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The Finance and Public Administration Committee recently produced its pre-budget scrutiny report. Do you agree with the criticisms that were made of the Scottish Government’s public service reform programme?

Do you think that there is a will from the Government to be more transparent?

Thank you.

Last year, you were critical of the transparency of Scottish Government borrowing. Are you satisfied that the Scottish Government is taking steps to improve the transparency of how it reports its borrowing decisions? If so, how has transparency improved?

Auditor General, when my colleague Graham Simpson was asking you about underspend, you said that, if the committee were interested, the Government could provide it with much more detail. Is that the kind of detail that should be readily available to us without our having to ask for it?

The workforce challenges briefing highlights the need for

“better data on the size, cost and skillset of the workforce in over 100 of its public bodies”

to better understand how workforce reforms will impact services. Can you give us any more detail on any work that you are aware of that is under way to address the data gaps?

You state in your section 22 report that:

“The Scottish Government must develop a clear roadmap of how the design and delivery of public services will be transformed to be financially sustainable.”

What would that road map look like? How quickly would you like to see it?

If the Government gave us more information, it would save it a lot of man-hours spent dealing with freedom of information requests.

Do you have any concerns about the increasing level of repayment charges linked to borrowing? Has the Scottish Government taken a view on what is considered to be reasonable?

You mentioned the budget. What else—what details—should we expect to see in the upcoming budget in that area?

We will come back to questions on workforce planning.

I want to move on to the issue of social security. What measures should Social Security Scotland take to assess levels of fraud and error in the benefits that it administers? Is it taking sufficient action to address those issues?

Good morning. Given the non-recurring way in which the 2022-23 changes to improve pay deals and provide cost of living support occurred, and given that increases in public sector pay will be baselined into the 2023-24 budget and beyond, how can fiscal sustainability of the public sector payroll be achieved? Do you think that that can be done without reducing the size of the public sector workforce?