Chamber and committees

Willie, do you have any further questions?

Craig Hoy has another question.

Thank you. With that undertaking, I thank Pat Kenny and Graeme Greenhill for their evidence this morning, which has been very helpful, and of course I thank the Auditor General for leading on the evidence that has been brought before us. Once again, I place on the record our thanks to him.

Thank you very much, Auditor General. I want to press ahead straight away with questions. I turn to my right, to Sharon Dowey.

Thank you. Some of us might describe it as excess profiteering from a global pandemic.

My next question is not designed to catch you out. My eye was drawn to a line that says that the auditor reported that the audit work did not find

“any issues with the quality of goods procured or the companies contracted.”

The report goes on to talk about cost overruns.

I will not always rely on the media for my sources, but I was struck by a story that the Sunday Mail ran—the weekend after the report came out, I think—which included the following figures:

“We can reveal that millions of masks and goggles were binned after a rush to secure vital PPE as Covid struck”,

including

“90,000 respirator valve masks made by US firm Medline ... Three million pairs of goggles lenses and frames from US company Tiger Medical Products ... 66,000 face masks from Dumfries-based Alpha Solway—some of which were poorly made”,

and

“700 charity donated masks it was feared were made at forced-labour camps in China.”

What was your methodology, and how did you arrive at a point where you could make the categorical statement that you make in the report?

We are coming towards the end of the evidence session. I know that Craig Hoy has a couple of questions, and I want to touch on the long-term planning of NSS and future funding, which is a subject in which we have taken an especial interest. We have looked in our rear-view mirror at how things have gone over almost the past two years, but we also want to look at some of the consequences for the future.

We note from the report that there still appears to be financial uncertainty for NSS—I do not know whether that has changed since the report was published—and that there is consideration of the pausing of some areas of development work by NSS. Will you outline which areas of its work are being paused, or will potentially be paused? What is your assessment of the risks of not progressing that work?

I end the session by inviting Craig Hoy to be very topical.

The principal business of the first of our two evidence sessions this morning is consideration of a section 22 report that was published on 13 October. I am delighted to welcome our witnesses: Stephen Boyle is the Auditor General for Scotland, and joining us remotely are Graeme Greenhill, senior manager for performance audit and best value at Audit Scotland, and Pat Kenny from Deloitte LLP, who worked on the audit and assurance in reference to this audit of the Crofting Commission. I invite the Auditor General to make an opening statement before we proceed to our questions.

I am sure that we will return to some of those themes. Willie Coffey has a laser-like focus on an area of the report that caused real alarm among the committee.

Graeme Greenhill wants to come in on this.