Chamber and committees

Willie Coffey wants to come in at this point.

Thank you. Members of the committee will ask further detailed questions about some of the areas that you have identified.

One thing that you mentioned, and that Anthony Clark mentioned in his opening statement, is alluded to in the report. There appears to be greater reliance on external agents this time. I presume that that is a euphemism for the outsourcing of some of the data matching work. First, do you have any reflection on whether that affected the quality of the data matching exercises? Secondly, was there a pattern? For example, did smaller local authorities struggle more with the effects of Covid and therefore have to rely on outsourcing some of that work, or did big local authorities and big public agencies also do that?

Thank you very much. I have a couple of questions to get us under way.

It struck me that the cases that were identified—I think that they led to four prosecutions by the police—are largely small-scale, household-level examples of fraud or individual fraud. Is part of the exercise designed to look at the wider spread of organised crime fraud or at examples of much bigger, co-ordinated attempts to defraud the system?

I will now bring in the deputy convener, who wants to follow a particular line of inquiry.

I want to inject a sense of perspective. The pilot was presumably intended to understand whether that line of inquiry was worth pursuing and whether the resources invested in it will reap a significant harvest. The report says that, of all the cases in Fife during that year,

“Thirteen matches showed cause for concern as the NECs appeared to have been used after the death of the cardholder. Two of these cards were used for journeys to the value of almost £2,300 for one”—

I do not know where you can go to from Fife for that kind of money—

“and £240 for the other. The value of the journeys for the other 11 cards varied from £3.10 to £69.00.”

First, that seems to show how honest the good people of Fife are. Secondly, does that indicate that there is a major problem that would require lots of resources to be turned over to extend the pilot into a national-level scheme?

We resume this morning’s consideration of evidence by the Public Audit Committee with agenda item 3, under which we continue our consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report, “The 2020/21 audit of the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life in Scotland”.

I welcome our witnesses. We are joined by Maggie Chapman MSP, who is a member of the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. Alongside her is David McGill, who is the clerk/chief executive of the Scottish Parliament, and Huw Williams, who is private secretary and head of office in the clerk/chief executive’s office.

We have received your written submissions in response to a letter that was sent in my name, as convener of the Public Audit Committee, and in Martin Whitfield’s name, as convener of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee. We shall no doubt turn to some of the issues arising from that in our questions.

We have set aside some time for questions from members of the committee, but we would like to offer Maggie Chapman the opportunity to make a short opening statement.

Before I turn to Sharon Dowey, I observe that although this committee is particularly interested in the historical reviews, we are also interested in the history of the outcomes that those reviews have produced.

I ask Sharon Dowey to open the questioning for us.

That sounds like the institutions are happy, but what about the complainants? You do not need to answer that question.

Thank you. One of the things that we are interested in is the gap that might exist between the theory and the practice. The issue is whether the good practice that you have outlined is actually being followed through, whether it was followed through in session 5 and, if not, how we came to that situation. Martin Whitfield and I wrote to you initially about our concerns that came out of the section 22 report by Audit Scotland, and one of the underlying issues that we outlined in our letter was how things could have got to that stage and why there was not much earlier intervention.

Something else that is referred to in the correspondence is enhanced governance arrangements. The expression that is used in the report is that they had

“deteriorated to a significant degree”.

There is a record of deep-seated problems at almost an interinstitutional level. Could you outline to us what progress you have made in the area of enhancing the governance arrangements and seeking to address the clear deficiencies that gave rise to the section 22 report into the ethical standards commissioner?

Good morning and welcome to the 23rd meeting in 2022 of the Public Audit Committee. The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take agenda items 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.