all members equally and as individuals,” he sets out. “You might think that’s odd, given that my wife is actually an SNP MSP, but she doesn’t get favoured any more than anybody else. If she puts forward a question that I think is worthy of being asked, she’ll get picked. And if she puts forward ones [I don’t think are worthy] – and I don’t think this has happened – she’ll not be picked.”

I noticed a number of MSPs publicly saying, ‘oh, we think this is a wee bit over the top’ and all that kind of stuff, but privately, a lot of them were saying ‘good on you, you should have went further’

The only favourability he’ll offer to chamber colleagues, he says, is to “people with critical questions – good quality questions”. He recalls how an SNP member he’s “friendly with” complained of having pressed his button four times without being chosen to speak. “I said, ‘well, [it’s] because I know that you’re going to ask a rather long-winded question, and I don’t like that. So, you know, think about being focused and you’ll get to ask a question’. 

“It’s not about who you like and who you dislike, it’s about who’s going to be more impactful in the Chamber.”

Gibson was elected on a pledge to improve debate, increase scrutiny, and encourage participation. He says rambling questions must go to ensure that happens, despite “grumbles” from some quarters. “I’m no having people asking long-winded questions then having ministers read out every single word of every civil servant-written reply,” he says. “I’m looking for things to be a bit more punchy, a bit more impactful, more effective.”

The stats speak for themselves, he suggests. “We’ve just had the figures this morning,” he says, with the number of questions asked across all sessions up by 24.3 per cent, year-on-year, in the last three weeks of parliament. Backbench questions alone have more than doubled from 25 to 55, encouraged in no small part by the launch of a dedicated Tuesday session of FMQs. 

“I’ve been impressed by the fact that so many new members have been getting tore in already,” he says. “I think it’s been a high standard of questioning, a real enthusiasm about participation – the number of people attending in the chamber is up quite dramatically compared to the last session. People are keen to press the buttons.”

If Gibson is pleased with that progress, he’s less happy with the response to the media pen set up for reporters. The barrier brought the first stooshie of Gibson’s tenure, with lobby journalists highly critical of what they saw as an attempt to restrict access to MSPs and limit scrutiny and accountability. A letter on behalf of editors hit out at the attempt to “corral” their staff.

“Intimidating behaviour by journalists” towards MSPs was blamed for the move, with complaints understood to have been made by members of two parties who have not been named. The Greens issued a statement saying it wasn’t them, but co-leader Ross Greer told reporters to “have a word with some of [their] colleagues about their behaviour” and Reform’s Thomas Kerr said a suggestion to lobby members to “behave yourself” was in jest.

Gibson disputed that the pen was a restriction of press freedom and says the intensity of reporting on the subject, which dominated for days, has been “unbelievable”. “It really is a bubble story,” he says.

“You have to understand that the role of the presiding officer is to represent staff and elected members in this place. If members complain to you in a state of some distress about actions by others, whether journalists or anybody else, you have to act on that. 

“I have to say, it’s not really an issue the public took any interest in. Only journalists really took much interest in it, and it’s quite funny because I noticed a number of MSPs publicly saying, ‘oh, we think this is a wee bit over the top’ and all that kind of stuff, but privately, a lot of them were saying ‘good on you, you should have went further’ and all the rest of it.”

Still, he says there are “no plans” to have the pen in place at the end of summer recess.

Gibson is now focused, he says, on his next steps. A day-long session on fiscal literacy for MSPs is to be held on 7 September, with current and former FPAC members set to share expertise alongside Scottish Fiscal Commission chair Professor Graeme Roy, Auditor General Stephen Boyle, Fraser of Allander Institute’s Professor Mairi Spowage, Professor David Bell of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Nicola Hudson of the Scottish Parliament Information Centre. Around half of MSPs are expected to attend, including two party leaders.

And a strengthening of the Non-Government Bills Unit is on the agenda after the frustrations of spring, when big bills on assisted dying, prostitution and more fell in a parliament that had run out of time before dissolution. Tensions were palpable as sittings ran into the night to cope with the backlog of business.

Staff in the unit “work really hard and bring in additional staff from elsewhere,” but still often find themselves “really burdened beyond capacity”, Gibson says, and there’s now a moratorium on the introduction of new member’s bills 18 months before the next election. “If you’ve not got your member’s bill proposal in by December 2029, it’s not really going to be considered,” he says. “The idea for that is we encourage people to bring forward proposals early”, allowing more time for them to pass through the committee system. 

Gibson is not one who, in his own words, tends to take a “cautious approach”. Take the composition of motions, for example – something he occasionally must adjudicate on as PO when there are disagreements between MSPs and officials. “I remember putting down a motion about Afghanistan saying that the Afghan government is oppressing women and denying women an education, blah blah blah. And the chamber desk wanted to write ‘notes, reports of’. I said it’s not ‘reports of’, it’s actually happening. 

“You wouldn’t say ‘reports of an earthquake in Japan’, you would say ‘there was an earthquake in Japan’. 

It’s one thing passing bills, but what did that bill actually do? What did it deliver?

“I don’t necessarily take a cautious approach; I like a factually accurate approach. If something’s happened, it’s happened.”

By the same token, parliament should take more stock of its own past, he suggests, through greater post-legislative scrutiny with witnesses called to give evidence. “It’s one thing passing bills, but what did that bill actually do? What did it deliver? Did it make people’s lives better? If not, how can we improve the bill or should the bill continue in its current form or be amended.

“It’s not like we pass a bill and everything’s great and we can move on to the next one; you have to think about what you’ve done.

“People are so focused on the work we have in front of us, but what about the work we did five years ago, or our predecessors did five years ago,” he asks. “You want to make sure that the house is built on solid foundations.”

Institutional memory, he goes on, is a “very important thing” in a house where members turn over every five years. At more than 40, a record number of MSPs stood down in May. Amongst them were former first ministers, ex-cabinet secretaries, experienced committee members, and several who were first elected in 1999.

From the last session, only one of Gibson’s finance committee colleagues remains on the panel, he points out – Michael Marra, who as a Scottish Labour leadership candidate “might be moving on to something else in the not-too-distant future”. But in a parliament with up to 1,000 staff, there remains plenty of expertise available. “The memory is often the staff, the clerking teams,” Gibson says. “Some of our clerks have been here since 1999 and they are part of that institutional memory. They have a phenomenal store of knowledge and experience. It helps when we’ve got that to draw on.”

If Gibson’s trying to change how the parliament works, he’s also interested in where it works. It’s become too “Edinburgh-centric”, post-Covid, he says, and believes days working away in other parts of Scotland would improve visibility, decision-making and trust. 

In previous sessions committees went out to places like Carnoustie, Hawick, Pitlochry, and Largs to meet with local organisations, communities and councils, he recalls, with high school pupils invited to observe as cabinet secretaries gave evidence. He’s told current conveners he wants their panels out at least once a year, and despite the fact that this can be “resource-intensive” he’s certain it is achievable.  “The parliament doesn’t always have to go to Stornoway or Inverness or Stranraer,” he says. “I mean, the finance committee in the last parliament, we went out to Pumpherston, which is about 10 or 12 miles outside Edinburgh.”

It’s not just “for the sake of doing it”, he says, but because “it’s always better if you’re discussing and deliberating over something to speak to the people who’d be most likely to be directly impacted” by it. It might even improve voting rates, he hopes, by proving that MSPs are not “people that you just see on the telly or on social media”.

“There’s a lot of other things we’ve got in the sausage machine,” he goes on. “It’s constant, constant, constant.”

Such as? Meetings with parliamentary staff to harness their ideas for improvement. “I don’t just want to be a politician who talks to other politicians; I want to talk to everyone who’s got a stake in this place,” Gibson says. Still, chats with party groups are also planned, because despite offering an open-door policy “only three or four MSPs have walked through” it so far. 

Overall, he wants to know “what’s good, what’s not so good, what can we change, what can we do differently, what can we do better?” 

“There are loads and loads of wonderful ideas that I’m not even aware of out there,” he says. “I’m not the font of all knowledge, by any means.”

Gibson’s not sure what kind of presiding officer he’d have been if he’d gone for the job earlier in his career, but he knows he’d have lacked the experience that’s influencing him now. “I’m trying not to be very woolly about this, but what influences me is what I see and what I experience on a day-to-day basis, month-by-month,” he says. “I’ve always been one of these people who thinks, how can we do things better?”

He expects to learn in the role, which is an expectation  based on the speedy realisation as a newly elected councillor that the job was about people, not party. 

“People say ‘I want to become a councillor because I want to help the people in my community’, right? I didn’t want to become a councillor to help the people in my community, I didn’t even stand in an area where I lived or anything like that. I wanted to stand because I wanted to go for the party.

The number of times people used to come to me and say, ‘why don’t you join the Labour Party, we’ll help you out, make you an MP’

“Within about a week of being elected, I found that 95 per cent of what I did and what I actually wanted to do was working in those communities. The politics, I put really to one side. I’ve always spent the overwhelming part of my day-to-day work on constituency business, constituency issues, and I’ve always preferred doing that. 

“I never thought about that until I was elected, ironically, in ‘92. But since then, I’ve always put that first.”

He was approached several times by Labour about defecting in his early career, he says, and offered plum roles. “The number of times people used to come to me and say, ‘why don’t you join the Labour Party, we’ll help you out, make you an MP’, all that stuff. ‘How would you like to be the convener of housing?’, which at that time carried an £18,000 stipend over and above the council [salary], and, you know, ‘the SNP’s never going to amount to anything, don’t waste your time with them’, blah blah blah.”

But the younger Gibson saw the SNP and independence as a means to improve national prosperity. He’d been deeply influenced by an eye-opening trip to Europe, where he marvelled at what he found in Switzerland. “I couldn’t believe a country which was half the size of Scotland with no raw materials and not even a coastline, was so much more prosperous than Scotland was,” he says.  

“In politics, if you believe in something, whatever it is, and you fight for that, then I think you’ll be happier in yourself.”

Gibson is, he supposes, “one of these people who’s never content with the way things are” and is “looking to try and achieve some of perfection that can’t be done”.

Short of absolute perfection, he’s certain plenty of improvement can be made. “I’ve always found it frustrating that in Scotland we do many things really well, but there’s often a reluctance to share best practice,” he says. 

“If we’re looking at it from a devolved context, you might find that in one of our health boards they have a particularly innovative way of dealing with people who’ve got epilepsy or diabetes or something, so why isn’t it shared across all the other health boards? If a local authority is getting a much more efficient and effective way of collecting council tax or the rubbish, why isn’t that being shared?

“We’re in a country where, if you’ve got a problem, rather than dealing with a problem, you create another body to deal with that problem,” he goes on. “I’ve always been someone that wants to see end results quickly.”

Becoming PO, he says, was the quickest, best way to try to turn his ideas for the parliament into a reality. After all, anyone else in the role “may not consider them”. “It’s always best in life, if you have an opportunity to do something for yourself, you seize that opportunity.”