Chamber and committees

It would be interesting to know the extent to which the private sector is still reliant on the public sector to provide PPE.

Your briefing also states that, in the first five months of the pandemic,

“had NHS NSS been able to buy PPE at the same prices as 2019, it would have spent £37.4 million less on PPE”.

This might be a daft question, but I suppose that it has to be asked. In your opinion, could anything have been done to avoid that additional spend?

Before I ask any specific questions, I will just say this: here we are again with an NDPB in trouble. We have had a series of examples over a number of years, and they all seem to rotate around much the same issues. The big one is governance, but there have been problems with budgeting, technology and all sorts of other things. The issue comes up time and again. Is there a fundamental problem with how NDPBs are run and monitored? Is the system broken? Should we be considering something totally different?

The biggest problem that I see has been governance. Typically, what we have is a small organisation operating out there semi-autonomously that turns in on itself and becomes a little knitting circle that gets out of control. The question is how that can be dealt with, because the organisation is semi-autonomous. What should the Government do to bring it back in and ensure that, while the Crofting Commission or Bòrd na Gàidhlig, for example, retains the autonomy that it needs to carry out its job, the necessary support and overview are in place?

I ask Pat Kenny also to touch on whether the board members, even if they did not attend such training, would have been aware that training arrangements were in place and that they should be attending.

Therefore, given the relationship that the sponsor team had with the senior management team, would it be correct to say that the sponsor team attended meetings of the senior management team and/or the board?

I will pick up on something that you said there. You very carefully said that the staff working for the Crofting Commission were under Scottish Government terms and conditions. Is that the same as saying that they are employees of the Scottish Government who are seconded to the Crofting Commission?

I have one final question on the back of what we have been talking about. You have already indicated that it is not unusual for there to be seconded staff from the Scottish Government in NDPBs. Although you may not have an answer to this, based on what we are talking about, is that mostly staff being employed on Scottish Government terms and conditions, or is it actually staff being seconded from the Scottish Government, or is it both?

Do we have a cost for that?

If there is any information on that, I would be interested in it, because obviously there is a cost to the public purse. Although PPE is essential and the Government is doing everything that it can to ensure that it is available, there is nevertheless a cost, and we should monitor that.

So it is actually a back-up, rather than primary provision.