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Your taking legal advice implies that you had some doubts about it.

To do that, do you visit the works?

Therefore, you were satisfied that the milestones had been achieved and that the payments were justified, up to 85 per cent of the value of the vessel.

Did you ever challenge FMEL on how the money was being spent, given what was uncovered about it not paying its suppliers and so on? Was it £9 million or something?

I would like to explore a bit further a couple of areas that have been touched on. We have been talking about data and the quality and availability of data in this committee ever since I can remember. I realise that the pandemic is pretty overwhelming and it is unlikely that anybody was prepared with data sets that could be used to report on it, but there seem to be differences in the way in which data is collected. Local council data seems to be somewhat more robust but non-council data appears to be being collected and presented in a way that I would describe as being random. East Renfrewshire is one of your examples and it has a significant proportion of non-council administrative funding compared to other areas. Are the differences due to the variable data collection at a local level or is it that data groups are linked to specific public bodies and it is difficult to bust that out? Where does that come in?

When Ashleigh Madjitey answers, perhaps she could touch on the point that most non-council spending came through the council is some way. My understanding—and correct me if I am wrong—is that councils used non-council bodies to support them and some funds went directly from the Scottish Government to the non-council bodies. I hope that I am making that clear.

I would like to change this a little bit to talk about fraud, which my colleague Craig Hoy touched on. We have discussed it in other evidence sessions and looked at what is being reported in the UK Government in terms of allegations of fraud and other irregularities around things such as personal protective equipment, in particular. I have seen the figure of £36 billion; I think that that was an official estimate of the money that had somehow gone missing in the system through payments to companies and so on. We hear of inappropriate PPE worth hundreds of millions of pounds having to be destroyed and PPE that was not delivered. It seems unlikely that we have completely body swerved that, given the sheer volumes of money that were paid out due to Covid, but I am not seeing that reflected in the information presented here. I have the suspicion, and I hope that you do too, that there is still more to come out on that.

Finally, your briefing refers to the retrospective fraud risk review that the Scottish Government undertook on 11 major business funds that were administered by councils and other bodies. What are the fraud error rates for funds administered by public bodies and how does that compare with the funds administered by councils?

The next area is the adult disability payment. Your exhibit 2 highlights the huge increases that are expected in the scale of the activity to be undertaken by Social Security Scotland. One of the areas that have been highlighted is the lack of certainty around the levels of staffing that are required to administer the adult disability payment. The lack of certainty is a risk. Given the unknown resource implications of the benefit, how confident are you that Social Security Scotland is well placed to respond to the increase in demand? What is the plan?

I have no doubt that you will be reporting back on the implementation in due course.