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Thank you for clarifying that.

Your report includes a summary of progress against some of your recommendations from previous years’ reports. Some of the recommendations that you made in previous years are repeated this year. Do you think that sufficient progress is being made in the areas that you have highlighted as being important for improving the performance of the national health service in Scotland?

I will now bring in Graham Simpson, who wants to continue on some of the themes introduced by the deputy convener.

Let me pick up that theme. In your evidence to us last week, you referred to your concern about the lack of a medium-term financial strategy, which was also expressed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and other bodies. In your report this week, you refer to there being insufficient clarity about a medium-term financial plan for the NHS and say that we are still awaiting an NHS capital investment and asset management strategy—so some quite important parts of the framework do not exist. I go back to my earlier point: the calls that you have made in previous reports still do not appear to have been met.

Thank you very much. I invite Jamie Greene to come in.

I will draw the evidence session to a close at that point. In doing so, I thank the Auditor General very much for the evidence that he has given us. I also thank Carol Calder, Leigh Johnston and Bernie Milligan for their input. We have quite a lot to think about and we need to consider what our next steps might be. Thank you very much once again for your time and input.

I now move the committee into private session.

Thank you very much. I will begin with a minor technical question. You came before the committee to give evidence in March this year, and you have changed the publication date for your latest report, so it seems that the cycle of your reporting on the financial state and operational performance of the national health service in Scotland has changed. Does that mean that you will revert to publishing your reports every 12 months around this time of year?

We have just a few minutes left, but there is time for a couple of questions from the deputy convener to finish the session by looking at a couple of other aspects of operational performance.

One area of capital spending that has previously come under scrutiny by the committee relates to the programme of investment in national treatment centres. When the chief executive of NHS Scotland was before us in June this year, we asked her about that. She sent us correspondence in which she confirmed that the plan for six national treatment centres had gone from originally costing £200 million to costing more than that. The running total at that time—summer this year—was £827 million, which represents a quadrupling of the cost. Are you in a position to give us an update on where we are with the national treatment centres investment programme?

I think that that is right. That was a significant part of last week’s budget announcement.

I want to move on to another area. I am looking at exhibit 7 in the report that we are considering today, which is a bar chart that shows the annual unitary charges that are payable under public-private partnership contracts. I was quite surprised that that chart stretches all the way to 2045-46. In other words, I thought that we had moved away from the model of private finance initiatives and public-private partnerships into a new age, in which we were no longer liable for the big unitary costs that that model involves, but it looks as though those costs are on-going.

You can keep me right on this, but I think that the normal lifetime of a PFI or PPP contract is about 25 or 30 years. If the expiry date is 2045, I presume that we are talking about capital projects that were commissioned under that form of financing fairly recently.

I have a few more questions on that, but I am conscious of the time, so I invite James Dornan, who joins us via videolink, to put some questions to you.