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Welcome back. In this session, we will take evidence on the Auditor General’s briefing paper on tackling child poverty in Scotland, which came out on 22 September—so, by our standards, it is relatively hot off the press.

I am pleased that the Auditor General is joined by, from Audit Scotland, Tricia Meldrum, senior manager, and Corrinne Forsyth, senior auditor, performance audit and best value; and I am particularly pleased to welcome Andrew Burns, who is here as a member of the Accounts Commission, because the report was jointly produced by Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission. Andrew, we are delighted that you are able to join us.

I turn first to the Auditor General for an introductory statement, after which we will ask a number of questions.

I will just follow up on Colin Beattie’s questions. It would be useful for us to understand what the vacancy rate is now and what it was at the time of the report.

I am also interested in the fact that sponsor roles are not seen as “sexy”—somebody says that in the report; I am not sure that it is the view of the report. I am not sure what that means. People in sponsor roles are in bands A to C. The salary range starts off in the low £20,000s in band A, but goes up to about £76,000 in band C. Are you having difficulty in attracting people to the higher-paid posts or to the lower-paid posts? Where is the problem in that spectrum of pay grades?

That is helpful. We will come to questions on the local government and health board data collection and reporting mechanism. At this point, Sharon Dowey has a few questions to put to you.

I am going to have to draw this session to a close, but I thank Andrew Burns, Corrinne Forsyth, Tricia Meldrum and the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle, for their evidence this morning. I am afraid that we have run out of road, but we might well come back to you to follow up your oral evidence.

I now draw the public part of this morning’s meeting to a close.

Colin, I am afraid that we are running out of time, so I will have to move things on. The clock is against us. Thanks for your questions. If there is time, I would bring you back in, but I think that that will be very unlikely.

Craig Hoy has the final area of questioning.

I am about to turn to Colin Beattie. Before I do that, I must observe that Mr Johnston has invariably appeared before us or our predecessor committee when things have gone wrong and when section 22 reports have been conducted by the Auditor General. This morning, we are outside the eye of a crisis and are keen to have an evidence session that allows us to understand how things work now. That is why we are interested in hearing more about where things are going right.

Colin Beattie is joining us online.

Thank you very much.

I remind people that Colin Beattie is with us, but is joining us remotely.

You have outlined some of the key messages in the report, some of which are quite startling—from gaps in data to your assessment that

“It is not possible to assess the success of the ... first four-year plan”

and that there has not been a demonstrable

“clear shift to preventing child poverty.”

Those are quite important messages and, as you have set out, there are areas in which you are keen that improvements be made.

You finished by explaining that you plan to carry out more work. Will you elaborate on that a little? What further work is already in train or is likely? Will you tell us a little about the timetable that you have set yourself for that?

Thanks. You mentioned at one point that Covid has had an effect, which we fully appreciate. However, the committee also wants to understand whether the foundations are in place to deliver the data, notwithstanding external factors.

We are interested to hear your views on the robustness of the data and on the time lag, because—I presume—that makes it exceptionally difficult for policy makers to base their decisions on current evidence. Parliament has legislated for statutory targets to be met, but if there is no data to understand what progress is being made or what regress is taking place, that makes it pretty hard to give any meaning to the targets that have been set.

Your briefing mentions that new data on levels of child poverty in 2020-21 are expected in 2023. Have you any expectation that that data will be more robust? Will it be better? Will it address the deficiencies that you outlined in the briefing? I am happy for you to bring in the other members of your team, as needed.

On that last point—and this covers part, though not the full extent, of the evidence that we have taken this morning—you say quite critically in the briefing paper:

“Gaps in data and not enough involvement of children and families with lived experience of poverty are hindering the development of sufficiently targeted policies”.

That lack of involvement is actually having an effect on the policy-making process and therefore the outcomes, and it is absolutely critical, is it not, to the approach that is adopted if we are going to get these things right.

There is another issue with regard to employability that I am bound to ask you to clarify. Am I not right in thinking that two out of three children living in poverty in Scotland live in households with at least one adult in work? This situation has come about not because there is a big unemployment problem, but because people are not being very well paid when they go out to work.

It would be interesting to understand the process in relation to the establishment of Scottish Rail Holdings and whether that is classed as a small body. I do not know how many people it directly employs, for example.

There is a tension here, is there not? I picked up something else from reading the report. In paragraph 4.11, an interviewee encapsulated what they thought was necessary, which at first I was quite attracted to, but then I thought about it a bit more and I have another comment on it.

In that paragraph, the interviewee says that it would be useful to set out

“what you can expect from us”

and

“what we expect from you”.

I thought that that was a neat encapsulation of the issue, although when I reflected on that a bit more, I thought that it sounded a bit like a master-servant relationship—it did not sound like a partnership of equals.

One thing that we come across in section 22 reports is a blurring, a confusion and an unclear sense of where roles and responsibilities lie. Paragraph 4.4 warns that

“Establishing a separate body and then managing it too closely risks undermining the benefits of separate status.”

First, do you agree with that analysis? Secondly, how do you see that in relation not only to Scottish Rail Holdings but to other bodies that are being created to deliver public services under the auspices of the Scottish Government and maybe at the instigation of the Scottish Parliament?