Chamber and committees

Are there any successful examples of local co-operatives getting together on a regional basis or whatever in order to bid? That would have the same effect as having a large company bidding and then subcontracting, except that the contract would be kept in Scotland for local benefit.

Anecdotally, I have heard about large companies taking on contracts but then completely subcontracting everything. They are then really just managing the subcontracts rather than any of the products involved or anything else. Have you come across that?

It is hard to tell whether everything being subcontracted to local businesses is a positive thing.

You are first on the right, you see.

I have one last question. I have been talking to a number of community groups in my constituency that have had experience of bidding for business, and they have had difficulties with navigating the website. In one case, a group gave up, because it was just too difficult. Have you had any feedback on experiences of the complexity or inefficiency of the website? I see Stacey Dingwall nodding.

Colin, have you had any experience with the website?

Michael, you touched on hospital appointments. I highlight paragraph 29, which says:

“705 hospital appointments were recorded as GEOAmey failures. Of these, 561 were cancelled by the escort due to resourcing issues. Eighty-six appointments did go ahead late”.

However, the report also says that we do not seem to know much about the impact of those cancellations on the prisoners or on the NHS.

The NHS is geared up to receive prisoners for hundreds of appointments that are suddenly cancelled, presumably at the very last minute. The impact on NHS efficiency—we can look at NHS Forth Valley, for example—is not insignificant. Are there any plans to assess the overall impact of those delayed and cancelled NHS appointments, both on the health of the prisoners and on the NHS?

I think that it probably is.

To move on from staffing levels, I note that the contract is, obviously, going to be retendered. What steps are the SPS and its partners taking to ensure that the contract will take account of all the external factors that are believed to be impacting on the current contract? In other words, how will they ensure that we do not head down the same path again? I realise that we will not—I hope—have Covid creating a disruptive factor, but, nevertheless, I would like to know how they are approaching that.

Barlinnie is clearly a priority.

Very simplistically, we are talking about there being an underspend on the capital budget. That was the case in 2018-19. I presume that the underspends are not real underspends—they are just money that has not yet been paid out for on-going contracts and so on. Is it as simple as that?

Is there a timescale for that?