Chamber and committees

Good morning and welcome to the 24th meeting in 2023 of the Public Audit Committee. The first item on our agenda is for members to consider whether to take items 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in private. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

The main item on our agenda is to take evidence on the Auditor General for Scotland’s report on adult mental health, which was co-written with the Accounts Commission. I am pleased to welcome our witnesses: Auditor General Stephen Boyle; Leigh Johnston, senior manager, Audit Scotland; Eva Thomas-Tudo, audit manager, Audit Scotland; and Christine Lester, Accounts Commission.

We have a large number of questions to ask but, before we get on to those, I ask the Auditor General to make a short opening statement.

Thank you for that introduction. To go back to the starting point of the audit, the question that you set yourself was:

“How effectively are adult mental health services across Scotland being delivered?”

How would you summarise your answer to that critical question?

I will come on to ask about the focus groups in a second. Before I do so, I note that paragraph 15 in the report sets out the scale of the challenge that we face. It talks about what appear to be almost epidemic proportions, in that 22 per cent of the adult population

“may have a psychiatric disorder”.

You talk about the huge expansion in pressure and demand on services. For example,

“The number of police incidents relating to mental health increased by 62 per cent ...The Scottish Association for Mental Health ... reported a 50 per cent increase in demand for its information service”

and

“The number of calls to NHS 24’s 111 Mental Health Hub increased by 436 per cent”.

Those are startling figures, which are presumably placing huge pressure on the system. We might not have measured the outcomes, but we know something about the scale of the demand that there is.

Do you want to tell us a bit more about the qualitative information that you got from the focus groups that you met and what that told you about their experience?

Okay, but is it therefore possible that that spend was deprioritised?

Thank you. That is a theme that we will return to during the course of the morning. I turn to Colin Beattie, who has some questions to put to you.

Thanks.

Christine Lester, will the Accounts Commission monitor the Verity house agreement and its outcomes?

Perhaps Leigh Johnston would like to come in.

Thank you.

Before I bring in Graham Simpson, I will take you back to the emergency budget review, in order to fully understand what you are saying. Auditor General, you said that the exercise was about identifying underspends and rationing the public finances according to that. However, when Eva Thomas-Tudo spoke about that, she said—as I interpret it—that that exercise has knocked off track the targeted support for GPs by 2026, for example. Was that going to be underspent, and that is the reason why the £38 million cut was made, or has the £38 million cut resulted in your assessment that that will not be on track?