Thank you. I am very grateful for the opportunity to open out my scope in this way during my final appearance before the committee.
As I finish my term of office, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic feels overwhelming. However—as you said—many of the issues that I have reported on over the past eight years are as important as ever, so I would like to step back and highlight three themes.
First of all, I say that Covid-19 has shown us many of the strengths of Scottish society. The responsiveness and resilience of our public services and the ways in which individuals and communities have supported each other show that we have a lot to be proud of.
However, there is also the risk of the pandemic obscuring some long-standing issues that will need to be addressed, as we move towards recovery and renewal. In particular, Covid-19 has highlighted deep-seated inequalities in Scottish society. Despite the commitments that have been made by all political parties since the establishment of the Parliament, Covid-19 has shown how the cards remain stacked against the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, and how those people suffer disproportionately during times of crisis.
The Scottish Government’s national performance framework is an ambitious attempt to join up policy making, and to focus on outcomes including reducing poverty, stimulating economic growth and tackling climate change. The framework was groundbreaking, but 13 years after it was launched it is still difficult to see how individual policies and budgets are designed to improve outcomes, or how trade-offs between, for example, tackling climate change and supporting the economy, are managed.
In order to make a greener, fairer and more prosperous Scotland a reality, the Government will need to be more focused in setting its policies and directing its resources, and that must be underpinned by better data. The committee has seen many examples of how lack of data—for example, on primary care and mental health services—gets in the way of shaping services to meet people’s needs.
We also need more parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’s plans, budgets and progress in tackling the long-standing challenges that we face, as a nation.
Secondly, one of the defining features of my term as AGS is the big increase in the Scottish Parliament’s financial powers. We now raise directly about 40 per cent of what we spend, with borrowing and reserve powers providing some short-term flexibility. However, the limits of the fiscal framework mean that it will be difficult for the Scottish Government to balance its spending against the available funding in this and future years. Maintaining that critical financial stability will require greater financial transparency.
I will highlight two priorities. The first is that there should be a set of consolidated public sector accounts that sets out what the Government owns and what it owes alongside what it raises and spends. That is essential to underpin good decisions and effective scrutiny.
The second thing is that transparency about the medium-term financial strategy is also critical. Before the pandemic, the strategy offered little information on the Government’s spending plans, and no consideration of how a £1 billion budget shortfall over the next three years would be addressed. The pandemic has made those pressures much more acute. We need to know what the budget is likely to look like in the years ahead, and how the Government intends to fund its priorities.
The new budget process has been slowly bedding in, but we are now at a pivotal moment. I want to stress that that is not only a technocratic issue. As we have said, Governments are protecting lives and livelihoods in ways that would have been unthinkable even six months ago. As we emerge from the pandemic, the Scottish Parliament will need to base its decisions on clear, comprehensive and reliable information about the spending choices that are available and what they are intended to achieve.
The third area that I want to focus on is renewal of the NHS and social care. Our NHS has been a rallying point during the pandemic, but the tremendous speed and scale of its response risks obscuring the fact that it is not sustainable in its current form.
Society has changed dramatically since the NHS was established; we live much longer, and we increasingly suffer from chronic diseases such as diabetes and dementia, which cannot be fixed during a hospital stay.
It does not make sense to keep pouring money into a system that was designed for a different era. Health boards increasingly struggle to break even. When I most recently reported, health accounted for 42 per cent of the Scottish budget—[Inaudible.] That cannot continue indefinitely without consequences for other public services, such as education. We have seen the unintended effects of looking at individual parts of the health and care system in isolation; now we need to look at the system as a whole, and we need to remove the barriers to change.
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Progress with integration has been limited so far. We need to look again at the incentives in the system, and we need to reward people for working together rather than for the performances of their individual silos. We also urgently need to shape a culture that gives leaders the space to lead every day, rather than just when there is a crisis, and which puts trust and kindness at the centre.
I will close by touching on the role of the committee. In the Parliament’s first decade, its committees were seen as one of the successes of devolution, but that view was challenged by the commission on parliamentary reform, which found that they have not been as effective in holding the Government to account as the constitutional steering group hoped they would be. The commission made a number of recommendations for change, some of which have been taken forward.
However, I believe that there is also scope for the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee to play a stronger role in scrutinising Government spending, and that Audit Scotland can help you. We were created alongside the Parliament to provide you with independent evidence to hold people to account for how they spend public money. As Auditor General, I am nominated by Parliament and can be dismissed only by a parliamentary vote. I am accountable for my budget to a commission that is chaired by Colin Beattie. The safeguards exist to protect our independence, and to enable us to produce reports that the committee can rely on.
That is a privileged position, and we take it seriously. We invest in the quality of our work, agree the factual content of reports and communicate our findings clearly, in a fair and balanced way. However, it sometimes feels as though the committee’s scrutiny is directed at our work rather than at the Government and other public bodies that are accountable for what we have found. That reflects the polarised political environment that we all work in, but it can limit the committee’s effectiveness.
When the committee takes evidence from accountable officers, you are sometimes hampered by not knowing how to interpret the evidence that you are given or how to probe the answers that you receive. Audit Scotland could help you to strengthen your scrutiny by acting as trusted advisors, rather than just being another set of witnesses—in line with well-established practices in Westminster, Cardiff and Belfast. The pandemic and a change in Auditor General offer you the chance to look again at your working practices, at a time when your scrutiny role has never been more important. I have no doubt that you will be in excellent hands when Stephen Boyle takes over on 1 July.
I have covered a lot of ground, but I hope that I leave you with some food for thought, as I step down after eight tremendously privileged years as the Scottish Parliament’s Auditor General. Delivering the changes that are needed will not be straightforward; it is much easier to score points than it is to engage in debate about what is important and what trade-offs are involved. All political parties recognise those challenges and all find it difficult to deal with them in office, so we need to address them together, as a Parliament and as a nation.
If I may, I will finish with a question. We all find ourselves at a watershed moment: how do we want to use it?