Seòmar agus comataidhean

Over the past 18 months, councils, and their education departments in particular, have been working round the clock to set up hybrid learning and distance online learning and to get in-classroom learning back up and running. Do you think that councils have had sufficient resource to compile the relevant data or is that something that could be lost in the scramble to get education back up and running?

Your report explains that improving outcomes for children and young people through school education requires the contribution of wider stakeholders—health, social work and the third sector—and that the Covid-19 children and families collective leadership group, which was established in May 2020, will help to provide scope to build future cross-sector collaboration. How important in improving outcomes is the contribution of those wider stakeholders and why?

The children and families collective leadership group was set up in addition to the Covid-19 education recovery group. How effectively do you think those groups, specifically the children and families collective leadership group, are in sharing and highlighting good practice? Do you as yet have any indication of whether good practice is finding its way through to measurable and implementable solutions?

The question is actually a little bit unrelated. Something that has not come up today is the Government’s plan for the creation of a national care service. When we talked previously, we discussed the role that Audit Scotland might have in relation to that. This week, the First Minister called the proposed national care service

“perhaps ... the biggest public sector reform that Parliament will ever have undertaken.”—[Official Report, 31 August 2021; c 13.]

Given the scale and scope of the proposed service—it could touch on adult social care, children’s services, social work, drug and alcohol services, GP provision and the criminal justice system—what role do you see Audit Scotland having in relation to development of the policy and the service so that we can achieve good outcomes, and so that you do not have to produce in, perhaps, five or 10 years what could be one of the largest “What went wrong” reports in the history of the Parliament?

Anybody who turns on their television set will see the impact that Covid has had on our courts, schools and hospitals. To what extent do you anticipate that certain sectors, such as the NHS and the education and justice systems, have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic? What work will you undertake in order to specifically track their recovery in future months and years?

Welcome to the meeting, Mr Boyle, and thank you for setting out your programme and priorities so clearly this morning.

You mentioned Covid and your work on following the pandemic pound. The committee very much welcomes what you are doing, given that, as you have pointed out, such spending amounts to £13 billion and counting. How do you plan to track the spending to mitigate Covid, and how will you assess its effectiveness?

Following up on Graham Simpson’s point on the definition of dancing, I wonder about the use of regulation 5(1)(r), as it raises a question about the context. The provision governs nightclubs but, hypothetically, if I were to dance my way round a supermarket—or go very fast round the supermarket, as in the TV programme “Supermarket Sweep”—would that be a form of exercise that would allow me not to wear a mask?

Mr Simpson raised questions in relation to the definition of dancing, but I also wonder whether the way in which the provision is framed opens up an issue to which we should be alerting the lead committee regarding the context and the premises in which the activity takes place.

I am an elected member of East Lothian Council and a board member of the South East Scotland Transport Partnership.

Thank you, and congratulations on being elected as convener.

From looking through the report, I picked up what I thought was a sense of frustration from your predecessor as convener, particularly in paragraph 4 of the foreword. It says:

“We kept seeing the same issues again and again across the public sector—leadership challenges, poor workforce planning, weak governance arrangements, failed ICT projects and an absence of key data making it impossible to determine whether policies and initiatives were actually making a difference to people’s lives.”

Maybe that is one observation that we should keep uppermost in our minds as we set out on the work programme.

I have a couple of points to make on the previous committee’s recommendations, which might lead us towards ending the session without the same sense of frustration.

Paragraph 25 of the report states:

“The incoming Committee may also wish to consider inviting SPICe to prepare a briefing on mechanisms used in other jurisdictions to follow-up audit report recommendations,”

so that there is action beyond the identification of problems such as those that we will no doubt find.

Colin Beattie alluded to my next point, I think. Paragraph 64 states:

“The Committee recommends that the remit of the public audit committee ... is reviewed with a view to enabling its successor committee to freely initiate its own inquiries.”

I hope that we can do that.

My third observation is that we should consider paragraph 56. As we emerge from Covid, and given the huge amounts of public moneys that have been pumped into the economy,

“it will also be important that scrutiny of how public money is being used to support the economy and its recovery from COVID-19 examines the impact on inequalities, including regional inequality.”

I know that we will come to that in considering the work programme.

I thought that considering those three issues might mean that we do not end the session with the same sense of frustration that I picked up from our predecessor committee.

I am a member of East Lothian Council.