Seòmar agus comataidhean

You talked a little bit about the budgets for the NHS, social care and social security. We all know the direction of travel for those budgets—they are becoming an ever-increasing chunk of expenditure for the Government. Presumably, any announcement—whatever the numbers are or whether they are increases of 1, 3 or 5 per cent—will either cannibalise the wider Scottish budget and the total pie available, or is reliant on some additional cash, the value of which is unknown, although we know roughly the value of the spending commitments. You talk about balancing the books. That may be the case, but big spending announcements are being made where there is no clear, backed-up and identifiable source for how those will be funded. Are we able to follow the money, or is there still a lack of transparency and clarity?

Thank you.

Finally, do you have the feeling or the impression that the Scottish Government is, year on year, firefighting in the way that it makes in-year changes to the budget? By that, I mean emergency measures that move money from one budget to another. Over the past two years, money has been pumped into pay awards, pensions, social security and health and social care at the expense of agriculture, energy, housing, ferry services and education. Money is getting sucked out of other portfolios in the middle of the year to plug gaps as a result of policy decisions and spending commitments that must be fulfilled not just annually but, as you have rightly said, over the medium term.

To me, that feels like a very short-term way of managing your budget year on year. It is a bit like getting up in the morning and deciding how much you will spend that day, instead of looking towards the rest of the week or month. Again, does that indicate a picture of stability or good governance of public money?

Good morning, Auditor General. I am very surprised that you were not up all night studying the budget like everyone else was.

Yes, a draft budget was announced yesterday, but I want to look at the context, given your report and some of the wider issues around financial sustainability of public spending relative to revenue that you have been talking about for the past few months. I will reflect on some of what happened yesterday, but in that context, rather than in relation to the specifics of policy. I hope that that is helpful.

Over the 24 hours since the budget announcement, I have struggled to dig below the headlines. You will see a lot of media reporting around cash spend increases and promises to spend more in specific portfolios, but where that money is coming from is particularly unclear. That transparency issue is something that you raise in your report. How do we, as a committee and as parliamentarians, and the public get to the detail? How do we know where the additional money is coming from? I do not know where it is coming from.

What are some of the elements that you think are missing in terms of transparency from the Government that would allow the public to make an informed decision as to where the money is coming from?

Exhibit 4, which shows the barriers to accessing support, sums up the issues. It covers alcohol and drugs, but it talks us through the user journey very nicely, from the point of someone seeking help as an individual through to their getting help and then staying on the path to recovery. The list of barriers is unbelievable. There are so many barriers to people getting from the point where they identify that they have a problem to coming out the other side and being supported and in a better place in life.

I find the barriers that you have identified and the way that you have presented them to be quite extreme and quite shocking, to be honest. Perhaps that identifies the problem, because some people will engage with one or two of those issues on their journey, and others will face them all. Is that part of the problem? Perhaps that is the answer to my first question about why Scotland has such a big issue.

Is that because alcohol is legal and commonplace? You would not need to walk very far from this room to buy alcohol this afternoon—arguably, the same could be true for drugs—but my point is that we have a different view of alcohol. Drugs are illegal, for want of a better term, but there is societal acceptance of everyday drinking—the phrases “acceptable norms”, “social drinking” and “safe levels of drinking” are all used. Is it just the case that we have a different take on alcohol? If the law suddenly made alcohol illegal, perhaps everyone would have a bigger focus on it, and if drugs were legalised in some shape or form, perhaps there would be a different societal view. Is how we perceive the harms just relative?

Based on some of the focus group work that you did and your conversations with stakeholders, would you say that the issues are massively underreported? Back in 2014, public health research showed that only one in four people who were dependent on alcohol or drugs was engaged in services. I believe that we are waiting for updated figures for the past decade to see whether access to and take-up of services have improved.

Do you think that alcohol issues are massively underreported? With alcohol, it is more difficult to spot problematic behaviours and to identify people who have dependency issues until they present with an extreme issue, whereas people with drug dependency issues perhaps present more quickly and sooner to health services and in a much graver or more extreme condition. Is the Government on top of that? Is it identifying the undercurrent of underreporting and the problem that exists in society but that is not being helped in any way by a public service?

I know what is in the report; it is here in black and white. However, if the ministers are sitting watching this committee meeting—I know that everyone watches the broadcast of the Public Audit Committee on a Thursday morning—what is the overarching theme that you want them to take away from your report?

You will probably not answer this question, but in that case, what is the point of having a Minister for Drugs and Alcohol Policy at all if we do not have that bigger picture? All the questions that you have just raised are completely valid. They are in the report, and you have reiterated them today. We get the same feedback time after time about the lack of governance, lack of structure and lack of ambition, about knowing whether the money is going to the right people at the right time and whether it is being spent in the right way, and about getting best value.

The governance arrangements seem to be all over the place in relation to who those lines feed back to. Ultimately, you could argue that they all feed back to the minister who is in charge of it all and who is tasked with delivering progress, but it is clear that we are not seeing progress. Things are going in the wrong direction, not in the right direction. I am not asking you to comment on the policy, but you have analysed the outcomes and they do not look great. Anyway, that is perhaps a statement rather than a question, which is a bit unfair.

I want to talk about residential rehab, which is an important issue. It comes up frequently in Parliament, and I am trying to get my head around it. I have done a lot of work in this space, asked a lot of questions of Government and met a lot of stakeholders, but I still cannot work out whether we are heading in the right direction on residential rehabilitation for alcohol and drugs. There are instances where residential rehab is required for people with both those addictions, because sometimes people present with both addictions. You talk about the £100 million for residential rehab in your report, but you state in bold and big letters that you do not know whether that is enough. How will we know whether that is enough? How many beds do we need?