Chamber and committees

Is it a logical recommendation?

Is that successful?

My concern is that it is difficult to get auditing information from the third sector to validate its outcomes. I know that the Auditor General is limited in what he can do there. The key point is that, if we do not know what the outcomes are across the board, we do not know whether money is being spent in the right places.

I take your point on that.

Let me move on to another area. What impact has the Scottish Government’s emergency budget review had on the delivery of mental health and wellbeing services in primary care?

Your report recommended that

“The Scottish Government should publish a costed delivery plan that sets out the funding and workforce that will be needed to achieve its aim of establishing sustainable and effective MHWPCS across Scotland by 2026.”

What confidence do you have that that recommendation is progressing? Is the Government actively working on it?

There are a couple of areas that I would like to cover, Auditor General. One is a long-standing favourite: data collection. You are now the third Auditor General in whose time issues with data collection have been highlighted right across the public sector. It is disappointing that we still have this problem, particularly with regard to mental health, and it is a central theme in your report.

We do not really know how much is being spent on adult mental health services, or what their quality or outcomes are, and we do not even know what the demand is. In what must be a long list of deficiencies, what areas should be prioritised to improve the data and information that is available? Resources in any part of the public sector at the moment are quite tight, so they need to be targeted where they will benefit the most.

You touched on an interesting point about the £1.4 billion or so. What proportion of that goes to the third sector?

The old difficulty with that is that the Scottish Government is funded annually, too, so there is some uncertainty about what the figures will be.

On another aspect, in paragraph 37 of the report, you highlighted the inequalities in provision that you also spoke about in your opening statement There are certainly many inequalities in mental health services. If there is a clear link between mental health inequality and inequality in society, can you give us more information about what your audit work found in that area, because it encompasses a broad number of factors?

Before you hand over, perhaps I could broaden that out a little. Paragraph 39 of the report says that the Scottish Government

“recognises the importance of addressing inequalities in mental health”,

but you also state that

“the impact of its commitments is not always clear”.

Perhaps in your response you could include how the Scottish Government will address those concerns.