Chamber and committees

We will do so. If that funding was for this session of Parliament, which ends in six months, there are no guarantees that the £350 million will be available to future Governments and Parliaments, which is a concern.

Linked to the issue of resource is that of people. The report is excellent in highlighting some of the challenges facing the workforce in social care and the care sector. Two statistics jump out at me as the most worrying, because we need people to deliver the services. One is that there is a 10 per cent vacancy rate for social workers. I do not know whether that is good, bad or indifferent in the bigger picture of health and social care. More importantly, a similar proportion—13 per cent—of social workers are very likely to leave the job in the next 12 months. It is not that they will maybe leave or are considering it because they are a bit stressed or overworked. They have clearly been questioned by their employers, unions or third parties and have said that they are very likely to leave. We must assume that that is a fairly accurate figure.

Where did you get those numbers? How concerning are they?

They are very concerning. I would be concerned about any public sector area where four in 10 people felt unsafe in their place of work. That is a shocking statistic, and, given those circumstances, it is no wonder that people are considering leaving the profession—I am surprised that it is only 13 per cent, as it would be a lot higher in any other business. Those people are clearly passionate, love what they do and do not want to give up, but that is a real concern.

I will sum all this up. The Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland have done intensive work in producing the report and highlighting the issues, and it has rightly received a huge amount of media coverage over the past month. Based on your professional judgment, is it Audit Scotland’s position that, by 2030, the Promise will be delivered? Alternatively, is there a risk that the Promise will be broken for some or all care-experienced young people?

Might you revisit the issue in coming years to follow and track progress?

Thank you.

Good morning. I will start with a fundamental question about the Promise as a concept. As is mentioned in your report, the Scottish Government has a clear, well-known and well-defined policy of getting it right for every child, which is commonly referred to as GIRFEC. If every relevant public agency was getting it right for every child, would we need the Promise at all?

Does that strike you as unusual, given how far into the policy we are? The former First Minister made the Promise a high-profile commitment and gave it a top priority—rightly so—nearly six years ago, and we are less than four years away from the date by which the Promise should be completed. Your report from a few weeks ago talks about a lack of clarity, a lack of accountability and a lack of following the money. Those issues have been highlighted in today’s evidence session, and I will come back to them. Given how far we are into the delivery of the policy, that strikes me as unusual for something that has had such attention given to it.

It looks as though the lion’s share of the funding goes on element 1. I am trying to get my head around what has happened. After the Government announced that money would be available, did the CSPPs not make bids for the money, were the bids rejected or was the money simply never made available to them in their block grants or through ring-fenced funding that they could spend? Did the Government never give CSPPs the cash, or was there no appetite for the money to be spent on specific projects? I know that such projects would need to have specific remits.

It is key that we understand what has happened, because we need to know where the fault lines are and why the money that was promised is not coming out of the system.

I understand that, and I am not passing any judgment, one way or the other, on whether that would be appropriate. However, I draw attention to what paragraph 40 of the Audit Scotland report says about the Scottish Government’s responsibility under the “Our Charter” principle of delivering value for money. More importantly, the Auditor General made an interesting point about understanding what effect taking a different approach to social security would have on other bits of the same budget, which support the same cohort of people but in different ways. There is a whole other area that you could expand on—it is maybe for another day—in terms of where you see these benefits being an investment and the ways in which they could bring down expenditure in other public services. That is probably quite a big and complex area of policy to look at, but it is an important one.

Good morning. Thank you very much for joining us. Unfortunately, I have to be the one who talks about money—this is the Public Audit Committee—but I will try to limit it to what is in your report and what we have already heard from Audit Scotland and what is in its report. I will link it to some of the comments you made in your opening statement, to tease out some of the other issues, which are not just financial but very much linked to the finances of the delivery of this devolved benefit.

I will not state the obvious, but both reports point out some of the fiscal anomalies of the Government in Scotland introducing different benefits of this nature. To take one snapshot, in the financial year 2023-24, more was spent than was received from the block grant—to the tune of £171 million. However, looking ahead at the bigger picture, the forecast seems to suggest that, by 2029, the figure could be as high as £700 million to £800 million. Of course, the numbers will vary as we work through those years, but it is a substantial amount of money.

Given that the Scottish Government has a mandatory duty to balance its books, have you identified any concerns that resolving that variance of spend versus what is received may affect other areas of the wider welfare budget or other social security benefits? What effect might that have on recipients of other benefits, for example?

Thank you for allowing me to join remotely this morning. It is much appreciated.

I have listened very carefully to the questions that have been asked, and I have a few other areas to cover, but I want to clarify a few things that have been said. First, I want to press on the issue of gaps in information and data, which came up earlier in the meeting and was raised in the report by the Accounts Commission and the Auditor General. The report is clear on the matter in referring to specific circumstances. Paragraph 35 says:

“there is currently no consistent, comprehensive national monitoring system in place to assess the condition of existing flood-protection schemes.”

The report then goes on to explain that, in practice, that means that, because information about whether the existing schemes are performing effectively is not available, it is not clear if they are providing the protection that they were presumably meant to provide. It is an open question, but who wants to address that specific criticism?