Audit Scotland (Study Programme)
We have a paper on the study programme, to which members have made a number of contributions. Members will notice that there are question marks next to some of their suggestions for study topics. It might be helpful for members who have made suggestions to elaborate on them or give us some sense of priority if they have made more than one.
Given that we have submitted suggestions, it might be helpful to hear from Audit Scotland.
We will do that, but I just wanted to check that members who have contributed to the document had nothing further to say about their suggestions. If not, we will move to the Auditor General.
I invite Caroline Gardner to respond.
I want to outline the process that we are following. As well as asking the committee for its views on our future study programme, we have consulted widely across the public sector and further afield over the summer. That consultation period is drawing to a close, and we are pulling together people's comments with what the committee has suggested. We are also having meetings with people such as Sir John Elvidge and other key players to ensure that we have an informed debate.
We would like to take the comments that the committee has usefully provided to us, perhaps follow up on a couple with individual members to get under the skin of the particular concerns and then play all of that into a draft proposal for the programme. We will ask the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission to approve that proposal in late October or early November, which will allow time for the work to be done.
If members are content, we would like to reserve the option of coming back to them to get a more detailed understanding of the thinking behind their comments and to explain how we might be able to take account of them in designing the study proposals and programme as a whole.
Thank you.
Two study topics that stand out for me are the NHS dental service and affordable housing. Those topics cover major and practical problems that I have had to deal with in my constituency. If practical solutions could be found to those practical problems, it would be of great assistance to many people.
I do not disagree with any of the suggestions, because each has its merits and covers an issue that we as MSPs are aware of locally and in Parliament.
I want to comment briefly on Susan Deacon's suggestion for a themed study on investment in children, families and early years. It caught my eye because so many different avenues would lead into it. Many different departments and people outside the Parliament have a role in that area and use public funds to provide services, but there does not seem to be any way of pulling that together to set targets, invest in them and monitor the results.
I suspect that, if we get into the issue, such a study would take years rather than months because so much is involved. However, if we are serious as a Parliament about making life better for people in Scotland, this issue must be at the heart of that. I congratulate Susan Deacon on pulling her suggestion together.
Do members have further comments?
I want to give my backing to two or three of the topics that Susan Deacon suggested, particularly the one on affordable housing. I also want to back up what Mary Mulligan just said about investment in children and families, which I think is an important issue and probably one of the difficult ones to tackle because much of the payback will be in the medium to long term. I do not know whether that would make it difficult to deal with the issue in a report, but we should consider it in some way.
I also want to pick up on Susan Deacon's suggested topic of regeneration. I know from my constituency that that is a fraught issue that has different strands, one of which is people's perception of regeneration. Communities perceive regeneration as the delivery of local jobs to local people and so on, which might not be Government's view of regeneration. The task is to consider regeneration in practical, outcome-based terms and to assess what has and has not worked.
Regeneration is an area in which we can go round and round—I was going to say round and round the houses, but we have to build them first, and that is regeneration. We can talk a lot of warm words about it, but not really achieve anything. Therefore, it is a good idea to focus on what has and has not worked, and on what has been done practically to get around issues that affect regeneration. For example, at the weekend I attended a meeting about regeneration in north Edinburgh, which we discussed earlier. One issue that cropped up is how we get local jobs for local people there when the biggest regeneration in Scotland is taking place on their doorstep. The area has not achieved as much as other places have, such as Dundee, which has done good work on regeneration.
There are examples of best practice around the country, but they do not seem to have been shared. That means that five years down the road in a project, people could turn round and go, "Oh, well, we haven't actually got to where we wanted to be." A lot of work could probably be done to share good practice on what is an important issue for many of our communities.
Three of us suggested reducing reoffending as a study topic. The issue is not just about prisons; it is about the operation of and investment in all the alternative programmes and about assessing the value for money of what happens inside and outside prisons to try to reduce reoffending. The issue is a big one and there is huge potential for making genuine progress in reducing reoffending and saving money. I would like the issue to be regarded as at least a medium priority rather than its being left out in the cold. We could do an across-the-board consideration of all the programmes for reducing reoffending that take place inside and outside prison. We could make an interesting analysis of best value.
I have not heard the word "holistic" for a long time, though I sensed that it was about to be spoken. Are there any further comments or points?
I just want to say for the record that, as nice as it was to be credited for coming up with some of the ideas, they were actually Audit Scotland's proposals, to which I responded. However, of the topics that I suggested, I am pleased to hear colleagues speak positively about the idea of doing something about investment in children and early years. However, I note that nobody commented on my other suggestion, which was a new suggestion about whether work should be done on the cost of democracy and regulation. I will leave that suggestion hanging for now; the only other thing I want to say about it is that it ties in with a comment in the main body of the Audit Scotland document and that I feel strongly about it.
Ensuring that people are not overaudited, inspected and regulated is a big issue. I know that the Auditor General shares that view; I have heard him give a thoughtful examination of the issue—you have also done that, convener. It is worth putting on record that this committee is sensitive to the issue. I think that all of us want any audit process to add value and knowledge to the organisations concerned. I worry about crossovers between, for example, NHS Quality Improvement Scotland and HMIE with regard to the number of times that people are asked to fill in forms and answer questions about their work and so on.
I have two brief points to make. First, I think that several members put their finger on the work that we are trying to do just now, which is to identify areas to look at that are broad enough to have an impact but which are also manageable. That would allow us to come up with something concrete rather than make broad generalisations that are not of much practical help.
Secondly, I thank Susan Deacon for the reminder about joint working across the world of scrutiny. We are committed to that already. We think that our proposals take account of the work that other bodies have planned. Forthcoming studies, such as that on hospital catering, will be done jointly with NHS QIS. We seek to keep the issue of joint working in mind when planning all our work.
Good. I think that that has proven to be a useful discussion of the Audit Scotland future study programme. I thank members and Caroline Gardner for that.
We have made up significant time, to the extent that members can now have a comfort break. We are about to move into private session, which was planned for 11.45—look how well you have done. I must thank the minister in particular for helping us with that. I suspend the meeting and we will reconvene in private session at 11.45.
Meeting suspended until 11:46 and thereafter continued in private until 12:52.