Chamber and committees

He was not under investigation, but he was clearly under a lot of pressure to respond to a very serious allegation by Audit Scotland about corporate governance. While that process was going on, and you were, I presume, waiting on a response, he handed in his notice. He was required to give you six months’ notice so, rather than have him hanging around for six months, was he allowed to leave with immediate effect and a six-month pay-off?

This is a wide-ranging report, but I appreciate that we are short of time, so I will focus on specific areas, particularly the operational performance of the NHS, which affects the public more than some of the other issues.

The first obvious area to cover is where we are on waiting time targets. In that respect, the report makes grim reading. Albeit that the exhibit goes up only to September 2023, it seems to me that none of the eight key metrics on performance against waiting times is being met, and that some are failing by quite some margin—in particular, accident and emergency treatment times, the standard that cancer treatment should start within 62 days, and the 12-week in-patient and out-patient targets. What is your general view on whether things are getting slightly better or whether the long-term trend, certainly from 2018 to now, has been a trajectory of increased waiting times?

Some of my questions may give you the opportunity to say what you were about to say, Kersti.

Before we look at wider issues with other public bodies, I will start with the issue of WICS itself. I am new to the committee and did not attend the previous meeting, although I watched the footage. I thought that that was uncomfortable, but this is 10 times worse.

I am hearing about a wide range of issues. People who worked in the organisation got a number of what you might call perks in working practices, including free personal eye care, boozy lunches, retail vouchers, expensive training courses at Harvard, business class flights and so on. None of that would really ring any alarm bells for anyone who has worked in the private sector, where that is all quite common practice and is how businesses work. However, WICS is not in the private sector. It seems to me that there is a private sector culture of spending profits and shareholders’ money, but it is in the public sector.

Has the organisation been run like a business in the private sector instead of like a body in the public sector?

Was there any financial payment?

Why did you not make him work his six months?

Why has the public funded him to go off and do something else for six months?

I hope so.

My questions carry on nicely from the conversation that we have just had about progress on the action points. You said that you do not have a view as to whether 78 or 79 actions are enough or too many, or whether there is the right spread across the six areas, but let us have a look at where we are in terms of auditing.

I am looking at the figures for actions completed under the first four measures, which are more business orientated and are centred around specific interventions rather than things such as diversity, fairness and culture. At the risk of sounding like a football results announcer, the figures are: entrepreneurial people and culture, one; new market opportunities, nil; productive businesses and regions, one; skilled workforce, nil. The figures are pretty poor. Does your audit work lead you to be concerned that we are simply not making enough progress on some of the actions?

I hope that we are not saying that we will have to wait for eight years before we can determine whether the strategy has worked. I am not sure how many of the committee’s current members would be here to question you, or indeed whom we would be questioning. Surely we should have a rolling brief on that, which should be produced annually.

We look forward to that. There are wide expectations about whose role it is to follow the money. It is sometimes hard to follow every pound of public money that is spent by various means—for example, to see which directorate is funding what, which grants are available, where investment is made and where nationalisation has occurred. We need to follow those routes to determine whether there have been good returns on investment and whether the objectives of the NSET and other Government strategies have been met.