"The Gathering 2009"
Agenda item 2 is the section 23 report, “The Gathering 2009”. I remind members that the liquidation procedures are still on-going and that the points that we discussed previously about sub judice still apply, so members will have to exercise their discretion on that, as advised by the Presiding Officer.
No, there is nothing yet. I await questions with interest.
Concern has been expressed about the way in which the matter has developed. I do not know whether you have followed any of the evidence that has been given to the committee so far, but it has emerged in that evidence that there was an expectation on the part of the Scottish Government—officials and ministers—that the City of Edinburgh Council and DEMA would take on liability for the debt.
It is a two-part answer. First, about a day before the press release, I received a call from Dave Anderson, the director of economic development at the City of Edinburgh Council. He imparted to me that the council had been approached by the Scottish Government, which had identified DEMA—if I can call it that rather than use its full title—as a suitable vehicle for promoting a future event. As a result, a discussion took place about whether DEMA would be in a position to accept that appointment.
So you became aware of what was emerging only the day before the press release came out.
As far as I am aware, it happened reasonably quickly. The approach was possibly made at a late date. As I say, I received a telephone call. I cannot recollect the exact date, but I am pretty certain that it was 13 October.
And at that point there were no discussions about the council or DEMA taking responsibility for the creditors.
None at all. The only condition or caveat that was put upon it was that DEMA may need to be aware of the obligations for the running of the future event and would therefore be obligated to produce a business plan, which was clearly in everyone’s interest.
And, to the best of your recollection, Mr Anderson similarly was of a view that there would be no responsibility for the creditors.
Nothing came up in the conversation, which would indicate to me that Dave Anderson was not aware of it. Otherwise, he would have mentioned it.
When the press release was issued the following day, what was your reaction when you saw the terms?
I have had the opportunity to look at the notes that I made at the time of the press release. A copy of the press release was sent to me by e-mail at about 20 past 4 on 14 October. I was asked specifically to comment on the comment in the press release that was being attributed to me, and I sent back a response 10 minutes later saying that I was fine with that.
So, subsequently, when the City of Edinburgh Council decided not to proceed, it was a further surprise to you that the council seemed to have agreed but had then come to the conclusion that it could not take it on, which was more in line with what you originally thought was being discussed.
My view was quite clear. DEMA Ltd has a separate legal persona and we had a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company. My immediate reaction was that DEMA was not in a position to take over those liabilities. How the matter was going to be resolved between the Scottish Government and the City of Edinburgh Council was a matter for themselves. My view, as interim chair at that time, was quite clear, and the other board members were of the same view when I consulted them. We could not assume the responsibility—it would have been illegal for us to do so and we had no funds to do so.
You attempted to speak to other members of DEMA to ascertain their views.
Yes. I did a ring round and spoke to every director bar one, who was on holiday, and the chief executive of DEMA, Kenneth Wardrop, who was on holiday in Morocco. Those were the only two whom I did not consult; the rest were aware of the potential press release and were supportive of the concept of DEMA, although the financial aspects had to be resolved.
You are quite clear that at no point had there been any discussion of DEMA taking on any of the responsibility for the creditors of the company.
Not with me, if I can put it that way. I had no knowledge of that. My position was immediately stated and became a subject of perhaps some annoyance or embarrassment, as I was vehemently opposed to the idea that we could accept those responsibilities.
Who were the officials who supported you in your work at DEMA?
You will appreciate that DEMA was a public-private sector corporation—quite a laudable one, I might add—and the City of Edinburgh Council had decided to put a majority of the funding into it. The council had seconded a number of employees, the lead being Kenneth Wardrop. In my view, he is currently doing a sterling job within DEMA in promoting this for the city. He was the main official who was seconded from the council, and there was back-up from public relations, marketing and various other employees.
He was on holiday in Morocco.
He was in Morocco at the time and was, therefore, I presume, not consulted on the content of the press release.
I presume that, had he been consulted on something so significant as taking on substantial liabilities, he would have spoken to you. As well as Mr Wardrop, was there anyone on the official side who may have been involved in discussions about taking on the debt?
Not at that particular time. We are talking about the immediate time up to the issuing of the press release, and the only people who were likely to have been aware of it in advance were Mr Dave Anderson, probably Councillor Tom Buchanan, who was a director of DEMA, and Greg Ward, the head of economic development at the City of Edinburgh Council. Those are the only ones who I believe would have been involved in the process.
Was Councillor Buchanan one of the people to whom you spoke?
I did not need to, since Mr Anderson reports to Mr Buchanan. It seemed logical that the approach was made through Councillor Tom Buchanan, from the Scottish Government.
So a public statement was made about a substantial commitment, but neither the chair of DEMA nor the senior officers who support the board members were aware of it. It was clear from the press release from the Scottish Government—which was written by the Scottish Government, but issued on behalf of the City of Edinburgh Council—that there would be a responsibility on DEMA. At that point, what did you do?
I was faced with the difficulty that DEMA was a public-private corporation. It was a separate legal entity, and I was the chair, but—without being too rude about it—the funding was the council’s; it was their ball.
If Edinburgh wanted to take on the responsibility, that was a matter for the City of Edinburgh Council, but you were clear that, as chairman of DEMA, there was no way that you would be involved in DEMA taking on any responsibility.
We could not do so; there were insufficient funds. We would have been happy to make the payments or whatever, but we were in a position in which assurances of funding would be insufficient. I needed written assurances that funding would be provided.
How did events develop once you became aware of what was happening? Whom did you speak to?
The press stated that the obligations were being met by DEMA. It then caused some embarrassment when I immediately reported that DEMA could not accept that liability.
Good morning, Mr Springford. It might be helpful for the committee if you could explain the constitution and the set-up of DEMA. It is a limited company; I take it that it is, in effect, an arm’s-length wholly owned subsidiary of the council.
It goes back to the City of Edinburgh Council’s laudable intention that the public and private sectors could co-operate to the benefit of the city. I still strongly believe that to be the case.
Who were the members of the company?
The members of the company were those who had been involved in an initial steering group to discuss DEMA, such as the Edinburgh business assembly and the University of Edinburgh. There were about 10 financial contributors.
You mentioned Mr Wardrop, who was the chief executive. Were there other employees?
No, there were no employees. DEMA did not employ anyone. Vacancies were filled by City of Edinburgh Council employees who were seconded to assist the process, because that is what they had been doing prior to the creation of DEMA.
May we have the names of the four other directors and the two who were subsequently appointed by 20 October?
From the private sector, there was Alan Johnston, Derek McCulloch, the solicitor in the city, Graham Birse, who is probably known for being with the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, and myself. Part of DEMA’s articles was that the council could nominate an official, and Councillor Tom Buchanan was chosen. Kenneth Wardrop was acting chief executive of the company in any event; he was a director. Those were the six.
Thank you.
That was helpful. Even though DEMA is wholly owned by the council, because the council provides the funding, it is operationally a separate entity and it takes its own decisions.
No. It was discussed after the press release. A board meeting was scheduled for 21 October; by that time there was some furore around the issue, so the item was on the agenda and was discussed at that point. It had not been discussed prior to the press release because, at that point, no one—including me—was aware we were under such an obligation.
Leaving aside the issue of the previous debt, when it was originally proposed that DEMA should proceed with the gathering, that was obviously put to you as the chair, and you consulted other directors by telephone. You got the understanding from them that they were in agreement. Although there was no time to call a formal board meeting, you felt that the gathering was something that DEMA wanted to go on with.
Oh yes; there is no doubt about that. If I were to be asked again, I would still say that the promotion of the gathering within the city would be to the city’s economic benefit. If we had been asked whether DEMA could have run an event, the answer would have been that DEMA is a marketing organisation rather than an events promotion organisation, but we still felt that, given proper funding, the gathering would benefit the city and that DEMA could and should be involved in it.
I return to the press release that was issued. Was there an understanding between DEMA and the council about statements being issued by the council on behalf of DEMA? Did that happen on a previous occasion?
I do not recollect that a press release would be specifically headed, “Issued by the City of Edinburgh Council on behalf of DEMA.” Numerous press articles were written for DEMA but would go out in DEMA’s name, having been done by DEMA’s in-house team, which had marketing and promotion expertise. It was quite customary that whatever event DEMA was trying to promote, it would be dealt with by that in-house team and it would issue a press release.
Is it fair to say that it would have been improper for the City of Edinburgh Council to issue a press release on DEMA’s behalf without checking whether you were fully happy with its content?
I certainly feel that the council should have consulted DEMA’s chief executive but, as he was off at the time, perhaps that is where the system fell down. I have no idea who originated the press release. I was not asked to comment on it; I was asked merely whether I was happy with the quote that was being attributed to me, and the answer was yes. That was all that I was asked to do. As I said, although DEMA is a legal entity on its own, it has strong ties to the council, so my natural conclusion was that it was not my place to question the press release.
It is clear that you were left in an embarrassing position when you saw the press release as issued.
As I said, I had no doubt—and the directors’ view was similar—that it would be illegal for us to accept what the press release said. We could not meet £300,000 of liability. As I said, accepting that would be a breach of fiduciary duty. I was placed in a difficult and untenable position, which—unfortunately—it is clear caused the council embarrassment.
You say that you were asked about the quote that was attributed to you and that you were happy with that. Scottish Government officials—some were fairly senior—worked on the press release over several days. They wrote the whole press release and gave it to the council, and an exchange took place between the Scottish Government and the council. Did officials not share with you the full content before the press release was issued?
No. As I said, all that emerged was that, in a phone call on probably 13 October, the first indication was given that DEMA was being invited to the party. I did not see a copy of the press release until 4.20 on 14 October.
So you were unaware until late in the day not only of the emerging discussions about DEMA taking on responsibility—although you were happy for the principle to be considered—but of the press release’s full content, including the significant statement that Scottish Government officials prepared, which said that DEMA would take on the “remaining private sector obligations”.
I will be a bit more specific. At 4.20 on 14 October, I received a copy of the press release that contained a line that said that DEMA would take over the private sector obligations. That was the first indication to me that that scenario was likely. I guess that, at that point, the chief executive would have said, “No—we cannot do this.” As a private sector individual in the midst of a public sector-funded organisation, my view was that something had been done before DEMA’s involvement that allowed that statement to be made.
I accept 100 per cent what you say and the dilemma that you faced, but I will describe the difficulty for us. A press release was produced at a senior level in the Scottish Government and given to the City of Edinburgh Council. They agreed the press release, which was issued. A line, which the press officials wrote, was put in about DEMA taking on the “remaining private sector obligations”. Press officials would not put in that line unless someone agreed and authorised it, so someone, somewhere along the line—in the Scottish Government, the council or both—agreed to something and to putting in that line. However, you were completely unaware of that. That is significant and worrying for an organisation such as DEMA, which could have been left with liabilities that could have had significant repercussions for the reputations of you as a businessman and of the other businesspeople who were involved.
I want to go back to what Murdo Fraser said. DEMA had only recently been set up when the press release was about to be issued, so it did not have the capital to be able to take on those responsibilities, did it?
That is correct. It was a fledgling organisation that had funding of around £1.5 million. Most of that was provided by a direct grant or in-kind services such as staffing and various other expenses. The budget that we prepared initially had a £300,000 deficit. It was revised at later board meetings so that there was almost a break-even situation, but that did not include £300,000-worth of liability.
As the convener said, the press release was issued on 15 October. We know from the letter that we received from the new permanent secretary that two meetings took place on 14 October to discuss it. Were you at either of those meetings?
No.
Was anyone from DEMA at either meeting?
Not that I am aware of.
That is not recorded. From the letter, it seems that Scottish Executive officials and people from the City of Edinburgh Council were at the meetings, and I notice that a special adviser was at both. However, no one from DEMA was at them.
I was not aware until now that there was a meeting.
There were two meetings. Do you find it astonishing that two meetings took place on 14 October to discuss a press release that was going out in your name, but nobody from DEMA was at them?
As I said, we were doing our best as a private sector organisation, but we accepted that the ball was with the City of Edinburgh Council. I would not say that it was riding roughshod—far from it. It was entirely open in allowing DEMA to carry out its wishes, but the funding was its funding. I was not aware of meetings outwith us, and would not expect to be party to political meetings of that nature.
We have a copy of the press release. At the top of it are the words:
I admit that I find that strange—or unusual, not strange. That was not a normal press release.
Were you annoyed about it?
No, I was not. My view was that there must have been some other discussions to which I was not party that allowed The Gathering 2009 Ltd to be taken over by the City of Edinburgh Council and DEMA.
Were you not annoyed that you were not party to discussions that involved the organisation of which you were chair and that were about a press release that said that you were taking on responsibilities that you said that it would be illegal for you to accept?
I am certainly not annoyed.
You are very easy going.
No. My view is that something could have been agreed between the Scottish Government and the City of Edinburgh Council that allowed DEMA to proceed. As I said, we did not know about the debt and so on; we were merely invited to run a future event that seemed to be for the good of the city and we were honoured to be able to do that.
But the press release said that DEMA would take on the responsibilities and liability of The Gathering 2009 Ltd.
It did, but I was quick to announce publicly the following day that DEMA could not do that.
You have said that and made that clear. That contradicted the press release that was put out in your name.
It did indeed. That was the difficulty that I was faced with. I could not agree with the press release. My view was that it had been agreed outwith us and that until DEMA had written assurances that funding would be available to meet the obligations, the only stance that my fellow directors and I could take was that we could not accept the liability.
Mr Wardrop, your chief executive, was abroad at the time, so he could not have authorised the press release.
That is correct.
You did not authorise it on behalf of DEMA.
No, I did not.
Did you find out who authorised it?
No. In fact, I have not received a formal copy of the press release.
Really?
I received an e-mail of what was proposed, but I have still never seen what actually went out.
Is it possible that Councillor Buchanan might have agreed it on behalf of DEMA?
I cannot answer that. It is possible, but I cannot comment on that, since I was not party to it.
He had two roles: as a DEMA board member and as chairman of the appropriate committee.
That is right.
At any point, did you discuss the issue with Councillor Cardownie, the deputy leader of the council?
No.
Not at all?
Not at all.
Okay, thank you.
Mr Springford, you said that nobody from DEMA authorised the press release. The press release went out on 15 October in the name of DEMA, and you were sent a copy of it the day before. In effect, was that not you authorising it?
No. As I said, the e-mail that I received from a council official said, “Here is the press release that is going out. We ask you to comment on the statement in it that has been attributed to you.” That is all that I was asked to do. I was not asked to approve the press release; I was merely asked whether the comment that was attributed to me was acceptable.
Did you read the press release or only your comment?
I read the press release. When I responded, I said that there was a technical error in that there was no company called Gathering Ltd—it was The Gathering 2009 Ltd. I corrected that point, but I was not asked to comment on the press release.
When I get my staff to send out a press release from me, they send it to me before it goes out so that I can check it for accuracy. As you just said, you corrected one technical point in it. There has been reference to this statement being slipped in, but the font size is exactly the same as the rest of the press release when it says that
It would have been if it had been my company. As I said, I was acting as a private sector chair of an organisation that was almost 100 per cent funded by the local authority. My view was that an arrangement had been made that the obligations would be met.
If you felt that it was your place to state publicly the next day that DEMA could not do it, why was it not your place to say privately the day before that DEMA could not do it? Why were you in a position to make a public statement once the press release had been published, but not the day before?
The day before I was still under the impression that a deal had been arranged or an agreement had been made and that, although the press release said that DEMA was responsible for the obligations, I would be, I suppose, assured that the funding was in place. As soon as it became clear that the funding would not be in place, I had no option but to say that we could not accept the liabilities. We could have accepted them if somebody had given us funding.
In a letter to the committee on 22 October, the permanent secretary states:
I quite agree.
And you did not question that; you allowed the press release to go out and then you questioned it.
As I said, my remit with regard to that e-mail was to comment on the item that had been attributed to me. If it had said, “Please review the press release”, I would have commented, but I felt that it was not my place to do so. The arrangement between the Scottish Government and the City of Edinburgh Council appears to have been to take the gathering forward to a future event. That was my understanding; that was what was put to me on 13 October. DEMA was perfectly happy to take on a future event. I was not aware of what arrangements were being made about the existing debt. I assumed—perhaps that was my error—that the City of Edinburgh Council and the Scottish Government had resolved the matter between them.
So, when you read the press release that said that DEMA would take on those obligations, as the chairman of DEMA you thought to yourself, “No, we’re not doing that, but I guess that somebody has sorted it out” and it did not occur to you to question it.
No, it did not, unfortunately.
Okay. I have one more question; it is connected not with the press release but with your opinion of the loan that was given to enable the gathering 2009 to go ahead. We all accept that more than £8 million was generated for Edinburgh. Given your experience, what would the consequences have been of not having that loan for the gathering?
I cannot comment on the decision made by the Scottish Government to give that loan. If you want a personal opinion, there are umpteen instances of public sector grants that are unlikely to result in a return of those funds. If we take the example of Edinburgh’s hogmanay, no one in their right mind expects the return of the grants that are made to promote the city at hogmanay, but the economic benefits to the city are enormous. Personally, I see nothing wrong in any form of Government giving a handout of that nature if it can be shown that there are substantial economic benefits to be derived from it. I see nothing wrong in the £180,000 being written off in that way.
That is a good point about the hogmanay celebrations.
I return to the press release and the e-mail that you received at 4.20 pm on 15 October. You explained that you read the full press release and you commented on an item that was outside your quote, which I am reading now and which does not refer to The Gathering 2009 Ltd. Your comment was on an issue in the wider press release. You also told us that you read the sentence that says clearly:
No, I did not miss it.
Did you fail to appreciate its significance?
No, I appreciated its significance. The error was that I assumed that the Scottish Government and the City of Edinburgh Council had resolved that funding would be available to DEMA to meet those obligations.
So you saw that sentence in the press release and you decided to let it run and not draw attention to it. In summary, you trusted the council and the Scottish Government on the issue.
Yes, but it was not a commission of trust; it was an acceptance and presumption that the press release would not have been issued unless the matter had been resolved.
But the issue had not been resolved.
No, it had not. Hindsight is wonderful, but at the time my assumption was that it had been resolved.
I am interested in the fact that you do not want to use the word trust, although I can see no other word for it. You relied on the Government and the council to come through with the £300,000. How would you describe that other than as an issue of trust?
The issue of trust was that the press release would be issued with that point having been resolved.
Exactly.
It is such a significant point.
But it had not been.
It had not been.
Is that not an issue of trust?
Yes. It is an issue of trust that, surely, the Government and the council would not have issued a press release of that nature unless the matter had been resolved.
Exactly.
My assumption was that it had been resolved.
Exactly.
With hindsight, it is clear that it had not.
And just how quickly did it unravel?
Within hours, almost. Immediately that the press were on to the statement that we would meet the obligations, we had to say that, unless we could get written assurances that funding would be available to meet those obligations, DEMA would not be in a position to do so.
At that point, you must have contacted the council or the Government—the council, I presume—to find out whether an agreement had been reached and what lay behind that sentence in the press release.
No, I did not. I was responding to the question whether DEMA would meet the obligations.
And the press release said that you would.
Yes, but I was asked by the press whether DEMA would meet the obligations and my answer was that DEMA could meet the obligations only if it had the funds to do so, and it did not have those funds.
At what point did you contact the council? You did not contact the council before issuing a clarification to the press. You must have contacted the council or the Government at some point that day to find out what lay behind the wording of that sentence in that press release.
I had no channels to the Government. I was not aware of any discussion—
You were not aware that the Government had drafted the press release.
No. Until it came out in press articles recently, I was still not aware that the Government had done that. The press release said that it was issued by the City of Edinburgh Council, and I assumed that the City of Edinburgh Council had produced it.
You must have contacted Mr Anderson, who phoned you on 13 October to put the proposal to you.
No. My recollection is that Greg Ward would probably have been involved. I do not recollect speaking to Dave Anderson on the matter at any time after the press release was issued.
So, when did you speak to Mr Ward and what was the nature of that conversation?
It is difficult to recollect the timings.
I presume that it was on that day. Was it on 15 October?
I can only say probably—I have no notes of any phone call at that time. Numerous discussions took place over the few days following the issuing of the press release. If you are asking me to be precise, I cannot say with certainty—
As precise as you can be.
A number of telephone calls were made within two or three days of the press release being issued.
When you made those calls, what did you discover?
I discovered that verbal assurances had been given that the funding would be made available either for clearing the obligations or for the subsequent event.
Verbal assurances of what nature?
That the funding would be available.
Verbal assurances by the council that it would make the funding available to DEMA, or was the Scottish Government to be involved?
I believe that the Scottish Government was to be involved.
Can you tell us more about that, please?
I believe that discussions took place between Greg Ward and Sir John Elvidge to the effect that the Government would ensure that funding was available to meet the obligations of a future event. No assurances were given that funding would be available to meet the current creditors’ obligations.
You discovered that nobody in the council and nobody in the Scottish Government had authorised or approved any allocation of funding to DEMA that would justify the sentence in the press release on 15 October that said that DEMA would take on the remaining private sector obligations.
That is correct.
You had been completely stitched up, Mr Springford, had you not?
The press release is clearly at odds with the circumstances that we faced. The question was whether we had funds available to meet the obligations. The answer was that we did not. Neither did we have any written assurances that funds would be available.
Did you feel stitched up?
I felt disappointed, and more embarrassed for the city than personally embarrassed.
But you have already told us that your position was difficult and untenable—you resigned from the post.
I did not necessarily resign because of the position that I was placed in.
I cannot think of a better reason to resign from an organisation than being placed in that position. Can you?
Yes.
You were placed in an untenable position because of—
I was placed in an untenable position, but I resigned on 6 November, which was post the events. My resignation was part of the events, but it happened post the events.
Are you trying to tell us that the events that happened on 15 October were not a fundamental reason for your resignation on 6 November?
They were a substantial part of the reason for my resignation, but it was not the—I am trying to be as careful and precise as I can—
I can see that.
It was not the funding issue, or the lack of funding, or the position that you effectively described when you asked whether I was stitched up. Was I sufficiently annoyed by that to resign? No, that was not the reason for my resignation.
What was the reason?
The reason for my resignation was that Councillor Tom Buchanan was on the point of issuing a letter on local government paper replacing me as chair. He did not have the authority to do that, because DEMA is a private limited company.
When that happened, was there an exchange of correspondence, or did you feel that it was a step too far and that you would immediately resign?
My view was that I did not wish to cause the city any embarrassment. I was in the privileged position of being party to a fair bit of involvement in the city’s affairs and I was privileged to be in the chair.
Was it explained to you why Mr Buchanan was taking those steps and was trying to get rid of you as chair?
No. I received a copy by e-mail of the proposed letter. The e-mail came from Kenneth Wardrop, who said that we had not discussed this at the board meeting, and made a certain number of proposed changes to the letter, but by that time the damage had been done. It was crystal clear to me that I was no longer welcome.
Do you believe that it might well have been because you were failing to go along with the City of Edinburgh Council and Scottish Government deal that the private sector obligations of The Gathering 2009 Ltd would be taken on by DEMA?
I have absolutely no doubt that that had caused embarrassment. Councillor Tom Buchanan is, in my view, a very honourable man. He would not have taken those actions without interference from or the involvement of someone else. I am certain in my own mind that I had embarrassed somebody—whether the Government or the local authority—and I was being replaced, and that was fine.
But you do not know who that person or those persons are. You can only speculate.
I can, indeed, only speculate.
I will stick with this issue for a minute, Mr Springford. The situation is truly astonishing. An eminent businessperson in the city of Edinburgh took a hard and unpopular decision—some would say that it was a principled decision—that DEMA could not take on liabilities, because it had no money. That decision did not go down well, perhaps with people in Government or perhaps with people in the City of Edinburgh Council, and a matter of weeks afterwards someone who was regarded as making a significant contribution to DEMA found out that a letter was being prepared on the council’s headed paper to say that he was being removed.
I can merely comment that I think that you are spot on. I received a copy of the letter at about half past 12 and within 50 minutes, I had resigned. Yes, I was annoyed, but although I was annoyed, I did not wish any embarrassment to be caused. If someone had asked me whether I minded stepping aside because I was causing embarrassment, I would have been perfectly happy to do that. As I said, it was a privilege to act as interim chair of DEMA and I did not wish any harm to befall DEMA or the city.
That is a highly honourable position to take. I just wish that other people had had the best interests of the city of Edinburgh at heart when they came to their conclusions about how the matter should be dealt with. Why they would have wanted to sacrifice someone like you who was making a significant contribution in your own time is truly beyond me.
The response that came from others was that it was not his intention to replace me immediately. In my view, the letter was crystal clear, but the subsequent response was that the lady who was being invited to become the chair was being invited to do so at a later date—in other words, it was not intended as an immediate invitation—but, in my view, the letter made it quite clear that it was an immediate appointment.
We are talking about quite ruthless behaviour. When you did not play along and said how you read the situation and what you, as a businessperson, believed the legal and financial position to be, that did not go down well. Ruthlessly, steps were taken to have you removed and poor old Councillor Buchanan, for whom you have a high regard, was used by someone else as the vehicle for dispatching you. That is truly astonishing and quite cynical in the extreme.
First, I commend you for what you have said this morning. It has been a difficult time for you. It has emerged in the course of our discussion that a number of challenges emerged as the situation unravelled, and I think that we should put on record our appreciation of your commitment to the city of Edinburgh. Coming from a Glaswegian, that is an incredible commendation.
No, I think that I was ill prepared. I might well be a businessperson—in which respect, I would probably argue with the reference to “prominent”—but the fact is that we in business deal with things in a different way from the public sector. If you are asking whether I would have dealt with the situation in a different way had I been a politician like yourself, my answer is probably yes. Things run in different ways. I do not mean to demean your profession when I say that I do things in an open way, and I am not saying that as politicians you are necessarily covert in your actions—[Laughter.] However, you are not quite as forthright as I might be.
Given our obligation to be transparent in the way we conduct our business, I am interested—and worried—to hear your assessment of how some of this process has been handled.
Yes.
You said earlier that your organisation simply made assumptions that other discussions were taking place out of respect for the public sector’s parameters and the way in which it would debate the issues. I presume that, by that, you mean the dialogue that council officials, Government representatives and the political leadership at council and national level might have been having to try to address the issues. Are you saying that at no time did someone sit you down and say, “Here’s what we intend to do and here’s the exact programme of activity for the next period”?
No one did that.
Do you think that they should have?
Well, yes. I am a member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, but you do not need to be someone of that calibre or a financial genius to look at DEMA’s financial situation and work out that we could not afford those obligations and could not pay them without getting into difficulty. Even with the press release that said that DEMA would meet the obligations, my natural assumption was that a deal had been cut beforehand to ensure that DEMA was in a position to do so. After realising very quickly that there were no such assurances, DEMA’s directors were left in the position of saying, “We cannot meet the obligations”. It is as simple as that.
In a sense, you are saying that you cannot be cavalier about your fiduciary duties.
That is correct.
And the concern over whether such obligations could be met would make it impossible for you, as someone with liability, to confirm what was in the press release, whereas other individuals perhaps felt that they could stretch its meaning.
It is not necessarily the meaning. There could have been something via word of mouth or a verbal assurance that funding would be available to meet these obligations but, as a director, I felt that I could not depend on such an assurance. I needed something in writing to enable DEMA to accept those obligations, which was not forthcoming.
Was there at any stage confusion over whether the verbal assurances that were made were for liabilities for the 2009 gathering event or for future events?
Both issues were involved. The press release was amended by Greg Ward, the head of economic development, effectively to put a stake in the ground with regard to future funding. The original press release, which I saw at 20 past 4, excluded from my statement the last sentence, but I cannot recollect 100 per cent what that sentence was.
In the press release, the last sentence of your statement is:
That is correct. It was effectively a precursor to putting a stake in the ground and was saying that by all means we would like to take on the obligations of the event—although not the financial obligations—but that we needed clarity over future funding.
So you were willing to take on the obligations for the event and the future development of a project such as the gathering, but not the liabilities that had emerged during that turbulent period.
No. I believe that 15 October was a Thursday. On the Friday, there was a dinner at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre at which I was at Councillor Tom Buchanan’s table, and he said to me, “Councillor Cardownie’s on the look-out for you, so be prepared.” [Laughter.]
I know he is a Hearts supporter, so he must be quite gentlemanly.
It is worse than that—he used to be a tenant of one of the pubs that I used to own. I have known him for some time.
So you knew the meaning of that term, then.
He was a tenant of one of the pubs that you used to own?
I used to own the Playhouse and the pub next to it. Steve was the tenant there. It was a gay pub, I might add.
There is always interesting information to be found out. You can give me the details later.
I could do so. The lady in question is no longer in Edinburgh, as far as I am aware. I seek guidance from the convener as to whether this is something that the committee feels I should divulge.
I have to leave that decision to you. I cannot instruct you. Your statements will be a matter of public record.
The letter was addressed to Marcia Campbell, the chief operating officer of Standard Life. She had been approached at an early date.
In the discussions that you had with Councillor Buchanan at that admittedly emotional and turbulent period, what did he say to you about what was happening with your role and about the proposed letter?
There was no prior discussion—
Was there subsequent discussion?
The subsequent discussion was to the effect that he had no intention of replacing me as chair. My stated intention had always been to act as interim chair, on the basis that DEMA needed as chair a person of gravitas and with a better standing in the city than I had.
Did that kind of language come as a surprise?
I am sorry? What language?
Gravitas, standing and so on.
No; that is my wording. I accepted the position of interim chair on the basis that I was there as a temporary appointee. We had always sought a high-profile chair.
Who is now the chair?
Alan Johnston.
What is his background?
He is the chair of the Edinburgh Convention Bureau. It is not my place to comment on any of that, though.
No—I was just trying to ensure that we had an accurate recording of the facts.
You said that Councillor Buchanan told you that Councillor Cardownie was looking out for you. In the parlance, does that mean that he was looking out for your best interests? [Laughter.]
Sorry for laughing, convener—perhaps that is a serious question.
It is a serious question. In what respect was he looking out for you? Was it to help you?
No, I think that he was annoyed. It was a serious question and I take it in that spirit. I think that he was annoyed that I had said publicly that DEMA would not pick up those liabilities.
So there was an implied threat there.
I would hardly describe it as a threat. I think that it was annoyance.
So when you say that he was looking out for you, I presume that you mean that Councillor Cardownie was on the warpath and you were in his sights.
Councillor Cardownie is always a fair man. He certainly did not give me a hard time. He merely said, “Are you the character that is giving us all this difficulty?”
That is very politely put, obviously. In Edinburgh circles, such matters are resolved in a much nicer way than they would be in the west.
I would not bet on that.
To your great credit, Mr Springford, you are answering the committee’s questions in a candid and forthright way that is refreshing when compared with our experience at some previous committee meetings. Some of your answers are a wee bit colourful. I also commend you for sticking to the answers that you wish to give, rather than using the language that some members are putting to you in the hope that you might answer in another way.
No, it is not.
To whom is it accountable?
To the members of the limited company.
But the organisation is entirely funded by the city council.
The whole organisation is almost exclusively and materially funded by the council.
So the council has a significant interest in DEMA and how it performs.
Yes.
You said that you were fairly relaxed about the press release, despite your comments about some of the statements in it. You were happy with it at the point when it was issued. Would it be normal practice for a local authority with an arm’s-length body such as DEMA to issue press releases back and forward? Would DEMA issue press releases and get them approved by the council? Had the council previously issued press releases involving DEMA without asking for DEMA’s approval? I am curious as to whether the press release that we are interested in was a stand-out or one-off press release, or whether that was normal practice.
I do not have enough experience and knowledge of how the public sector operates to answer that. All that I can do is talk about how DEMA operates. As I said, DEMA issues a number of press releases—it has an in-house team to do so. If DEMA is promoting events or marketing opportunities, that team creates a press release and then telephones me or sends me an attributable comment to ask whether I am happy with what it is planned for me to say. I either amend that or approve it. The press release that we are talking about was different, in that it was the first one that I had seen that had at the top of it the specific wording that it was issued on behalf of DEMA by the City of Edinburgh Council.
Surely there must have been some discussion in DEMA, among members of the board for example, about the content of the press release. You said that you presumed that an arrangement would have been put in place to cover the liability. Surely not only you but other members of DEMA must have had some discussion about that, all coming to the same conclusion that an arrangement had been made.
No. As I said, the process happened at fairly short notice. I got a call on, I believe, the Wednesday, to say that DEMA was being invited to the party and that an e-mail about the press release was coming out. The first time that I saw it was 20 past 4 in the afternoon. The only discussion that took place with board members was about the principle of a future gathering, not about the inheritance of the debt of the previous one. That was not known to us, so there was no reason to discuss it.
I see. So there was no discussion at all, among anybody in DEMA, about the crucial element of taking on the liability.
Not prior to the press release.
Thank you, Mr Springford. Your contribution has been extremely interesting. You said—I think this is clear—that DEMA was a fledgling organisation. It was very new; it was just in the process of establishing itself and its remit. You also said that any income that it had to become established came almost exclusively from the City of Edinburgh Council.
I do not have any way of knowing what was in the council officials’ minds at the time. Subsequent to the press release there was certainly discussion about the intellectual property rights, databases and various other things. Although diligence had not been done, it was certainly clear that there was value in The Gathering 2009 Ltd. The extent of that in monetary terms was not known. Subsequently, an investigation has been carried out and a value has been placed on it. Whether DEMA could acquire those assets was certainly one of the matters that was discussed with Greg Ward, the head of economic development. The difficulty was that if the value had been, say, £300,000, it might well have resulted in the balance sheet being in balance—I am not being overtechnical—but it would have created a cash-flow problem that was equally as severe as the solvency problem. The solvency test was that, if we had acquired £300,000-worth of intellectual rights, databases and knowledge, what was the other half of the balance sheet? It was that, rather than having an intangible asset, payment would have to be made to the creditors—so where would the cash come from?
I understand that. Thanks very much for that answer, because I am not a businessperson, so it is always worth listening to people who understand how the cash-flow situation would feed out. That is the major issue for most businesses, particularly these days.
I still very much believe that that is the case. Edinburgh is a festival city. If a more varied programme throughout the year could be achieved, and if the gathering was an event that, if properly run, would enhance the city’s reputation and benefit it economically, I would be 100 per cent behind it.
It is a bit of a loss for you not to be in charge of DEMA any more. Thank you for your answers.
I will return to the letter from Councillor Buchanan, but before I do so I have another question—accepting that, like my colleague Bill Kidd, I do not know much about business. Both DEMA and The Gathering 2009 Ltd were private limited companies.
That is correct.
Is it standard practice—I genuinely do not know this—for one private limited company that takes over another to take on the liabilities of that company? I will explain why I ask. I very much doubt that you were “stitched up”, as Nicol Stephen suggested. Has there been a huge misunderstanding here? Assumptions have been made on different sides. DEMA made an assumption that The Gathering 2009 had somehow sorted things out; The Gathering 2009 made an assumption that DEMA would take on the liabilities—if that is standard practice. Is it?
There are two ways of doing an acquisition. If a company buys a hotel, it would either buy the asset of the hotel from the limited company, or acquire the share capital of that limited company, which would then come with the assets and liabilities that the company had. I am sorry if I am going back to school for a number of people who are already aware of this, but if we take a £100 hotel—
Like in Monopoly.
Yes. We could pay £100 for it, and that is the end of the transaction. However, the company, as well as having the £100 asset of the hotel, might also have a £100 liability to the bank, for example. That company has no value. Equally, it would be possible to take over the share capital of the company for nothing, and that would mean inheriting the £100 hotel plus the £100 debt. In this instance, I did not believe that it would be a case of taking over the share capital of The Gathering 2009 Ltd; it would be a case of taking over some of its intellectual property rights and its database.
That is helpful—even though it is not what I really wanted to ask you about.
I have the letter—or a copy of it. Will I paraphrase a bit of it?
It is entirely up to you, but it would be helpful to get a flavour of it.
I will just get my glasses out—old age does not come easy.
You said that you made it clear that you only ever wanted to be the interim chair.
Yes. I was happy with that. The view that I held, and which I still hold, is that DEMA is a terrific organisation for the city. With deference to our Glaswegian, the way in which Glasgow runs tourism promotion and marketing is different from the way in which Edinburgh has tried to tackle them. Edinburgh is trying to tackle them on the basis of not just including tourism, because that is just one branch. We have to integrate the themes of live, invest, visit, work and study. Somebody who comes to study here might become a worker who then comes back as a chief executive and is involved in inward investment. DEMA was formed to encourage that integration, and we do that by implementing a one-stop marketing approach, including our Convention Bureau and our festivals. I am sorry if I have laboured the point, but that is the background.
What was it about the letter that made you unhappy and caused you to resign? I might have misunderstood the position. You wanted to be the interim chair and then to hand over to somebody else, and that is what the letter was doing. Was it because you were not consulted before the letter was sent?
The letter from Councillor Buchanan was unable to go out in that form. Because the organisation is a private limited company, he could not appoint a chair or directors. It was up to the members of the company to appoint the directors. Kenneth Wardrop wrote back with some amendments to the letter, saying that we did not believe that the matter had been discussed at the board.
You said that Kenneth Wardrop sent you the letter and said, “I don’t believe this is quite what we discussed at the board.” Was the matter not discussed by the board at all, or was he saying that the letter did not exactly reflect his interpretation of the discussion?
What was discussed at the board on 21 October was the appointment of additional directors. We had been at an early stage of development and we were now at the next stage, which was to expand the board. As I said earlier, there were six appointments. We were allowed to co-opt two further directors, and a further four appointments were possible by the members. There was discussion at that time about who would be suitable board directors.
If the rest of the board supported you and said, “Actually, that’s not how it is, because we haven’t discussed replacing you yet,” why would you feel the need to resign? Why would you not just stay?
In my view, the intention of the letter was crystal clear.
Did you say that you spoke to Councillor Buchanan afterwards and he said that that was not how he intended it to be interpreted?
Yes.
Did he say how he intended it to be interpreted?
His intention in writing
Thank you.
Before I bring in George Foulkes and Murdo Fraser, I want to pursue that point. It would be helpful, Mr Springford, if you could give us a copy of Councillor Buchanan’s letter now that you have put it on the public record. Is it correct that the letter referred specifically to your intention to resign?
Yes, that is right.
But you had not said that you intended to resign, so the letter to some extent misinterpreted or mis-stated what you had said. Mr Wardrop pointed out to Councillor Buchanan that he had exceeded his authority and that he had no power to appoint directors or to remove the chair. Whoever it was from the City of Edinburgh Council who assisted Councillor Buchanan in drawing up the letter had presumably badly advised him.
I would not go so far as to say that he was badly advised. Given the situation with legal entities and limited company articles of association, the public sector would perhaps be involved in such actions. It seemed to be perfectly logical—it was, as I keep saying, the council’s ball.
Understandably. However, while I would not necessarily expect Councillor Buchanan to understand all the nuances, he would, in writing a letter on behalf of the City of Edinburgh Council, have had a team of lawyers, accountants and others around him who were versed in administration to give advice. Either he wrote the letter off his own back—although he said to you that he had not necessarily intended the resignation to happen and he was not particularly happy about it—or he had assistance from within the City of Edinburgh Council.
No damage was done, as the letter was issued for comment to Kenneth Wardrop, who corrected it. As far as I am aware, the letter did not go out. I have no way of knowing whether it did or not, but I think that it did not.
It was nipped in the bud, because it was pointed out that Councillor Buchanan could not do that.
He could not do that. It was the implication behind the letter, and its content, that caused the difficulty, rather than whether it was issued or not.
Because you had not said that you intended to resign, and he had included something that was inaccurate, which came on top of what had happened with the press release.
I just want to fill in a gap. When was the meeting about the letter held?
The draft letter was raised on 5 November and I received it on 6 November.
The letter from the permanent secretary Sir Peter Housden states that Councillor Cardownie was involved in the meeting on 12 October to try to find a solution. He was one of the masterminds behind the plan to save the gathering, which he was keen to do from an Edinburgh point of view.
He was on the look-out for me; he wanted to meet me.
You can see why he would be annoyed. You had undermined his plan.
The timings were different, if I may correct you. The resignation was on 6 November.
I am coming back to that.
Right—okay.
I did not say that you had resigned—I said that you had disavowed the press release.
My apologies.
You had said that the press release was wrong and that DEMA was not taking on the responsibilities, so Councillor Cardownie was annoyed with you. What was the dinner?
I cannot remember which dinner it was.
Did you meet him at all?
Yes. We met up—
At the dinner?
Yes.
And what did he say?
It was pleasant. There was a jocular comment. There was no nastiness or throwing the toys out of the pram.
Was Tom Buchanan there as well?
Yes. Tom and I had met up and Councillor Cardownie passed by.
You were at different tables.
Yes.
Can you remember anyone else who was at the dinner?
I cannot even recollect whose dinner I was at—and I was not even drinking.
I have had that kind of evening myself.
Yes.
And on 5 November you got called in and shown the draft letter. Do you think that there was any connection between your upsetting Councillor Cardownie and the letter being drafted and shown to you?
All I can say is that I believe that I embarrassed someone. I have no idea who that was.
Surely you can guess. Was it Councillor Cardownie or someone else?
I have no way of knowing. All I can do is repeat my view that Councillor Buchanan is an honourable wee man and I do not believe that he would have issued such a letter without either prior consultation or discussing with me why he was doing so.
But when you spoke to Councillor Cardownie at that dinner you did not discuss, say, prospects at Tynecastle the next day; you talked about this issue.
I think that talking about Tynecastle with Councillor Cardownie would be an unlikely event.
He is there regularly.
Is he? I apologise—I did not realise that.
He is a Hearts supporter, allegedly.
I cannot recollect. As I said, there was a jocular comment. There was nothing difficult about the conversation. I have known him for many years.
Have you seen him since?
I cannot recollect whether I have. As I say, though, there was no animosity or sense of annoyance between us. It was a jocular comment.
Has any other councillor, MSP or anyone else expressed to you concern over your disavowal of that press release or your resignation?
No. If anything, all that I have had since that date is the support of the board’s members, who have said that in their view the statement was exactly the correct one to make.
I have a quick question of clarification about the letter that led to your resignation. My understanding was that the letter from Tom Buchanan was intercepted just as he was reaching the post box, but you seem to be saying that he showed it to the other board members for comment and they showed it to you. He did not decide off his own bat to run to the post box with it.
Perhaps I can clarify. The letter was clearly dictated by Councillor Buchanan but it was then sent by his development adviser or whatever they are called to Kenneth Wardrop for comment. Mr Wardrop edited it, saying, “You can’t do A, B and C and here are my amendments,” and sent the amended letter back to the adviser. Mr Wardrop also sent me a copy of the letter and his proposed amendments, saying that he could not recollect it having been discussed at the board meeting. Indeed, his response to Councillor Buchanan’s officer was, “I cannot recollect this having been discussed at the board meeting. If I am wrong, please let me know.”
I presume that when you saw the letter you came to the view that you were, in effect, being handed the black spot, that the City of Edinburgh Council had lost confidence in you and that it was time for you to go.
Yes. I had embarrassed the council, the Government or whoever and it was time to go. As I have said, I was perfectly happy. I did not want to make a fuss and I did not divulge the presence of the letter until now. Indeed, I would not have divulged it had I not been called before the committee.
You are obviously from the private sector. Am I right in saying that you are the chairman of Apex Hotels?
That is correct.
From what you have said, my impression is that you have been treated quite shabbily in the whole process. Do you feel burned by or bitter at your treatment?
Not particularly. I feel disappointed rather than bitter. There was still an awful lot to do at DEMA that the city would benefit from. However, someone else has taken on the baton, DEMA is working well and the city is benefiting from it. However, I would have liked to have had the opportunity to continue in the position a little while longer to see whether we could enhance co-operation between the public and private sectors.
Like other private sector people, you give up time to take on these positions. I presume that you became chairman of DEMA not for the money but because of your interest in improving Edinburgh’s economic development and promoting the tourism sector in which you work. Would this whole episode make you think again about taking up a similar appointment in future? Would you be reluctant to do so?
There is clearly a learning process. For a start, it is clear that the public and private sectors operate differently. However, we have always recognised that each of those branches has particular skills. Although we do not necessarily see eye to eye on all things, I find it refreshing that we are able to co-operate, particularly in the current political climate.
Okay. Thank you for your evidence.
Mr Springford, the evidence session has gone on much longer than we expected and we appreciate your forbearance. This cannot have been easy for you. We also realise that you are at a disadvantage in trying to recollect conversations, times and dates without access to notes or records, so we really appreciate what you have been able to tell us and your efforts to be candid and fairly forthright. Your evidence has been useful and we thank you for giving us your time. No doubt you will hear in due course the outcome of the committee’s deliberations.
My pleasure.
I suspend the meeting for a couple of minutes.
“Emergency departments”
Item 3 on our agenda is a section 23 report on emergency departments. We have with us Dr Kevin Woods, director general health and chief executive of the national health service in Scotland; Derek Feeley, director of health care policy and strategy with the Scottish Government; and Dr Bill Morrison, who is a consultant in emergency medicine with NHS Tayside. I apologise for any inconvenience caused by the considerable delay in starting this item. We had a useful session with a witness in relation to another item on our agenda.
I have two or three points. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to contribute to your discussions.
You mentioned several facets of emergency services, including the Scottish Ambulance Service. Recently, there have been a couple of incidents of failures of control rooms, leading to the resilience facility having to kick in. On at least one occasion, calls were handled by a control room in Belfast. Obviously, it is a worry that, on one occasion, all the control rooms went down. I am not sure whether, on the second occasion, all the control rooms went down or just some of them, but there has been more than one incident in which ambulance control rooms have gone down. Clearly, the Scottish Ambulance Service is an important part of the emergency services. What caused that problem and what has been done to ensure that it does not happen again?
The problems were to do with telecommunications systems. The arrangements that you describe are the standard arrangements that apply to ensure continuity of service. The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing gave a full statement to Parliament on the background to the occasion to which you refer. The detail is in that statement. Obviously, the Scottish Ambulance Service has been working with its telecommunications contractors to ensure that any underlying issues are addressed. I am happy to give the committee an update on the action that has been taken.
But it has happened on more than one occasion.
There was another occasion recently, but I would need to check whether it was the same problem or a slightly different one.
I did not suggest that it was the same problem, but control centres for the Scottish Ambulance Service have been down on more than one occasion.
On the second occasion, only one centre was affected.
Right.
Good morning, Dr Woods. Perhaps I should congratulate you on your new appointment with the health service in New Zealand.
Thank you.
I want to ask about increasing demand for the emergency services, and inappropriate attendances. The auditor general’s report shows that there has been a substantial rise in unplanned attendances at emergency departments. It also shows that 9,500 people who called an ambulance and arrived at the emergency department were not treated, presumably because they did not want to wait or they were not that unwell. Inappropriate call-outs are a tremendous drain on resources.
As you say, the situation is quite complex; many factors are at work. It is important to set a bit of context around the increase in numbers, which is just under 10 per cent over a decade, which is an average of 1 per cent per year. Nonetheless, it is a rising pressure on emergency departments.
We thought that there was a problem with your microphone, but it is still on.
The pilot was intended to explore how we could communicate more effectively with the public about when to use NHS 24, when to call an ambulance and when to go to the emergency department. From that pilot, we have developed a set of resources that all NHS boards can use, and we have provided them with a small amount of funding for that.
The specific problem group that you are talking about—the people who come by ambulance and fail to stay—is a worry. There is also a group of people who self-present and do not stay, although that does not have the same financial implications. It is difficult to come up with a common factor, and I do not think that there is one.
Thank you, that is very helpful. Managing public expectations and ensuring that people have the right information are clearly a work in progress.
I will comment, and Dr Morrison might then add a bit more.
One message that comes across is that attendances are increasing. If all attendance for treatment at an emergency department is legitimate, nobody will complain, but there is a group of people who tend to use emergency departments for primary care purposes. We cannot give them the best primary care—that obviously comes from primary care services—and we need to look at shifting the balance.
We are about to publish some guidance that has been agreed with the Royal College of General Practitioners on the issue of access that Dr Morrison has described, which we would be happy to share with the committee.
That is helpful. Thank you.
I would like to pursue that point. I take what Dr Morrison says about the path of least resistance, but what efforts have been made to quantify how much of an issue the difficulty in accessing GP out-of-hours services is in relation to accident and emergency departments? Anecdotally, most of us can share experiences of difficulty not just in accessing emergency services but in trying to use out-of-hours services. I wonder whether, because we are making it increasingly difficult for people to access out-of-hours services, more members of the public are doing what Dr Morrison suggests and going to accident and emergency departments because it is easier and sometimes quicker to get a service there. Has that been quantified? What steps have been taken to resolve the issue by reconfiguring out-of-hours services?
We have done some significant survey work, particularly in Glasgow and Lothian, on what drives those behaviours—why people attend accident and emergency departments. The survey has found that the reasons for that are related to people’s perception of the seriousness of their injuries, especially if they think that they might need an X-ray. Their proximity to the accident and emergency department is also a factor, as is people’s perceived convenience—the attractiveness of the four-hour wait limit. There is also an issue around the age profile in that the people who self-refer to A and E tend to be younger. Only the convenience factor relates to your point about the relationship between access to out-of-hours services—and primary care more generally—and people’s tendency to attend A and E departments.
How significant, in numerical or percentage terms, is the impact on the emergency services of people’s problem in accessing out-of-hours services? In essence, I am asking whether we now make it too difficult for people to access out-of-hours services, with consequences for the emergency services.
The NHS 24 response times are very good—that is the performance point that I am talking about. The point that I think you are pursuing is about onward referral of patients by NHS 24 if the clinical judgment—and it is a clinical judgment—is that the person would benefit either from a telephone conversation with someone in one of the out-of-hours centres or from visiting a centre. We have improved that response but, as Dr Morrison said earlier, although it is quite good in the out-of-hours period, there may be issues about urgent access to general practice services within hours, which is where the guidance that has been agreed with the RCGP becomes important. I think that that is the point that you are pursuing.
I do not think that it is particularly an out-of-hours problem. The situation may even be better than is imagined. I probably gave the wrong slant on the problem, in that I failed to list the work that I am involved in to sort out the issues. I would not underplay our role in emergency departments. For far too long, we have taken an almost submissive attitude in saying, “Well, you are here.” We have not reinforced education messages, and we have a big role to play in that.
The work that Derek Feeley referred to, regarding self-referral, showed that proximity and deprivation play a significant part in determining the levels of self-referral. You spoke about the Grampian pilot. Was it targeted? Have any pilots been targeted on areas of deprivation that are in close proximity to an emergency department? If not, would it be worth targeting those areas where there are significantly higher self-referral rates?
I understand that the Grampian pilot was not targeted. It was about trying to demonstrate whether it was a viable approach and it demonstrated that it was. We have provided boards with the materials and the wherewithal, if you like, to judge the best way to use them. If they took the view on the basis of their local data that the focus should be on the areas that you suggested, they have materials that could be tailored to enable them to do just what you described.
I can add that a useful thing that they did in Grampian—and this partially answers your question—was that they used the leaflet to reinforce the messages that Dr Morrison was talking about earlier. If someone attended—you are right that people from relatively deprived areas tend to attend more—they were handed a copy of the leaflet to make sure that they were aware of the situation. There was that subsequent reinforcement.
Part of the emergency access delivery team work towards target 10 of the health improvement, efficiency, access and treatment targets—or HEAT 10—is to encourage and give guidance to emergency departments on feeding back to general practices. The data collection means that we can now report back to GPs about attendances from their practice area, which gives practices across the board, regardless of deprivation, information on attendance by their patients. If there is overuse or inappropriate use of emergency services, the GPs are in a position to do something about it. That is another example of better communication.
When you say that you are able to provide those data, do you provide them on request or are they provided as a matter of course?
We are in transition, but in Tayside we are providing those data automatically to practices with which we have been in discussion and that have requested them. That is being done automatically, and the idea is that it will be rolled out throughout the country.
In the past, we have talked about the integrated resource framework. The provision of such data is part of the dialogue about giving people an overview of the way in which patients are using services and the cost consequences of those decisions.
Page 7 of the report states:
The point that the Audit Scotland report was making is that, as we have expanded the range of responses to unscheduled care needs with the development of NHS 24, minor injuries units and so on, people might have become uncertain about which route they should take. That takes us back to programmes such as know who to turn to. As you have drawn attention to paragraph 10 on page 7, I assure the committee that there is absolute operational clarity in the Ambulance Service, for example, about where to take individual patients. That is always being updated throughout the day to ensure that people are taken to the right place. There is clarity. The report was making the point that there is now a more varied landscape and the health service needs to respond to that by providing more information, a point that we accept entirely because of what we have been saying.
Dr Morrison spoke earlier about triage. I have worked in the admin or reception areas of hospital accident and emergency departments and I know that triage is an extremely important tool for differentiating between the different levels of illness that people present at A and E departments. The report says—and I know that this is a fact—that
I understand that the situation has changed over the past few years. Triage used to be an absolute given—and it is still very much up there. Then the principle of streaming came along. I was rather confused by that at first. It is triage by another name, but it also means that patients who can be dealt with very quickly by see and treat are put in that category. We used to have the Manchester five triage categories, which were very formal, but there is now some flexibility. However, all patients are seen by a nurse at an early point and allocated a priority. Occasionally that will mean a rapid turnaround and we might have staff who are dealing entirely with see and treat for cases that can be dealt with quickly. We still have a standard that says that, after the patient registers, they should be seen by the nurse as the first point of contact within 10 minutes. That still holds. So, triage is still there. It is a bit of a red herring to say that not everyone goes through it, because everyone goes through the point of first assessment. We have altered the language a little bit, which might be confusing, but the principle is still there.
Is that 10-minute requirement now a standard pattern in hospitals?
It is not a standard that we have been told to adhere to. Guidelines were put in place, principally by the College of Emergency Medicine, but we are not in a tick-box situation. We monitor to see whether we are reaching the standards, but we do not report on that at the moment.
The report identifies a number of key areas. The issue that I want to focus on is the appropriate location of accident and emergency departments, which is obviously part of the wider community debate about treatment in Scotland.
I will kick off and then I will ask Mr Feeley to comment on the locational points that you raise, because the work that was done in the context of the Kerr report, which Mr Feeley supported, is relevant.
As we have considered the issue over time, we have focused deliberately on the whole range of unscheduled care services, because our belief was and is that considering emergency departments in isolation does not recognise the interdependencies that Dr Woods spoke about. That is why, when we worked on the Kerr report, which has informed thinking ever since, we identified four levels of unscheduled care, from community-provided services such as GP out-of-hours provision all the way through to level 4—the highest level of trauma-type services—which we recognised that only a limited number of places should provide. It is now for boards to take that planning guidance, recognise the range of services and ensure that they have facilities in their communities to provide such services to local populations.
I remember reading a long time ago the Scottish trauma audit group reports about the primary importance of paramedic intervention. Many of us have personal experiences of reasonable proximity to A and E units, but the reality is that the work that is needed to make someone survive is probably best done by properly qualified paramedics who have the resources to intervene in such extreme cases.
Mr Feeley described a framework in which such discussions can take place. I will shortly draw in Dr Morrison to say a little about trauma.
The question is interesting. I imagine myself asking members how we will sort things out, as it is clear that the public want teaching hospitals on their doorsteps, but we will never have that. Therefore, services must be tiered, as has been illustrated. If we started with a blank sheet of paper in Scotland, we certainly would not end up with the distribution of services that we now have. The point is made in the report that the services have evolved over time.
The general principle is that, where there is a clear evidence base that patients can benefit from a concentration of services, we will concentrate services because we know how important local access is for most services that people want. It is about how things are balanced. The evidence evolves over time, of course. People who have suffered a particular form of heart attack that paramedics can detect at the scene will be taken directly to a hospital at which coronary intervention can take place, rather than to an A and E department just down the road, as there are better outcomes for such patients as a result of concentrating services in that hospital. Dr Morrison may be better placed than I am to comment on that matter. The debate on that has to be balanced.
That is interesting.
The role of paramedics was mentioned. I have seen an imaginative and innovative approach taken in recent years in Renfrewshire. A paramedic on a motorbike has located himself for part of the day near my constituency office. Such an approach is fantastic. The speed of response to an emergency call is critical in some cases and a person on a motorbike who sits waiting for calls to come in can cover quite a wide area. A rapid response can mean the difference between life and death: the motorbike may be able to get to the person in time and they will decide which hospital the person needs to go to. Dr Woods spoke about that. The ambulance service is to be commended on the excellent and imaginative work that it is doing, in which I wish it well.
The word “professionals” encompasses a large group, and there will be different views within that group. We have been down this road before with Lanarkshire and Ayrshire. In those cases, even within the clinical groupings, there were differing views about whether there should be closures, centralisation, rationalisation and so on. However, I also accept that, at the moment, the landscape is such that we have what we have and that it will stay like that.
Earlier, you said that there was a need to centralise services because the current situation is unaffordable. However, you have now expanded your view to say that you have concerns about the fact that we cannot guarantee services unless there is 24-hour cover from senior medical people. You are expressing financial worries, but you seem also now to be expressing medical concerns about the current situation.
I am not sure that we can separate the two. You have all seen the report, which shows that a lot of injuries that come to A and E departments are towards the minor end of the spectrum—although that is a dangerous word to use—but also that some significantly ill and injured people come to A and E departments. We do not know when they will come, but we know that their conditions are no respecters of a 9-to-5 routine. Therefore, it is folly to suggest that we should have consultants present between 9 and 5 but have a junior doctor on duty at 2 in the morning.
Are you concerned that, as a consequence, the individuals who need the service will not have adequate access to the necessary level of medical expertise?
In short, yes. We do our best to provide the cover but, sometimes, that cover might not be provided by someone who is as experienced as we would like them to be.
Just to reiterate a point, it is important to differentiate between types of patient in this debate. The evidence base for the benefit in outcome terms will vary according to the type of patient. It is not a simple either/or situation. The area is complex and the evidence base is quite contested. The Government believes strongly that people value timely local access, and that is supported by the report. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that there must also be access to safe and high-quality services that deliver the outcomes that we want for everyone.
I have a question about trends that relates to what the convener asked about earlier. The number of people who present to A and E has gone up 10 per cent in 10 years to roughly 1,500,000. The table on page 16 of the report suggests that half of the current presentations are for minor illnesses and so on. Was that the position 10 years ago, as far as you know? Is there an increasing trend for minor presentations?
I will defer to Dr Morrison, although I speculate that there has probably been a similar mix over that period.
I do not think that the case mix has changed significantly. I have some issues with the description of up to 50 per cent of patients presenting “minor injury or illness”. That is a dangerous description. Frequently, conditions can be described as minor only in retrospect. Even if something is minor, that does not mean that it is inappropriate for it to be presented at an A and E department. I would prefer to talk about things in terms of need, urgency and emergency. You will find that those departments are more responsive—they have to be responsive according to a timescale that might not apply in other services.
According to the table on page 16, the hospital in my constituency, Crosshouse, has about 60 per cent—two thirds—of presentations admitted or referred. I do not know whether that is bad news or good news. Is it bad news in the respect that there are more cases requiring admission being presented at Crosshouse, or are more people using the accident and emergency service more appropriately in my area? It is hard to know which it is.
I can answer that with some degree of accuracy. Crosshouse operates a system whereby all patients come in through the emergency department. If someone has been seen by a general practitioner and has been referred for admission, for medicine, surgery or whatever, they will touch base in the A and E department, and they will be recorded as an emergency department attendance. In contrast, at Ninewells, if a GP has referred someone, we take the view that the GP knows that patient well, so they should go direct to a bed, rather than waiting on a trolley. Those patients go direct—they do not touch base in the A and E department, and they are not recorded as an emergency department attendance. There is also a default whereby, if the ambulance crew feel that the person needs immediate attention, they will come to A and E.
So it is not worrying.
Increasingly, direct admission to medical or surgical beds by GPs is the trend.
That is helpful to know, as it explains some of the reasons why there are such variations in the data. I am reassured by your response in relation to Crosshouse. Thank you for that.
I am slightly confused about nomenclature. Are “A and E unit” and “emergency department” interchangeable?
No.
Could you explain the difference?
Emergency departments are A and E departments. During my career, they have been casualty departments and A and E departments, and now they are emergency departments. Do not ask me to explain why they have changed.
But they are the same.
Those three are the same but an AMU—acute medical unit—is not the same as an emergency department. An acute medical unit is the next stage. If you have been seen by a GP who feels that you need to be admitted, or if you have been seen in an emergency department and it is deemed that you need in-patient care, you go to the acute medical unit.
Let us forget about the acute medical unit for a minute. A and E units, as we used to call them, or A and E departments, are now called emergency departments.
Yes. Sorry—I misheard you.
When was the decision made to change the name and why?
The decision was made about three or four years ago by the College of Emergency Medicine. I am not entirely sure that I can explain why, but it brings us more into line with practice in the United States and mainland Europe. It was felt that the word “accident” was not necessary.
What was it called in your day, George?
Florence Nightingale.
Casualty, I suspect.
Burke and Hare used to deal with it.
2005.
Which department were you in when Andy Kerr was the Minister for Health and Community Care?
I was in the same job that I am in now.
That is what I mean. You were in the same job, so you advised Andy Kerr on the proposed closure of the A and E units at Monklands and Ayr. Is that right?
Since my appointment, I have advised all ministers on a wide variety of issues.
My understanding is that you advised him to close the units on the basis that, as we heard from Frank McAveety and Dr Morrison, centralisation was necessary to provide the highest level of qualified consultants, but you later advised a new minister to keep them open. How do you reconcile that?
Let me say a couple of things, if I may, convener. There are a number of former ministers on the committee who will know the conventions around what civil servants or public servants will say about the advice that they may have given to ministers at any particular time, but the reconciliation is really quite straightforward, in that I am a civil servant—a public servant—and I am employed to provide the best advice that I can to ministers and to implement and work within the policy framework that ministers adopt. I have no difficulty with that. If ministers come with a policy proposal, my colleagues and I will give them advice, but ministers will make decisions and we will work within the policy framework that is adopted. I do not see any inconsistency in that.
Good. I hope that you have a nice time in New Zealand.
Thank you.
I note what you say about giving advice depending on the policy objective of ministers, but your professional opinion and professional advice on the best configuration of accident and emergency units has stayed consistent.
The point that I am making—I was trying to explain this previously—is that the question of the balance between local access and the concentration of services is quite a complex and vexed one. The evidence base is contested, it is not always clear and it evolves. One has to consider all these issues in the context of ministers’ policy preferences. That is all that I can say.
Absolutely. But—
Yes, minister.
Perhaps, minister.
But, clearly, new ministers came in post-2007 with a very clear policy objective and I understand absolutely that it is your job to give advice with respect to the policy objective. However, the situation prior to 2007 was that the minister did not have a policy objective as such; the minister was responding to the professional advice that was developing and was being given and was politically trying to ensure that resources were used in a way that reflected the best professional and medical advice. I presume that the professional and medical advice that you gave to the minister prior to 2007, to which the minister responded, stayed consistent post-2007, when you gave advice to the new minister about the best configuration of services, regardless of the political priorities of the minister at that time. Is that the case? That is the question that I am asking you.
The point that needs to be added is that a further step was introduced after 2007, which was the independent scrutiny of board proposals. You will remember that, in the case of Lanarkshire and Ayr, an extensive process was bound up with that. That independent scrutiny shed further light on the evidence base. To that extent, new considerations emerged from the evidence base, which would no doubt have informed the advice that ministers were given and the decisions that they took.
Had you taken steps to get independent scrutiny prior to 2007, the advice that you gave to the minister, to which the minister responded, might have been different.
It might have been, but that is a hypothetical question.
If such scrutiny was so valuable post-2007, why did you not take steps to obtain it prior to 2007 to help the minister, who was responding to the professional advice that was given to him?
The context for the advice that was given at that time was the Kerr report, to which Mr Feeley referred. When the new Government came into office, it pledged to continue with the services at Ayr and Monklands, and it asked for the independent scrutiny process to be undertaken. As I said, policy and evidence emerge constantly. In 2007, as a result of the independent scrutiny process, further evidence was put on the table that I am not sure was necessarily there in quite the same way prior to 2005, but Mr Feeley could comment—
But we are not talking just about the situation prior to 2005. It still applied in January 2007. Why was that advice and information not given to the minister then? Was it just that you had not thought about it?
No, the point that I am making—within the bounds of the conventions on what we discuss in relation to such matters—is that there was a policy framework and a set of evidence that informed the decisions that were taken at that time. The new Government came in and pledged to introduce a process of independent scrutiny, which produced some further information and evidence, in the light of which new decisions were taken.
We have a situation in which politicians in the incoming Government thought that independent evidence would be good. The independent evidence that was obtained was so valuable that it changed the situation, but none of the professionals at a senior level who gave advice to ministers prior to 2007 thought about obtaining such evidence.
I think that it is fair to say that the evidence base was contested prior to 2007.
No, I am talking about the people who gave advice to the minister. Did you contest that evidence base?
Obviously, we evaluate the evidence and information that are available. That is part of the normal business of government.
If you look back to the Kerr report, you will see that there is a huge amount of uncertainty about the relationship between volume and outcome that drives many of the issues to do with the centralisation and location of services. That was the case then and it is still the case. As Dr Woods has recognised, the position evolves.
Forgive me, but I am not talking about the controversy and the different arguments, which you say have always existed. I accept that. I am talking about a situation in which, prior to 2007, the minister responded to the advice that officials gave about what was the best framework. He did not come in with a manifesto commitment about how services should be reconfigured but responded to the professional advice to which the two of you were central. You say that, post-2007, with the independent scrutiny, new information came to light that changed that. I am not talking about the controversy and the different views that have existed. I am talking about your views and your advice and how that could have shifted so substantially. Did it shift or has it remained consistent? I am not asking you to tell me what the advice was. I am merely asking you whether your opinion and your advice have remained consistent.
What has remained consistent is that we have sought to give ministers the best advice that we can give with the information that is at our disposal at the particular moment in time. The fact is that that might change, but the consistency comes from giving ministers the best advice that we can with the information that we have.
What changed, then, between January 2007 and September 2007, in terms of the best information?
I am not sure what the significance of the September date is, unless it coincides—
By September, the view was that there should be independent scrutiny and new information would eventually come to light, but in January you had a different view. At that time, you were telling the minister that this was the best way to structure emergency services. I am asking you what changed, from your perspective. Leaving the politicians aside, because I am just talking about the professionals, what changed in the intervening months?
I am not sure that we can entirely divorce the politicians from the issue, because the change of Government came with a commitment to introduce independent scrutiny, and it was—
No, no. I am not talking about that, Dr Woods. I am talking about the advice and whether it remained consistent. Politicians have the right to make such a commitment. I am not contesting that. I am asking you about the advice that was given by key people—by you and Mr Feeley—who were central to policy evolution at the beginning of 2007. I am asking you whether your advice remain consistent, because we clearly came to a different conclusion.
My point, without getting into details of the advice that may have been given to ministers at any particular time, is that we have given, with the information available to us, the best advice that we could give at each and every one of those points.
What advice became available that was not available before May 2007 and which changed your opinion and your advice?
I think the important point is what information became available that informed ministers’ decisions, and it is all set out in the independent scrutiny panel report. It related to things such as a commentary on the workforce and staffing issues that had been quite a controversial feature of the proposals prior to 2007.
I am not talking about that, Dr Woods. I am talking about the opinion of yourself and Mr Feeley. What information was available to you that changed the advice that you gave? I am not asking about the advice. What information became available?
I am saying that the detail of that—I am having some difficulty remembering all of it because it was some time ago—is in the independent scrutiny panel report, and a lot of it related to commentaries on the workforce issues, which had been a major driver of some of the proposals in both Lanarkshire and Ayrshire. Part of the commentary in the report was on that, so that matter, for instance, would have been part of it. There was also quite a lot in the report on the rather complex question of volume and outcome, which is a debate that continues to be unresolved.
But should not that information have been given to ministers prior to 2007?
Information was given—
Specifically on that?
It is quite difficult to deal with the question in terms of the convention of what was said. I come back to my point that the information that would have been used would have been the best information and advice that was available to us and hence to ministers at that time. That is the consistent position.
Clearly we are not going to get much further with this.
I think that I might have started all this off. I have a certain interest in this matter in that I was nominated although not selected to be on the independent scrutiny panel, and my memory suggests that the outcome of the panel was that it could find no evidence to support the changes that had previously been proposed. That is not the same as finding evidence to suggest that a different direction should have been taken—and, in saying that, I hold my hands up as one of the specialists and clinicians who might have been involved in giving advice on this matter.
I accept that 100 per cent and I know that, as the argument progressed, different opinions were expressed. I am simply trying to find out whether the key people who advised ministers on policy—and, indeed, were largely responsible for the evolution of the policy, as it was not in the manifesto—gave consistent advice all the way through the process. Clearly, I am not going to get an answer to that question.
My understanding from the responses to this section of questions is that the evidence that was not available to the health secretary before 2007 became available from the independent scrutiny panel, which was established by the current health secretary. Was there anything to prevent the previous health secretary from putting in place such a panel to come up with that evidence?
Not in principle.
But the point brings me back to the questions that I have just asked. I commend Nicola Sturgeon on introducing the independent scrutiny panel—fair play to her—but clearly it had not dawned on the people who gave the previous health minister advice that other information existed that could have changed the situation. Either he was given bad advice or your views have not changed and have remained consistent.
The context was that the Kerr report had been produced and ministers had embraced its intentions in a publication entitled “Delivering for Health”. The boards were asked to go away and look not just at A and E but at their whole range of services. They did so and came up with proposals. At that time, there was no independent scrutiny process and, as they are to this day, boards were responsible for analysing and reviewing services and running consultation and engagement events. You will recall that in the heat of these controversies much concern was expressed about the quality of engagement and consultation processes throughout the health service, not just in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire, and as a result independent scrutiny was introduced and the Scottish health council was created to provide an independent commentary on the work that boards carry out. All of that became available after 2007. The quantity and nature of evidence that has been available to the present set of ministers is different from that which was available to previous ministers.
Dr Woods, do you remember who the MP for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley was at the time?
I believe it was you.
Indeed it was. Do you remember that member’s strong representations to the health minister and the First Minister against the closure of the A and E unit?
It is much to my regret that I do not remember your specific representation, but I am sure that it was clear and to the point.
Indeed. Do you remember that the then health minister—aside from the fact that he told me that the health board, which was full of experts and consultants, had recommended the closure—was advised by his civil servants that it was the right thing to do?
I do not remember that specific conversation. I am not sure that I should comment on a discussion that may have taken place between a minister and a fellow member.
Was Kerr independent? I mean Professor Kerr, not Andy Kerr.
Yes, I believe he was. It is important not to personalise the report: although his name is associated with it, the report was the creation of an extensive process of engagement and dialogue in consultation. Mr Feeley was the secretary to the group that was involved, which contained very able and committed people. I am sure that Professor Kerr was independent and that he dealt with the issue in the most objective way that he could.
Absolutely—I agree. So how do he and his group differ from the independent scrutiny panel?
The process moved on. The Kerr group was considering not the specific proposals but the generality of the policy. The independent scrutiny panel was examining the specific proposals. Kerr was, if you like, a commentary to inform decision making on the specific proposals that the boards had created, which was a rather different context.
But each was independent. It must be an enviable position to be able to make those recommendations and not have to bear any of the responsibility, as that rests with ministers. You get paid a great deal more than ministers for that privilege.
You have referred to the fact that I will be moving on in the near future. It is not only enviable to be able to occupy a position like this and make a contribution but a real privilege. I have always believed that it is my job to give ministers the very best advice that I can, given the circumstances, the policy framework and the evidence that is available at the time. That is what I believe my colleagues in the Scottish Government do, and we have a strong set of values to ensure that that is the case. I am sure that there are people around this table who have occupied ministerial positions in the Government, and I hope that they recognise that.
I have one final question. Are you aware of staff concerns that patients are being moved out of emergency departments or discharged to avoid breaching the four-hour target?
You ask whether we are aware of staff concerns. We are aware of what is in the report with regard to the staff survey. However, we believe that the staff survey should be treated with a degree of caution; I would be happy to give the committee a note on that. It uses a comparatively small sample, and the responses disproportionately represent a group of staff who are not clinically responsible for admissions.
Without going into too much detail because of the time, I think that you are saying that the practice of moving people just to meet the four-hour target is not happening.
I am saying that if it did happen, we would not consider it to be acceptable. Dr Morrison can tell you whether or not it is happening.
I have no evidence—none whatsoever—that it is happening.
Just to come in on the previous discussion, I feel as though we have drifted slightly—
If we have drifted, we are not going back.
Well, if you do not—
No, I am sorry.
I think that is a wee bit unfair, convener. We have spent 45 minutes asking about 20 questions on a matter that is outside the scope of the committee.
I am convening the meeting. We have moved on. You said that we have drifted, so I am not drifting back. I will leave it at that.
Thank you very much, convener. It has been a real privilege to occupy this post. Public Audit Committees are not the sort of thing that people say they enjoy, but the exchanges have been free and frank, and I am sure that they will serve me well in New Zealand. I am very grateful for your good wishes.
We will now move into private session.