Seòmar agus comataidhean

The principal item on our agenda this morning is to consider community empowerment during Covid-19. Back in 2019, Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission produced a report entitled “Principles for community empowerment”, which provides a foundation stone for our discussion this morning. In late October, Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission jointly prepared and published a briefing that considered how community empowerment had been affected or changed by Covid-19.

I am delighted that we will be having a round-table discussion this morning among participants with knowledge and experience of how community empowerment has looked over the past 18 months to two years. I thank those witnesses who are joining us online for taking the time to give us your insights this morning. As you would expect, there will be some questions from members of the committee, but this is quite a discursive session, and you can ask questions of each other, if you like. It will be a bit more conversational, and hopefully not at all like an interrogation. I am keen to encourage a free flow of discussion. By that token, if questions are asked or if there are parts of the discussion on which you do not have any strong views, or if there is nothing that you particularly wish to put on the record, do not feel obliged to answer every question or to take part in every area of the discussion.

For those who are joining us virtually, the best way to attract our attention and to indicate that you wish to come in and take part is by putting an R in the chat box. Your microphone will be activated for you, so you do not need to press unmute on your screens. Again, I welcome you all here. I also welcome Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, who joins us in person in the committee room.

As this is a round table, I would like us to go round and introduce ourselves. Perhaps you can each say a little bit about the organisation that you are here to represent this morning. I begin, however, by inviting committee members to introduce themselves, before I ask the witnesses to do so.

Anna, I ask you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your organisation.

I ask Stephen Boyle to introduce himself.

I certainly echo loudly Ewan Leitch’s final comments.

I thank each of the panellists for their contributions. The session has been instructive and insightful, and it has given us lots to think over in respect of what we can do as the Public Audit Committee of the Scottish Parliament in ensuring that the harsh lessons that we have been forced to learn because of circumstances beyond our control are embedded in our public institutions, including the Parliament, and that they find a ready echo in the communities that you all serve and that we also seek to serve.

I will have to draw the session to a close. I emphasise to the people who have been kind enough to join us this morning that, if there are further things that they want to get across that they have not had time to get across because of the time pressures this morning, please do not hesitate to put them in a written submission. It does not have to be an omnibus piece of work; it can be short, sharp and pithy. If there are points that you have not felt that you have had the opportunity to raise or that, on reflection from this morning’s session, you think are important for us to consider, please put something in writing to us, and we will consider that in our deliberations.

Once again, I thank all of you who are online, and I thank the Auditor General for joining us in the committee room.

I close the public part of the meeting.

That is great—thank you. The emphasis on outcomes is right, because we were living in unprecedented times, with people at risk of hunger and isolation and all the things that go along with that. We have already heard some of the experiences of communities rallying round, coming together and making sure that people did not fall between the cracks.

We have a large number of questions and areas for discussion this morning, so we will move on. Sharon Dowey will get the next part of the conversation going.

Thanks. Committee members have a whole suite of questions to ask.

On your previous answer about those who directly represent crofting communities being on the commission, Auditor General, do you—or perhaps Pat Kenny or Graeme Greenhill can answer this—have any sense of the extent to which the issues raised in the report have affected the key services that the commission provides to those communities?

Did your team look at communications between the sponsor division and the commission, including the board, in order to understand what that relationship was like? Were you able to amass any evidence that pointed to relationships—or lack of relationships—that rang alarm bells?

In the previous session, the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee raised concerns about the adequacy of sponsorship arrangements between the Scottish Government and public bodies, especially non-departmental public bodies. I think that those arrangements are set out very clearly in the Scottish public finance manual. Accountable officers in organisations, as well as, I presume, board members in those organisations, should receive some training on, or be led to some understanding of, their roles and responsibilities and what sponsorship arrangements should look like. What is your sense of that? To what extent has that happened in the past and is it happening now?

Mr Beattie has a series of questions that will probe governance and the different areas of responsibility.

We are drawing towards the end of the evidence session. I will bring in Sharon Dowey shortly.

Mr Kenny mentioned the hopefulness that comes with the commissioning of an external consultant’s report. However, did I not read that there was a consultant’s report in 2016 that looked into the Crofting Commission? The question that that provokes is to what extent there is a similarity between the findings of the consultants in their 2016 report and what Deloitte uncovered in 2020-21. Is the Crofting Commission just dealing with the same issues? Are you as auditors having to deal with the same issues? Are we as the Public Audit Committee of the Scottish Parliament having to deal with the same issues over and over again?