Chamber and committees

I presume that those programmes do not cost £77,000.

The final question that I have before I invite Willie Coffey to put some questions to you is about the chief operating officer. She benefited from £77,000 of public expenditure to attend the Harvard business school. I do not know how long the course lasted, but is there any condition on that expenditure that means that the chief operating officer will stay with the organisation for a certain period of time, or could she leave tomorrow?

Do you mean six months’ pay?

Wow.

I would rather the figure was accurate, so I am happy for that to be the case.

I thank the witnesses for their time. I will suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

The next questions come from Colin Beattie.

Thank you very much. I now invite Willie Coffey to put some questions to you.

My final question is on leadership, especially at health board level. First, your report mentioned that four of the 14 territorial boards will be looking for new chief executives. Actually, the number might have gone up since the date of the report. My question is this: how much succession planning is there? The committee gets the impression that people move around from board to board. Is that too narrow a focus for recruitment to the senior positions? Have you a view on whether other parts of the public sector could be looked to?

The second part of my question is about non-executive board members. The committee has looked in some detail at the NHS Forth Valley experience, where there has been a governance review, fairly substantial recommendations have been made, people have moved on and so on. What are your views on recruitment, the standard of people who come forward for non-executive posts and whether the training that they receive is sufficient to equip them to do those important jobs? In the end, they are responsible for a huge part of public expenditure in Scotland—40 per cent, potentially rising to 50 per cent—under the devolved budget.

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the 10th meeting in 2024 of the Public Audit Committee. The first agenda item for the committee to consider is whether to take items 4 to 7 in private. Are we agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

The next item on our agenda is consideration of “The 2022/23 audit of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland”. We have a number of witnesses from the Scottish Government and from the Water Industry Commission with us this morning. You are very welcome.

Our witnesses from the Scottish Government are Roy Brannen, who is the director general of net zero; Kersti Berge, who is the director of energy and climate change; and Jon Rathjen, who is the deputy director for water policy and for the directorate for energy and climate change operations.

We are joined from WICS by Professor Donald MacRae, who is the chair of the board; Robin McGill, who is a member of the board and the chair of the commission’s audit and risk committee; and David Satti, who is down in our papers as the director of strategy and governance, but I know that, as of yesterday, he was appointed as the interim accountable officer, so we will be asking him questions in that capacity, too.

We have quite a number of questions that we want to put but, before we get to those, I invite Roy Brannen and then Mr MacRae to make a short opening statement each. Over to you, director general.

Yes—but even with the benefit of hindsight, you did not challenge the expenditure. In fact, you agreed with it, then, in turn, you authorised the expenditure. It was in your gift to turn it down. That option was open to you, was it not?