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Thank you. Colin Beattie has a couple of questions.

The first principal item of business this morning is agenda item 2, which is consideration of Audit Scotland’s section 22 report “The 2020/21 audit of Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting, particularly our newish permanent secretary, John-Paul Marks, in what I hope will be the first of a number of appearances before the committee in this parliamentary session. He is joined in the room by Jackie McAllister, who is chief financial officer, and Colin Cook, who is director of economic development, and, virtually, by Lesley Fraser, who is the director general corporate, and Alyson Stafford, who is director general Scottish exchequer, Scottish Government.

As I have said, I welcome John-Paul Marks to his first meeting, in his new role, with a Scottish Parliament committee—in this case, the Public Audit Committee—and I invite him to make a short opening statement.

Permanent secretary, we cannot hold you individually accountable for this either, but one of the other things that the committee, the Auditor General and the Auditor General’s predecessor have waited for for a long time is the publication of whole public sector consolidated accounts. We understand that they will be produced in two stages, and I think that the stage 1 account is due to be published this spring. Will you bring the committee up to date on what progress is being made on that? Do you expect that target date to be met?

Good morning and welcome to the sixth meeting in 2022 of the Public Audit Committee. Before we begin, I remind members, witnesses and staff who are present that social distancing measures remain in place in the Parliament’s committee rooms. In addition, face coverings must be worn if you are entering, leaving or moving around the room, but you can take your face masks off when you are at the table.

Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Do members agree to take items 4 and 5 in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you very much.

I also wanted to ask you about one quite specific area. At our previous evidence session on this report, on 27 January, we took evidence from the Auditor General on the overspend in the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which arose as a result of special payments of £40.2 million in connection with the acquisition and administration of Rangers Football Club. We are interested not only in the impact of that overspend on the service itself, but in the decision making around those payments, particularly the role of the Lord Advocate in that respect. At the previous evidence session, we were told that there were two cases still outstanding. The Audit Scotland report tells us that the Scottish Government authorised the overspend. Can you tell us who did so?

Just to conclude, I think that you undertook to give us some information in writing about fraud, payment and recovery, decision making relating to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service overspend and so on. That would be helpful. When we survey the Official Report of the meeting, we might find that there are other areas that we want to follow up with you, too.

Thank you for your time this morning and for your thoughtful contributions. I also thank your team: Lesley Fraser and Alyson Stafford, who joined us online; and Jackie McAllister and Colin Cook, who joined us in the committee room.

With that, I suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.

Thank you for clarifying that. That is helpful.

You have inferred this to an extent, but one thing that comes out in the report is that temporary arrangements have had to be put in place for things such as paying staff salaries and paying suppliers. From your auditing perspective, were you satisfied that those temporary financial arrangements were sound?

Thank you, Willie—I will come back to you.

For me, there is a stand-out feature of the report. Over recent weeks, we have looked at section 22 reports on organisations that are quite small and have fairly limited resources, budgets and staffing levels. Here, we have two premier agencies of central Government—Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council—which have a combined budget each year of £2 billion and more of public money. Despite that, the story in the report is that, going back to 2016-17, they have failed to agree, and therefore things have not happened. That is quite staggering.

The report infers that the Scottish Government has failed to provide leadership to address and rectify the situation. There have been a few reheated attempts to set up various committees and bodies to co-ordinate things, all of which—according to the report that has been laid before the committee—seem, largely, to have failed. Why do you think that is, Auditor General?

I turn to the skills alignment actions, which are, as you say, the principal focus of the report that we are considering. The report notes that in 2018-19 the Scottish Government said that it planned to issue the same strategic skills guidance, through letters of guidance, to the boards of Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council in order to support delivery of the enterprise and skills strategic board’s strategic plan, once that was published. Has consistent and complementary guidance ever been issued by the Scottish Government to those agencies?

Thank you very much, Auditor General. We have a large number of questions, but before we go to them, I remind everyone that, to aid broadcasting, it would be helpful if members could direct their questions to a particular member of the team. I also say to Stephen Boyle that if someone on his team other than whoever has been invited to respond wishes to come in and add something to our evidence gathering, they should put an R in the chat function. We will pick that up and bring them in.

Sharon Dowey has a number of questions.