Audit Committee, 07 Dec 2004

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 7, 2004

Official Report 171KB pdf

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“Scottish Prison Service: Contract for the provision of prisoner escort and court custody services”

Item 3 is consideration of the response from Tony Cameron, the chief executive of the Scottish Prison Service, to our letter with regard to the Auditor General's report "Scottish Prison Service: Contract for the provision of prisoner escort and court custody services". I will invite members to comment and will then ask the Auditor General whether he has any comments to make. Do members wish to make any observations?

I found paragraph 2 and the penultimate paragraph of the response quite interesting. In paragraph 2, Mr Cameron refers to the

"clear objectives for the project in the light of the considerable deficiencies of the previous escorting systems".

I must admit that I was not aware that the case had been proved that previous escorting systems had failed.

I do not think that that is what it says.

It says

"in the light of … considerable deficiencies".

I am not entirely sure whether those deficiencies have been set out.

I take that to mean that the deficiency was the use of police officers.

The term is fairly ambiguous.

I have just noticed that, in true civil service fashion, the response talks about a

"multi-agency review team … an expanded contingency planning group"

and

"a performance review system".

I would prefer the SPS to get prisoners safely from point A to point B and back again.

It is good that different agencies are speaking to each other. However, at the bottom of page 1 the response says:

"It is difficult to say exactly when the contract will have fully bedded in",

whereas on the next page it states:

"we are already clear that many of the key objectives of the contract have already been achieved".

That means that some key objectives have not been met. I would like to know which ones they are.

The SPS says:

"we believe that prisoner security has been improved"

and that

"the efficiency of escorts is likely to have improved … In all we consider that the contract is already delivering".

Those are opinions. I do not see many facts to back them up.

The committee has decided not to take any particular evidence on or to institute an inquiry into this matter. Members will be aware that the Justice 2 Committee is following up the process of awarding the contracts. I simply mention that to help us keep in context any decisions about what we might do with this response.

The last paragraph of the response states:

"a post implementation review needs to await a full year's running of the contract".

Only then can we start to evaluate whether it has delivered in full. After all, the contract has just been rolled out in some places; indeed, it still has to be rolled out in one or two areas. I think that all Mr Welsh's questions will be answered when we reach that stage.

Except I would have liked to see details of the performance reviews and all the other methods that are being used to measure performance. Central Government is very quick to introduce very stringent measures to test whether local government is being effective, but it does not seem to apply them to itself.

The targets are all laid out in the contract. I can give you a copy of it if you want.

So I take it that losing prisoners was a mere detail.

As I remember, the company was fined for that.

Auditor General, do you have any observations to make on the response? You might also wish to outline how Audit Scotland plans to monitor the outcome of the contracts.

I have no further comments to make on the letter. As I indicated when the committee previously considered the item, I would expect the appointed auditor of the Prison Service to keep the performance of the contract under review and to provide an assurance on the basis of that analysis when it comes out in a year or so.

Given that the review was undertaken at the Minister for Justice's behest, has she indicated whether she wants you to review the matter one year down the line?

The terms of my report to the committee were based on audit work that would have been undertaken in any case. In other words, I would expect any appointed auditor to look at such a major contract with such clear potential risks as part of their annual audit. At the minister's request, I asked the auditors to bring forward the work that they would have done in due course. This year and in future years, the matter will be monitored as a normal part of the audit process.

Given that the letter has been copied not only to the Minister for Justice but to the Justice 2 Committee for its information, and given the Auditor General's comments, I propose that we note the response. That will allow us to come back later and consider whether the contract has been successful or otherwise and whether it has met its targets and specifications. Do members agree?

Members indicated agreement.