Chamber and committees

I apologise to Graeme Samson. We are not sure whether the problem is at our end or at his, but we cannot hear him.

The Auditor General’s undertaking to provide us with written evidence, which I suspect Mr Samson might be asked to write, is useful. I apologise to Mr Samson for being unable to hear him.

Thank you very much.

I thank Graeme Samson—I am sorry that we were unable to hear you—Asif Haseeb and Dharshi Santhakumaran for joining us online. We very much appreciate your time and contributions this morning. I also thank, as always, the Auditor General, who joined us in person.

I think that you also said that, because of the need to recover the census exercise, management consultants were brought in. I do not know whether it is cause or effect, but a decision was also taken around that time to widen the membership of the census programme board to include the ONS and NISRA, which oversees the census in Northern Ireland. Were they not already on the programme board?

Good morning, and welcome to the 11th meeting of the Public Audit Committee in this session. Before we begin, I remind people about the Parliament’s rules on social distancing and advise everyone that, if they are moving around, exiting or entering the room, they should wear a face covering.

The first item on our agenda is a decision on taking items 3 and 4 in private. Do members agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

The second item on our agenda is consideration of an Audit Scotland section 22 report on the National Records of Scotland. We have a number of witnesses with us this morning. First of all, I welcome the Auditor General for Scotland, Stephen Boyle, who joins us in the committee room. Also from Audit Scotland, we are joined remotely by Graeme Samson, senior auditor, Asif Haseeb, senior manager, audit services, and Dharshi Santhakumaran, correspondence manager, performance audit and best value. You are all very welcome.

The Auditor General usually invites his colleagues in at the appropriate juncture. However, if any of you want to come in but have not been spotted, please put an R in the chat room function. I also extend that invitation to Willie Coffey, who also joins us remotely. I will bring him in as we go through the meeting.

Before we move to questions, I invite the Auditor General to make an opening statement.

However, the audit report from 2018-19 refers to a census recovery plan, and that was two or three years before the expected date for carrying out the census. Is it not fair to say that there were underlying problems, even before the pandemic struck?

That is helpful. I will move on. We will return to some of the themes of staffing and support, and some of the implications of the delay.

The delay has meant that data will be delayed in reaching public sector planners—the people responsible for delivering services. The census is in no small measure designed to inform decision making about those services. Have you assessed the impact of the delay on the planning decisions that public authorities will need to make?

That would be helpful. A word that we have, quite understandably and rightly, heard an awful lot over the past few years is “unprecedented”, but in a sense the census is not unprecedented. You would therefore have thought that, as a result of previous exercises, people would have known it to be good practice to include representatives from the ONS, most obviously, but also NISRA on any kind of programme oversight board.

I want to go back to the significant line of questioning that Mr Beattie pursued about whether NRS was refused access to HMRC or DWP data and whether that was requested. Dharshi Santhakumaran said that the ONS had such access because it started earlier to put together data-sharing agreements with those bodies, and she said that NRS is starting to do that. The question arises of why NRS did not start to make such agreements at the same time as the ONS, as a matter of good practice. Will we have in place, in time for the census in March 2022, data-sharing agreements that will allow the enrichment of the data that is collected through digital and other means as a result of the exercise that will take place in March?

Yes, that point is well made.

I will conclude by quoting the final paragraph of the section 22 report that came out 10 days ago and which we are discussing this morning. It says:

“significant risks remain”

in the delivery of the 2022 census

“and it is of the utmost importance that NRS continues to monitor and manage them. NRS should also ensure that it continues to act on the outstanding TAF/Gateway review recommendations. I expect the auditor to continue to monitor NRS’s progress with delivering the census programme and its management of ongoing financial pressures.”

The committee would welcome an update on that monitoring work. Is it your intention to produce a follow-up report for Parliament so that we can return to the issue in the future?