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I welcome everybody back to this morning’s meeting of the Public Audit Committee. I am very pleased to say that agenda item 3 is further consideration of the Auditor General’s report on adult disability payment. I am particularly pleased to welcome to the committee Edel Harris, who is the former chair of the independent review of adult disability payment. Thank you for joining us—it is greatly appreciated.

We have some questions to put to you, but, before we get to those, I invite you to make a short opening statement to get us under way.

Thank you. I have a couple of final questions. The first question relates to something that you were speaking to Graham Simpson about, not in the last set of questions but in the ones before that. An argument has been paraded in Scotland that the reforms or even the removal of personal independence payment in England and Wales have had no effect in Scotland because we have adult disability payment. However, as you have explained, reforms to PIP have implications for Scotland because of the passporting issue that you have identified, the Barnett consequentials that would potentially result from such reforms and the way in which the fiscal framework operates, which means, in other words, that if the benefit bill in Scotland goes up, the financial settlement that comes through the formula goes down. Can you confirm your view that there is a direct relationship between what happens with the Timms review and what the consequences will be for recipients of adult disability payment in Scotland?

Graham Simpson will come in with some questions on that area shortly. I have one more question to ask before I bring him in—it is on a related area, but it looks at it from a slightly different angle.

In paragraph 20 of the report, you make the point that many of The Promise Scotland’s aims are to support longer-term change. On the other hand, the nature of these things is that there are often short-term projects and short-term imperatives. You identify that as a risk. The question that we, as the Public Audit Committee, have is, how is that risk being managed? Do you think that there is a danger of some of those longer-term structural changes, which are intended to be delivered by, at the outside, 2030, which is less than five years away, may be blown off course by shorter-term imperatives?

Thank you very much indeed for that opening statement.

When we took evidence from the Auditor General and his team on 1 October, he said some interesting things about where things were and what the Government’s response was to your review and your recommendations. We will get into questions about that, as well as costings, because, even though we are the Public Audit Committee, we think—as you do—that we are not concerned simply with the financial cost implications of the system; we want to look at how it is being run and whether it is producing the intended outcomes.

I invite Joe FitzPatrick to put some questions to you.

If you could have a look and get back to us in writing, that would be helpful.

I have one final question, which picks up on the theme of 15, as it is about paragraph 15 in your report, which made for interesting reading. You describe how, in 2020, an independent strategic adviser was appointed, presumably by the Scottish Government. In the following year, 2021, an oversight board was established and the independent strategic adviser was made the chair of that board. In 2022, the adviser was asked to step down as the chair, but it took over a year for that process to be completed. The adviser did not fully step down but became a co-chair, along with somebody else who was appointed as a co-chair.

You describe that in very diplomatic terms, but it looks like a very messy situation. It also conjures up questions about the point about clarity of roles and responsibilities. Is the independent strategic adviser an adviser to the Government, the oversight board or The Promise Scotland? Why was the decision taken that it was not appropriate for the person that held that role to continue as the chair of the oversight board? Why was there clearly some resistance to that from some quarters?

Thank you very much. I will now turn to Joe FitzPatrick to put some questions to you.

Thank you very much indeed for that clarity and for concluding the meeting with a very hopeful and visionary message of a better future.

Edel Harris, thank you for your time this morning. Your evidence has been very useful for us. We have a session with the Scottish Government and Social Security Scotland coming up very soon. I do not know whether we will take the opportunity to press them to get a response earlier than February about their view on the recommendations that you have made in your very important report. We will make sure that you are aware of when that evidence session is, so that you can tune in or follow it later on.

When we took evidence from the Auditor General on 1 October, he said:

“I do not think that we are yet clear about the Government’s intention around the review.”

Edel, are you reasonably clear about the Government’s intention around the review?

Thanks for that response. I invite the deputy convener, Jamie Greene, to ask some questions of you.

Okay—good. That is a nice bookend, because we finish as we started, by looking at the governance arrangements.

I thank the Auditor General, Mark MacPherson and Claire Tennyson from Audit Scotland, and Andrew Burns from the Accounts Commission, for their evidence. You have undertaken to have a look at some of our requests for a bit more data. We would very much appreciate it if you could supply us with that, because we will need to consider our next steps in reviewing the findings and recommendations in the report.

We will now have a further evidence session, but I suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses. We will resume in five minutes or so.