Chamber and committees

Fergus Ewing joins us remotely this morning, and Paul Sweeney will be with us shortly.

No other colleagues are indicating that they wish to comment.

I continue to be perplexed. The inquiry in England and Wales has managed to accommodate the review into abuse in the care sector and, that being the case, it is unclear to me why there is resistance to closing the gap in the scope of the inquiry in Scotland. That is very much the petitioner’s perspective, from the evidence that we heard, and that point remains largely unanswered. The argument that it would create difficulty or delay does not seem to have been borne out by the ability of the inquiry elsewhere to accommodate that area of abuse, so we really want to pursue that point.

Is the committee content with the recommendations that have been made in relation to the evidence that we heard?

Members indicated agreement.

PE1912, on funding for council venues, was lodged by Wendy Dunsmore. It calls on Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to provide the necessary additional revenue to local councils to run essential services and venues.

When we last considered the petition, we agreed to investigate the issues with local authority chief executives. We have received responses from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, Angus Council, North Ayrshire Council, Argyll and Bute Council, North Lanarkshire Council and Fife Council.

The responses highlighted a number of common challenges for leisure and sport funding at local authority level including: low customer return rates after pandemic lockdowns, resulting in reduced revenue for leisure venues; continuing financial pressure as a result of funding cuts; and the creation of limited flexibility for councils because of ring-fenced funding from the Scottish Government.

Local authorities also highlighted a number of changes in their service provision to tackle the issue of financial sustainability. However, concerns remain over the allocation of funding for sport and leisure activities in the future, which very much echo the concerns of the petitioner.

Do members have any comments or suggestions for action?

Do others have a view?

With regard to the development and delivery of multiyear projects of core services that are provided by the Parliament, you could point to a number of different examples. Maintenance of the lifts is an example: you might ask how much you know about how much it is costing to replace or maintain the lifts in the building. Such costs are all incorporated within the particular line item elements of the budget. I think that the corporate body would be more concerned were it to find—we would be alerted to it—that there was a significant problem evolving in the development of a project that was now somehow spiralling out of control or had spiralling costs.

In each year—and at each meeting of the corporate body throughout the year—the various departments of the Parliament schedule fairly detailed and extensive reports, which we consider. I think that many of those are subsequently available to the public as minutes. So, I do think that it was sufficiently transparent.

With regard to the overall portfolio of a £100 million budget—it might have been about £80 million at that time—the level of detail that the committee sought or asked us about was accommodated. As I said, I was asked questions in that year and in subsequent years about the project’s ongoing development.

I begin by acknowledging and thanking the officials who have worked tirelessly to ensure that the sustained efforts of external parties who have sought to break into and corrupt our network have been frustrated and defeated on each occasion. The corporate body has been advised of those efforts and it takes the issue seriously. I seem to remember that we have seen briefings from Government Communications Headquarters—GCHQ—which is obviously very exciting. A genuine and sustained effort has been made to attack the network, and I know that the team has worked incredibly hard and succeeded in frustrating it. I also know that, in developing the new website, as Alan Balharrie will now explain, the understanding that that is an on-going issue is very much to the fore of our thinking.

There has been quite detailed correspondence between us, so I do not think that there is any particular need to repeat all that, and we are quite happy to move straight to questions.

However, I point out that I am not a website designer or an information technology specialist—I am probably one of those dinosaurs who is the last person that you would consult on any such matters. Like many other laypeople probably do, I imagine that you can go to Currys PC World and buy a website for £5.99 and that that will probably suffice. However, with an organisation as huge and complex, and of such public interest, as the Parliament, it is important that we have an accessible website, given that it is accessed by many people from not just within but outwith the Parliament, including from around the world.

You will need to bear in mind that the previous website was launched 10 years ago, which was the same time that the iPad was launched. So much has changed in life since then, not least with mobile communications and people’s ability to access things in ways that are quite different from how things were accessed previously. I am afraid that the previous website had become largely obsolete, it was incapable of being maintained and it was certainly not something that could be accessed easily. It required to be upgraded.

The inability of the public to access the website was very much a feature of the public engagement meetings that were conducted by the commission on parliamentary reform, which was established by Ken Mackintosh and on which I was pleased to sit. It might be the case that users in the building who were familiar with the website felt able to access it with ease, but that was not the case for those trying to engage from elsewhere. That was the corporate body’s justification and reasoning when it took the decision some years ago to commence the establishment of a new website.

That is how the new website came about. I know that you will have detailed questions on what came about and, possibly, the process that led to that as well. We are very happy to take your questions. Michelle Hegarty, Alan Balharrie and Susan Duffy will assist me—or perhaps prevent me from contributing—as we go through the questions.

The corporate body reviews these things, but in the sense that they are approved projects in a schedule, so there is a monitoring and an understanding of how the work is progressing. The corporate body might be more exercised by a project that comes out of left field and for which there has been no provision, such as Police Scotland’s recommendations in relation to security in the building, none of which had been anticipated in a five or 10-year plan and which required to be progressed with a degree of urgency. In such a case, the corporate body considers the recommendations and total costs, and the recommendations may or may not be accepted as we decide what we are going to authorise and the exceptional item of expense that we have to approve.

I will ask Michelle Hegarty to come in, but that report exists to some extent—we have a red-amber-green traffic-light warning report on all the risks and developments in the Parliament and on the progress that has been made against them. It is not that such things come to us only if we ask for them—we are proactively alerted to them.

The website project came largely within budget and on time, with the caveat that the pandemic complicated things because resources had to be diverted away from its development to things such as the hybrid working of Parliament, for which we had no advance notice, provision or additional staffing that we could deploy, other than those people who were working on the website at the time. I would therefore take issue with the idea that the corporate body is not being advised of all those things.

It was not £3 million in one year and the £100 million is an annual figure.