Seòmar agus comataidhean

I begin by acknowledging and thanking the officials who have worked tirelessly to ensure that the sustained efforts of external parties who have sought to break into and corrupt our network have been frustrated and defeated on each occasion. The corporate body has been advised of those efforts and it takes the issue seriously. I seem to remember that we have seen briefings from Government Communications Headquarters—GCHQ—which is obviously very exciting. A genuine and sustained effort has been made to attack the network, and I know that the team has worked incredibly hard and succeeded in frustrating it. I also know that, in developing the new website, as Alan Balharrie will now explain, the understanding that that is an on-going issue is very much to the fore of our thinking.

There has been quite detailed correspondence between us, so I do not think that there is any particular need to repeat all that, and we are quite happy to move straight to questions.

However, I point out that I am not a website designer or an information technology specialist—I am probably one of those dinosaurs who is the last person that you would consult on any such matters. Like many other laypeople probably do, I imagine that you can go to Currys PC World and buy a website for £5.99 and that that will probably suffice. However, with an organisation as huge and complex, and of such public interest, as the Parliament, it is important that we have an accessible website, given that it is accessed by many people from not just within but outwith the Parliament, including from around the world.

You will need to bear in mind that the previous website was launched 10 years ago, which was the same time that the iPad was launched. So much has changed in life since then, not least with mobile communications and people’s ability to access things in ways that are quite different from how things were accessed previously. I am afraid that the previous website had become largely obsolete, it was incapable of being maintained and it was certainly not something that could be accessed easily. It required to be upgraded.

The inability of the public to access the website was very much a feature of the public engagement meetings that were conducted by the commission on parliamentary reform, which was established by Ken Mackintosh and on which I was pleased to sit. It might be the case that users in the building who were familiar with the website felt able to access it with ease, but that was not the case for those trying to engage from elsewhere. That was the corporate body’s justification and reasoning when it took the decision some years ago to commence the establishment of a new website.

That is how the new website came about. I know that you will have detailed questions on what came about and, possibly, the process that led to that as well. We are very happy to take your questions. Michelle Hegarty, Alan Balharrie and Susan Duffy will assist me—or perhaps prevent me from contributing—as we go through the questions.

The corporate body reviews these things, but in the sense that they are approved projects in a schedule, so there is a monitoring and an understanding of how the work is progressing. The corporate body might be more exercised by a project that comes out of left field and for which there has been no provision, such as Police Scotland’s recommendations in relation to security in the building, none of which had been anticipated in a five or 10-year plan and which required to be progressed with a degree of urgency. In such a case, the corporate body considers the recommendations and total costs, and the recommendations may or may not be accepted as we decide what we are going to authorise and the exceptional item of expense that we have to approve.

I will ask Michelle Hegarty to come in, but that report exists to some extent—we have a red-amber-green traffic-light warning report on all the risks and developments in the Parliament and on the progress that has been made against them. It is not that such things come to us only if we ask for them—we are proactively alerted to them.

The website project came largely within budget and on time, with the caveat that the pandemic complicated things because resources had to be diverted away from its development to things such as the hybrid working of Parliament, for which we had no advance notice, provision or additional staffing that we could deploy, other than those people who were working on the website at the time. I would therefore take issue with the idea that the corporate body is not being advised of all those things.

It was not £3 million in one year and the £100 million is an annual figure.

I will make one general observation and perhaps make a constructive point.

As Michelle Hegarty identified, in terms of the high-level information that the committee receives, we are looking at one particular project; there have been questions about why there was not more information in relation to the project. I think that if we were to drill down into all the projects that the corporate body is overseeing and progressing, and provide the committee with that level of detail on them all, that would not be helpful or productive either for the progress of the budget or for the committee’s understanding of where it wanted to focus its attention.

If, on the other hand, there is a particular area of development in Parliament that is the responsibility of the corporate body and on which, ahead of the budget presentation, you would like to have more detailed information—such as you are perhaps seeking today in relation to the website—the corporate body could supply such detail in advance of its presentation to the finance committee.

It was you who said that, Alan.

I joined the corporate body just after the discussions about the website had taken place. I was handed the portfolio and had to go straight to the then Finance and Constitution Committee to sell the project, which was interesting. Those of you who have longer memories will remember that that was just after Alex Johnstone’s death, which caused my accession to the corporate body.

I have been involved in a series of projects in the years that I have been with the corporate body—for three years previously, and again since the election last year. Someone like me, who has been in business, looks at and them and thinks, “Crikey! This is a pretty eyewatering way of achieving things.” I am reminded at times that we are a Parliament.

I suppose that my mother would take the view that she would not change the light bulb in our kitchen until it popped, because she was going to get value for money from it. I think that If we took that view about the infrastructure of the building and just waited for things to fail—for the website, the lifts and everything else to fail; the telephone system might be next—people would not thank us for it. There clearly has to be a long-term projected look at wear and tear, obsolescence and the need to upgrade and monitor things, for which we need to plan over a number of years.

In this case, I know nothing about websites. Given the alacrity with which my SPCB colleagues agreed that I would represent them this morning, I take the view that there is no great depth of expertise among them—and naturally, therefore, in the corporate body—on the project.

With regard to our on-going monitoring of the website project, we have an idea of what the original estimate and the timescale were. We receive detailed information on all the expensive projects—some of which we can relate to more easily than others.

I hope that we will reflect on whether there are lessons to be learned from the way that this project has emerged and from the concern that has been expressed about it. I think that we have already suggested that the corporate body will have further discussion of whether other protocols could be put in place, and of whether there are natural points in the year when we should look at those things, just to ensure that we are offering whatever level of scrutiny we can offer within the portfolio of responsibility that we have.

I invite Alan Balharrie to answer that.

That is a suitably pejoratively phrased question, convener. As someone who does not access websites and things, I might find these things complicated, too. It certainly is the case that, if you were an internal building user, you understood how the previous website worked and were familiar with your way around it. However, it was a hugely lugubrious website. It had hundreds of thousands of documents in it, which were slowing down its operation and decreasing its efficiency. That is unlike any website for any Government department or Parliament that you would expect to come across. Our content was extremely dense and, if you were not one of the internal building users who was familiar with the site, you would not have had a good experience using it.

Have we got a final product that is incapable of evolving further? I am sure that that is not the case. I know that Susan Duffy is very much involved in engagement around how the website might progress, so it might be worth while hearing from her at this point.