Chamber and committees

I will give the final word to Stephen Boyle.

Before Colin Beattie comes back in, a few people have indicated that they want to come in on this question—I think that it has stirred things up, Colin.

Thanks. One thing that occurs to me is that children are only five or 10 once and we need to get it right now. There is an urgency to the matter, is there not, John? Unless we get it right now, it will change the course of those young people’s lives.

I want to pick up that point with Hanna McCulloch and Matthew Sweeney. Paragraph 44 of the briefing is pretty clear in its critique of the patchy return by local authority area. The briefing says:

“people with experience of living in poverty were rarely involved in developing plans”,

which is the point that John Dickie has just made. The briefing continues:

“only four out of 27 reports available had an introduction signed by the chief executive. The level of sign-off of reports was seen as an indicator of the level of commitment to tackling child poverty”.

It goes on to say that

“most reports used data well in describing their local area”,

but that

“not many reports considered monitoring and evaluation carefully”.

Do you have any reflections on that? Do you accept it as fair criticism?

It is useful to have that on the record.

Hanna, the briefing mentions the Renfrewshire tackling poverty commission, of which you were a member, if I have been informed correctly.

That leads us on nicely to a question from Sharon Dowey.

Matthew Sweeney has just alluded to that, too. You said earlier that there is a limit to the extent to which some of these big questions can be tackled at local government level. First, do you want to comment on the part of the briefing that I read out? Secondly, will you give us some of your reflections from being involved in that commission?

On behalf of the committee, I thank all the witnesses for their time and rich contributions in talking about poverty. The session has brought out some very strong messages for us, not just as the Public Audit Committee but as a Scottish Parliament, about the urgency of what must be tackled and the transformative changes that are needed.

On your first point, there is a lot of talk in this debate about employability, but the families of two out of three children who were living in poverty before the cost of living crisis had at least one parent in work, so that economic fundamental also needs to be addressed.

Key message 4 of the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland briefing states:

“The views of children and families living in poverty are not always meaningfully considered as policies and actions are developed, implemented and evaluated.”

That is pretty much what Bruce Adamson has said, is it not? I do not want to put Paul Johnston on the spot, but it would be useful to get a view from the Scottish Government on that. Do you accept that improvements are required?