Chamber and committees

The costs are quite significant—equivalent to 150 full-time agency/contingent staff. Based on the figure that I mentioned earlier of £23.5 million, that comes to an average of £156,400 per agency/contingent staff. That is a pretty substantial share of your expenditure.

Of the two reasons that you give for agency staff, one is that you are bringing people in to do a specific piece of work and when that is done, they leave. The other is that you are relying on agency staff because you cannot recruit people to do the digital jobs. What proportion of your agency staff are people who are doing one-off pieces of work and what percentage is covering the fact that you are not employing permanent staff to do a job that is likely to continue in the future?

However, it is not clear how much each directorate is allocating towards the delivery of NSET, which is what Audit Scotland is concerned about.

Cabinet secretary, you mentioned the other recommendations from Audit Scotland. How many of the eight recommendations in its February report have now been implemented in full?

Yes, I am.

You have touched on a couple of the eight recommendations, but how many have been delivered in full?

To be fair to Audit Scotland, it is calling not for a single budget line but for shared NSET budgets across departments. In fact, Audit Scotland said:

“the Scottish Government needs to have financial processes that can easily identify and analyse relevant spending across government.”

It is clear that it is talking about “across government”, not a single budget line. Do you know how much each department allocates towards the delivery of NSET?

Again, it is important to stress that there is no suggestion that there should be a single budget line or any silo working. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Audit Scotland is clear in saying that

“There is a lack of transparency about directorate decisions on allocation of funding for NSET actions.”

It goes on to say that

“there is a risk that NSET objectives are not given the same priority by all directorates when it comes to funding decisions.”

It is important to stress that Audit Scotland is not talking about silo working—it is quite the opposite. All directorates are required to consider NSET, but the concern is that, because of the lack of clear budgets showing what each department allocates for NSET, it is not clear what priority each directorate gives to it. Why do you think Audit Scotland is calling for that, if it is not necessary?

Cabinet secretary, when you last appeared before the committee, I asked you about the level of investment that is needed to deliver NSET. That stemmed from concerns from Audit Scotland, which reported:

“The Scottish Government has not determined how much investment is needed to deliver the NSET. This creates a risk to financial management and public accountability.”

You have just confirmed that you do not intend to refresh NSET. The Government has had plenty of time to establish the level of investment that is needed across Government departments to deliver the strategy. Has that been done?

Audit Scotland’s main concern clearly relates to the finance recommendation. Do you think that the argument that you are making would hold water in the private sector? Imagine a project manager or an engineer with responsibility for a major strategy of his company saying to his bosses, two years after the strategy was written, “There is going to be a ruthless focus on delivery, but I can’t tell you how much investment is needed to deliver it and I don’t know how much is being spent.”

That is very helpful indeed. You mentioned sectoral agreements, and encouraging those agreements has been an important priority for the Fair Work Convention. Given that we may see that area strengthened on a statutory basis, what evidence do we have that sectoral agreements have been successful in their implementation? Presumably, that is challenging at the moment because they are also voluntary, but is there evidence that that is a direction of travel that we should be encouraging from a devolved point of view but, ultimately, also across the UK, with statutory backing?