Chamber and committees

This morning, we will hear evidence on the Audit Scotland and Accounts Commission section 23 report, “Early learning and childcare: Progress on delivery of the 1,140 hours expansion”. To that end, I welcome our four witnesses. We are joined by the Auditor General for Scotland, Stephen Boyle, who is accompanied by Tricia Meldrum, a senior manager at Audit Scotland, and Rebecca Smallwood, an audit manager at Audit Scotland. I am pleased that we are also joined by Sophie Flemig from the Accounts Commission. It is a joint report by the two organisations. You are all very welcome.

We have a number of questions to put to you on the report but, before we get to questions, I ask the Auditor General to make a short opening statement.

Thank you very much indeed.

My first question is on that last point. You make it clear in the report that it is too early or you are not yet in a position to make an assessment around the impact of the policy. What do you envisage your timescale being to be able to do that?

Yes.

I am reflecting on the report that you referred to, Auditor General, which you brought out earlier this year, where you reminded us that a climate emergency was declared in 2019. Four years down the line, we are in an emergency situation. What urgent action has been taken? Is anything being included in construction specifications around new public infrastructure that recognises the seriousness of the emergency that we are facing?

We will be keen to hear the results of that investigatory work that you are doing.

I will ask one other question before I bring Sharon Dowey in. Again, it is about something that we have spoken about in other contexts at the committee over the last couple of years, and certainly over the last year or so, and that is inflation, especially in the construction industry. In paragraph 43 of the report, you refer to a concern that councils have expressed that construction inflation is estimated to be around 30 per cent. I suppose the fairly obvious question is: what is being done in terms of the allocation of funds to address that?

For reasons of transparency, if it was possible to disentangle any of that in order to understand what the different drivers of inflationary costs were and what was happening to the overall capital settlement, that would be useful. Presumably, it would be useful for local authorities in order to help them to prosecute their arguments for, perhaps, additional funding.

That is really helpful. Other committee members have questions about financing arrangements and staffing levels, so we will come to those. I now turn now to Craig Hoy.

Thank you. We can see that there are staged approaches to the roll-out—by age, for example. It will be interesting to see where that gets to.

We have another question that we want to ask you by way of introduction. You indicate in the report that, roughly speaking, expenditure in the year that you looked at was £1 billion of public money. What is the projected funding figure for future years?

Reflecting on some of your earlier reports, there were concerns about the extent to which the expansion would be fulfilled, because of delays in the provision of new buildings and refurbishment of buildings, and concerns about whether the increased staffing that would be required to deliver the expansion would be met. Therefore, when I read this report, I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that that appears to have happened. We talk about the £1 billion of funding, but is that revenue funding? Does it include the capital investment that has been required to increase capacity in the public sector, for example? Can you break down those different components for us?

Who produced the report on the pilots? Was it produced by the local authorities or by somebody on behalf of the Scottish Government?