Chamber and committees

I thank Dharshi Santhakumaran, Ashleigh Madjitey and the Auditor General very much indeed for what has been a very useful evidence session for the committee.

I close the public part of the meeting, and we will now move into private session.

That is fine. I will bring you back in shortly.

Let us move on. You have mentioned the issues around revenue-financed projects a couple of times. Colin Beattie has some questions to put to you on that.

I presume that Addiewell is newer than Kilmarnock.

Thanks. I now invite Graham Simpson to put some more questions to you.

We are coming towards the end of the session. Willie Coffey has a couple of questions on maintenance and I have one final question.

Good morning. I welcome everyone to the 27th meeting in 2023 of the Public Audit Committee. The first agenda item is for committee members to decide whether to take items 3, 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree to do so?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you very much indeed for that opening statement. We move straight to questions. I invite the deputy convener, Sharon Dowey, to ask the first set of questions.

Before we move on, I want to pick up on the theme of transparency that you mentioned in your opening remarks. Paragraph 9 of the briefing paper, which is where the deputy convener started her questioning, states:

“Details are available for only £14.9 billion of the £26 billion of infrastructure investment originally announced.”

In the same paragraph, we find expressions such as

“it is not possible to compare ... makes it difficult to compare”

and

“It does not assess”.

That is a series of criticisms of the transparency of the available data. Have you had any initial response to that from the Scottish Government?

We will return to some of those themes over the next 45 minutes to an hour. I will now bring in Willie Coffey, who has some questions to put to you.

On the point that, of the

“45 projects, the costs of eight had increased, 13 had been delayed and a further three had been paused”,

that means, does it not, that fewer than half are on track in terms of cost and timescale?

We hear what you said about it not being possible to be too precise about cost and delivery dates. However, I presume that people build in a degree of flexibility, with an indicative date of completion for an infrastructure project. You might make allowances for snagging and so on as part of the process. We are talking about a substantial number of infrastructure projects that have problems associated with them.