Chamber and committees

Thank you very much, commissioner. I think that our working list had 22 recommendations, with a breakdown of 10 that had been implemented at the time of the Audit Scotland report’s publication, and 10 being a work in progress. I am sure that during the course of the next hour we will get into some of the detail of the recommendations and the progress that you have made. If you have reconfigured them, maybe we will get to the bottom of that, too.

I go first to Willie Coffey, who has an extremely important question that exercised us very much at our last session with the Auditor General.

I am sorry to interrupt, Mr Bruce, but what is the AAB?

That is very helpful.

I want to take us on to a matter that you have previously spoken about and informed us of. It is one that not only the current committee but our predecessor committee in the previous parliamentary session identified as being extremely important. We get section 22 reports, for example, which contain recommendations, but because, the following year, a follow-up section 22 report is not produced on that organisation or public body, we lose track of what happens to the recommendations.

Therefore, we would value the ability to have oversight and continuity of interest. I recall that you said that you also saw that as being important, and that you were in discussions with the Scottish Government about establishing some kind of framework that would allow that to become a routine outcome of the audit work that you do and the reports that you present. From memory, December 2022 was mentioned as the date by which you hoped to be finalising that process. Could you bring us up to date with where things are with that framework? Are you taking any other steps to address that issue of being able to follow through on and keep track of recommendations that you and your auditors have made, which is, by common consent, a deficiency?

As I mentioned, Roz McCall has questions on particular aspects of some of our longer-term areas of interest.

You alluded to our previous evidence session today, during which we discovered that 22 recommendations had become 26, not because four had been added on but because some of those 22 had been subdivided. Is there typically interaction with a public body in formulating recommendations, or are they imposed on it?

Okay. It is fair to say—and some would argue—that the project Neptune outcomes will address that. We started with the ferries and will finish with the ferries. There was some concern about the sponsorship role of Transport Scotland and how that all fits together, so it is not just historical—we as a Public Audit Committee have contemporary concerns about how sponsorship arrangements are working in practice.

Thank you. We obviously want to put quite a number of questions to you, but before we get to those I ask you to make a short opening statement to the committee.

You described the eight-month wait as the outlier, but did you put that on your website to inform people who might have a complaint of the length of time that they might have to wait?

We very much appreciate that. We also appreciate your response to Willie Coffey’s questions about sharing the legal advice. That has been a bit of a bugbear of ours, so we would really appreciate greater transparency on it.

Thank you very much for your evidence.

I suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.

Under agenda item 3, we will take evidence from the Auditor General and his team on their work programme for the next period of time.

I welcome Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, who is joined by Gemma Diamond, director at Audit Scotland, and Mark Taylor, audit director at Audit Scotland.

As usual, we have a series of questions that we would like to put to you, Auditor General. To begin with, also as usual, I ask you to make a short opening statement to get us under way.