Therein lies the problem. The builder who constructed the house subsequently went out of business and could not perform any remediation. The owner is left with the house and unable to sell it. I am trying to get at whether we have improved those circumstances for the public in Scotland who are buying and selling houses.

Do you recognise that that is a potential issue even going forward now? When people buy a house, one of their principal concerns must be whether it is fire safe. Somebody should tell them whether it is, and they should be able to see that in documentary evidence, without opening up cavities and having a look. Surely, that should be recorded somewhere to give people the assurance that the house that they are about to buy complies with all those requirements. Do people get that as purchasers or does it happen through the survey process?

Is the process thorough enough to find deficiencies that are as serious as those that I mentioned? In that particular case, it clearly was not thorough enough, so I wonder whether the new standards that we have introduced will give people the assurance that that kind of thing cannot happen in the future—particularly for fire safety but also for other matters that I have mentioned. Has the process improved? Could that circumstance happen again?

That is a great point. A number of issues were raised with the committee when we looked at this previously, as well as with me in my role as a constituency member. I will just share an example with you and ask for your opinion on it.

A retired person bought a flat and subsequently wanted to sell that flat, only to discover that it had no fire safety measures and no sound insulation. They are now having incredible difficulty, as you might imagine, in trying to sell it. There is a debate about where the responsibility falls—there is the builder’s responsibility and then, of course, there is the responsibility of the local authority to inspect, and so on. It is in that territory. Whose responsibility is it to assure a person who is about to buy a house that it is fit for purpose, especially in relation to fire safety and other measures such as sound insulation?

I was going to come to you anyway on that point, John-Paul, to see whether you could assist with that type of inquiry.

I asked this question previously. Is it possible for people to submit a fresh complaint about old matters?

Good morning, Ian. My question is about restoring public confidence, which you mentioned in your remarks. We know that advice has been given to you that you cannot revisit complaints that were made in the past. Other members have raised that matter with you previously.

Do you not think that there is an obligation, for reasons of natural justice and to restore public confidence, to re-investigate complaints that were clearly not handled appropriately? There could be a potential feeling of injustice because, as stated in paragraph 19 of the Auditor General’s report, complaints had not been investigated in compliance with the legislation. On balance, do you not feel that greater weight should be attached to that aspect of restoring public confidence than to advice that you might have received not to revisit those complaints?

I have a supplementary question on the digital exclusion work that you are going to do, Auditor General. I am pleased to hear that that is going ahead. Will it extend to examining the models of interaction that can often cause exclusion to widen? For example, when people try to get information from or interact with their energy supplier online, they often talk to a software bot rather than to people. It is difficult to negotiate your way through that kind of stuff. Will you spend any time considering the models of engagement that, in my opinion, widen exclusion?

I have a final question for you, just to get your views on the table. What lessons have been learned from the process of the concluded investigations and so on that will deliver and restore the public confidence that you have mentioned a few times?

My next question was going to be whether that advice could be shared, either in private or public, with the committee, so it is very much appreciated that that is possible. Just to emphasise the point, are we being told that that direction overrides the requirement—the duty—to deliver justice to people who have raised complaints? I would like to separate the complaints that were dealt with in which the complainant was unhappy with the outcome from the complaints that were not properly investigated. How on earth could that direction supersede those? That is what I find difficult to understand.

Auditor General, how can the public be assured that a difference has been made? It is one thing to deliver recommendations—to agree with them, say that you are implementing them and then actually implement them—but how does anyone determine whether performance has improved, or whether a difference has been made in the quality and value of public services? That has been a recurring issue at the Parliament’s audit committees over many years. How do you plan to square that circle—if you can—to show the public that differences have been made? How can we evidence that?