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Good—so they should be.

That is very helpful. I appreciate that there are a number of moving parts, and that complexity makes it difficult to take a snapshot in relation to a budget ask and present it in that way. For future years, it might be helpful to get a snapshot of those moving parts in order to see, for example, how the average salary is changing and to get a feel for the number of people that you have and, relatively, how much that costs.

In effect, year on year, you come back to ask for more money for people. That seems to be off the back of annual pay rises as opposed to fluctuations in the types or number of people that you have. The other side of that is marrying that up with the type of work that you are doing and the implementation of automation and AI, for example. I am looking for more of a medium-term strategy, rather than this annual snapshot that we seem to get. However, perhaps that is for another session on another day.

I am glad that modernisation has been mentioned a few times, because I want to talk about that. I have a specific question on this year’s budget ask. Apart from national insurance contributions, the biggest chunk of your 10 per cent year-on-year increase relates to your request for £672,000 for audit modernisation. Why is that a people cost? The commission assumed that that would be a cost for consultancy, an agency, software or development work or some form of pre-implementation cost, but that budget line seems to be a cost for people. Why is that?

How reliable is that estimate? With the greatest respect, public bodies do not have the best track record in forecasting budgets for software and modernisation projects. I am concerned that, although £672,000 this year is a big chunk, you might be loading the costs towards the end of the project and that, in a year or two, we will find that you come back to ask for £2 million or £3 million, because the cost of the whole thing has just ballooned.

That follows on nicely from the chair’s line of questioning with regard to your passing on the uplift in fees, which is much lower than what you are being charged by external companies. What is the strategy in that respect? For example, given that a small handful of very big companies perform the lion’s share of such audit work, is there a risk that, in future, they might simply not bid for it in light of the relatively low margins for such work or the nature of the bodies that they are required to audit?

That is interesting, bearing in mind what we are looking at for next year and your asks there. I presume that the increase includes year 2 of the pay deal that was agreed, which involves an increase of 3.8 per cent. However, does it include or exclude the national insurance contribution increases? I presume that they were not factored into your initial projections for 2025-26.

You have come to the table asking for a 10 per cent increase overall, which is substantial. I am trying to break it down into the constituent parts to make it easier to scrutinise. A big chunk of that is the national insurance contribution. I am trying to find out why Audit Scotland felt that this was the mechanism to try to recuperate that money.

Something else that struck me about that table on page 12 is the staff projections. Please do not take this in any way as a criticism, but it jumped out at me. For the years 2024-25, 2025-26, 2026-27 and 2027-28, you have projected pretty much the same number of staff. It is very unusual in an organisation to have such certainty, year on year. In addition—maybe this is a question for the board—does having the same numbers of people scream of efficiency and productivity improvements? Do you suspect that the volume of work will be the same? Will you need more people to do more work, because of the change in working hours? I am trying to get my head around this, because it strikes me as such an unusual forecast in a big organisation.

In essence, you are saying that your current cost estimate for the modernisation project is about £2.2 million—that is a back of a fag packet analysis—and you are splitting that over three financial years, with the first tranche being an ask of £672,000 for next year and an expectation of £1.5 million over the following two years’ budgets. Is that correct?

That is much appreciated—thank you.

Could Audit Scotland provide better support to small and medium-sized auditing firms in Scotland that are more localised to their clients and which are spread across your four geographic office areas? After all, four very big international companies are soaking up huge amounts of public money here.

That is helpful and insightful, and I agree with much of what you have said. At the end of the day, the people who are involved are often sick or elderly. People just want the best treatment for their family members and loved ones—they want them to be looked after in the right place. It seems to me that the blockage at that end is causing massive issues in the process, right from A and E all the way through to care. That must be addressed.

The page in your report that struck me the most is page 48, which is in appendix 3. We often get graphs and tables in your helpful reports, and the table on page 48 really stood out as the most shocking one. It is not on A and E but on planned care. The three main targets by which we measure the success of the NHS are on out-patients, in-patients and planned care treatment times—the targets on those are 95 per cent, 100 per cent and 90 per cent respectively. That is ambitious and the targets are high, but not one of them is being met.

In the way that you present data to the committee, we expect to see little green ticks next to any targets that are met. On page 48, not a single health board in Scotland has a green tick next to it. Not a single health board in Scotland is meeting any of the out-patient or in-patient targets. That is shocking.