Chamber and committees

Thank you very much indeed. We will come to questions shortly, but before that I invite Gregor Irwin to give us a short opening statement as well.

Thank you very much. You mentioned written authority and the recent statement to Parliament. We will start with questions around that from the deputy convener, Sharon Dowey.

Again, under the Scottish public finance manual, you are obliged to speak up if you think that something is not value for money, which you did. Do you not think that you blurred the lines a little bit in your role as an impartial civil servant in the justification that appears in your letter to Neil Gray, which we have seen, around Government policy objectives and ministerial decisions? You stray into the policy territory. Why did you feel that it was necessary to do that?

Thank you very much. We now move to another area that has been highlighted in the report and which Willie Coffey has some questions on.

Okay.

Okay; thank you.

Obviously, the committee will have to consider whether it would be useful for us to invite officials from DG net zero to give evidence to us. If we decided to do that, we could put to them directly some of the questions that have arisen from our session with you.

I thank the Auditor General very much for the evidence that he has led this morning, and I thank Rebecca Seidel and Sally Thompson for the very useful evidence that they have contributed.

For the record, I should have mentioned at the start that Colin Beattie has submitted his apologies for not being at today’s meeting. I wanted to have that recorded.

I close the public part of the meeting and move us into private session.

The principal item on this morning’s agenda is for us to consider an important report, which the Auditor General published in April. The report relates to audit work that was conducted up until March, so it is very up to date in both data and analysis, and looks into how the Scottish Government is set to deliver climate change goals.

I welcome our witnesses. Stephen Boyle is the Auditor General for Scotland. Alongside him are Rebecca Seidel and Sally Thompson, both of whom are senior managers at Audit Scotland.

As usual, we have quite a wide range of questions to put to you, but before we get into them, I ask the Auditor General to give us an opening statement.

Okay. Obviously, part of our role as a parliamentary committee with an interest in this area is to hold Government to account and it might be that we will consider taking up what you have just told us.

Another thing struck me in relation to the point about transparency. Does the GCE programme board publish minutes, for example? Does it have minutes? If so, are they in the public domain?

Sometimes we as a committee consider elements of public life that are almost unique—for example, the national health service—but every Government in the northern and southern hemispheres has to face up to the global climate emergency.

To reiterate what I said at the start, your report came out last month, and is based on audit work that was carried out up until March of this year. In the report you say:

“The Scottish Government does not routinely carry out carbon assessments or capture the impact of spending decisions on its carbon footprint in the long term.”

Is that because it does not have a template to use? Presumably, other Governments are grappling with those kinds of measures and impact assessments and so on. Is there any good reason, learning from international experience, why those things could not be brought in and become an integral part of decision making in the Scottish Government?

I guess that my horizons are a bit wider than the UK. For example, what are the Scandinavian Governments doing? What is happening in Germany or some of the African states? There is no point in every single Government in every single country carrying out its own from-the-start approach. Presumably, shared understandings of policy implications and how you can better measure the impact of the decisions that you are taking on your climate change targets should exist.