Chamber and committees

Thank you for that clarification. The question was not designed to catch you out. It is just that we want to understand better how you arrived at your conclusions.

One of the other issues that features in the report is that costings were done at pace, especially in the early days. Contract approval documents were not completed to a consistent level of detail, as you already mentioned, and concerns are raised in the report about the scrutiny of contracts before their conclusion. Will you give us a picture of the extent to which that was prevalent at the beginning of the pandemic, when there was urgency, and the extent to which it continued as a practice over the months after the initial spike in demand for PPE?

How confident are you that the new arrangements will allow issues to be spotted and addressed early, without the need for another section 22 report from Audit Scotland?

I also note that the report mentions Scottish Enterprise visiting overseas factories, which I presume was part of some kind of due diligence process. Will you expand on that to give us a bit more sense of what is contained in the due diligence guidance that is being pursued? For example, does it include matters such as labour standards and whether forced or exploitative labour is involved or what conditions are like in the factories that it visits at home as well as abroad? Will you elaborate on that part of the report?

I am keen to move things on. I will bring in Sharon Dowey, who has a couple of questions to ask.

We will certainly reflect on that. Sharon Dowey has a final point and question.

For the next item, I welcome two new witnesses from Audit Scotland, who join the Auditor General. Joining us remotely is Ashleigh Madjitey. If you want to come in at any point you can put an R in the chat function. That would be helpful. My apologies—Carole Grant joins us remotely. She is an audit director in audit services at Audit Scotland. I welcome Carole, and I welcome Ashleigh, who is here with us in the room, to talk about the fuller 2020-21 audit and the subsequent, more recent, briefing on personal protective equipment. We have a series of questions to ask our witnesses. Auditor General, do you want to begin with an opening statement to get us under way?

I want to go back to part of the discussion that you have just had with Colin Beattie. These are my calculations, so they may not be entirely reliable, but, broadly speaking, and based on the figures that are in the report, the increase in the volume of PPE from 2019-20 to 2020-21 was of the order of 212 per cent, but the cost of shipments increased by 2,100 per cent—by a factor of 10. The price inflation was exorbitant, was it not? Do you have any reflections on that?

Who would normally issue that guidance? Would it be the Scottish Government or NSS?

Thank you. I will bring in Willie Coffey.

With that, I thank the Auditor General, Ashleigh Madjitey, who is with us in the committee room, and Carole Grant, who joined us remotely, for some robust and illuminating evidence. It is greatly appreciated.