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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.

It would be interesting to understand the process in relation to the establishment of Scottish Rail Holdings and whether that is classed as a small body. I do not know how many people it directly employs, for example.

There is a tension here, is there not? I picked up something else from reading the report. In paragraph 4.11, an interviewee encapsulated what they thought was necessary, which at first I was quite attracted to, but then I thought about it a bit more and I have another comment on it.

In that paragraph, the interviewee says that it would be useful to set out

“what you can expect from us”

and

“what we expect from you”.

I thought that that was a neat encapsulation of the issue, although when I reflected on that a bit more, I thought that it sounded a bit like a master-servant relationship—it did not sound like a partnership of equals.

One thing that we come across in section 22 reports is a blurring, a confusion and an unclear sense of where roles and responsibilities lie. Paragraph 4.4 warns that

“Establishing a separate body and then managing it too closely risks undermining the benefits of separate status.”

First, do you agree with that analysis? Secondly, how do you see that in relation not only to Scottish Rail Holdings but to other bodies that are being created to deliver public services under the auspices of the Scottish Government and maybe at the instigation of the Scottish Parliament?

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. Members of the committee will ask further detailed questions about some of the areas that you have identified.

One thing that you mentioned, and that Anthony Clark mentioned in his opening statement, is alluded to in the report. There appears to be greater reliance on external agents this time. I presume that that is a euphemism for the outsourcing of some of the data matching work. First, do you have any reflection on whether that affected the quality of the data matching exercises? Secondly, was there a pattern? For example, did smaller local authorities struggle more with the effects of Covid and therefore have to rely on outsourcing some of that work, or did big local authorities and big public agencies also do that?

Thank you very much. I have a couple of questions to get us under way.

It struck me that the cases that were identified—I think that they led to four prosecutions by the police—are largely small-scale, household-level examples of fraud or individual fraud. Is part of the exercise designed to look at the wider spread of organised crime fraud or at examples of much bigger, co-ordinated attempts to defraud the system?

I will now bring in the deputy convener, who wants to follow a particular line of inquiry.

I want to inject a sense of perspective. The pilot was presumably intended to understand whether that line of inquiry was worth pursuing and whether the resources invested in it will reap a significant harvest. The report says that, of all the cases in Fife during that year,

“Thirteen matches showed cause for concern as the NECs appeared to have been used after the death of the cardholder. Two of these cards were used for journeys to the value of almost £2,300 for one”—

I do not know where you can go to from Fife for that kind of money—

“and £240 for the other. The value of the journeys for the other 11 cards varied from £3.10 to £69.00.”

First, that seems to show how honest the good people of Fife are. Secondly, does that indicate that there is a major problem that would require lots of resources to be turned over to extend the pilot into a national-level scheme?

We resume this morning’s consideration of evidence by the Public Audit Committee with agenda item 3, under which we continue our consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report, “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”.

I welcome our witnesses. We are joined by Maggie Chapman MSP, who is a member of the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. Alongside her is David McGill, who is the clerk/chief executive of the Scottish Parliament, and Huw Williams, who is private secretary and head of office in the clerk/chief executive’s office.

We have received your written submissions in response to a letter that was sent in my name, as convener of the Public Audit Committee, and in Martin Whitfield’s name, as convener of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee. We shall no doubt turn to some of the issues arising from that in our questions.

We have set aside some time for questions from members of the committee, but we would like to offer Maggie Chapman the opportunity to make a short opening statement.

Before I turn to Sharon Dowey, I observe that although this committee is particularly interested in the historical reviews, we are also interested in the history of the outcomes that those reviews have produced.

I ask Sharon Dowey to open the questioning for us.

That sounds like the institutions are happy, but what about the complainants? You do not need to answer that question.