Chamber and committees

I invite Nora Senior to comment.

Before I invite Lisa Pattoni to respond, I will make one comment that builds on what Fiona Hyslop said. Is it likely that the lack of home-grown skills in Scotland will impact on investment in the economy in general? Obviously, people rely on Scotland being a highly skilled nation, but it does not sound as if we are at the high end, in this area.

Are we behind other countries in Europe or the rest of the UK on that? Is the problem specific to Scotland, or is it a common issue that everybody is struggling with?

I was going to ask about common agricultural policy funding. That continues into next year, 2022, does it not? I presume that you will continue with your current auditing role up to that point, by which stage there will be, I assume, some clarity about how things are going to work.

Many members of the committee are new and are not familiar with the history or the past discussions that have taken place. Nevertheless, I am sure that it would be productive for that discussion to take place with a view to picking up from where the previous committee was at and, hopefully, agreeing to offer you support with that. The previous committee was willing to approach the Scottish Government with a view to making it compulsory for bodies to be part of the initiative, but it was not clear what the Scottish Government would have to do to bring that into effect. Would legislation be needed or just guidance? How strong would it have to be?

I will focus on three areas. The first is in connection with the exit from the European Union. In your opening statement, you made some comments on that but, on the business planning day, you said that you were still waiting for clarity on where audit responsibility would lie in relation to the changes that are going to occur. That is still an on-going process, because parts of that agreement have still come into play.

The UK internal market and some of the existing devolved areas are currently in a little bit of limbo. What discussions have you been having with the National Audit Office, or whomever, about how those responsibilities will be divided up and whether you will still have a role in things such as the UK shared prosperity fund? It is certainly unclear to me at this point how and where that fund will be administered. All of that leads on to the question about who does the auditing. How far along are those discussions? Is there any clarity at all or are you in limbo, the same as everybody else?

No doubt, your reports in the coming months will reflect some of those strains.

I will conclude by raising the matter of the national fraud initiative, which is due next year. As you know, the committee has, in the past, offered Audit Scotland support to strengthen its hand on that issue, because there was a perceived weakness in the fact that a fairly useful tool is, in fact, not mandatory. It seems extraordinary that councils and so on can decline to take part.

We also talked about other public bodies that might benefit from being part of that initiative but that are not included. You do not have the power to compel, but I think that the committee had the feeling that maybe you should have. Have you had further thoughts about that and about how you will make NFI effective next year? How will you deal with bodies that cannot be bothered to take part? Given the Covid pandemic, those bodies have been under stress and strain, and the NFI may not be a priority for them. How will you handle that?

At this point, therefore, you are unaware of what your future role will be, once all this settles down.

The committee will be very interested in finding out how the audit structure will work. There seem to be an awful lot of gaps, and you seem to be in the same situation of uncertainty that we are in at the moment.

Perhaps we can follow that up, convener.