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.

In the year to which you refer, I gave evidence to the previous finance committee and colleagues asked me questions about development of the new website, which are in the Official Report. Therefore, MSPs on the predecessor committee were aware of development of the website and interrogated me on it.

We have already responded to feedback in number of ways, and a number of initiatives are already planned. As well as the matter of the range of users, the team also had to accommodate the significant issue of the number of ways in which people now seek to access the website. There has been a huge shift to using mobile digital technology to access it, which was not something that the previous system was capable of sustaining.

I invite Alan Balharrie to answer that.

That is a suitably pejoratively phrased question, convener. As someone who does not access websites and things, I might find these things complicated, too. It certainly is the case that, if you were an internal building user, you understood how the previous website worked and were familiar with your way around it. However, it was a hugely lugubrious website. It had hundreds of thousands of documents in it, which were slowing down its operation and decreasing its efficiency. That is unlike any website for any Government department or Parliament that you would expect to come across. Our content was extremely dense and, if you were not one of the internal building users who was familiar with the site, you would not have had a good experience using it.

Have we got a final product that is incapable of evolving further? I am sure that that is not the case. I know that Susan Duffy is very much involved in engagement around how the website might progress, so it might be worth while hearing from her at this point.

I think that the answer to that is largely yes, and by the corporate body, on the advice that we received.