Chamber and committees

Thank you. I am sure that we all hope that, too. We would certainly be grateful for more data on the expedite process.

How many of the 5,000-odd outstanding cases do you think have bespoke agreements?

Finally, when do you expect to be able to share that timetable with the committee? Would it be possible to show in your blog month-on-month or quarter-on-quarter improvements alongside some of those figures?

I alert members to my entry in the register of members’ interests.

I will start on a positive note: I have had some good feedback from professionals about some of the improvements to the service. I just wanted to pass that on. In a similar vein, I have to say that I am an avid reader of your blog, and I welcome your appearance before the committee and your willingness to share information today.

However, I hope that you will take away from this meeting the disappointment felt by the committee and by SPICe about a lack of transparency or willingness on your part to share some of your data beforehand. Indeed, the question that I would like to pursue now as a follow-up to Michelle Thomson’s questions on the back of Keith Robertson’s letter is about just that: what more data can we get?

For example, can you clarify whom the bespoke agreements are with? Are they with customers? Can you provide some sort of metric or key performance indicator for how many agreements there are and what timeframes are being agreed under them? Is it three months or a year? Are they all under a year, as you have said—and, if so, can we see that? Some of the data suggests that some cases might take 11 years. How can we see that happening?

The question, therefore, is: what further data can you share on those agreements? Also, does anybody have an appeal under them? Is it really a mutual agreement, or is it just dictated to customers?

But how many cases in the 2017 backlog have had bespoke agreements? I am not talking about the expedite process.

When do you expect to have an idea of that? You have said today that you expect all of them to be done within a year, but you have nothing to evidence that.

What more information can you provide on the detail of that backlog and when those cases will be completed?

Yes, the 2017 backlog.

Do you have an updated figure for the unspent money? I agree that you promoted the scheme—we all promoted the scheme to constituents—but, despite all the additional promotion and the extension, there was not a bigger uptake. What do you think was fundamentally wrong with the voucher scheme? People will not take something up if it is not attractive enough, so what was wrong with the scheme?

How much is the unspent money and where will it go now?

Good morning. Why has the voucher scheme not worked as well as you might have hoped? Why was the uptake so low? I wrote to you about the possibility of extending the deadlines for that. There are questions about why some applications for vouchers were turned down and what will happen to the unspent money. I appreciate that you might not have all those figures in front of you. Will there be a formal report or analysis of the scheme, so that we can properly scrutinise why it did not work as well as it could have done?