Chamber and committees

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?

I ask that question because there is an interesting quote on page 22 of your report from an unnamed children’s services staff member, who, I assume, is trying to deliver the Promise. They are quoted as saying:

“does GIRFEC sit above The Promise or does The Promise provide a framework in which GIRFEC then sits?”

Do you have a view on the answer to that question?

The system sure is complex. In relation to the workforce, which I will ask about in a moment, I was quite struck by exhibit 8, which shows that somebody who works in social care or the care sector faces 60 different—and sometimes competing—pieces of legislation and policies. That is a complex landscape for somebody on the front line, who might be dealing with very difficult situations, to navigate simply in order to do their day job. That is testament to those staff. That was a statement rather than a question for you, Auditor General.

You go into great detail on the whole family wellbeing fund. What is the situation? Four or five years ago, the Government announced a dedicated £500 million—£0.5 billion—to deliver the Promise. That is a substantial amount of money. You say that the Scottish Government “introduced”—that is your terminology—£0.5 billion. I do not know what “introduced” means. Does it mean that the Government spent, made available or delivered that money? In the next paragraph, you say that, to date, only £148 million of that funding has been committed in budgets or is visible in budgets, so there is £352 million that has not been spent or simply does not exist. Do we know why that is the case?

Thank you very much. I will pick up on something that you just said that I find very interesting. That figure of £770 million is, of course, based on a number of assumptions, but it also assumes that the status quo will continue for the next five years and does not take into account the Government’s response to any of your recommendations. Therefore the obvious question is this. If, in an ideal world, from your point of view, the Government accepted and implemented all your recommendations, would that figure of £770 million go up or down?

That is helpful. Thank you.

I presume that those are questions for ministers, which we can rightly ask in our own way.