Chamber and committees

The main business this morning is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report on “The 2021-22 audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts”, along with his briefing on “Scotland’s public finances: Challenges and risks”.

It is almost exactly a year since we held our previous session on this subject, and I am pleased that, this time, all the witnesses are in the room with the committee. I am pleased to welcome the permanent secretary, John-Paul Marks. Alongside him from the Scottish Government are Colin Cook, director of economic development, Alison Cumming, director of budget and public spending, and Jackie McAllister, chief financial officer. Welcome to you all.

We have a range of questions to put to you, but, before we get to them, I invite the permanent secretary to make a short opening statement.

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the sixth meeting of the Public Audit Committee in 2023. The first item for the committee’s consideration is to agree to take agenda items 3 and 4 in private. Are we all agreed to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

On that positive note, I draw this morning’s evidence session to a close. I thank the witnesses—the permanent secretary, Colin Cook, Jackie McAllister and Alison Cumming—for their input. We did not quite get to some areas because of time, but we might follow those up in writing, if that is okay, and I think that you have undertaken to look at some of the issues that we have raised in the session and come back to us. I thank you very much for your time and your contributions.

Can you tell us more about the timescales that you work to for your borrowing? The fiscal framework has a default position of 10 years, has it not? Do you look at shorter or longer periods than that? How do you come to settle on that?

Okay. Do you accept the Auditor General’s critique in his briefing on public finances? He said just a couple of months ago:

“The pace and scale of reform required across the public sector needs to increase.”

The watchword for us is transparency. Regardless of whether we are looking at the reserve balance, which is not disclosed in the accounts, the failure to produce significant progress on the whole-of-public-sector consolidated accounts, or the extent to which there is transparency about capital borrowing, the view of the committee and the Auditor General is that much more could be done to improve levels of transparency. I hope that you will reflect on that.

It is a higher-than-normal level of risk, is it not, given that the supply chain banker of the organisation went into administration and the Serious Fraud Office is investigating the company because of concerns about fraud and money laundering? Unusually, the auditors that they had resigned, and the finance director walked. It is not just another company; it has been under considerable scrutiny from parliamentary committees, this one included, because there are real, grave concerns about the business model that it operates on.

Thanks. In the end, this is about accountability to Parliament.

I have a couple of quick final questions. First, going back to the GFG Alliance deal, you seemed to suggest that there was no cost to the public purse and that everything was fine, but the Auditor General’s report points out that £13.5 million of Scottish Government loans were written off during 2019-2020 and 2020-21. So there has been some debt write-off there. The provision for the guarantee arrangement is valued at £114 million. I accept that that is less than it was when you sat before us last year, but it is still 300 per cent greater than it was two years ago. There are things going on, and I am sure that you will have seen the Auditor General’s comments about the volatility of the situation and how things can unravel quickly. Can you give us your views on that?

Thank you. For us, it is not just about the £52 million but about the governance arrangements, the outcomes, the whole way in which it operates and whether there is any displacement effect, for example.