Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am trying to work out whether a process was missing or was not followed, or whether there was a culture—that has been mentioned a good few times during this meeting—in the organisation of not giving two hoots about the process that was meant to have been followed.

I understand that, when an official inquiry takes place, an external body publishes the lessons, but where are the lessons about the census, for example? Where can I go to see the lessons that we have learned and the actions that we have put in place to try to ensure that the same thing does not happen again?

I want to go over a few things again. The first concerns a point that the convener raised about lessons learned. As a committee, how can we get assurance that the lessons learned process is in place? Is it visible so that people can see what those lessons were, and so that we can go back and check whether that has been done, rather than just having a tick-box exercise?

Is a document produced after a project or piece of work has taken place to say, “These are the lessons we learned”? I understand that you are saying that changes were made, but is there a list that captures the things that went wrong and the lessons to be learned?

The reason why I ask is that a witness at a previous meeting explained that the more transparency you have, the greater the risk of “government by WhatsApp”. Is that recognised by the Scottish Government? Can we get an assurance that that is not happening and that we do not have ministers and civil servants communicating by WhatsApp to avoid freedom of information requests or anything else?

I guess that that goes back to the reporting issue. It looks as though there is £2 billion but, when you dig a bit deeper, you see that it is not as bad as it seems.

Were the past failures relating to vessels 801 and 802 because of a failure in the process? Was no process in place, or were people not following the process that they were meant to follow?

My question is whether the First Minister was asking for advice about all three harassment reviews or just one in particular.

Whom did he ask?

I go on to critical challenge. I understand that the funding for organisations such as the SFC or Audit Scotland is safe; however, as Michelle Thomson mentioned earlier, we had the SCVO in, which said that its members felt that there was a risk that their funding might stop if they were critical of the Government. That is an issue. What can we do to change that situation?