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The risk is that you are hanging on the coat tails of other things that were happening anyway. I heard in your opening statement that the roll-out of R100 was one of your great successes. That was happening anyway: it was a Government project that was funded centrally from the United Kingdom Government, so of course it was going to happen at some point. However, whether it is a measure of success of NSET is debatable.

On that note, director general, I apologise if I do not use the specific wording, but I think that you said that you “welcome” the recommendations and “accept the broad thrust”. That, as the convener mentioned, does not sound entirely like acceptance of the recommendations. I would like you to be specific as to which of the comments, phrases, criticisms, recommendations or summaries in the Audit Scotland report you do not agree with, and why.

That is all good work and I think it is to be commended. You cannot detract from positives in that respect.

Our point of view is that we are reflecting on the Auditor General’s commentary. I will come to some of the specifics. Two things have jumped out that were flagged by the Auditor General and which seem to have come to pass. One is the clear inability to monitor progress through specific targets and the other is the lack of political leadership.

In the first 20 minutes of the meeting we have heard that there is clearly a lack of political leadership. You are the accountable officer—you are not accountable for ministers and what they do—but we certainly have not seen political leadership in this respect in the last two years.

As for monitoring progress—you mentioned some successes—it is very hard to measure success if you do not know what you are measuring against. Why are there no clear, specific economic output metrics or targets that NSET is working towards? Could you enlighten me, for example, on how many jobs have been created through the strategy? How has gross domestic product improved? How has productivity improved? How many new start-ups are there and how much economic growth has occurred as a result of the strategy? If we do not know that, it is very difficult to say whether you have been successful or not.

Good morning, gentlemen. Let us go back to where we started. If we look at page 11 of the Auditor General’s report, paragraph 17, the opening line states that

“The Director General for Economy is the accountable officer for delivery of the NSET.”

I appreciate that your brief opening statement claimed that progress has been made, but you are yet to convince me. As the accountable officer in charge of the delivery of NSET, in what way have you made progress?

Before we come on to targets and metrics, because they are important and it is an area of questioning that we do want to go into, at what point did you, in charge of the strategy, not flag with either the First Minister or someone senior in Government to say, “Guys, you have to sit around the table and have a meeting”? How can two years pass and colleagues who sit next to each other in the parliamentary chamber not sit next to each other in a civil service room somewhere and ask what progress is being made on the strategy? Is it just that they had meetings, but you were not party to them? Did you not flag to them that this was important? Were you not chasing them for meetings? At what point did you say, “This is not working.”?

Page 10 has is a nice visual version. In the middle we have dotted lines between the NSET delivery board and the economic leadership group, which we know has been a failure. However, below that, there is the relationship between the NSET portfolio board, the programmes and the economic strategy unit, then with the Scottish Cabinet and corporate governance within various directorates-general. The bit in the middle, in the dotted square, says:

“No formal connection set out in NSET Accountability Framework.”

That is the missing link—the key missing link—but you are saying that it is not.

Can you indicate how much?

There have been penalties of around £5 million. However, a recalibration of the contract seems to suggest that GEOAmey is receiving £4 million over a number of years in payments additional to the original contracted value. Is that correct?

Wow—you are weeks away from hitting your absolute capacity. What happens when you hit that point? Do you say to the courts, “Please do not send us any more people. We cannot take them,” or do you say to ministers, “We have to start releasing prisoners”? Which of the two is preferable?

Here is what I do not understand. In your opening statement, you said that we are sending fewer people to prison each year, but the prison population is rising—it is at its highest level in nearly five years.

The Parliament has made a number of legislative changes, some of which have been mentioned, such as the Management of Offenders (Scotland) Act 2019, and there is the presumption against short-term sentences, the changes in sentencing guidelines for under-25s and a massive shift in alternatives to custody. Whatever your views on those policies—for or against—some of which were rather controversial, we have made such changes already, and yet the prison population is going up.

Are the courts simply not following the guidelines and are sending too many people to prison, or does the nature and profile of those prisoners mean that we are sending the right number of people to prison, but the Scottish Government has simply not built the capacity to deal with that?

Or, potentially, those other countries have less serious organised crime or sexual offences.