Seòmar agus comataidhean

We have reached the end of our evidence session. I thank our witnesses—your detailed evidence is greatly appreciated by the committee. Next week, we will continue to take evidence on the national performance framework.

We will take a break until 12 minutes past 11.

Let us move on to the tender. We were advised that specialist technical staff were procured through existing framework contracts and the technology behind the site was also procured through an existing contract that was in place at the time. Why was the project not put out to tender?

Okay, but from here on in, are you looking to give us the breakdowns that were not provided previously?

I suggest that that is a relatively minor point, given that there are other search functions and features that people would probably use more frequently. I will touch on only one other area, because I know that my colleagues are keen to come in.

We looked at areas of spend, which I found quite interesting. For example, in 2019-20, the cost of salaries for people who were working on the project was £928,000. The amount that was spent on software was £4,000. The following year, the cost of salaries was £940,000, and £2,000 was spent on software. What kind of salaries were the people who were working on the project being paid? How many people were working on the project?

Even with people being paid £300 a day or £840 a day, it still took years to produce the website. The response from the Presiding Officer said that,

“Apart from the challenges of managing and co-ordinating a large team virtually ... members of the team”,

had to deal with issues

“such as childcare and home schooling”.

Honestly! Basically, we are spending all that money but must also accept that folk who were earning those huge day rates had to juggle home schooling and childcare. Was that not taken into consideration?

That concludes questions from other members of the committee. I have one or two questions to round up the evidence session.

On the issue of costs, I notice that the annual licensing support cost—which has not come up yet today—has increased from £54,000 to £86,000. Is there an explanation for the significant jump in cost?

I thank the witnesses for their evidence. The committee will consider any next steps that arise from today’s session at a future meeting. We look forward to considering the SPCB’s budget bid for 2023-24 towards the end of the year, as part of our wider budget scrutiny process.

That concludes the public part of today’s meeting. Under the next agenda item, we will discuss a private paper and consider a work paper.

Thank you for your helpful opening statement. Committee members have great interest in the issue, so I will restrict myself and will try not to ask myriad questions. However, obviously, I will kick off with a few.

The committee has a focus on a couple of areas, one of which is our scrutiny function and how the website relates to that. The cost itself is, of course, also a major issue for us. I do not pretend to be an expert on websites either, but, as you said, simply Googling websites shows that you can buy one for just a few hundred pounds. We realise that this is a complex organisation, but, again, I understand that, for major organisations, the cost of introducing a website is considerably less than what the Scottish Parliament appears to have paid—by a number of zeros. The timescale for developing it is also a matter of concern.

The committee was sent a list of the cost of other websites, including, for example, those of various UK Government departments. The cost varies from £14,000 to millions of pounds. However, we do not know whether we are comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges because we have not been provided with a great amount of detail.

The Parliament’s project began in 2017, with cost and delivery spanning subsequent years until 2021. However, no specific costs are provided against the web project for each year. I am keen to find out why that is.

A response from the Presiding Officer states that

“The web project budget was put forward by the Digital Strategy Board, as part of the overall project portfolio bid which comprises part of the SPCB’s annual budget bid from 2017/18. SPCB approves the Parliament annual budget bid and its indicative bid for the next financial year”,

as we know. However, we are also advised that

“Officials have also recognised the need to provide increased detail on major multi-year project costs as part of the annual budgeting process to the SPCB and Finance and Public Administration Committee.”

Therefore, the obvious question is why the committee was not previously provided with that detail. When did the realisation dawn that we should receive that detailed information? When did SPCB members become aware of the on-going costs of the project? I have heard a number of views that they were not necessarily au fait with the details.

Okay. Having covered the issues of costs and scrutiny, I will cover one other issue, which is quality. My question relates to a comment that Alan Balharrie made earlier. We had the referendum in September 1997 to set up this Parliament, and 20 months later, the Parliament was established. It had a functioning website that served us for many years. I recall that there were many IT problems—for example, our email inboxes only had a capacity of 50 megabytes, and there were other issues—but I do not remember many difficulties with the website.

I think that we all accept that we have to evolve, because more than 20 years have elapsed. There have been some upgrades, but this was a mega one. When Michelle Thomson talked about the trade-offs between time, cost and quality, Alan Balharrie said that we had to give a little on the quality. Surely if you take more than three years to develop a project, and spend more than £3 million, you should not have to concede anything on quality. Where have we conceded on that quality?

Surely if the Official Report was more accessible online, most people would just access it online and would not have to have it sent to them every day. We will leave it at that.

I have a final question. Michelle Hegarty said that we need to “eke out the life” of equipment. However, this very day, there are IT people in my constituency office and in my office upstairs telling me that the laptops, which some staff have had for less than a year, need to be replaced and so on. We discussed retaining some of the technology, because it all works pretty well as far as we are concerned—it certainly works a lot better than it did a few years back—and we would rather not lose any of it. What is the necessity of that project? What will the overall cost be? We might want to further scrutinise that project later in the year.