Chamber and committees

Good morning and thank you for joining us.

I have a few questions that follow on from the themes that Kevin Stewart was exploring. We will all be familiar with accountability versus responsibility. All of the funding lines have three components—funding from the UK Government, from the Scottish Government and from the local authority. In that governance structure, who is ultimately accountable? Catherine Young, you are looking up. You can go first.

The whole change management function that you articulate is understood and people will use that as effectively as possible. However, when it comes to a key decision, it is exactly the same as when you set up a company structure. You always want to have a majority shareholder. You would never have a 50:50 shareholding because there is always the possibility that people will not agree. You need the minimum share to be 51 per cent to 49 per cent. Even though what you describe might make things marginally more effective, ultimately the accountability remains uncertain.

Precisely.

When I ask that question, I am not trying to lead you. It is not a political point; it is about programme efficiency. Fundamentally, the accountability has to be absolutely clear otherwise it leads inevitably to inefficiencies in spend and it affects the ultimate scrutiny of outcomes.

You, and indeed Mr Stewart, made the point about the value of communities. To what extent will local communities perceive these programmes as being done to them rather than done through them?

I want to bring in Audit Scotland here. Many years ago, I had another life doing project management and large-scale so-called transformational change programme management. Of course, the laugh was that the only time your plan was ever accurate was at the end of the programme or whatever. That comes with the job.

From Audit Scotland’s perspective, going back to the concept of scrutiny where there are diffuse accountabilities, it can become a bit of a circular firing squad. What role do you see for yourselves going forward in this complex multitude of city region deals? As we said, some started years ago, like Glasgow in 2014, while Falkirk, which is in my area, was signed last week.

The committee has chosen to do an inquiry into this but if we wait until the end of the deals, 25 years down the line, the only thing that we can be certain of is that we will have got lots of stuff wrong. Where do you see yourselves fitting in to avoid that circular firing squad? Where do you see a committee such as ours fitting in and, indeed, who else would fit in? We can be confident that a lot of this will be wrong because that is its nature.

Is it accountable or is it responsible for delivery? I ask that because, from a delivery perspective—perhaps this goes back to what Neil McInroy was saying earlier—the local authority will rely on the staging gates for sign-off, and they could be different from those for the Scottish Government and the UK Government, and it is responsible for delivery. I suppose that I am making the point that it is quite untidy to have two Governments and one local authority that is responsible for delivering. Having such a governance structure automatically builds in inefficiencies because of all the staging gates.

I am hearing from you that you agree that the arrangement is fundamentally quite untidy because we have, in effect, two accountable partners and a delivery partner in the form of the local authority. Neil McInroy, it looks as though you want to come in on that point.

Are there any final comments? Paul Mitchell, I am sorry that I have not asked you anything directly. Are there any final comments on the themes that we have explored?

I was about to say, “Always look on the bright side,” but the outlook does not seem to be terribly bright.