“Best Value in police authorities and police forces in Scotland—Overview report”
We move to consideration of “Best Value in police authorities and police forces in Scotland—Overview report”, which is a joint report by the Accounts Commission and Her Majesty’s inspector of constabulary for Scotland. Mr Baillie from the Accounts Commission is still with us. He is joined by Andrew Laing, who is HM inspector of constabulary, and Martin Walker, who is an assistant director with Audit Scotland. The briefing will be on the same basis as the previous one. We are running a little late, so I ask colleagues to stay focused, and we will get through it.
I invite Mr Baillie and Mr Laing to make introductory remarks, if they wish to do so.
You will be happy to be told that my introduction is a bit shorter than the one for the previous agenda item.
I was speaking to committee members.
I will return to my preferred format of a brief introduction.
We worked closely on the report with Her Majesty’s inspector of constabulary, Andrew Laing, who is here with me to present it. The report draws on the best-value audits and inspections of the eight police authorities in Scotland that the Accounts Commission carried out jointly with the inspectorate. I will make some brief remarks on the police authorities, and Andrew Laing will remark on the police forces.
The background on crime rates is generally positive. The crime rate in Scotland is lower than that in England and Wales for most types of crime, although violent crime is greater in Scotland than it is in England and Wales, and elsewhere in Europe. Aggregate levels of reported crime have been falling, although reported levels of domestic abuse and racially aggravated crimes have been increasing.
The context of our report is similar to that of our report on the fire services, in that a new national police force and board are to be in place from April this year. Therefore, the lessons from our work on leadership and governance in relation to police authorities are similar to those relating to fire authorities.
We found a mixed picture in how police authorities provide leadership and carry out their role to best effect. In general, there is much room for improvement. We found improvements in the way in which police authority members scrutinise their forces and hold chief constables to account, but in our view there is still not the appropriate level of challenge, particularly in relation to value for money and risk.
In aggregate, we found that members of police authorities need to understand their roles better. That point must be considered by all stakeholders in the new arrangements. The respective roles of the Scottish Police Authority, the police service of Scotland and local authorities and their partners need to be clearly understood, in accordance with principles of good governance and accountability. That will be critical, because policing faces the same challenges as other parts of the public sector, with competing priorities in a time of financial stringency.
Our engagement with the current police authorities since publication of the individual audit and inspection reports has been encouraging, in that the authorities have committed themselves to working towards a positive transition to the new national arrangements. We provide at appendix 1 in our report a checklist of the issues for current police authority members to consider prior to April. We are confident that they are being acted on.
Appendix 2 in our report also sets out 24 key issues for the stakeholders in the new arrangements. I hope that that helps in providing the agenda to ensure a successful transition to, and the establishment of, the new arrangements.
I and the other witnesses will be happy to answer questions, but Andrew Laing wants to say something first.
Andrew Laing (Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary for Scotland)
I will echo one or two of John Baillie’s comments.
The report tends to show that policing performance in Scotland is good and strong against a range of measures. The record highs that are reported publicly in the press are hugely welcomed. The service was found to be well managed within reducing and reduced budgets against real-term costs, and showed strong levels of effective leadership.
It is important to note that there is good evidence of focus on partnership working by the service and many others. It is also important to note that local community policing has been at the forefront of each force’s strategic approach to policing in its area. Equally, there was a strong commitment to diversity and equality. All the forces that we examined are meeting their statutory responsibilities; often, they are going beyond them.
That said, there is room for improvement, primarily in improving understanding of the cost—not the budget, but the actual cost—of policing. I am sure that you have heard Mr Emery talking about that. That relates to the overall function of policing and the constituent elements. Some of the questions that were asked about costs in the fire service are probably equally pertinent and relevant to policing.
The report also shows that there is scope to improve accountability through better developed and supported governance. That point is at the front of many of our minds, at the moment.
There is no question but that the report is very positive on performance against outcome measures. However, I have a question about one of the paragraphs that looks forward to the creation of the new single police force. Paragraph 22 says:
“It is critical that the respective roles of the Scottish Police Authority … the Police Service of Scotland, local authorities and their partners are clearly understood and that policing services are managed in accordance with well-established principles of good governance and accountability.”
You must, therefore, have been horrified to watch the dispute that has broken out between the chair of the new Scottish Police Authority and the chief constable of the new police service of Scotland about exactly those lines of governance, accountability and responsibility.
If you were to substitute “interested to note” for “horrified”, you would have described my initial professional response to the matter. It is almost inevitable that there will be disagreements at the formation of a new service of that kind. You are alluding to the fact that it is a public disagreement.
In the report, we make the point on a few occasions that whatever is decided about who does what and when must be clear and unambiguous so that there is no further scope for confusion and disagreement. That would include the role at local level for members, councils and commanders. Andrew Laing might want to talk about the pathfinder projects that are currently under way on that. It seems to us that the matter needs some clarification, and the pathfinders will inform that. There could be different approaches for different regions of the country—who knows? The clarification is the key.
11:00
I offer an observation on that. The best-value report tends to reflect HMIC’s report on governance and accountability, published two years ago. The best-value report says that the system of governance and accountability in the current set-up is good, although its implementation and the support that is given to councillors to undertake their role in holding chief officers to account is perhaps less well developed. It is envisaged that that model of governance, in which the authority and the force are segregated and in which the authority is responsible for governance and accountability and the force is responsible for direction and control, will move forward. The legislation, which is ample in its articulation, is capable of interpretation.
With a new service, new legislation and new leaders there were always going to be challenges around boundaries, as we are seeing at the moment. The challenge, both for HMIC and in general, is to create a system of governance that provides that level of segregation, allows the service to exercise its responsibilities under law, and holds it to far better account than hitherto. Holding the service to account will happen through a professionalised board with good levels of support that can do analytical work and ask incisive questions to hold the chief and the force to account.
It is good that things regarding the dispute appear to be moving apace. If it is not sorted out soon, the Justice Committee will ask for a discussion of the problems faced by the two gentlemen concerned.
Mr Baillie, you said that local service problems were coming up and you seemed surprised that there may be differences locally or between localities. I understood that that was bound to happen, simply because of local needs and the fact that the newly constituted boards would see those as their priorities. We were always going to get those differences, so I did not understand your surprise at that. I assume that the recording back and the reporting mechanisms will be the same as in the fire service.
I did not mean to mislead the committee. It is entirely possible and entirely justified that there will be local differences in response to local needs. The question is the extent to which that happens and is justified and the extent to which it is not justified. It seems to me, frankly, that the local performance is absolutely crucial. To be effective, it must respond to community needs, and it is the role of both the police and the councillors to identify those. If I expressed surprise, I may have overstated that aspect of it and misled you.
We went through the question earlier, but are there any glaring differences between the board set-ups for the police and fire services, or will identical problems be faced?
In principle, they are identical, but that is not the question that you are asking. You are asking about the reality of comparing one region with another.
I should perhaps make my question clearer. We heard earlier about the councillors, the reporting back mechanisms and all that sort of thing. Are we looking at the same problems?
In general, yes. There is not the broad support that some police authorities need for their members to be able to challenge and scrutinise effectively the strategy that is proposed by the chief constable. Again—and for similar reasons—there is an officer-led tendency. Andrew Laing and Martin Walker might want to comment further on the matter.
Perhaps I can provide a bit of context. One concern that emerged in the best-value reports related to the fact that a number of board members tended to be rather parochial in their questioning of larger forces such as Strathclyde and Lothian and Borders. The local arrangements that are emerging through the pathfinders free up local members in that respect, which I think is a positive step. Instead of challenging the governance of finance, corporate human resources and corporate strategy, locally elected members will now be able to focus on what is important to the local community in their discussions with the local commander and local partners.
I might be able to give the committee some confidence by pointing out that, while the local pathfinder scrutiny arrangements are very much developing at their own pace, the Scottish Government is providing broad overall guidance on those developments. This month, HMIC has commissioned a thematic inspection that we hope will report by mid-February and which will examine the emerging arrangements and try to provide some guidance, not on how this should be done, but on the best principles that should be applied. We are carrying out that inspection with Audit Scotland in order to develop what we would describe as best-value characteristics—and, more important, we are doing it jointly with the fire service inspectorate to ensure that the views on police and fire arrangements are shared by both inspectorates.
Spinning back a bit, in response to an earlier question on fire service performance, I should point out that HMIC has developed 22 strategic indicators for policing, is about to merge the fire service and police inspectorate’s back-office service and will assist the fire service in developing broad strategic indicators against which it can be measured.
In your report, you say that police support staff numbers are falling, indicate that, in the short term, those posts are being covered by police officers and suggest that strategic workforce planning will be an issue for the new police service to address. With regard to ensuring that we have the appropriate people with the appropriate skills and, as far as cost effectiveness is concerned, on the appropriate wage, will workforce planning be helped or hindered by having a minimum of 17,234 police officers?
I certainly understand your concern about what is a big question. As the report points out, there is a general question about the current model’s sustainability. Some backfilling is going on at the moment, and I am sure that Andrew Laing will want to say more about that—indeed, we were talking about it before we came into the room—and the use or perhaps misuse of police officers in staff functions. As you say, a minimum level for police officers has been established.
Andrew Laing will elaborate on the issue, because quite a lot of work has been done on it.
There has been some pretty high-profile press coverage about what we would class as reverse civilianisation—in other words, the notion that police staff are removed from the service and replaced with police officers. Indeed, only yesterday, there was a fair spread in the Tayside area.
Just to set a bit of context, I point out that there have always been individual instances of police officers going back to fill in vacant police staff posts. The reality is that it is a cost-effective means of backfilling in the short term. Very often, there are police officers who are not fully fit for front-line duties, who might be pregnant, who might have short-term injuries or who would for other reasons be out of the service and there needs to be scope to accommodate them within it. In short measure, it is a good, cost-effective way of making use of valuable resources.
Of course, police officers have generic skills and can fulfil a number of roles. However, the report draws out the very important question whether, as we look to shrink the police staff side of the business, which will inevitably happen as a result of the cost-cutting measures, this sort of thing will happen wholesale in the long term. The challenge that the report draws out for the Scottish Police Authority and the chief constable is to ensure that it does not happen routinely, but only if there is a valid business case for it. If you go back to the 1980s, it was a simple calculation—a member of police staff was around half the cost of a police officer. That business case has long since gone. Very often police staff come in at around the same cost as, if not more than, police officers who can undertake the jobs.
I will go back to Mr Laing’s interesting observation to the committee with respect to the convener’s question about paragraph 22. The area that I know best, and therefore the force that I know best, is the Northern Constabulary. At the moment, the human resources function and the finance function of that police area are the responsibility of the chief constable—is that correct?
Yes.
Therefore, would it follow that in the new set-up, the national force chief constable should control the human resources and the finance functions of the overall Scottish force?
If we were simply moving forward on a like-for-like basis, yes. However, in my professional view, that system has emerged—where finance and HR sit with the chief constable—because policing is hugely dynamic. Quick-time decisions need to be made that inevitably rely on HR, HR policy and finance being available so, under any guise, the chief constable would have to have that level of function.
Beyond that, if you look at the joint police board within Grampian, it has a finance function—a treasurer. The responsibility of the treasurer is not to carry out the day-to-day running of finance for the police; it is to provide the board with the relevant information and challenges that the board can then hold the chief to account on. That is exactly how I think the system was determined to be.
In terms of HR, it is slightly different, but we have to bear it in mind that the new Scottish Police Authority, with the back office that comes with it, has a significant resource—a significant number of people—so there is a human resource element to that and we need to factor in the responsibilities of the authority. The current debate and discussion is about to what extent those two functions provide direction and control over the resource. I will simplify that: the force needs a human resource function and a finance function and the authority also needs those functions; the question in terms of governance is whether the Scottish Police Authority wants to hold the chief constable to account for those elements or whether the Scottish Police Authority wants to have much more direction and control.
In my evidence to the Justice Committee, I made what I thought was a reasonably clear statement, which was that the legislation allows for both. I do not think that there is any difficulty in interpreting that. Section 4 in the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 gives an opportunity for the Scottish Police Authority to set up memorandums of understanding, schemes of delegation and schemes of administration that will allow and facilitate the efficient running of policing, and I think that that exists.
The challenge is around how much the board wants to retain responsibility for governance and accountability and how much it wants to exercise direction and control. If it is the latter, somebody else who is independent must exercise the governance and accountability role. There needs to be clear segregation. In reality, I think that that role will fall back to HMIC, the Auditor General and, ultimately, the Justice Committee. I am not sure that the legislation was designed to do that, but it allows for that interpretation.
That is very helpful. Let me get this absolutely straight. Your assessment of what is going on is that your office, Audit Scotland and the Parliament will have to be responsible in the future for accountability and questioning and scrutiny, because the board that is being set up will simply seek to control aspects of the chief constable’s work?
That is close to what I mean. What I am really saying is that there is a spectrum. At one end sit governance and accountability and at the other end sit direction and control. The further apart those are, in terms of audit and scrutiny, the better; that segregation is an important factor and it is a factor that we have always seen within policing and police authorities.
The more the board tends towards direction and control, the less it can legitimately hold itself to account. Somebody else would have to do that. My view is that the more the board veers towards direction and control, the more locus and the more intrusion will have to come through Audit Scotland from the Auditor General, from me, and, I suspect, from the Parliament through the Justice Committee.
11:15
I asked that question because, as the Public Audit Committee, we have a clear interest, through Audit Scotland, in where that balance would be reached on the spectrum that you have interestingly described.
You talked about local members. Would it be fair to say that, while in the new set-up local members will sit on some kind of local committee that is yet to be exactly prescribed in different parts of the 32 local authorities throughout Scotland, they will not have any say over the budget other than to say, “Yes, sir”?
There is a requirement under legislation for local members to agree on the local policing plan but, when it comes to resource and finance, the answer is that they have no direction over budget setting. There has to be recourse, and that comes naturally through default, either in negotiation with the local commander, failing which an escalation to the assistant chief and, potentially, to the deputy and the chief. However, there is always direct access back to the Scottish Police Authority, so that negotiation can continue.
In your earlier answer, you mentioned the responsibilities of the Parliament and this committee. Do you envisage more of a challenge function for this committee and, indeed, the Justice Committee in future because there will be no effective financial oversight—or at least there will be oversight but no direction—by the 32 local authorities throughout Scotland?
In simple terms, the answer is yes. There needs to be an interest by the Parliament. If good governance and accountability sits into place, we will be working to nationally set priorities. The Scottish Police Authority will set a plan and the chief constable will set a plan and those plans will be extended into the local command areas—in fact, the local authority. Chief Constable House has said that a plan will be agreed for each ward area in Scotland—
As an islander, I carefully noticed that he said, “Except in the islands.”
—except in the islands.
That linear progression should suggest that we will do the appropriate things and that we will have the appropriate national priorities within the local context. There is a real opportunity through the local committees for their elected members to influence and shape the local focus on those priorities.
The answer is complicated. Two things need to happen in terms of the involvement of the Scottish Parliament in overseeing the budget and its right and proper distribution. First, we need a really good system of governance and accountability. It comes back to the point about whether the Scottish Police Authority will be an authority of direction and control, or governance and accountability. Secondly, there needs to be feedback from local areas to say that, although they are broadly happy with what is happening, they think that their resource distribution has been distorted.
Our role in HMIC will be to provide profiles across the 32 local authority areas. The performance measures that we are developing are designed to be applied across all 32 local authorities. There is a level of benchmarking within that. That information will be fed to the Scottish Police Authority and will be available to the Parliament and to its committees.
Overall, the report is quite positive. Of course, being the Public Audit Committee, we have to look for the bits to pick at.
I am looking at paragraphs 113 to 115 on special constables. Although the number of special constables has not really fluctuated for several years, there is a lot of variation among the forces. It is also clear that there has been a huge increase in the number of hours that these people work—paragraph 115 correctly refers to the potential impact of the European working time directive. Special constables are an effective resource—from the point of view of the police authorities, they are cheaper. However, in some cases the number of hours that they work seems to have doubled. That is quite an ask for people who generally have another job. How is that being managed?
There are a couple of issues here. The arrangements for the employment—if I can use that term—of special constables have changed over the past five years. Historically, special constables were recruited on a voluntary basis and received no remuneration. It is probably fair to say that the number of special constables was previously higher, but the number of hours that they worked and the commitment that they gave was perhaps lower.
Around four or five years ago, those arrangements were changed and a fixed payment was made available to special constables over a period. At the same time, a review was undertaken of the training of special constables. Special constables need to be trained up fully, but they are hugely valuable because, although they are cheaper, they are a very effective resource that can perform all the functions of a constable. Over a period, there have been a smaller number of special constables who are more skilled and better trained, so I guess that there has had to be a return on investment, in that there needs to be some return on the significant level of training that has been invested in those individuals.
The working time directive is indeed a challenge. Forces across the country are involved in monitoring special constables’ working time, which needs to be looked at against the backdrop of their other employment.
Does that answer all your questions, or have I missed a section?
I am also interested in where all this is going. What is the pattern for the future? So far, the trend seems to be that there is a lesser number of special constables—in some forces, it is considerably less—but a huge increase in the number of hours. Where is that heading? Is there any sign of that tailing off?
No, I do not think so.
Sorry, one point that I missed is the more recent advent of people moving into the special constabulary as a first step towards becoming a police officer. That is a change from the past, when many people would come into the special constabulary for, if you like, a part-time career. Now, people who apply for the police are encouraged to become a special constable first or, alternatively, if they are unsuccessful at their first interview, they are encouraged to become a special constable. People will spend a couple of years as a special constable and draw on that training and they will then be taken into the service. That is the pattern and that strategic approach will continue to be taken, but my understanding is that there will continue to be a huge emphasis on trying to recruit to the special constabulary over the period ahead.
As of March last year, there were 1,443 special constables. What percentage of that number is accounted for by people who joined the special constabulary with a view to joining the regular police force? In other words, how many use the special constabulary as a sort of training ground as much as anything else?
To be entirely honest, I cannot put a figure on that, although I could come back to you with one. More and more, the service is encouraging people to do that. That is not simply about getting someone on a voluntary basis whom the service does not have to pay; the predominant idea is that people can come and test it. People do not really know what policing is like until they have come and tested it, so there is a real opportunity for people to come in and experience what a police officer does and then choose whether that is the right lifestyle for them.
That makes sense, but I would be interested to know what proportion fall into that category.
If Mr Laing could write to us with that information, that would be appreciated.
Yes.
My question is for Mr Baillie. In the course of working on the two reports, did you see a discernible difference between the police service and the fire service on things such as partnership working and the way in which they approached shared services? If so, did you see anything that the national services could learn from?
Both services try hard to work with their partners in that area, and there is lots of evidence for that. I see that continuing and, indeed, strengthening as the new services come into play. Perhaps Martin Walker can embellish that general point.
Martin Walker (Audit Scotland)
Part of the story here is that the consistent message is difference, if that makes sense. We did not see the same thing in all areas, as there were different approaches to partnership project working and so on and we saw different things in different places. That probably comes back to our earlier discussion about the fact that what works in one area might not necessarily be fit for purpose in others.
We tended to find that the positive aspects of partnership working included a commitment to involvement in community planning partnerships and in groups and projects—that kind of stuff—but we did not find many more formal partnership arrangements. That ties in with the earlier discussions on whether, for example, there could be just one HR function that covered all forces. There was not a huge number of formal partnerships to share backroom services, but we found that, on projects and people working together on the ground, across the piece there was a pretty good pattern of partnership in some shape or form in all the areas that we visited.
Did you find that, where that was strong, it was strong for both the police and the fire service in that area, or was it uniformly strong across the country?
I did not cover the fire stuff; I covered the police stuff, so it is difficult to comment on that. I know, from our other audit work, that when there is a culture of partnership working in an area or within organisations, that tends to permeate all the organisations. If we find that a council is involved in good partnership working, it must, by definition, be working well in partnership with somebody else. Typically, that involves the likes of the police, the fire service and so on.
When we carry out audit work in the Highlands, we find that, because of the nature of the area, the people and the localities, it is almost part of the fabric of society that people will know each other and will work in partnership. We tend to find good partnership working on the ground in the Highlands, although we would not necessarily find that reflected in more formal structures in a more formal setting.
The situation varies, but we generally found that partnership working was much more commonplace and was becoming part of the culture right across the piece.
I will supplement that in terms of the fire service. We did not detect any difference in the willingness of either service to participate in partnership-type approaches to sharing any information that they could share and working together on projects. There is just the same willingness to work within the family, if you like.
Was there any difference in the effectiveness?
The honest answer is that I do not know. Often, they were working in the same partnerships and it was difficult to measure.
Thank you. I am sorry for putting you on the spot about the fire service.
This is probably one of the best reports that I have seen as a member of the committee for a number of years. We must put on record our congratulations to the police for delivering the service that they deliver to Scotland’s public. I am glad to state that, across a whole range of indicators, there is improvement across the board.
I return to the issues of accountability, scrutiny and the role of elected members—our local councillors. There is some comment in the report about the levels of engagement among our local councillors in their scrutiny role. Although training needs have been identified—significant training programmes are going on in local authorities—surely the scrutiny role is also predicated on quality information being given to local elected members. In paragraph 49 of the report, inconsistencies are noted in the quality of the information that is provided to local elected members to enable them to conduct such scrutiny. What measures are in place, particularly with the establishment of the single service, to ensure consistency in the information and data that are provided to local boards and councillors to enable them to engage much more effectively in their scrutiny role?
I will take a longer run at that question in my response. We have made the point several times in individual reports that it is not just that the members are not provided with the information, meaning that they cannot scrutinise, but that they should know to ask for information. I am talking about daft-laddie and daft-lassie questions that, almost inevitably, are quite piercing questions that get right to the nub of things. They are not as ill-equipped as some of them may think that they are, and if they do not have an answer to a question they should be asking, “Why is that not in the regular scrutiny package? Why is that not in the regular information that I get?”
I ask Martin Walker to respond on the other aspect of your question.
In contrast to the fire service audits, which were done over a relatively short timeframe, this sequence of audits started in 2009, which is when we wrote the first report, so it covers a longer time period. It is interesting—we comment on this in the report—that we saw the quality of performance reporting and performance information improve as we went around doing the audits. We might like to think that that was partly because other forces were picking up on the findings that we were publishing in the audits and choosing to make some changes. That is partly what audits are supposed to be about.
11:30
A point that, for me, is very relevant to a lot of this discussion, and which echoes John Baillie’s previous point, is the need for members to have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities. In the report, we say that in many boards there is a fairly passive relationship between the board and the chief constable and that, although the board will scrutinise the information that is presented to it, it will not, as John Baillie made clear, ask for particular information. It is possible to track that back to members’ clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities and their understanding that it is entirely fitting and appropriate for it to be part of their role to ask for information. Boards seem to have got into a sort of “It’s aye been” way of doing things—they get these kinds of reports at this kind of frequency covering these kinds of areas—and might collectively have almost forgotten that they have the power and indeed responsibility to ask for information and to determine what information they get, which will put them in a much better position to carry out the scrutiny that is part of their responsibility.
On what that performance information might look like, the issue of the use of comparative information arose quite regularly in the audit work. We found that boards would typically get reports containing the latest performance information. The better reports would compare that information with information from last year or the previous quarter, but did not compare it with, say, the Scottish average or a similar force. At the risk of beating the same drum all the time, I think that there is an issue with board members being provided with the level of performance information that they reasonably ought to expect in order to be able to ask the daft-laddie and daft-lassie questions that John Baillie alluded to. That area can be developed and, from a national perspective, I think that there will be a better opportunity for local members or national board members to really understand their roles and responsibilities and to set their expectations with regard to the performance information that they need to fulfil their role effectively.
That was very helpful. I have to say that most councillors I know—certainly those in East Ayrshire—are not slow in coming forward. Are local authorities focusing more on the strategic nature of scrutiny to ensure that our local councillors can step in and not only ask those daft-laddie questions but really engage in the strategic issues that will be very important for the service as it moves forward?
We have been encouraging councillors to take on a corporate strategic role on all manner of fronts. Sometimes they do; other times they do not. That is where it all starts. When it comes to, say, policing activities, councillors might have been knocked back by the debate about strategic and operational matters that has been going on for ever and, as Martin Walker has said, might have too readily accepted the response that something was operational and therefore none of their business. Obviously, I am simplifying, but I think that the challenge to such a response has been less thorough than it might be.
Paragraph 70 of our report says:
“we found in only a minority of police authorities ... members had influenced the type and quality of performance information they received to allow them to determine whether forces are delivering their strategic objectives.”
There is therefore evidence that only a minority of authorities are saying, “That’s what you’ve provided me with, but I want something different.”
I thank all our witnesses, especially Mr Baillie, who has taken part in both evidence sessions.
This has been something of a transitional session, because next year the reports on the fire service and the police will be laid by the Auditor General. Given that, I propose that we do one thing and ask the Accounts Commission to do something else. First, we can send the Official Report of today’s meeting to the Auditor General to draw her attention to the points that we and the witnesses have made about things that it will be important to get right in the new set-up.
I also note that at the end of a parliamentary session a committee usually writes a legacy paper for its successor committee and I wonder whether it might be useful to ask the Accounts Commission to prepare such a document. It would not be a lengthy paper but would, from the commission’s experience of carrying out best-value reports, summarise the key things that it thinks will be important to get right or even get better when it comes to the audits of the national police force and the national fire service.
I am happy to accept the general principle behind your proposal and to discuss the detail offline. In the meantime, one immediate response that I can give the committee is that both reports have an appendix—I think that in both cases it is appendix 2—that highlights key issues for the fire service, the police service and the new SPA. Interestingly—this might sound like an advertisement, but it is not meant to be one—when I was re-reading the reports, I noted that every point was a substantive one. Both new boards have a big agenda to get under way, and it is going to take more than 10 minutes to sort it out.
That is a very fair comment. The tables in the reports certainly act as a starting point, but I thought that it might be interesting to give you the opportunity to elaborate on some of them for our benefit when we come back to the issue a year from now and see what is happening.
I am happy to contribute.
Thank you.
I suggest that we have a two-minute break.
11:37
Meeting suspended.
11:41
On resuming—