Audit Committee, 30 Sep 2003
Meeting date: Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Official Report
215KB pdf
Work Programme
We move on to item 4, which is consideration of the committee's work programme. Members might want to have before them the accompanying paper that details the programme and tries to lay out a likely time scale for our deliberations. It also takes account of the likely publication dates of reports that Audit Scotland has compiled either by itself or with other bodies.
As members will see, our next meeting takes place on Tuesday 28 October and is followed by further meetings on 11 and 25 November. Given the amount of evidence-taking work that we will already have carried out, it is suggested that we do not take evidence on 28 October, to allow the clerks to prepare reports. I am not saying that we cannot take evidence on that date. However, if we do so, it will mean another report to compile. We are already gathering a backlog of work for the clerks, which is why the outline in the paper does not mention an evidence-taking session on 28 October.
However, we will take evidence from the Scottish Further Education Funding Council on 11 November and there will be an opportunity to hold further evidence-taking sessions on 25 November and 9 December. We can discuss the items on today's agenda later in the meeting, but it might be beneficial if I flag up to members the suggestion that, before we break for Christmas, we should take evidence on the report "Moving to Mainstream" and its financial implications for scrutinising bills.
There is also the likelihood—
On a point of clarification, how will we take that evidence? Are we going to carry out some investigative work on that matter?
We will have to discuss how to undertake that work. We might decide to take oral evidence before Christmas on the financial process of passing bills, which will require holding an oral evidence-taking session with the Executive, clerks or people who handle the bill process.
The Auditor General's timetable also mentions the publication of the report on Scottish Enterprise. Depending on its exact publication date, members might also want to take evidence on that report before we break for Christmas. The fact that the work programme contains gaps does not mean that we have decided not to do anything. At each meeting, we will take up the reports that have been laid before Parliament and make decisions about them at that point. As a result, I caution members not to feel that we can fill in all the gaps immediately. Later in the meeting we will discuss the report on general practitioner prescribing and how we will approach taking evidence on hospital cleaning.
If members have no points about the work programme, I should say that as part of our intention to be open and transparent—I see smirks round the table—we will post the work programme on our website so that people can find out what we are doing. Are members agreed?
Members indicated agreement.
We will keep members updated on any additions to the work programme. Some things might even be added today.