Chamber and committees

Okay—thank you. I will bring in Colin Beattie next.

Good morning and welcome to the 26th meeting in 2024 of the Public Audit Committee. Our first agenda item is to consider whether to take items 3 and 4 in private. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

Our main item is a further consideration of the joint report by the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission “Tackling digital exclusion”. I am pleased to welcome our witnesses: Lesley Fraser, director general corporate, Geoff Huggins, chief digital officer, and Eilidh McLaughlin, deputy director, digital ethics, inclusion and assurance—all at the Scottish Government; and Martyn Wallace, chief digital officer in the digital office for Scottish local government, Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

There are no opening statements, so I will start the questions. I direct my first question to Lesley Fraser. Do you accept the findings and the recommendations in the Auditor General for Scotland and Accounts Commission report “Tackling digital exclusion”?

Sorry—and this will be my final question—but are you saying that, if we were to send freedom of information requests to public bodies in Scotland or write to them as the Public Audit Committee of the Scottish Parliament to ask them to send us their equality and human rights impact assessment regarding their digital strategies or the roll-out of digitalisation in areas of public service delivery, they would be able to send them back?

Is each of the 32 local authorities in Scotland carrying out that recommendation and doing that mapping work?

Martyn Wallace, do you accept the finding in the joint report from the Accounts Commission and the Auditor General that

“the Local Government Digital Office, the delivery body for the Local Government Digital Partnership, does not include tackling digital exclusion as part of its work programme”?

It was postponed because of the election.

We have time for one final question, and I am going to award it to the deputy convener.

Within the first 10 minutes of the meeting, we have already been told a few times that this is complicated, but some of these things are quite simple. Paragraph 37 of the report that we are discussing notes that

“Meetings of key governance groups have been infrequent.”

What is the explanation for that?

I will bring in the deputy convener, Jamie Greene.