Chamber and committees

If you could write to us, not now, but subsequent to today’s session, with the comparable figure for the current date, that would be a useful measure for us to understand whether things are back to a level that most people would recognise.

I think that my next point also came up at the SPPA Committee meeting. You have touched on this, but I can safely say on behalf of the Public Audit Committee that we would be very supportive of welfare support being in place for respondents and, in particular, people who have lodged complaints. It seems a little bit unbalanced to have an apparatus through which complaints can be processed without having a wraparound support mechanism for people. If you and the Standards Commission are making those representations, we would be supportive of that.

Thank you very much for your evidence, which has been very useful. You are right, Mr Bruce: we hope that we do not see you next year either, because that would indicate how much progress had been made. It has been a valuable session for us. Thank you very much for coming in and giving us the answers to some of our questions.

Yes. I do not recommend that, Mr Bruce.

One of the alarm bell figures that we have seen over the past couple of years is the statistic about the numbers of complaints that were or were not progressed. There is a contrast between two years. We were told that, in 2016-17, 43 per cent of complaints against councillors and members of public boards were not pursued—i.e. 57 per cent were pursued—but, by the time that we get to 2020-21, 84 per cent of such complaints were not pursued. That big contrast was one of the things that sent out a clear signal that people had lost confidence in the system and that something was going wrong. You might want to reflect on that, but could you tell us the current figures for complaints against councillors and public board members? We will take that as the test area, to find out what the figures are now.

I think that that is a provocative question that you have put, Mr Bruce. We do not want you to go through all the recommendations now. I will say what we are interested in as the Public Audit Committee. If you sat here and said, “We’ve arrived and everything’s been done”, we would probably question whether that was probable or not, but we want to get a sense of how many of your 26 recommendations—or the 22 as accounted for by the audit—have been implemented. The auditors said that they thought that it was about half and half. Half had been fully implemented, to the credit of you and the people who work in the organisation, and half were—again, quite creditably—work in progress.

We recognise that some of these things are moving targets and that there are changes—it is a dynamic organisation. You coined a memorable phrase when you said that it is akin to rebuilding a plane in flight, which is a rather good way of putting it. You do not need to go through each recommendation individually, but can you say whether about half of the recommendations are still work in progress or whether more have been implemented? Are more of the recommendations ones that can readily be implemented so that you can say, “We’ve done that now and we can move on to something else”?

Okay—that is fine. I am conscious that we are coming towards the end of our session, but I know that the deputy convener, Sharon Dowey, has a series of questions that she wants to put to you, so we will finish with her.

May I seek verification on one point? All the reports that I have seen say that there is an eight-month wait for an initial assessment of a complaint. Did you tell us that that has now been cut to 13 weeks, which is just over three months?

Yes—it would not be the first time that accountable officers have said, in front of the Public Audit Committee, that they have agreed all the recommendations in full, and then proceeded to give evidence that suggested that they did not. [Laughter.]

Roz McCall has follow-up questions on certain areas but, before I get to her, I invite Willie Coffey to come in.

I agree with that.

Thank you all very much indeed for your evidence this morning. I am sorry that we have been a bit short of time. Perhaps we should have allocated a bit more time. The discussion of your work programme is important for us, because it is a first step in a path that is ahead of you, of engaging with other committees of the Parliament so as to be informed about what would be the most useful areas of work for you to concentrate on and to pick up some of their empirical insights on the policy areas that they have dealt with over the past year and those that they are looking forward to dealing with in the future.

Again, I thank the Auditor General, Gemma Diamond and Mark Taylor for giving evidence, and I move the committee into private session.