Chamber and committees

As a committee, we will retain a strong interest in that to see where it goes in the next financial year.

We are short of time, so I will bring in Bill Kidd, who has a number of questions.

Thanks. We are short of time. The committee will want to return to these areas because they are worthy of further examination. Time is tight, so I will ask Willie Coffey to come in. He has questions on the use of agency nurses and so on.

The NHS is a very high priority for all of us in the Parliament and I reflect that the terms of our debate about it often contrast inputs and outcomes. Your report notes that there has been a £4.4 billion increase in NHS spending since 2018-19 and that the budget for 2023-24 is estimated to be over £19 billion. You assessed that level of expenditure as being three years earlier than anticipated. There is no question that there is substantial public investment going into the NHS, yet we do not necessarily see outcomes improving. The rather fundamental question is, do we just need funding or is it necessary to apply other factors in order to rise to the challenges that we are facing in the national health service?

Agenda item 3, which is our principal item of business this morning, is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report “The 2021/22 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”. I welcome our witnesses: the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle; Pat Kenny, director of audit and assurance at Deloitte; and Richard Robinson, senior manager at Audit Scotland. We have a number of questions to put to you about the report but, before we do that, I invite the Auditor General to make an opening statement.

Thank you. That was a useful laying out of the principal points in the report and some of the areas that we are keen to probe a bit more deeply. I begin by inviting Willie Coffey to put some opening questions to you.

Before I bring in Colin Beattie, I want to go back to the question that Sharon Dowey asked about the governance arrangements and the relationship between the SPCB and the office of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland. Pat Kenny talked about the new whistleblowing arrangements, and Richard Robinson mentioned the threshold and internal outlets for people inside the organisation to raise concerns. That is right.

However, there were other warning signs, were there not, that some things were not happening as they ought to be happening? We should not have simply relied on staff working in the organisation to point those out. In last year’s section 22 report, you documented that, in 2016-17, 43 per cent of complaints against councillors and board members “were not pursued further”, but by the time we get to 2020-21, 84 per cent of the cases that were lodged were not pursued. It was not just a matter of the people who worked day in, day out at the organisation having some concerns about the culture; presumably, there ought to have been some external monitoring of the quite big change in the way in which complaints were being processed. It comes back to the root point: this is about public trust and confidence in the whole system.

You mentioned exhibit 2 in one of your answers. Craig Hoy has questions on that.

Yes—I understand that you do not, as an auditor, want to speculate. We are very flattered by what you have just told us about our profiles.

However, the serious point is one that I made earlier: when the organisation appeared to be in some kind of crisis, one of the measures of that was the extent to which cases were not pursued. I have cited the example of complaints against councillors, 84 per cent of which were not pursued. Do you have an up-to-date figure for cases that are not being pursued?

Okay. That is helpful.

You mentioned a situation that I certainly raised last year; other members of the committee raised it as well, I think. It is our concern about what I think is referred to in the audit report as “functus officio”, which is a Latin legal term used in reference to people whose cases were discarded—maybe they were part of that 84 per cent—not having the right to resurrect their claims: those complaints are dead. Does that not raise wider questions about public confidence in the system and whether justice was served on those people? Can you comment on that?

Those people may, indeed, seek their own legal advice on that interpretation.

Another thing that rang a bit of an alarm bell with me was the fact that the management update on the recommendations in this area included the excerpt:

“We took our own legal advice and concluded that we could not re-open investigations on the basis of the legal principle ‘functus officio’. We also concluded that there would be no value in conducting a lessons learned process.”

Why was that conclusion arrived at?