Chamber and committees

Good morning, and welcome to the 17th meeting in 2022 of the Public Audit Committee. Willie Coffey, one of the members of the committee, is not able to join us in the committee room, but I am pleased to say—and see—that he is joining us via videolink. Willie knows that he just needs to indicate in the chat function if he wants to come in.

Item 1 is consideration of a decision to take in private agenda items 3 and 4. Does the committee agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

Hugh Gillies, do you want to add anything to that?

The principal item of business on our agenda is to take evidence from representatives of the civil service in the Scottish Government about the procurement and arrangements for the delivery of vessels 801 and 802, which have been the subject of a detailed section 23 report by the Auditor General for Scotland.

I welcome our witnesses this morning. I begin by welcoming Mo Rooney, who joins us online. Mo is deputy director for strategic commercial interventions at the Scottish Government. If you wish to come in, Mo, please indicate using the chat function, and we will do our best to bring you in. You may also be delegated responsibility by other members of the panel to answer questions.

I also welcome Roy Brannen, the interim director general net zero at the Scottish Government; and Colin Cook, the director of economic development. We are also joined by Dermot Rhatigan, the deputy director for manufacturing and industries at the Scottish Government; Hugh Gillies, interim chief executive of Transport Scotland; Fran Pacitti, Transport Scotland’s director of aviation, maritime, freight and canals; and Chris Wilcock, head of the ferries unit at Transport Scotland. You are all welcome.

To begin with, I ask Roy Brannen to give us an opening statement. Members of the committee will then wish to put some questions to you.

Yes. We have only a couple of minutes left, and we want to address other large areas of the report—on nationalisation and the lead-up to it, for example. Colin Cook has been noticeably silent today. We may require a further session to complete the evidence gathering that we would like to get through.

I will conclude today’s proceedings by inviting Sharon Dowey to ask any outstanding questions that she has.

However, at that stage, there was a reprofiling, as you called it, or an acceleration, as many others would call it, of the payments to FMEL.

The First Minister stands up in Parliament and says that, in the end, she is responsible but she was not involved in the decision. Is that what you are saying?

When you say that it is a decision entirely for the minister, the finance secretary does not have a role in that.

Okay. You say that it is the responsibility of the minister, but it is the responsibility of the civil service to give the minister advice on issues around the value for money, propriety and regularity of the contract that is about to be entered into. Under some circumstances, if it is believed that the deal runs contrary to those values, it would be expected that written authority would need to be given.

In your opening remarks, you said that you accept in full all the recommendations of the Audit Scotland report. However, you do not seem to accept the recommendation that says that there was a huge gap in the supporting paperwork—which required to be logged—that lay behind the decision to award the contract to FMEL.

Maybe it was more a conclusion than a recommendation.