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Director general, we must leave it there. Thank you very much for that final answer.

I thank all our witnesses for the evidence that they have given us. Thank you, Andrew Chapman, Tim McDonnell, Susan Gallacher and director general Caroline Lamb for giving us your time and insight. We might want to follow up on some areas; I think that you, in turn, undertook to give us more information, which we would very much value, as always.

With that, we move into private session.

I invite Stephanie Callaghan to put some questions to the witnesses around access to GP services. As I mentioned earlier, Stephanie joins us online.

Other committee members might return to some of those points. I will move on to another aspect of the report, which I asked the Auditor General about when he was before us a few weeks ago. In the end, we are talking about a whole system, and the difficulties that are faced in secondary care in the national health service are pretty well documented. There are extensive waiting times and a large number of people on waiting lists. Will you describe for us—maybe Dr Provan can answer, too—the impact on general practitioners of that persistent and almost intractable increase in waiting times for people who are awaiting treatment in hospitals? You choose between yourselves who wants to answer first.

Welcome to the second half of the meeting. We are looking at the Audit Scotland report, “General Practice: Progress since the 2018 General Medical Services contract”.

I am pleased to welcome a team from the Scottish Government, led by Caroline Lamb, who is the director general of health and social care and the chief executive of NHS Scotland. Good morning. Alongside Caroline Lamb are Tim McDonnell, who is the director of primary care; Susan Gallacher, the deputy director of general practice policy; and Andrew Chapman, the unit head for the general practice contract and operations. We have some questions to put to you.

Stephanie Callaghan joins us online, and I will bring her in at the appropriate time. Before we get to our questions, director general, I invite you to make an opening statement.

You accept the key messages that are set out at the beginning of the report, including message 1, which says that the

“commitment to increase the number of GPs by 800 is unlikely to be met by 2027”.

You accept, presumably, that commitments that were part of the contract and were supposed to be completed by 2021

“have still not been fully implemented”

that things have been “slower than planned”, that the Scottish Government has not been transparent, that there is a lack of clarity and that direct spending to GPs has decreased. Do you accept all those findings?

Before I go to Graham Simpson, I will ask you about paragraph 100 of the report. I have never seen this language in an Audit Scotland report in all the time that I have convened the committee. It says quite bluntly, and Audit Scotland witnesses repeated it when they gave oral evidence to us, that the Scottish Government, in a press release in February 2019, was misleading, because it claimed that 172 loans to GP practices to improve or to purchase or to sell on their premises had been applied for successfully, when it turns out that only 63 had.

Well, these are not my words; these are the words of the Auditor General, who said that the Government was “misleading”.

Just for completeness, instead of £30 million being made available in sustainability loans for GP premises, only £15 million has been loaned out. That is half the headline figure that is in the 2018 document. Why is that?

Okay. It seems to me that this should not have come as a surprise. At the time of the publication of the contract in November 2017, it clearly stated that

“the contract offer proposes significant new arrangements for GP premises”,

so there was an acknowledgement that this was pioneering, it was significant and it was new. I am therefore a little bit puzzled as to why some of the difficulties have come as a bit of a shock to the Government.

I will move on and invite Graham Simpson to put some questions to you.

Item 2 is further consideration of the Audit Scotland report “General practice: Progress since the 2018 General Medical Services contract”. I am pleased to welcome our witnesses for the first session. We are joined by Dr Iain Morrison, chair of the Scottish general practice committee of the British Medical Association Scotland. Alongside him is Dr Chris Provan, chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners Scotland. We are joined remotely by the vice-chair of RCGP Scotland, Dr Chris Williams. Dr Williams, if you want to come in at any point to answer the committee’s questions, indicate that in the chat box and we will endeavour to bring you in.

We have quite a number of questions to put but, before we get to them, I invite the representatives in the room to give us short opening statements. I will begin with Dr Morrison.

The route map will be published within a year. What about action? What about the implementation of the terms of the 2018 contract?