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That is a useful thumbnail sketch of the three principal themes in the report, which we will consider in detail this morning. I will hand over to the deputy convener, who has questions about the courts custody prisoner escorting service.

You have drawn a parallel—a wage comparator—with supermarkets a couple of times. However, the genesis of the contract is that it was outsourced work that was previously carried out by prison officers and Scottish Prison Service staff. Given the nature of the work that is involved, would a better comparator not be with the pay rates that the Scottish Prison Service pays its own staff?

We are quite pressed for time, so I will move straight to Willie Coffey.

I have a couple of questions to finish up this morning. Touching on that last subject, you are right, Auditor General, as always. You gave evidence to the committee back in September 2021 about the briefing that you had prepared on where we had got to with the Government’s stated policy of shifting to more community justice options. The evidence that was set before us at that time was that it is hugely less expensive for the state, and that the reconviction rate was noticeably different. Of those people who had served a sentence of a year or less in prison, 49 per cent were likely to reconvict within a year, whereas, in comparison, those serving community-based sentences had a reconviction rate of 30 per cent, so there was quite a marked contrast in the outcomes.

At that time, you told us that there was a lack of progress in shifting the balance in sentencing. Two years or more on, where do you see that? It obviously has a direct effect on the prison population.

That will be a bit of a relief for my constituents in the Forth Valley health board area. Nonetheless, although we are talking about recovery from Covid and the backlog in treatments because of Covid, an already ageing population and, probably, a climate of rising demand, health boards are expected to produce savings of 3 per cent across the board and, as you described, NHS Forth Valley will have to come up with at least twice that amount. Will you explain how that works? It strikes me that that might be unsustainable financially and in terms of outcomes.

Yes. One of the lessons that we have learned is that culture change is one thing, but it is keeping the culture change going that is probably the harder task.

My final question—I think that you alluded to this in answering Graham Simpson’s questions—is about how far there is to go through the assurance board process and so on. Again, when I had a briefing from the assurance board, which I think was as far back as May of last year, the expression that its members used was that they thought that there was a long way to go at that stage. We are now several months down the line, so that position might have been revised but, at that time, the assurance board was saying—I took a note of it—that there was no clear path to de-escalation. What is your assessment of that today?

I want to ask about one of those in particular: the spend on agency and bank staff. In his opening statement, the Auditor General mentioned elected representatives being briefed by the health board. I speak as one of the elected representatives who have had those briefings. One of the features of them, which I have been trying to interrogate, is the extent to which there has been a ballooning in spend by NHS Forth Valley on bank and agency staff.

Back in May 2023, it was reported that there had been an increase in spend, year on year, in the region of 70 or 71 per cent. By December 2023, at the last briefing that I attended, the figure that was being cited was a 46 per cent annual increase in spend on agency and bank staff. Could you give us your understanding of the reasons for such a big escalation in costs in that area on a year-on-year basis? What lies behind it? Do you have any sense of how that compares with the reliance of other health boards of a similar size on agency and bank staff?

That is fine. I do not know whether I am asking you to break an embargo, but could you give us an early insight into how 70 per cent and 46 per cent increases in spend compare with the figures that you have been unearthing in your preparation of the overall NHS report?

One of the inferences of what came out of the Healthcare Improvement Scotland report is that, because of things such as poor leadership, there might be higher-than-average levels of absenteeism, and the figure for bank and agency expenditure might be a function of that, but we are being told this morning that that is not the case. I want to try to clarify that.

I think that Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s initial report identified an excessive reliance on bank and agency staff as one concern. I think that it used the description of “serious concerns” in its report, and that was one of its serious concerns.

We now turn to Colin Beattie, who has some more questions to put, and perhaps an initial observation to start us off.