There is an inference in what you have said and what is in this letter that, somehow, this Audit Scotland report is slowing things down or making things worse. I do not know how different the clearance report was to the final report, but the letter explicitly says that the clearance report

“will not accelerate pace of change, instead risks slowing the current one.”

In fact, it says that the clearance draft “misses” opportunities

“to drive pace and progress”.

I apologise if I am misunderstanding, but it is not the job of Audit Scotland to drive pace and progress. It is the job of Audit Scotland to comment on pace and progress.

You say that progress has been made. Since the Promise was first made, a third of councils in Scotland have declared a housing emergency. Our briefings from COSLA and Shelter Scotland state that nearly 17,000 children are homeless in Scotland and more than 10,000 are in temporary accommodation. Does that sound like we are keeping the Promise for those 17,000 children? It does not sound like it to me.

Most of the ground has been covered by those with far more in-depth knowledge of the subject than I have, but one thing that has struck me throughout this evidence-taking session—and indeed in other similar sessions, particularly on NHS boards—is that these are not new issues. These matters that have been raised by Audit Scotland with previous iterations of this committee as well as with this committee and, no doubt, will be raised with future public audit committees.

However, we are not talking about financial auditing here—people are involved. Indeed, the convener opened the session by pointing out that people are suffering, and sometimes self-harming, as a result of inaction. At what point, Auditor General, does what I can only assume is your frustration at the lack of progress turn into something more statutory? After all, we cannot keep producing section 22 reports year after year after year that say the same thing and still see no adequate progress by, or accountability from, these public bodies. What more can we as a Parliament or as a committee do? Indeed, what more can you, with your statutory abilities, do?

When will the rest of it be administered?

Where did the figure of £0.5 billion get plucked from? Who said, “That is how much we need to deliver the Promise”? It sounds like an arbitrary number. Having read the Audit Scotland report, it also sounds to me as if the Government has no idea whether that money is being effective in delivering what it has to deliver. It is virtually impossible to follow the money, so before you spend another £250 million, how confident can you be that the money will be well spent?

Yes, but that is not what the letter says. It says:

“In short, at worst, the report could derail Scotland’s progress towards keeping the promise.”

That is not welcoming the report or accepting its recommendations, is it?

I thank our witnesses for their responses to our questions thus far.

I will try to pick up some of the areas that we have covered, to give our witnesses the opportunity to make sure that they leave this public session having said everything that they think they need to.

I will reflect on the example of housing that was given by Mr Anderson as chair of the Oversight Board. He raised a practical example of how the Promise is essentially not being kept. Although I think that it is useful to talk about the specifics of that issue, I simply ask the Government, based on that example, what the point is of having that new model of oversight in the Oversight Board. It is clearly a new way of doing things: it is attached to the Promise but independent enough to critique progress—or otherwise. However, what is the point in having an oversight group if the Government does not react or respond to the warnings that it is given? We heard a classic example of two years of dither and delay in responding to a very specific problem, when instead a huge difference could have been made for a cohort of young people.

I am glad that you mentioned that. I received your manifesto asks the other day. It is interesting. You say that it is difficult to quantify how short councils are in terms of their ability to deliver the Promise, but we have specific asks from COSLA, and it is not a small amount of cash that is being sought—it is a £16 billion inflationary uplift to, I presume, the block grant funding. There is £750 million for social care, which COSLA claims would increase the social worker workforce by more than 19,000—I will come on to the workforce in a moment; £844 million for the capital grant; and another nearly £1 billion for affordable housing supply, which may address some of the housing issues.

Mr Rennick, I imagine that you do not have £16 billion sloshing around your coffers at the moment. However, do you see the point? If local councils are not properly funded, there is no way on earth that we will deliver the Promise by 2030.

Let us talk about the whole family wellbeing fund. How much of the £0.5 billion that was promised has been spent?

I think that you are right. I think, too, that people would understand that, for every pound raised, not exactly a pound would go full circle and come back to the Scottish Government. There is an element of acceptance that there is a complex settlement agreement and that the financial relationship between the UK Government and the Scottish Government is complicated, and that calculation is not always obvious to the public, as you have alluded to. However, people might be surprised about how little comes back—based on the statistic that you mentioned in your opening statement, it is about 30 per cent of the extra money, which they pay. We are talking about people who go out to work, pay their taxes and assume that most of that money will come full circle and go back to the Government that is taxing them in the first place, given that these are devolved decisions. The fact that so little of it comes back to the Government is what people will be surprised about. They will want to understand why so little of that extra money that they are giving to the Government is available to it to spend on public services. That may affect people’s choices—it may affect their ability to have faith in paying more tax, if you like.