Chamber and committees

Thank you. Agenda item 2 is to consider whether to take our next meeting, which is to be held on Thursday, 12 January 2023, in private. Are we all agreed to hold that meeting in private?

Members indicated agreement.

The principal item of business for the committee this morning is to consider the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report “The 2021/22 audit of National Records of Scotland”. I welcome our witnesses this morning. The last time you gave evidence to the committee you did so remotely, so I am very pleased to welcome to the committee room Graeme Samson, who is a senior auditor with Audit Scotland, Dharshi Santhakumaran, who is an audit manager with Audit Scotland and, of course, the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle. You are very welcome. We have some questions to ask you on the section 22 report, but first I invite the Auditor General to make an opening statement.

I will turn now to administrative data. The committee took evidence almost a year ago from Audit Scotland on the report at that time, which was in advance of the census being carried out. We then took evidence from National Records of Scotland in January of this year. We had exchanges with NRS about administrative data and how it would be used. We were told that it would not be used to fill data gaps, but we have learned since that, given the census return rates, administrative data will probably be used more heavily than was originally anticipated. What is the implication of that for the quality of census data?

Anecdotally, one of the things that I picked up around the time of the census was that, for people who did not complete the census in one go, they discovered when they went to log back on that they had to start right from the beginning. I do not know whether that feature was common to the systems that were applied in Wales, Northern Ireland and England or whether it was a deficiency in the Scottish system that, perhaps, drove down the completion rate. I do not know whether you have picked that up.

Okay. The committee will need to consider whether we want to pursue that with NRS.

I invite Willie Coffey to put questions to the witnesses.

We might need to follow up with you or NRS on elements that have arisen from the evidence that we have taken. Before I draw the public part of the meeting to a close, I thank our witnesses—Dharshi Santhakumaran, Graeme Samson and the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle—for their evidence.

Thank you very much for that helpful introduction to the report. I will begin by asking a factual question. The report talks about something called the census coverage survey. First of all, could you explain to us what that is?

Do we know, at this stage, whether the next census will be in 10 years or nine years?

I will steer away from politics, then, and ask my final question, at this stage.

You might recall that we had some quite detailed conversations with NRS about its access to administrative data. I think that it is the case that the Office for National Statistics has much more extensive access to HM Revenue and Customs data and Department for Work and Pensions data, for example. It has access to a much broader suite of data as a result of agreements that it had entered into. We were told that those are not data-sharing agreements that were entered into for the sole purpose of the census; they were entered into for other reasons. Nonetheless, it means that the ONS has wider access to much more comprehensive data than National Records of Scotland has.

My recollection is that when we quizzed National Records of Scotland, it said that it was looking to improve access to Scottish data sources in a range of work that it does, but is still at quite an early stage in that. The committee would be interested to learn—if you can help us with this—what progress has been made in respect of the data-sharing agreements that were spoken about in January this year.

To be clear, are there or are there not more risks associated with relying on less primary data and more administrative data?