Seòmar agus comataidhean

Good morning. I welcome everybody to the 24th meeting in 2022 of the Public Audit Committee.

Agenda item 1 is to decide whether to take items 4, 5 and 6 in private. Do members agree to do that?

Members indicated agreement.

Okay. Thanks.

I want to pick up on the last point and will bring in Andrew Burns to answer. There are four indicators, and the report calls for consistency in their application and use. Perhaps that suggests that, currently, they are not used consistently. For example, I do not know whether some local authorities, with health boards, rely on only one or two of the indicators and not on all four. There might be reasons for that. The committee is interested to understand whether your calling for consistency of application of the suite of indicators at Scottish Government and local government levels implies that that is not happening at the moment.

The Auditor General can start; maybe Andrew Burns can then come in.

In the end, the test will be how many section 22 reports are brought before us by the Auditor General and whether Mr Johnston has to come before us to defend a situation that arises from failed sponsor arrangements. We have found it really enlightening to hear about the work that is being done to prevent recurrences of those. What I take from the evidence that we have heard is that you are looking in detail at instances in which things have gone wrong to learn lessons from that and to build those lessons into the training that you give to the people who are responsible for ensuring good relationships between sponsor departments and public agencies, non-departmental public bodies and so on.

We are out of time. We would like to follow up on some areas to get more information from you. You have not withheld anything from us; it is just that we have run out of time to get some of the detail that we are looking for.

I thank Paul Johnston, Catriona Maclean and Mary McAllan for their evidence. I suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

I am about to turn to Colin Beattie. Before I do that, I must observe that Mr Johnston has invariably appeared before us or our predecessor committee when things have gone wrong and when section 22 reports have been conducted by the Auditor General. This morning, we are outside the eye of a crisis and are keen to have an evidence session that allows us to understand how things work now. That is why we are interested in hearing more about where things are going right.

Colin Beattie is joining us online.

I am going to have to draw this session to a close, but I thank Andrew Burns, Corrinne Forsyth, Tricia Meldrum and the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle, for their evidence this morning. I am afraid that we have run out of road, but we might well come back to you to follow up your oral evidence.

I now draw the public part of this morning’s meeting to a close.

Thank you very much.

I remind people that Colin Beattie is with us, but is joining us remotely.

You have outlined some of the key messages in the report, some of which are quite startling—from gaps in data to your assessment that

“It is not possible to assess the success of the ... first four-year plan”

and that there has not been a demonstrable

“clear shift to preventing child poverty.”

Those are quite important messages and, as you have set out, there are areas in which you are keen that improvements be made.

You finished by explaining that you plan to carry out more work. Will you elaborate on that a little? What further work is already in train or is likely? Will you tell us a little about the timetable that you have set yourself for that?

Thanks. You mentioned at one point that Covid has had an effect, which we fully appreciate. However, the committee also wants to understand whether the foundations are in place to deliver the data, notwithstanding external factors.

We are interested to hear your views on the robustness of the data and on the time lag, because—I presume—that makes it exceptionally difficult for policy makers to base their decisions on current evidence. Parliament has legislated for statutory targets to be met, but if there is no data to understand what progress is being made or what regress is taking place, that makes it pretty hard to give any meaning to the targets that have been set.

Your briefing mentions that new data on levels of child poverty in 2020-21 are expected in 2023. Have you any expectation that that data will be more robust? Will it be better? Will it address the deficiencies that you outlined in the briefing? I am happy for you to bring in the other members of your team, as needed.

On that last point—and this covers part, though not the full extent, of the evidence that we have taken this morning—you say quite critically in the briefing paper:

“Gaps in data and not enough involvement of children and families with lived experience of poverty are hindering the development of sufficiently targeted policies”.

That lack of involvement is actually having an effect on the policy-making process and therefore the outcomes, and it is absolutely critical, is it not, to the approach that is adopted if we are going to get these things right.

There is another issue with regard to employability that I am bound to ask you to clarify. Am I not right in thinking that two out of three children living in poverty in Scotland live in households with at least one adult in work? This situation has come about not because there is a big unemployment problem, but because people are not being very well paid when they go out to work.

Thank you, director general, for that opening statement. We have quite a number of questions that we want to put to you. They cover much of the ground that you outlined in your opening statement, which was helpful. I turn first of all to Craig Hoy.

Thank you. I want to give Willie Coffey the opportunity to put his questions to the witnesses now. I will then bring in Colin Beattie.