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Good morning. I have a couple of questions about the business plan, which refers to section 31 of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 and your intention to raise issue with that. That is to do with disqualification, sanctions and so on. Can you flesh out your thinking on that for the benefit of the committee, please?

Last week, we heard from the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman. We talked about own-initiative powers, whether they are a good idea, and whether they should be pursued. What is your approach to that? Do you feel that you should have own-initiative powers?

Is COSLA actively considering such a piece of work?

In that sense, people felt really hard done by under the legal system in Scotland, which I would have thought was there to deliver justice, rather than thwart it. Do you have a view on that?

The term for that is a functus officio determination, is it not?

Those are quite low numbers when it comes to progress, if there are 105 buildings and only 27 assessments are in commission and only one building has had any remediation so far. Would you accept that? Are the provisions in the bill likely to help you to accelerate that?

I have some questions relating to the Auditor General’s previous reports. You probably remember that I asked about that during several meetings of the Public Audit Committee. You have identified serious failings that occurred in the organisation, although I stress that they happened before you joined it.

We know that a number of complaints were closed without proper consideration. What are the complainants’ views on the outcome of that process? Have we tried to gather that information, or have we just said that we are sorry, but we cannot revisit those complaints? Has any attempt been made to connect with those people to find out their views on that experience?

One of the major failings of the process was that many complaints were not investigated at all.

Where should we turn, as the Government, to remedy that? We cannot have the law thwarting the delivery of justice. We are talking about honest people who came with genuine, honest complaints that were never dealt with. They were not even considered and dismissed; they were never touched by the predecessor organisation.

What would need to change to reverse that?