Chamber and committees

Other people will come on to some of those areas later, in particular the governance arrangements.

Before I hand over to the deputy convener I will return to the importance of transparency and clarity around the goals and action points. I looked at exhibit 1 in your briefing, headed “Examples of NSET actions”, and I noted the actions under the national strategy for economic transformation that you listed. The first one is:

“Create a national system of pre-scaler hubs that will stimulate the very earliest stages of high growth commercial and social entrepreneurship.”

The next one that is cited is:

“Build strategic partnerships with other key entrepreneurial ecosystems in other countries.”

The third is:

“Design and implement programmes on practical actions business and leaders can take to boost productivity at scale.”

There is an awful lot of jargon there for something that I presume is meant to be a public document that people can read in order to understand the intent of the economic strategy.

Thank you. I invite Jamie Greene to put questions to the Auditor General.

Thank you, Willie. I turn to the deputy convener, Jamie Greene, who has a final question or two.

Thank you very much indeed. That draws to a close our evidence session on Audit Scotland’s briefing paper on the national economic strategy. I thank the Auditor General for his evidence and Cornilius Chikwama for his contribution. I also thank Catherine Young and Kirsty Ridd.

I now move the meeting into private session.

Agenda item 2 is consideration of the section 22 report, “The 2022/23 audit of the Scottish Prison Service”, and I am delighted to welcome to the meeting Wendy Sinclair-Gieben, His Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons for Scotland.

We have some questions that we would like to put to you, Wendy. However, before we get to them, I invite you to make a short opening statement.

We will have more questions about the estate later.

I want to pick up on something that feels almost counterintuitive to me and which we have, I think, previously taken evidence on. If a person is on remand, they are more likely to be locked up for longer. That is still the case, is it not?

As you mentioned earlier, you spent time as the governor of Kilmarnock prison. From that perspective, do you have a view about how things could work better collaboratively between the Prison Service—or the private sector, as was then the case—and central Government departments?

Do you have a view about the model of outsourcing that function of the prison service?

But, again, we took evidence from the Auditor General that, as the report says,

“62 per cent of prisoners due in court arrived on time”.

That means that 38 per cent did not.

Finally, and before I bring in the deputy convener, who I think has another couple of questions, do you think that this is a failure of GEOAmey, which is going to be sitting where you are sitting in a few weeks’ time? Is it a failure on its part, or is it a systemic failure? Is it a model that simply cannot work, no matter whether it is run by GEOAmey, Serco or whoever?