Audit Committee, 01 Nov 2005

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 1, 2005

Official Report 173KB pdf

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Visit (Denmark)

Item 4 is consideration of a report about the committee's recent visit to Denmark. The report has been circulated to members, so I will speak only briefly to it. Those members who had the good fortune to go on the trip found it quite useful to see how an entirely different audit system works. The Danish system is quite unusual in the way in which it uses lay members. Although many of the lay members had political experience, only one of them was an active elected politician. It was useful for the committee to learn about how the Danish audit system had evolved over some 150 years and about how it differed from the Westminster model, to which we normally look to for comparison.

The paper suggests that there are a number of other issues that we might want to investigate, which might require future visits, and suggests where we might go to establish how other working practices impinge on what we do. The recommendation is that a visits paper be put together for consideration at a future date.

Do members have any comments?

I want to comment on the recommendation, although I am obviously happy to wait for the paper to be prepared for discussion before we debate the matter more fully. I seek clarification that agreeing to such a paper would not mean working on the presumption that there would necessarily be further visits as a consequence. Although I am conscious that I missed the early part of the away day discussion—and I am sure that the matter was explored more fully then—I am concerned that there is still a great deal of learning, and application of learning, to be done following the visits that have already been conducted. Indeed, we can also learn from our own experience in our own unique context in Scotland over the past six years. I am happy to agree to the recommendation, but I would not like us to presume that there will necessarily be further visits as a consequence of the paper being drafted.

I would not seek to prejudge the outcome of our discussion on that paper either. It may be useful to use the paper to discuss how we benchmark such working practices so that we can then apply them and ensure that our visits are not perceived to be jollies and that some benefit comes out of them.

Might it therefore be helpful to reposition the title of the proposed paper? Is the paper necessarily about visiting other legislatures, or is it about learning from other legislatures? There may be other information and lessons that we can draw on from international experience, which I am all in favour of, short of the committee having to go and visit other places.

The paper will consider where there are areas that we can learn from and whether visits will be required. The paper has not been written yet, but I am sure that the clerks will bear your comments in mind.

Do members agree that that paper should be drawn up?

Members indicated agreement.

Meeting suspended until 11:48 and thereafter continued in private until 12:07.