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Exhibit 4, which shows the barriers to accessing support, sums up the issues. It covers alcohol and drugs, but it talks us through the user journey very nicely, from the point of someone seeking help as an individual through to their getting help and then staying on the path to recovery. The list of barriers is unbelievable. There are so many barriers to people getting from the point where they identify that they have a problem to coming out the other side and being supported and in a better place in life.

I find the barriers that you have identified and the way that you have presented them to be quite extreme and quite shocking, to be honest. Perhaps that identifies the problem, because some people will engage with one or two of those issues on their journey, and others will face them all. Is that part of the problem? Perhaps that is the answer to my first question about why Scotland has such a big issue.

This is an important and difficult subject. Many of us will have lots of lived experience of this subject matter—I certainly do—so I am very keen that we try to get to the bottom of things. I have read your report, which is excellent. Unfortunately, it repeats much of what has been said in the past. I want to dig into that.

We all know the top-line statistics: we know that Scotland’s drug death rate is three times higher than that of England and double that of Wales, and that, arguably, it is the highest in Europe. We also know that spending on drug and alcohol services has increased, more or less, over the past decade, although it has flatlined a little over the past year or two. The Government acknowledged that there was an issue and started to pump cash into addressing it. It created the specific role of a drugs minister and it established a national mission—the media attention and the world’s focus on the issue pushed the Government to do so. The drug deaths situation is described as our national shame, and rightly so.

I do not understand—and I still cannot answer this question—why the drug and alcohol death rates in Scotland are so high relative to those of our neighbours. I simply cannot get my head around that. The report identifies many areas where improvement is needed, but I do not think that it answers that question.

Is that because alcohol is legal and commonplace? You would not need to walk very far from this room to buy alcohol this afternoon—arguably, the same could be true for drugs—but my point is that we have a different view of alcohol. Drugs are illegal, for want of a better term, but there is societal acceptance of everyday drinking—the phrases “acceptable norms”, “social drinking” and “safe levels of drinking” are all used. Is it just the case that we have a different take on alcohol? If the law suddenly made alcohol illegal, perhaps everyone would have a bigger focus on it, and if drugs were legalised in some shape or form, perhaps there would be a different societal view. Is how we perceive the harms just relative?

Based on some of the focus group work that you did and your conversations with stakeholders, would you say that the issues are massively underreported? Back in 2014, public health research showed that only one in four people who were dependent on alcohol or drugs was engaged in services. I believe that we are waiting for updated figures for the past decade to see whether access to and take-up of services have improved.

Do you think that alcohol issues are massively underreported? With alcohol, it is more difficult to spot problematic behaviours and to identify people who have dependency issues until they present with an extreme issue, whereas people with drug dependency issues perhaps present more quickly and sooner to health services and in a much graver or more extreme condition. Is the Government on top of that? Is it identifying the undercurrent of underreporting and the problem that exists in society but that is not being helped in any way by a public service?

I know what is in the report; it is here in black and white. However, if the ministers are sitting watching this committee meeting—I know that everyone watches the broadcast of the Public Audit Committee on a Thursday morning—what is the overarching theme that you want them to take away from your report?

That is really helpful. Perhaps those are questions for Government departments to answer in the future.

I will move the conversation on to strategic commercial assets, on which your report helpfully provides some analysis. The strategic commercial assets division is a fairly new venture, in governance terms. My understanding is that it employs around 40 staff and spends a considerable amount of money on external consultants. I use the word “considerable”, which is subjective. It spent £1.6 million last year. Is there any indication of the cost of that operation to the Government? In your opinion, does it represent good value? It is a fairly new set-up.

I guess that that is the question. We know the total value of money invested from the public purse and we know what it was thought might be recoverable, or what the value of the loan was, which is not necessarily the value of the business itself. That would be a whole other conversation. That value seems to have jumped up massively. Are you confident that there is sufficient rationale for what is almost a doubling of the recoverable value of the loans?

I look forward to that work, if it occurs.

It is interesting that you picked up on local government. That is the only line in the accounts that seems to suggest an overspend—of £5 million. Every other budget line that has been presented to us has a considerable underspend, totalling £509 million—half a billion pounds. Is that normal? I am new to the committee, but a £0.5 billion underspend, in the final outturn versus the budget, seems like an awful lot of money.

Okay. This is an observation, more than anything—I am not necessarily criticising the presence of the division—but 40 people is a lot of folk. Really, there are only two strategic commercial assets that are wholly owned by the public, and another two that have had public financial intervention. Therefore, it is not a huge portfolio to manage—if that makes sense. We often hear that those are independent self-managing organisations with their own executive management teams, directorships and reporting mechanisms. The question, then, for a future date is whether this is just overkill or the division is doing its job effectively. I understand that the division is a response to your recommendations.