Chamber and committees

Audit Scotland comes in and does an audit.

However, it does not have direct responsibility for the day-to-day running and oversight of your office.

It sounds as if there is an awful lot that has not yet been clarified. It seems to me that, without that clarification, there could be circumstances in which we end up having problems again.

There still seems to be a lot of vagueness about where the support, oversight and governance really are. Are you having discussions with the SPCB to seek clarification on that? Everything that I hear suggests that the SPCB is the closest thing that you have to a governing body. Would you agree?

If there were red flags, would you expect the SPCB to be the organisation that would pick those up and do something about them?

As far as this committee is concerned, we come in at the end of a problem, if you like. I am asking about who is alert to the red flags that you talked about. Who can intervene and do something about it? At the moment, from what I hear, that is not clear. More work needs to be done on that, and I am sure that the committee will follow that through.

We are talking about governance and so on. You have working relationships with the Standards Commission for Scotland and the SPCB, and you mentioned being primarily involved with two other committees of the Scottish Parliament. Which are those two committees?

I am glad that you used the term “public sector” because, although I focused on colleges and the NHS, issues around which have come before us in big numbers, there is the wider public sector. Is there anything on your radar that would pull everything together so that we could see the whole public sector liability in that regard? That is probably ambitious.

My question, like everybody else’s, is about money. Money is the key to everything in this. In previous sessions, this committee has heard that there are substantial amounts and increasing volumes of private capital available to invest in the transition. In last week’s evidence, however, we heard that the overall cost of financing the transition was a major barrier, which seems a little bit out of step. What are the barriers to matching the supposed supply of private capital with the demand in the market?

On a slightly separate matter, what can policy makers do to support that? I ask Heather Buchanan to comment first.

Ben Howarth, can I bring you in here?

Is it correct to take as read what has been said in previous sessions—that there is a substantial sum of money available and that it is increasing all the time? You have covered some of the issues around that, but there must be a way of tapping into the willingness to invest.