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Thank you. That is very helpful. Finally, you have alluded already to the fact that your report makes 58 recommendations across a range of areas. That might not be quite as big a range as you might have liked; nonetheless, 58 is a lot of recommendations. Do you have a view about what the priorities should be for the Scottish Government in the short, medium and long terms? By February of next year, or hopefully even before that, if the Government said, “We accept the recommendations of Edel Harris’s independent review on adult disability payment” and you were in the Government’s shoes, which ones would you look to accelerate and implement in the short term and which ones might be more for the medium and longer terms?

It is mentioned in the report, is it not, that there can be quite a wide variation from local authority to local authority? What is done to promote good practice? How much networking is there to elevate those examples where things have gone well and where there have been more successful interventions and outcomes compared with those in other areas where there appears to have been fairly minimal activity?

Thank you very much indeed. I will begin by looking at the governance and accountability arrangements. Your report draws attention to the extremely complex governance arrangements that are in place surrounding the Promise. I think that you used the expression “challenging” and said that the attempts so far to address that complex governance landscape have been—again, I will use your word—“insufficient”. Could you expand on that a little bit and give us your understanding of what those governance arrangements are, how they have come about, and what needs to be done to address them?

Thank you. I note that one of your recommendations calls on the Scottish Government, with support from The Promise Scotland, to complete within the next six months—so there is an urgency to this—work to

“review and identify opportunities to streamline the remit, status, and expected impact of governance groups, boards and forums linked to The Promise”,

so you have clearly identified that as requiring urgent attention.

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.