Chamber and committees

I think that many people would disagree with that. Anecdotally, we are hearing a number of voices being very vocal maybe not necessarily about the statistical analysis of migration, but the quantitative analysis is that every respected industry body says that it is really struggling to recruit people and that tax divergence is the primary cause of that. I hear what you are saying, but business leaders are saying entirely the opposite.

Yes. Progress in negotiations is always subjective.

What work will you be doing on community justice? Your predecessor produced an initial report on the establishment of Community Justice Scotland by the Community Justice (Scotland) Act 2016, and the Government published a national strategy for community justice in 2022. Will you respond directly to progress against that strategy?

That is helpful. One of the main issues is the importance of following the money. There are so many stakeholders involved in delivery and they have both statutory and non-statutory duties in delivering community justice. It is difficult to find out where the bigger budget goes except where it is directly attributed to a single agency such as Community Justice Scotland. Our committees have struggled with that for many years in looking at outputs.

As you are aware, we have done a lot of work on the input or use of the private sector in justice. I will not go into that today because there will be other opportunities to look at the use of companies such as Serco and GEOAmey. In the interest of time, I will park the other justice questions for now. As I said, my questions are quite meaty, unfortunately.

You will be pleased to hear that the next area is the national care service. Its establishment has been a matter of controversy both politically and among stakeholders but, moving on from that, I am keen to hear what work Audit Scotland will do in auditing the preparations and, potentially, the implementation, particularly from a financial point of view. That is particularly relevant given that the Finance and Public Administration Committee had grave reservations about the financial memorandum for the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. The matter is of cross-party interest, so I hope that it will feature in your work.

This might be a general worry but, when there is organisational change of this type, and particularly when there is consolidation, we cannot afford to wait a couple of years to see whether things have bedded in and are working. We talked about Police Scotland and the centralisation. You might need to wait five or 10 years to do that piece of work, but care has more immediacy to it because it is a matter of life and death, if you like. There may be a public opinion that we cannot afford to wait four or five years for that analysis.

The volume of casework that MSPs get regarding social care issues is probably symptomatic of those current and on-going issues, so I look forward to that work.

Another of the topics that I am covering in my four areas is social security and tackling poverty. As that is closely linked to social care, I will just move straight on to that. I was quite struck that you said in your opening comments that, in addition to the very large chunk of money that the Government has to spend on healthcare, particularly primary healthcare, devolved social security and benefits are fast creeping up to be the second-largest cost to Government. That is because a number of benefits are now devolved that were not hitherto. Will you elaborate a little bit more about any thoughts or concerns that you have, and on what work you might do off the back of that?

Thank you, convener.

I have four quite meaty areas to cover and not a lot of time to do that, which is unfortunate, but I will do my best. The first is justice, which you mentioned in your opening comments. I appreciate that there is some on-going work on prisons, prison populations and remand numbers, which we have delved into a lot, and that you are looking at court case backlogs and other live issues. I get the impression that you will be keep a watching brief on those things, but I am interested in what additional audit work you will be doing on the justice sector. There was mention of community justice and legal aid. What will those pieces of work look like?

On child poverty, is it your opinion that you will do work to assess whether that is the right type of benefit, and whether it is the level of money that is paid or whether it is how the benefit, when paid, is used that improves outcomes? It is very difficult to quantify whether you get a positive outcome from simply increasing the amount of benefit, for example.

Okay. Will you do any comparative analysis between the demographic situation in Scotland and the other four nations of the United Kingdom? For example, if we in Scotland are sitting with relatively low levels of unemployment but there is a baseline of people who rely on social security, will you look at how that compares with other parts of the UK and if the cost to Government to deliver a baseline of social security in Scotland is disproportionate?

That is all very helpful. I will park social security—we could spend all morning talking about that.

You have already mentioned public sector reform, which was built into quite a lot of the lines of questioning, but I want to pick up one last point about it. I go back to a piece of work that you did on Scotland’s workforce, which is very relevant to public sector reform. Obviously, a lot of working adults in Scotland are directly employed in the public sector, through either devolved public sector functions or a mixture of devolved and reserved public sector functions. The number of such staff is around 500,000-plus. I know that that number has been increasing in recent years. That is quite a substantial chunk of the workforce, which clearly comes at a cost to public agencies.

I was interested to see that around 80 per cent of all public sector workers work in the NHS or in local government, and that the other public bodies mop up the rest of those jobs. Does you see that percentage increasing? Does that raise any flags for you in terms of doing some audit work? What work will you be doing around public sector workforce reform?

You mentioned legal aid. That is clearly an area of dispute between the sector and the Government. The sector has warned that it is on its knees and that we are looking down the barrel at a big black hole in legal representation, which is a worrying perspective from a democratic point of view. There is a discussion about fees, for example. Are you just looking at the monetary value that the Government gives the sector or are you looking at wider issues, such as workforce issues, that may come down the line? We hear anecdotally that the workforce is ageing and there are fewer entrants. What level of detail will you go into when you look at legal aid?