Chamber and committees

I am interested in some of the comments in the Audit Scotland paper, Antony, and in one particular line, which states that, given the trajectory that our public finances will be on over the next couple of years, small savings will not be enough. If I can reword that slightly, is it Audit Scotland’s position that, at present, the Scottish Government is overcommitted and will have to cut back on or cease entire areas of service provision, that it cannot just trim and reform each service to be more efficient, and that more drastic decisions than that will be required?

Grand.

On better evaluation, whose role should that be? To go back to the convener’s original line of questioning, should reform take place within each public body or should it be led from the centre with some elements of evaluation, or is it more appropriate to have it take place externally through independent review? If we are trying to coalesce and take a consistent strategic direction in evaluation, collection of good-quality data and so on, who should lead that? Should we leave it up to each body or local authority to evaluate its service provision, or should evaluation be centralised and delivered in a consistent manner?

Thanks very much.

Students at the University of St Andrews and the University of Stirling face 8 and 9 per cent hikes in their university accommodation rent at the same time as the reserves of the University of St Andrews have increased by £4 million—from £376 million to £380 million. Is it justified for universities to raise rents in their accommodation when they are banking money?

I will follow up the issues about City of Glasgow College. Like colleagues, I have met union representatives from the college, who believe that, at the same time as the compulsory redundancies are taking place, new management positions are being created. If well-paid senior management positions came into being at the same time as lower-paid support and front-line teaching and lecturing staff were losing their jobs, would that concern you?

I think that Mark Ruskell has contacted you. Thank you for that.

On the wider point about reserves, I agree that universities should maintain sufficient reserves for operating costs and that not all reserves are in cash, but the University of Edinburgh’s reserves have gone up by £36 million to £2.5 billion, which is far in excess of six months’ operating costs. You are right that not all of that is cash, but a significant proportion of it is.

Has the Government analysed the reserves that Scottish universities hold and does it have a policy position on that? There is an issue for the public finances. It is right that we give our universities a very large amount of money each year. Some universities use that to be a going concern, but others are banking almost £40 million a year and now have reserves that are about four times what the Scottish Government can legally hold in its reserve at any given time.

The college’s principal earns a salary that is far in excess of the First Minister’s.

I will stick to that and write later to the minister about the outrageous salary of the principal of City of Glasgow College.

The Auditor General’s recent reports on the gap between policy ambition and delivery will, I think, resonate with us all. Those reports also relate to the issue of fiscal sustainability that the committee has been wrestling with, as has the Government.

The issue is relevant to this inquiry, because it relates to the issue of churn in the civil service. Part of that is about civil servants being spread increasingly thinly and being moved from one team to another because new initiatives and policies are adopted. That creates not just a lack of capacity but a lack of expertise and, potentially, in some cases, a lack of the robust advice that ministers might want.

I will round all that up into one question. Is the Scottish Government overcommitted? Are we trying to do too much with the resources that we have, which is resulting in the gap between ambition and what is being delivered?

My point is more that it appears that some of the decisions that were made in the EBR to withdraw and cut services have not had a negative impact on outcomes, which begs the question as to whether those services were the right thing to be spending money on in the first place. The RSR was the kind of exercise that should have identified that and that should have been asking those value-for-money questions. In relation to quite a lot of the services that were on the EBR list, that had not been done in the RSR, or it had been done and the decision had been taken that each service was value for money. Then, through the EBR, we decided that the services were not value for money or that they did not have enough value for money to justify continuing them. Does that not indicate that the RSR exercise did not achieve all its objectives?