Chamber and committees

As has been suggested by other members of the committee, it might be useful if you could follow that up in writing with some more up-to-date information, so that we have that data on the record.

My final reflection follows on from the deputy convener’s previous salient question. Three of you are very new to what are very senior positions in the health board. Did the people who left go through any kind of exit interview?

Do not misunderstand me: I am not asking you to send us copies, with people’s reasons for leaving, as a matter of public record; I am just asking whether, as a matter of good practice, you are monitoring those reasons so that you can establish if there are trends or other things.

Okay, but a recurring theme has come out in the report. The third recommendation in the report talks about the need to

“identify the staff numbers and skills”

required. It sounds as if a good old-fashioned workforce plan—which we speak about a lot at the Public Audit Committee—is needed. Is that in place? If it is not yet in place, what arrangements are under way to ensure that it is? Where are we on progress with that?

I do not know whether you have—or are willing to state on the record—a view on the dilution of targets in some cases and their abandonment in others. The original target was that, by 2030, 1 million homes out of the 2.5 million in Scotland would be converted, and that we would see a complete phasing out of all new gas boilers by around those target dates. We would also have 22 per cent of heat being generated by renewables; that percentage relates not to the number of households but to the measure of heat. All those targets seem to have been dropped.

Your report certainly indicates that you are calling into question some of those targets. There is also a credibility question, about whether the scale of change is sufficient. There are 2.5 million households in Scotland, but you refer to only 26,000 households having had heat pumps installed. That represents a completion rate of around 1 per cent, which, by my rough arithmetic, leaves more than 98 per cent of households having not had those conversions.

I want to take us to a couple of broader areas. The first is governance. In exhibit 1 in the section 22 report, the Auditor General notes that concerns about governance arrangements in the health board have been flagged since May 2022, when there was a Scottish Government national planning and performance oversight group report. The terms of the independent corporate governance review were not agreed for another eight months, in January 2023, and the outcomes of that were not considered by the board until November 2023. That seems to be an inordinate delay in addressing something that is pretty fundamental to the functioning of the board. Maybe Janie McCusker will want come in on that and explain why that timeline looks as it does.

Thank you. That is a useful introduction for us. Willie Coffey will ask the first question.

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the seventh meeting in 2024 of the Public Audit Committee.

The first item on the committee’s agenda is to decide whether to take agenda items 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 in private. Do members agree to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.

My question is: why did it take so long? Concerns about governance were flagged up in May 2022. Why did it take until January the following year for a review of governance arrangements to be established? Why did it take another eight months before the conclusions were considered by the board?

Thank you very much, indeed. The committee will be particularly interested in looking at the methodological approaches and the implications of greater divergence between the income tax systems of Scotland and the rest of the UK. Perhaps I could begin by putting an important question to you.

On the one hand, you say that HMRC estimates are reasonable, but, in paragraph 1.21 of the NAO report, you identify areas of methodology in which there is a degree of what we could call woolliness. You say:

“HMRC does not fully understand the causes of the over-estimate in 2021-22 and any socioeconomic factors contributing to the over-estimate may be different in 2022-23.”

You say that there is a big reliance on sample data in the revenue estimates and that pay as you earn and self-assessment amounts that are apportioned to Scotland do

“not reflect the differing proportions of each type of taxpayer between Scotland and the rest of the UK.”

I wrote to you last year about that, and I might return to it.

You say that PAYE assessments include areas that are not subject to Scottish income tax variation, such as dividend payments, savings interest and so on, and you note that assumptions are the basis of HMRC’s estimates of PAYE liabilities. Those are all holes in the methodology that you have identified. How does that provide you with the comfort to be able to say that what we have before us is reasonable?