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Okay.

Maggie Chapman mentioned that she has two hats. I have the hat of the convener of the Public Audit Committee. The evidence that we took from the Auditor General was rather contrary to what you have said. He felt—and, as it happens, it is a view that I share—that there is some value in getting the assurance of a stand-alone audit. Last week, we explored that in relation to His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland, which is audited as part of the Scottish Government’s consolidated accounts audit, unlike the Scottish Fiscal Commission, which has its own independent internal audit and is externally audited by Audit Scotland. Have you taken a view on whether there would be merit in combining the audit process for all those public bodies?

An idea that has been paraded before us as an interesting possibility—it is no more than an early-stage idea—is that one option might be for the commissioners and other bodies to have a committee of the Parliament that would meet in public and take evidence from the commissioners. That would not preclude subject committees from receiving reports, in the same way that the Auditor General for Scotland plugs directly into the Public Audit Committee but also gives evidence to the Economy and Fair Work Committee, the Education, Children and Young People Committee and so on when reports are produced on those particular areas.

Do you have any thoughts on that model and whether it might work as a way of addressing some of the gaps that might currently exist? Might that be a better way of holding the commissioners to account on their work?

It is important to recognise and to stress that Audit Scotland has 340 full-time equivalent staff, so it generates an awful lot of work. The commissioners that we are speaking about have much smaller establishments of staff, so the dimensions are different; we accept that. We wondered whether you had any initial views or whether, on reflection, you could get back to us with a view on whether that model is worthy of further examination.

Good morning. I would like to ask you some questions on the subject of capacity, and in particular your capacity. I read the evidence that you gave to the Finance and Public Administration Committee and the speeches that you made in Parliament when there was a debate on the report that the Finance and Public Administration Committee produced, and I note your concerns about whether you had the capacity to cope with the existing number of bodies for which you have responsibility, let alone new bodies that might be added to the SPCB’s responsibilities. We now know that there will be a patient safety commissioner, and I think that the bill that would establish a victims and witnesses commissioner is at stage 3 in the parliamentary process. I am not a betting person but, if I were, I think that I would put money on the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill going through.

What is your perspective on capacity, in the light of the existing situation and the imminent growth in the commissioner landscape? Do you have the capacity to have effective oversight, governance and scrutiny of those bodies?

Again, I do not wish to go down the rabbit hole on the topic of the Ethical Standards Commissioner, but an argument could be made that the issue might not have been picked up in the way that it was through the audit by Audit Scotland if that body had been part of a more collective audit process. It is not inconceivable that it would have been picked up in such a situation—it could have been—but, nonetheless, without that focused attention, the audit might not have led to the remedies that were required to deal with the situation.

I go back to the whole-system perspective. GPs are presumably grappling with the issue of waiting times in secondary care. If people are on long waiting lists to get elective surgery or other procedures, that is presumably leading to an increase in demand on GP services to infill for some of that.

Do you have a view on the necessity of tackling not just the general medical services side of that, but what is going on in secondary care? Presumably, you cannot have success in one area without achieving success in the other.

That is a useful clarification.

I turn to the deputy convener, Jamie Greene, for our final round of questions.

Before I bring in Stephanie Callaghan, I have two quick questions to put to you. The first question goes back to data. The committee has seen quite a few false dawns when it comes to data collection. I looked back at what was said exactly two years ago—on 4 May 2023—when the director general for health and social care and chief executive of the national health service in Scotland told the committee:

“We have started the roll-out of the next generation of information technology to general practices; we hope that that will help to improve ease of extraction of data from GP systems and that it will give us a chance to start with a clean slate on how data is coded.”—[Official Report, Public Audit Committee, 4 May 2023; c 26-27.]

That is what we have been speaking about this morning, but that was two years ago. Do you get a sense that there is a lack of urgency? Are there legitimate reasons why the delay has been extended in the way that it has?

Okay. I will bring Colin Beattie in shortly, but before I do that, I have one final question, which is about an area that we have not so far discussed but which is in your report. Again, it is a feature that many people have come across in recent years: the creation of GP clusters. I do not know whether they were created to try to address demand and supply and to marry up practices, so that access to a GP does not depend simply on being registered at one GP practice. If someone is registered at a GP practice, that facilitates their getting access to other GP practices in a cluster. Presumably, that is designed to improve levels of access to GP services. Has that been fully funded? Is it being implemented? What is your audit assessment of how that is going?