Seòmar agus comataidhean

It is a bit like the difference between a tightrope walker knowing that there is a safety net or that there is no safety net and how that might impact on their decisions.

Can you say anything more about the impact? Jamie Greene mentioned three factors but the factor that I am interested in is the pensions estimates and the extent to which they are quoted as an influence. My experience is that the actuarial evidence or guidance can oscillate hugely from one year to another, which can create huge problems for organisations. Is that the case here or was the impact fairly minimal?

It seems, from what you said earlier, that the internal audit function has been denuded over the years—its importance, or the cognisance given to it by external auditors and perhaps by the Auditor General—so that it is now diminished to being a kind of management tool and not something that external auditors can rely on to give them pointers as to the financial health and propriety of the organisation.

Is Deloitte involved only in performing an audit role for the public bodies for which the Auditor General is responsible, at the request of the Auditor General, or would Deloitte also do other work if those bodies directly requested it?

Pension estimates—and the way that they have varied and gone very high and very low—can have a major impact on jobs and on all sorts of things. The same is true in relation to the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates or the Scottish Fiscal Commission estimates. Their estimates are very important to how budgets are set. If they are wrong—as they invariably seem to be, because they are constantly being reviewed—I would have thought that they deserve more scrutiny.

The issue about student numbers seems quite central to this, and to the sector as a whole. It might be hard for you to say—you mentioned that Mr MacPherson might have an insight into this—but from looking at the audit report that you produced on Scotland’s colleges, is it possible that the well-publicised reduction in overseas and other students has meant that the higher education sector has looked much more into the pool of people who would be going on to either further education or to higher education in the further education sector and that such competition has meant that colleges are now struggling to get the numbers that they once had?

I would certainly find these reports easier to understand if they included that larger context—for example, whether Brexit has driven away lots of potential students from the European Union who would have come otherwise, or whether visa restrictions have reduced the number of overseas students. Rather than just always seeing this as a challenge for the sector or for ministers, I would like to see what the overall context is, but that is just one of my wee foibles. That is enough from me. Thanks, convener.

Thank you and good morning. I am thinking how difficult it must be to take an academic approach to this when so much of it comes down to political will and the politics behind it all. I do not think that intergovernmental relations could be explained without reference to politics. To the public, it is a hot mess. They will not even try to comprehend it because it is not governed by any rationale across the piece.

Going back to devolution, we were told that the Sewel convention would be enshrined in law. People were told that before they voted in the referendum, but it was ditched immediately afterwards. That bad faith has continued since.

The internal market act, which is opposed by the Welsh and Scottish Governments and by this Parliament, has taken further the extent to which the UK Government can involve itself in devolved matters. I will give one recent example. Last week, the UK Government announced a substantial amount of cash that is to go out across the UK through the pride in place initiative. That was not the subject of any consultation with the Scottish Government and it will involve spending in local areas and the establishment of committees or boards across the country. There is no real criteria as to how the money is to be spent, and the initiative does not use the Scottish index of multiple deprivation or any other measure. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has not been consulted and no reference has been made to the grant-aid expenditure formula for local government.

I just wonder about that lack of consultation. Given that a Labour Government was responsible initially for the establishment of devolution, you would have thought that a Labour Government would want to respect devolution. Labour also decried the predecessor levelling up fund, so you would have thought that it would not have announced the initiative. What implications will the fact that it has done so have for the intergovernmental relationship? Does it blow out of the water any idea of a substantive reset, rather than rhetoric sitting alongside actions that do not mirror that rhetoric? I know that that is quite a loaded question, but I am interested to hear any answers on the implications of the pride in place initiative.

I will just come back on that point. If you think back to Brexit, the shared prosperity fund was essentially trying to replace the European funds that came before, but the EU, as a body, quite rightly often wanted to identify itself with those projects, so you saw the big signage.

The point that I am trying to make is that it goes way beyond the idea of the UK Government trying to say, “This is what we’re doing in Scotland,” in order to make itself relevant—which is quite legitimate. Can you imagine what the reaction of Westminster would be if, in Scotland, six months out from a UK general election, we set up a fund and gave individual sitting MSPs a crucial role in deciding how those funds were to be disbursed? I find this an extraordinary thing to have happened in respect of the implications for intergovernmental relations and interparliamentary relations as well.

On your point about the politics, the examples that we have and the submissions that we have received show that in Germany, for example, the procedures and practices seem to have been strong enough to withstand the political ebb and flow. That is my impression anyway. I do not know that from first-hand experience, but they seem to have the policies and processes in place, whereas here they are ad hoc, one sided or absent completely in too many cases for us to be able to say whether there is proper intergovernmental working.

It is worth remembering that the UK Government told the Supreme Court that it viewed the Sewel convention as merely a self-denying ordinance, which undermines much of what people are trying to do to make it a more serious convention. That is just a comment.

I have not thought it through—I must admit that—but I suppose the idea is that, if the committee was recognised by both Parliaments, its recommendations, if not binding, would at least carry weight and would have to be reported to both Parliaments. It would also address the point you make about timing and the fact that we often get an LCM late in the day. A designated committee could help with the timing of it, because it would go straight to considering it, whereas currently the relevant committee of this Parliament has to try to fit a meeting on it into its work programme.

It is just an idea. I will leave it at that, convener.

For your information, I do not know what the Scottish Government’s intentions are, but mine are to write to the Electoral Commission and to the Presiding Officer, because that is a complete interference in the election process in Scotland.

On the general question, do other members of the panel have any views to express?