 Unwethaf amddwn i ddiweddorol â'r 20 ni. Under 2018, ond mae'r sgrutinau ychydigau agafol. Felly mae'n rhaid i sgrutinau ei ffordd o'r ffordd o ddigonol o ff Fraktionol, oherwydd unrhyw o ddigonol. 1. Fyfrigion ond mewn prif tran i loidiaeth ddim yn y gondiidd. Rydym ni'n adon ni'n credu ff scentr yn ff everywhere. 2. Ysgrifennu newid lleoedd 2016-17 Llanux-Ar. Fyfrigion i lsiad, ac mae wnaeth eich gweithwyr i ni Aelene Inla, EIS fellow branch secretary from New College Lanarkshire, a'r second witness, Leah Franchetti, is delayed in traffic and will join us as soon as she can. I would like to invite Aelene to make an opening statement to the committee, please. On behalf of the EIS Further Education Lecturers Association, the branch at New College Lanarkshire would like to thank the committee for responding positively to her concern that the voice of staff via their trade unions has not been paid due regard. The EIS fellow is the sole representative body for lecturing staff in Scotland. We believe that colleges are central to widening access to education and that they deliver high quality learning and teaching, which enriches the lives of those attending and ensures that society benefits from a workforce that is skilled and trained to meet the challenges of modern life. We welcome the scrutiny of both the business planning process and the sustainability of the plan. We want to engage positively with this process and to work towards a resolution which meets the needs of the community that we serve for high quality teaching and learning opportunities, has regard to the working conditions of our members and relieves the pressure that financial concerns place on staff at New College Lanarkshire. The college sector is fortunate to have a successful and proven national collective bargaining machinery in the NGNC, which it can use as a means of delivering progressive outcomes for college staff in partnership with the recognised staff trade unions. Local EIS fellow branches have an important role to fulfil in ensuring that those progressive outcomes are realised in practice. We negotiate locally on areas not covered by the NGNC and support our members with issues that arise on a day-to-day basis. We endeavour to work collaboratively with New College Lanarkshire management and the board of management to ensure that we maintain and improve our educational standards and appropriate working environment. It is our wish that an appropriately funded, sustainable financial plan can be achieved to help to facilitate that. Thank you very much indeed. I am going to ask Alec Neill to open questioning for the committee. Thank you, Eileen. I will begin with a general question. It is very clear from the evidence and the report itself and the last session that we had that there are major problems in the college. Are those problems getting in the way of the college being able to perform to its aims and objectives or to perform as well as it could ensued? Is it actually inhibiting the achievement of what we are all trying to aim at? I believe that it is in our members. The evidence from our members is that their working life is very difficult. Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. If that is interfered with because of all the pressures, it has an impact on the teaching process and on the learning process. I would say yes that it does. What are the root causes of the problems? We cannot get involved in the elements of the dispute between management and the unions. Our remit is to look at the report and the strategic issues coming out of the report. From where I am sitting, one of the strategic issues appears to be a weak senior management team. Do you agree with that? Our members took a vote in no confidence in the management team recently. The root causes behind that were to do with the business planning, the organisation of our workloads and the lack of management acknowledgement of our workloads, as well as a lot of operational issues that are not the business of the committee, but which we find difficult to resolve on a daily basis. Has any progress been made since the committee took an interest in the report that was published? In terms of transparency, in terms of us at last being able to look at what the plan is proposed, there has been a marked change in that much more information has been made available to us. The Unison Unite paper suggests that that might be too little, too late, but that is major progress. It seems to accept that sharing the plan with us is a necessity if the plan is expected to work at all. Having shared your view of the plan, is it robust enough? Is it logical? Is it achievable? No, for all of those reasons. We do not feel the plan. So what are the weaknesses of the plan? The weaknesses of the plan are that the efficiency measures that they are looking at involve the lecturers working harder and intensifying the workload. We recently negotiated nationally that there was a reduction from 24-hour maximum teaching to 23. The plan, in order to put in an efficiency measure, is that we teach the same number of credits, 24 credits, within those 23, so we will get less time with the students. That is an efficiency measure. They say that it is implementing national bargaining, but it is implementing national bargaining in a way that totally undermines national bargaining and adds to the workload where the staff were anticipating some relief from the heavy workloads. That is a major concern that we have with the plan. The plan also speaks about higher class sizes. We have had some discussions over the class sizes and we have had some assurances that say that big classes will not be made bigger. It is the smaller classes that are not filled. That is a recruitment and marketing issue to our mind and not something that we can particularly have a lot of input into. Lectures cannot be expected to pay the shortfall when credits are reduced and there is less income to the college. Lectures cannot be expected to make up that shortfall. There is no suggestion that we were not working hard enough. If it was the case that there always had been discussions about lecturers having a bit of slack, the discussions that we have had have been that the workloads are already too onerous, so to then add in an efficiency measure that makes that so much worse is just not a workable plan from our view. One of the concerns that I expressed at the last meeting when we had the chair and the principal here and other members of the senior management team was that there appeared to me to be an imbalance in the resource allocation within the college that seemed to be top heavy with senior management and middle management and not heavy enough at the curriculum, leader and lecturer level. Are you saying that that is the case and that the business plan makes it worse? The business plan makes the lecturers workload worse. In terms of the structure, we have always been unhappy that the structure was not properly consulted. We did not get proper consultation on the structure and we see that there are structural issues within the academic structure. It is very difficult to say that the position is too expensive or that position is too expensive. We are happy to engage meaningfully in any discussions over a structure if that needs to happen. What we have been led to believe by management is that they just do not get enough money from the funding council and that that is the cause of it. Because they are not getting enough money for the funding council, they say that their only option is to have efficiencies, what they call efficiency, which could not in the long term be inefficiencies, because if it impacts on student teaching and learning and could impact adversely on withdrawal rates, then it is not an efficiency saving even at that. They say that they have no other options other than to do that. That is something that we find difficult to imagine. My final question is—I think that you have reinforced that—I get the impression, as you would expect, that the blame for everything lies elsewhere and it is never them. The key question, from my point of view, is the senior management team in your view is it capable of taking the college forward and capable of addressing the strategic issues, capable of delivering a robust business plan? We do not, as I said in our paper, and our members are making clear that they are voting no confidence. We do not see things getting any better and the outlook seems very bleak. It is not our job to decide who is on the management team. That is for the board of management to make that decision, but morale is very low and confidence that things are going to get any better is very low. We will work positively with whoever is in management to address any issues that we can possibly work collaboratively on, but at the moment confidence is not high. Colin Beattie A theme that seems to be, through all this affair, is about consultation and planning and the lack of engagement on that. You touched in the beginning that there is now some information coming forward and there is presumably some better engagement, would that be true? There is definitely an improvement in the information. There is an issue that needs to be addressed over what management understands by consultation and what we understand by consultation and what issues we feel that management should be negotiating with us on and what issues they can consult on. That is clear throughout our paper and throughout the management paper that, from our point of view, they just do not seem to understand what the position of the unions is and when they have to consult with the unions and consult appropriately. The latest version of the business plan, because it is not yet finalised, we were given an advance copy on Tuesday afternoon. We then had a meeting and it was a constructive meeting, and we asked a lot of questions and we put our views forward to Derek Smeal and Ian Clark, and that was a constructive meeting. However, we then have until close of play tomorrow to put in our thoughts to the board of management, who are considering it via a committee, apparently they are looking at it. They are getting the papers on Tuesday. I would not say that that is sufficient consultation. We do not have time to speak to our members about it to address their concerns and their issues. Consultation should be with the unions if there is a union recognised, and it should be with a view to reaching agreement, whereas management seems to think that consultation is given us some information, allowing us to say what we want to say, but not necessarily taking on board our views. That has come across very clearly in the business plan. The version that seems to be acceptable to management at the moment is very, very unacceptable to us. If I can just interrupt a minute, our second witness, Lea Franchetti, has arrived. If you can indicate to me if you would like to add when you do, Lea. Colin Beattie. One thing that I was interested in is that the submission from the non-executive board members suggested that EIS Fella offered the opportunity to provide cost-saving suggestions for the business scenario plan in December. It was reported at the board meeting on 18 June that EIS Fella was engaged with senior management on further understanding the underlying cost pressures in the college. Can you tell us a little bit more about that offer and how it was developed and your participation in that? We asked to meet with the board of management when a voluntary seven scheme was announced, which we had not had any prior consultation on. It was to express our concerns that we felt that what we needed was an investment in staff, that we did not feel that we could afford to lose more staff in key positions, lecturing positions and support staff. We asked to meet with them to speak about that and to speak about the workload issues. At that meeting they did speak about the financial pressures. As we had done throughout the previous years, we asked to see the figures on the budget. We were told that there was no budget, and we asked why there was no budget, because the budget is in deficit. We said, can we see it anyway? They said that the finance committee was not releasing the budget because it was in deficit. We said that the budget is a plan, so how can we go through the year without a plan? We were told that we have a plan, so we said, can we see the plan? No, you cannot see it. If you can think of any cost savings, then let us know. Without any information on which to base, I do not know what we are supposed to be doing. We were supposed to be saying that we can use less paperclips or things of that. That is not proper consultation. It did not give us anything that we could take to our members. We said that if the case of funding council is not given us more money, enough money to provide further education, then let us see the figures on mill campaign with your shoulder to shoulder, if that is the issue. However, they would not let us see the plan, so to say that they gave us the opportunity to suggest cost savings. Yes, they did say that at that meeting, but it was not a proper opportunity to engage with the plan. It is a little bit odd with what the non-executive board members have suggested. At their board meeting, as I said, on 18 June, they said that they were engaged with senior management on discussing those cost pressures. We were engaged because we were in dispute, and we were in dispute because the solution to the cost pressures was to have all the lecturers teaching 24 credits within the time that is normally allocated to 23 hours, which also cut the time for the students. We did ask if we could see the figure, and at that meeting, they were not sure if they could let us see it, but they did agree. We attended a presentation at which they told us that we had no money and showed us the grass, many of which were later produced in the consultation, but not the business plan. The message that we got was that it is the funding council that is driving those efficiency measures. We were very surprised when they turned up here and made no mention of that, because the story that we were getting told when we have dialogue did not seem to be the story that they were telling when they came here. There was no mention of the funding council driving through efficiency savings that were not acceptable to us. There was no mention of that. They said that we were close to a plan, and what has been clear to us was that we were well into the plan. The plan started in the previous year without us being able to see it. We have to look forward to if that is the term that we can use. It is more of the same—more cuts to teaching and more pressure on staff. That was the dialogue that we had. At this moment, what is your engagement on cost issues and so forth with the college? Our engagement is that we have looked at the business plan. We have asked a lot of questions, but the answers that we always get is that we have no room to make any more savings. On the structure that Alex Neil has mentioned, he said that the funding council looked at the structure and said that it was in line with other colleges, so there was no scope for looking at anything structural. I understand that. We have looked at the historical issue and, obviously, there are communication issues and everything involved in that. Are we now in a position where there is satisfactory engagement and open engagement to take us forward? Our position is that the college, following the last meeting of this committee, has now rushed to consult with everyone on almost no one. I see that they have supplied a timetable for their consultation, but they have almost gone in exactly the opposite way in terms of engagement with the trade unions, because they have put out a plan over the summer holidays when our members are on holiday. They have had a very rushed full-staff consultation. There is still not enough time, as Eileen said, for a proper consultation. On the very basis, they seem to be ignoring everything that ACA sets out. It is the basic building blocks of information and consultation with employees. As you have already heard at the committee, they have their second iteration of their business plan. As Eileen said, there is very little option now. It is x-amount of cuts or x-amount plus one of cuts. We are not really clear where the college is trying to go. We were quite surprised to hear the college sit here and say that it is not—we were asked a straight question about, does the college need more money? We felt that there was a lot of provocation, whereas we are being told in the college that we cannot achieve what we are trying to do because it is the funding council that is stopping us from doing this. We cannot sustain what you wish from national bargaining because there is not enough money. Ian Gray Eileen, you have confirmed what Unison and Unite say in their paper, and Leah has just confirmed that, too. There has been a shift in the degree of consultation since the first evidence session that we took, but that is around the business scenario planning, which is an iterative process. I cannot remember, but I am not sure that it was the second iteration. I think that it might be even more from the previous session that we had. On the face of it, that seems good, but the Unison and Unite paper reflects some of the things that both of you have just said around this coming quite late in the process. Waryingly, that paper then says that some members as a consequence have taken the decision not to engage with the process, which is seen as ticking a box in too little, too late. My question is simply, is EIS Fella going to continue to take the opportunity of what does now appear to exist—difficult though it may be—to work with the college management in developing the next iteration of the business scenario planning? Absolutely. We want to engage positively. There is nothing to be engaged in. There is nothing to be gained by dropping out of it. Although I cannot put words on the other unions' mouths, I think that they meant ordinary members. They rely on the unions to speak for them, and that is why we have a recognised union. Leah made about two iterations. It is two iterations within the college, so two iterations within six weeks or so. The first iteration was presented to the staff as a worse-case scenario. That will scare the funding council, so it will not happen. Staff did not appreciate the gameplay that was scaremongering, especially after all that was said about the sensitivity of staff to rumours. We were concerned that the first iteration was not helpful to be told that that was not going to happen. Here is the plan that is not happening. That was not helpful to us. What we needed was a plan that the where was going to happen. They have said that there were updates from the funding council, and that is the iteration. In terms of consultation, it was from Tuesday afternoon until Thursday night. It is our chance to look at that. It is not a chance to speak to the branch, but we will respond to that iteration. The consultation is still not acceptable. In the initial consultation plan, there was no place. The timetable did not have consultation with the unions. I got the consultation plan at the same time as every other member of staff. In the past, when it was the Vol. 3.7 scheme, they thought that it was okay for the Vol. 3.7 scheme. I think that I got it maybe an hour or two. Could you pop up and see me? I will tell you that we are putting out a Vol. 2.7 scheme. An hour later, an email comes out. We will continue to engage, but we need the opportunity to engage properly and to engage with our members when we are engaged. We are a member-led union, so management should give us the information and then allow us to discuss it with our members in our union meetings and then come back and say, this is how our members feel, so that we have a clear view. All staff meetings can be very good communication, but it does not give you that opportunity to properly look through it and address any issues that arise and put forward proposals. Bill Bowman I think that a number of issues have been covered, but can I just, for clarification, ask Eileen? Are you a teaching member of the staff? What is the regulatory requirement to consult in a situation like this, apart from good practice? Will the ice regulations help with that? New college Lanarkshire has not sat down at the table and signed, as a new incorporated body, a recognition and procedures agreement with any trade union. What they are relying on are the legacy RPAs, recognition and procedure agreements from the pre-merger colleges. Those recognition agreements set out that the college should be consulting. With all its recognised trade unions, everyone that is being represented in written or verbal reports today, over matters of appointments, business plans, finance and those types of things, the ice regulations that I referenced before, are a tier below that. The college is a public body and has a duty to consult with the trade unions. Is it actually breaking a rule by what it has done or not done? We feel that they are in breach of the recognition and procedures agreement by not sharing the proper information. Our trade unions locally have asked for a long time for the proper financial information and we do not think that it is good enough for the college to say that some of that is in the public domain to go and find it. What is your way of dealing with that if you believe that they are not following a regulation or an agreement? Is that something that you have pursued? We could pursue it but we are trying to engage with the employer to bring them around a table. I think that the meeting that we saw just before the last committee meeting was a sign from the employer that maybe it is time that they shared some of the financial information. However, as Eileen was saying, it is very late in the day that the college has already gone through at least one tranche of voluntary severance. Is asking the trade union to volunteer information about making cuts where they feel that they are not in possession of the full picture? You are trying to engage positively rather than recourse to rules and regulations? Absolutely. The college is trying to say, and I notice that they said in their written information, that the deficit is not of a concern of the trade unions. That is simply false but we need to know the true financial picture and to suggest as they have done that somehow this would create stress and anxiety. However, it is a lack of that information that has created stress and anxiety because in that vacuum people will make up the story and the college could have done a lot more to engage earlier. Although they are engaging now, it is a scattergun approach and it is still not through the correct process. Okay, thank you. Bill, do you have any further questions? Well, just to ask him who you have been through for quite a long period. I mean, why wouldn't you use the regulations to actually move it forward? We may be there. So that might have been my next question. What next then? Yeah, so we could go through a formal process. I am heartened to see that the college has sat down finally to provide us with some of the financial information as the full-time officer that represents our members in new college Lanarkshire. I have not yet seen the second iteration of the business plan that has been presented to our members such as the lack of time that they have been given a second plan. I am not permitted to comment on the contents of what I have seen, but we are concerned about what is in it already. That is a quick question. Is there a staff member in the management structure on the board? We did have an EIS member as a member of the board, but she has recently resigned. Again, I cannot put words into her mouth, but she resigned because she was unhappy with the way that the board— And is she being placed? Presumably that place still exists. That place still exists. And have you put someone into that place? Not as yet, but I imagine that you are looking at that. In terms of the RPA, you are right. There is an argument for me saying that we should go into dispute. Our policy has always been to try and avoid disputes. Disputes should only be used as a very, very last resort. As Leah says, we could be there. The vote of no confidence should hopefully make the board of management take more of an interest in those issues. We have been trying to negotiate an RPA with management, and it keeps getting kicked into the long grass. I think that the way forward is to negotiate that properly and ensure that it is maintained. Thank you very much. Thank you, convener. Just a few things to clarify, if I may. Leah Francesi, if I may come to you first. I was just saying in response to the consultation piece earlier on. You said fairly clearly that you felt that consultation had been woefully inadequate—my words, not yours—previously, but then you almost said over the summer that they were doing too much. The fact that it was during holidays and that was not good enough either. What I am hearing from this side is that management are almost in a no-win situation. They either do not do it enough, or they are trying to do it, but they are not happy. No, I agree. Up until maybe July, it has been woefully inadequate. There is no doubt about it. I now think that it is woefully inappropriate to try and meaningfully consult with people during a period of summer holiday. I do not think that that could be taken seriously, and there is an unholy rush, in my view, to get things consulted on before an arbitrary deadline of the end of September. I understand that the college has to put in plans to the funding council, but that is a deadline that has been known about for a long period of time. A meaningful consultation could have taken place over a number of months with appropriate meetings for the trade unions. I would have expected, when the college recognises trade unions that it sits down with those proper staff representative bodies first of all before it goes to a wider consultation, and you are hearing that, locally, the branch is getting a plan on a wedding date and has to come back with a sponsor within a number of days. I do not think that anyone could really look at that and think that that was an adequate consultation. There is a deadline, you said, in September, because of the SFC. Yes, but that has been known about for months. Right, but when they start to do the consultation—I am just trying to reflect back, I may be wrong—they recognise in July that consultation seems to have been inadequate and there is a deadline looming and say, we need to sort this out. Unfortunately, that coincides with a period of holiday. Just help me out, because I am not in the sector. How long is the holiday over the summer? Well, about six weeks, isn't it? We agreed to come in—the branch officials agreed to come in over the summer to discuss the dispute, because we were keen to settle the dispute so that the start to term would not be disrupted. Management could have taken that opportunity to put a consultation meeting in shows the business plan. We could then have come back, arranged our branch meetings and discussed appropriately with the branch. They did not take that opportunity to consult with the unions. Instead, they put out a consultation. The business plan itself, or the current iteration of the business plan, did not come out until later. The lecturers came back to this presentation, saying that everything is terrible and it is going to get worse. That did not help. If I can direct a question to you on that, Eileen Imlaid, the earlier on in response to one of the earlier questions, you made the point that what you were hearing from the colleges is that they have no other options than to take the steps that they are taking. You felt that that was an incredible response. Rather than begs the question, what other options are you putting forward and saying to the management, well, this is what you can do. You have got a deficit, and that is how you need to resolve it. Given that management is telling us that they cannot cut down on expenses any further and that there is no scope within the structure to look at any savings there, we agreed with management that what we needed was more money. Where we found a difficulty was when they were asked directly the question, would more money help? They did not say yes. They said that there was a sustainable budget, and what they were showing us on the board was an apparently sustainable budget, which would have a very detrimental effect on staff. I am absolutely clear that your solution to the situation that the college finds itself in is that they need more money. Surely, then, somebody has to give them that money, so that is the SFC. I cannot speak for the SFC, but it seems that their argument is that they fund us the same as every other college. The way that budgets work, if your expenditure exceeds your income, you have got two choices. You either cut down on the expenditure or you increase the income. If they are saying that they cannot cut the expenditure at all, other than inappropriate efficiency measures, it would have to be the income. However, the way that the funding council decides on the income for colleges, I do not know how it decides whether your income will meet your expenditure. If there are cuts to credits—I am led to believe that some of the future cuts to credits are Government-led—if there are cuts to credits, that will give us more difficulties paying the necessary expenses. It does not mean that the expenses were not necessary, and we are publicly funded. It is not like we are a business. We can say, let us go out and sell more education. If the Government will not let us sell more education, then we cannot meet those expenditure targets. I cannot see any other solution other than more money or severe damage to education. Do we not have to start from the point that the college is saying to you—it sounds to me—as though the college is saying, look, we have not got any more. We cannot just create a pot of cash, so therefore we have to take some difficult decisions. The response from EIS Fella appears to be that that is not good enough. When do difficult decisions become so bad that a business is not capable of fulfilling its fundamental purpose? That is where we feel we are at. If courses are cut or if there are fewer lectures, when does it become the situation where the business is not running properly? What do you propose then, Leah? We are not here to fix the finances of the college. The committee heard lots of evidence that there had been problems in merger. I see that the college suggests that the deficit is not our concern. That is not our position. It is not that it is not our concern, but it is not the issue of the trade unions to fix. However, our position is that there is almost nothing left to cut. Further education, in our view, has been ravaged. There is nowhere further to go. It should not be lecturing staff or support staff—I cannot speak for the other trade unions—but we feel that there is nowhere left to go. The system needs to be looked at. The board paper that we have in front of us from 10 days ago says that there are four staff representatives on the board. Is that correct? Yes. That is the regional board. There is South Lanarkshire College as well, so they have a staff rep. There will be two unions there, and two from us and two from them. You were saying that there was an EIS member who is no longer there, but is there still four or three? There is a staff representation on the board at the moment. There is a staff representation on the board. However, it is my understanding that the business plan did not get to the full board because it was stuck in the finance committee, because it was in deficit. That was the story that we seem to have been told. You would need to speak to the board about that. On the budget and the issues relating to the budget, the paper that we have from Audit Scotland was dated April, and it refers to future financial sustainability. It tells us in here that the college is projecting a surplus, a forecast on a budget surplus in 1920 of £1 million. Years following that, it is forecasting successive surplices, surplices not deficits. Are you aware of those reports from Audit Scotland? Have you seen the business plan that shows those forecasts? We have seen those forecasts, but they are predicated on the cuts to the teaching budget, cuts to the time that we spend with students, bigger class sizes, 24 credits within 23 hours. That is what it is predicated on. Is your engagement with the board being that you are projecting budget surplices but you are still proposing to cut staff? Is that what you are telling us here? That is forecasting surplices in the three years from now, basically. They are saying that they have to show that they are in surplus. They also say that the future years are not yet written, that all sorts of things could change. There are loads and loads of positive things that could come in. That would mean that we would shed staff that we do not need to shed and damage our organisation based on information that seems to change very frequently for now on iteration 7 or 8. The information keeps changing. I do not understand this. I do not understand when it is all a forecast how all this information can keep changing unless it is the funding council saying that they are giving more money or less money. However, if the funding council says that they always fund the same thing, I do not understand it. I honestly do not understand the process. Can you try to establish that? See the current draft of the business plan. Does it similarly and also project these surplices in the three years from now, basically? The goal, I believe, is to get into a surplus situation. You are saying quite clearly here that those surplices are only coming about because of reduced staffing levels. Yes. Reducing staff and other staff take up the jobs that they have released. We have had several voluntary services schemes, so we have already taken up a lot of the support staff roles. As Leah has said, we have not been open to the difficulties of financial pressure. We have taken on a lot of administration tasks that we used to somebody else used to do. Things have been automated, which give us more work, but we have spoken to the support staff and said that we do not want to take your job, and they say that we are so busy that we would rather if you would do it, that would help. We have been very proactive and we have helped as much as we can. We are now at a stage that we can give no more. It would be irresponsible for us to try. I understand. I will just final… A couple of little bit, please. I will finalise. Thank you. Too far away from the mic. I think that you are saying that, if those forecasts are accurate, that they are projecting a million-pound surplus in each of the next three years, are you saying that the college need not to have that surplus but to invest it in retaining the staff? Is that what you are saying? I am saying that we need investment in staff and not another voluntary service scheme that reduces the staff that can do the job that the Government seems to want us to do. I think that that is something that we need to come back to for convenience. Thanks very much for that. Any further points from members? Alec Neill, briefly. Can I just raise a sartid off by saying can you deliver for the students? I have got information that suggests that the credits obtained in new college language are lower than what they were from the combined colleges that it replaces. I have also got information that the credits are relatively low compared to similar sized colleges elsewhere in Scotland. I have also got information that suggests that, of all the large merged colleges of scale, new college literature seems to be in the seat of the second highest funding per credit outside the rural colleges. Is that information that you would be aware of? If it is true, is that not very worrying? At the end of the day, this is all about trying to get the students through the credits that they deserve? It is indeed very worrying, because there is this concept of an unmet need that we were speaking about yesterday. It seems to me that an unmet need is interpreted as courses that you have not managed to fill, as opposed to what you would imagine an unmet need should be. If we have unmet needs, it means that larnachs are very well educated and they do not really need much more for their education. That would be my interpretation of an unmet need. An unmet need seems to be that we are not meeting the needs, therefore we need a credit target cut. The more you cut the credit target, the less income you have to pay the expenses. It becomes worse and worse, and that is why we do not have any hope of it getting better. The more our credit target goes down, the less income we have to offset against necessary expenses, including the teaching budget. That goes back to the balance between the investment in lecturing vis-à-vis the investment in senior and senior legal matters. It is also about marketing, recruitment and strategic planning as well. It is about all of this, about saying what is the job that we are trying to do here. If there is genuinely no need for the further education levels in larnachsure that we have been providing in the past, I would doubt that. If there genuinely is no need, then you would need to look and say, what is your cost base if that is what you are having or you would need to look at the cost per credit. I thank you both very much indeed for your evidence this morning. I am going to suspend committee until 9.50 for a brief change over witnesses. I would like to move on to item number three, which is the national fraud initiative in Scotland. I would like to welcome our witnesses today. Fiona Cordiac, my pronouncing correctly, director audit services, Angela Canning, audit director and Ann Karen's manager benefits on the technical side, I believe, all from Audit Scotland. I would like to invite Fiona Cordiac to make an opening statement. Thank you for the opportunity to brief the committee today on our latest report on the national fraud initiative. Public bodies spend billions of pounds of taxpayers' money for the benefit of the Scottish population. Spending systems are complex and mistakes can happen. Some people also try to fraudulently obtain services and benefits to which they are not entitled. The national fraud initiative aims to help public bodies to minimise fraud and error in their organisations. The NFI exercise is undertaken across the UK public sector every two years and is led by the Cabinet Office. We in Audit Scotland are responsible for coordinating the exercise in Scotland and 113 Scottish public sector bodies participated in the last exercise. The NFI involves comparing large volumes of electronic data that are held by a public body about individuals such as payroll and benefits records. Those are compared against records held by the same organisation and those held by other public bodies to see if there is a match. Where a match is identified, it might indicate that there is an inconsistency that needs to be investigated further. All bodies that participate in the exercise receive a report on the matches that they may choose to investigate. They investigate those so that they can determine whether the match is down to fraud, error or a perfectly acceptable reason. The body can then take remedial action and that might involve correcting a benefit reward or recovering any credit or duplicate overpayments, for example, and they also update their records for the future. Exhibit 2 and page 9 of our report gives an illustration of how the exercise works. The outcomes from the NFI include actual amounts for fraud and error that are detected by the data matching exercises, as well as an estimate for future losses that have been prevented by the exercise. Our most recent report on NFI highlights the outcomes valued at £18.6 million has been recorded since our last report back in June 2016. Exhibit 3 on page 12 of the report shows that eight areas generated about 95 per cent of those outcomes. Since 2006-07, the cumulative outcomes for NFI in Scotland stand at £129.2 million, and we think that those results highlight the value of data matching to Scotland's public finances at a time when budgets are under pressure. The committee also carried out a post-legislative scrutiny of the NFI last year and produced a report on its findings in September 2017. Your report noted that NFI had helped to improve the transparency of public finances and clawed back millions of pounds to the Scottish public sector that would otherwise have been lost to fraud and error. The committee's report made several recommendations for us in Audit Scotland, the Scottish Government and the Cabinet Office. All three bodies have been taking action against those recommendations over the past few months. We provided a brief update on those actions in the report itself, and we also prepared a separate briefing for you, which we provided for today's meeting. My colleagues and I are happy to answer any questions that you may have on either the report or the actions that we have taken in response to your report. Thank you very much indeed. Colin Beattie, please. In 2016, the committee discussed a number of concerns that were taken on by Audit Scotland, not least of them being the participation by public bodies who were receiving public funding in that exercise. Most considerably, it was bodies such as allios and housing associations. There was concern that some of the councils were less than good at participating. What progress has been made on that? As Audit Scotland, we can only mandate bodies to participate in the NFI that the Auditor General or the Accounts Commission appoint the auditors to. Other bodies can choose to volunteer to apply to be part of the exercise, and some have done so. We have a number of initiatives in place to try and encourage participation. In terms of the bodies that take part over the years since we started the NFI back in 2006, we have seen a general increase and improvement in the level of participation from public bodies. That is a good thing. You are going to engage with the Scottish Government on this very issue. What progress has been made on that? I will pass you over to Ann Cairns to pick up the detail of that question. Thanks, Fiona. As Fiona has said, we have been engaging with the Scottish Government and they have been proactively engaging with the housing association sector. At present, we have a number of housing associations who have volunteered to come into the NFI. We have taken that forward with the Cabinet Office in order to get them trained with a view to them being able to participate and actually get access to the data and bring in their data over the next six months or so. So they will be included in this next exercise? They will be included not so much in the batch matching every two years, but they will be included in what is known as the app check, so they will be able to check if someone applies for a house in the area. They will be able to go into the NFI system and access the data to check what the person is seeing in their application is true and verify that they have not got another house in another part of the country, for example. That, of course, was an anticipated question that I was going to ask about app check. Has that been now rolled out to all the councils? I know that you were discussing this with the Government on who would pay, and I think that the cost will be £1,850 per local authority area. A number of councils have undertaken a free trial. The Cabinet Office has been offering free trials of app check because it is a fairly new product. As I said, a number of them have undertaken the trial. Next week, we will have an engagement session with the Cabinet Office and the IT supplier of app check with all the participants of the NFI to promote it and have live trials so that they can come and see it. As part of that, we will have a couple of our participants to do presentations on how they are using app check in such an area. They are not just hearing from auditors or the Cabinet Office, but they will hear from their peers and other local authorities who are mainly using app check to their advantage. My concern is that we are two years on from when this was first raised, and we seem to be just at the point of having a few trials. It does not seem very fast. It is worth saying that, as auditors, we cannot mandate what a particular body might use as part of its internal control framework. We can only report and encourage, and we have been doing that through our engagement events. You are going to be engaging with the Scottish Government to try to see whether it could put a bit of pressure on. If necessary, there is a change in legislation or whatever to make it mandatory, because none of those participants have to follow up on anything. There is no penalty. Local auditors would report about anybody that they did not think was satisfactory following up its matches, so it would be reported in the public audit report for that particular organisation. Not really a smack on the wrist, though, is it? The other thing is that I am looking at the number of cases that were identified in 2016-17, and they have doubled since 2014-15. The value attached to that potential recovery has only gone from £16.8 million to £18.6 million. The next step on that is that they are actively trying to recover £4.8 million. Given the effort that has to go into investigating those cases, is that value for money? If they have 656,000 cases to investigate and the amount involved potentially has gone up such a small amount, what is the cost of this exercise? The cost of the exercise is definitely quite hard to estimate because many public bodies do not differentiate between investigating the NFI and following up matches in the NFI from some of the other counter fraud activities, nor would we necessarily expect them to isolate the cost of NFI. In paragraph 68 of the report, we try to give a broad estimate of the cost of undertaking the NFI initiative, but we are clear that the cost is clearly outweighed by the benefits that are received through the exercise. In terms of year-on-year comparisons between this exercise and the previous exercise, it is quite difficult because new bodies have come on and been involved in the exercise, and there are also new data sets that have been used this year compared to the last time that we did the exercise. In terms of the question that you asked about, the recovery rate of £4.8 million needs to be compared not against the £18.6 million, because that includes not actual overpayments. That includes prevented potential overpayments, so the £4.8 million needs to be compared against the £5.5 million of actual overpayments that are detected through the exercise. I will look at the figure of £656,000, and I think that somebody has had to look at each of those. Is there not a cost? I think that it is also worth stressing that a body does not have to investigate every single match. What it does is that it risk assesses those matches to determine which are the areas that are worth investigating and which probably are not worth their effort in investigating. Is a small amount of fraud that they do not bother? No, not necessarily, because not every match is indicative of fraud or error. Sometimes it can be due to a perfectly reasonable explanation. Can you assess that? Is there a cost in that? I will pass you over to Ann, who will mention some of the guidance that is available in the NFI process to help. I will spend a bit of time on that point. If you could summarise briefly, Ann, that would be helpful. When we release the matches—well, the Cabinet Office releases the matches, the Cabinet Office has inbuilt risk scoring in the system, so when a council or a health board gets their matches, some are shown as high risk. They are highlighted in red. There are other ones that are sort of gold, with a sort of gold key. That is the ones from the IT system analysis of previous exercises that the Cabinet Office thinks are the ones most likely to indicate fraud and error. Some of the other matches might just be perfectly legitimate reasons, or they might actually be getting more matches due to the data in their system. That is not as good as it could be, especially if some of the new matches, if it is the first time a match has been put up, the data in the underlying systems is not quite as accurate as we would like. I was quite interested in the case study 3, which is on page 15. Murray councils tell us once approach. This is where, when a death is registered, the register informs a relevant council and government departments, so that the bereaved relative only has to tell them once. That is a system that I have personal experience of, and it was very effective. However, that was not in Murray, it was in Edinburgh, so my question really is, are not all councils doing this, and if not, why not? More than Murray are doing the tell me once system, as you found out yourself. However, it is not taking place everywhere, and we will pass you over to Angela to talk a little bit more about that. Unfortunately, I had a similar experience last year when my mother died. I was fortunate, though, that, in contacting the registrar at a link to one council, they had to tell us once approach and informed other councils as well. I know from personal experience as well that it is more widespread than just what is happening in Murray council, but I highlighted this particular example, because it has obviously got an important impact on the councils and being able to manage their system as well, but also a really positive impact for bereaved families as well and only needing to tell a council once for all the various services that councils provide, so it is highlighting good practice. Is there anything that Audit Scotland or the Accounts Commission could do, or is doing, to encourage the system to roll out everywhere? I think that the very fact that it is in this report highlights good practice. What we are also working with our communications team in Audit Scotland is in developing a hub on our website, where we are capturing the work that goes on across the piece on fraud and counter fraud activity that Audit Scotland is doing, and is supported by our local external auditors. That is an area that we are developing and hoping to highlight good practice, highlight case studies as they come through, as auditors notify us of fraud examples in councils and other bodies. We can highlight them and get a more immediate highlighting of good practice. Liam Kerr Thank you, convener. Sticking with the blue badges, for clarity, do you know—the register informs the council, the Murray council, once a death has been registered—do they, or could they, also include information on council tax and benefits and pensions at the same time, or is it just blue badges? Pass you over to Ann, who might know the detail in that one. Ann Watt When the tell-as-one system works well, it should cover a whole range of services that the council provides—it would be blue badges, social care, benefits, council tax—it should cover the piece. Obviously, Murray has identified that as an example that it is working well. It does work in other councils, but we understand that it is not working totally effectively in all areas. The idea is that it would cover all council services. So, moving on, keeping with the specifics, but if we can move to council tax—on page 13 of your report at paragraph 26, in particular—you talk about the council tax discount, and you conclude that the total council tax discount that has been incorrectly awarded across the Scottish councils was £4.4 million. That is lower from the previous year by about £1.2 million, which sounds good, but it is still a very significant amount. Is there more that councils can be doing to address that? There is always more that councils and bodies can be doing to help to prevent error and overpayment. One of our recommendations in the report is for councils, and it concerns council tax singles person discount, and we are encouraging them to do more. For the record, can you point me to those recommendations in the report? That is on page 6. Local authorities should investigate the council tax single person discount matches in conjunction with other data matching suppliers, as they determine appropriate to ensure that their awarded discounts are valid. I have another point of clarity on the same topic. We have got £4.4 million council tax discount that has been awarded incorrectly. That has come down from last year. The thing that I am not seeing in the report is whether you know if those are the same councils or, in fact, did the £5.6 million councils sort it all out and that is a new set of councils, or is it the same ones? I will pass you over to Ann Watt, who might know the detail of that one. Thanks, Fiona. I do not have the list with me, who has identified a particular amount, but it is across the piece and across the 32 councils. It is basically that they have all worked on this area and identified more discounts that have been incorrectly awarded. It sounds like it is a fairly endemic problem. Do you get any sense, again, just to follow on from Ian Gray's question earlier, that the councils are talking to each other to share best practice and ensure that they are all doing as much as they can rather than individually trying to find solutions? We have an engagement event with NFI participants next week, and that is an opportunity for us to facilitate some of that discussion and sharing of best practice. I attended a meeting recently of fraud investigators who work in each of the 32 councils, so we know that there are forums out there for staff who are involved in counter fraud and looking at fraudulent activity for getting together. That is very much what they do, is to share their learning and examples and hear from each other about how they have tackled things. That brings me on to the point that I would like to raise. We touch on council tax, we touch on blue badges, and I think that you have all the data for each council. Audit Scotland must possess all the data for each council on this. Can you publish it? The number of details of overpayments for each council and matches for each council, for instance, is on page 14. Paragraph 32 says that Scottish councils have reported correcting 4,505 blue badge records where the NFI helped them to identify that the holder had died. Following on from Liam Kerr's question, Ann Cairn said that fraud is equally spread across all councils, but would there be any harm in Audit Scotland publishing the data? Perhaps we would be able to identify if Aberdeen has a particular problem with blue badge fraud. I am not suggesting that they do or that one council is particularly good at it. If we have got this data, is there any reason why it cannot be in the public domain so that it can be scrutinised by local authority? That is something that we are considering for our next NFI report in two years' time. What we are thinking about is producing a shorter overall report, but with more interrogative data sitting underneath that, so that if anyone was particularly interested in an area, they could drill down to some of the detail. What currently happens for each individual body is that the external audit team will be looking at that particular body's arrangements for following-up matches, and they will report some of that information in their annual audit report for the body. For each individual body's report, you may get some of the detail about how many blue badge matches they have had and have followed up. However, in terms of Scotland-wide data, it is something that we are looking at and doing differently next time round, partly to try to freshen up our approach to NFI. Ms Courier, would you agree with me that even by the whole process of publishing the data, that is an incentive for each local authority to get a grip of that? If it is all collated on one website to gather how each 32 local authorities are doing on blue badge fraud or council tax, discounts or whatever, that is an incentive in itself, that whole transparency? Yes. We think that that would be positive. Okay. In terms of the data for this report then, can I ask Audit Scotland to write to the committee and provide all the data local authority by local authority, and then we can publish it on our committee website for this report? I think that I will look to Ann to see how onerous that might be and how we might have that data. Thanks Fiona. Yeah, we do have the data, but just to clarify, Fiona mentioned earlier, we have the actual outcomes that overpayments were covered and then we have the estimates. So we have all the data of the actual figures and we have the estimates and these are collated and added together, so it would be an exercise. We would need to do a bit of explanation, but it is possible. Perhaps the committee can write to the auditor general and ask for that information and she will respond to say if that is possible. Okay, thank you. Bill Bowman. Thank you, convener. In the paper you gave us, there is an appendix with recommendations from the post legislative scrutiny review of the national fraud initiative, which lists recommendations, excuse me, and actions taken. Now the recommendations ask for the Scottish Government and Audit Scotland to do certain things and in the actions taken there are absolutely loads of Audit Scotland delivered this, delivered that, has arranged this, but when I actually look at the Scottish Government, it says that Scottish Government has advised that it will consider whether there is a need to. The Scottish Government will look in as advised that it will look to possibly fund. The Scottish Government has advised that it is considering this. The Scottish Government is a very broad term and are they just embarrassed that all they have done, they are just summarising it in a few words or have they really taken this on board and are delivering actions? We have had on-going engagement with the Scottish Government on this and Ann has been very active in her discussions with them. We have been in regular discussion with the Scottish Government and I know that Mr Mackay wrote to the committee round about Christmas time with the actions that they were going to undertake. They have been engaging, as I said previously, with the housing associations and they have got a number of them volunteering to participate in the NFI. More recently, they have also been taking forward the business rates and having a look to see if there is more that we could do in NFI in respect of getting business rates, getting a new data set, potentially new bodies to look at fraud and error in business rates. Even at the events that Angela mentioned earlier, there has been engagement with some of the local authorities around that and it looks like that will be an activity that we will be undertaking towards the end of this year. They have looked at some of the legislation. For example, there was a bit of clarity required around some of the electoral roll and council tax legislation and they have recently clarified that. To say it, no, it is fine. There were some previous questions, some of the councils were a bit uncertain if they had the powers to release all the electoral roll information, so they have recently clarified that. They have been undertaking various activities. You are reasonably confident that there is action underlying these very general terms. The biggest outcome involves pensions and overpayments of pensions or payments where somebody has died and it does not seem to have been stopped. Where the NFI has identified cases where pensions have been overpaid or should have been stopped and continued to be paid, is the Scottish Public Pensions Agency able to claim any of those summed back? The decision about whether it is worth recovering any overpayments obviously comes down to the individual public bodies and the pension agencies. Yes, it will be able to recover some of those payments but not all. Why not all? Can you help me with that distinction? In terms of any recovery decision, a body will consider the likelihood of recovery and the cost of recovery and whether the cost of recovery will outweigh what can be claimed back. However, of the £5.5 million in total actual overpayments detected, recovery action is only being taken on £4.8 million. The balance is that somebody has taken a decision that it would be inefficient use of public funds to recover it. Yes, and no different from any overpayment. Can you describe what is happening in the NHS with GPs who have retired and are going back on a locum basis and out of hours basis? Is there a problem there as well? I am not sure that we have any particular information on that issue. I will pass you over to Alan. It is nothing that has come through any of the NFI matches. That is not to say that it is not an issue, but there is nothing that has come on our radar through the NFI. I do not want to ask you to divulge your secrets about how you scan and check those things, but surely if someone who has retired then starts working again, that must flag up fairly early on in HMRC systems. He would think that that person is now earning again, but also in receipt of pension. That should happen pretty early on in the process, I would imagine. It is also maybe worth noting that some of the pension rules have changed as well, particularly for some occupational pensions with flexible retirement. It is now perfectly possible to receive an occupational pension and be working. The same amount of pension was previously enjoyed, surely. Otherwise, why would we be looking at this? £6 million over payment of pension. Reflecting back to when the committee undertook a review of the NFI, one of the issues that was raised at that point—I cannot remember if it is true, some of the evidence sessions—was that HMRC is not currently in the NFI over the last year, so we have been working really hard with the Cabinet Office to get access to HMRC data, to allow us to do some data matching. In the report, we have reflected some early success that we have had and that we are now using HMRC data to verify some of the student awards in Scotland. That is currently under way, as we speak, but it is an issue. We are hoping with that engagement that we have with HMRC and the Digital Economy Act that HMRC will be more amenable to allow us to access their information in the future. That is absolutely fundamental, convener, that the initiative can have access to up-to-date and current data from HMRC, but when you do get it, is it every week you get it, or is it every six months or so? How does it work in terms of getting access to current data? Just now, for this exercise, this is obviously a data match that happens every two years, so the data would be collected at a point in time and then the individual bodies would follow it up. Some of the pilot activity that we are doing and some of the future developments that we are speaking to the Cabinet Office and the IT suppliers who do the data matching for us is getting that on a much more frequent basis. They have increased the frequency of some of the matches, just now some of the emigration and some of the deceased persons matches. We are getting that a lot more frequently, but some of the other ones are only in a two-year cycle. With the app check, all the bodies can participate in that and they do it as and when they need. Obviously, not within the NFI, some of the councils, in fact all of the councils, have access to HMRC real-time information data for their sort of benefit side of things, so they have that on a daily basis. I remember, convener, when I was in this committee previously, when the report came up I asked the question that, of those data matches that you got in a particular year, did we make sure that we checked them again in subsequent years? I think that the answer was no, but we did not really do that. We went on to different scopes and areas. I wonder if you could just update me on that. If you get 1,000 matches this year that yields £5 million or something like that, do we keep checking that people are now continuing to attempt to repeat their behaviours? Obviously, the decision about which matches to investigate is down to the individual bodies, but focusing on individuals is not something that the NFI exercise does currently. Obviously, the IT system behind NFI, when a body or a council at NHS gets the matches, say, for the current exercise or due to get the next lot in January, it does highlight if that match has come up previously. If there was a match on myself, for example, that would actually be colour coded to say that that match has actually come up the last time, as well. The air flagged up for further investigation. Can I refer you to Exhibit 6, please, on page 23? Note 1 says that only two colleges took part in the 1415 NFI, which explains why there is no graph for 1415 under colleges. Did all the colleges take part in the 1617 NFI? For 1617, nine colleges took part. For the exercise that we are about to start just now, all colleges will be participating. The last time in 1617, it was the nine largest colleges, because under data matching and under the legislation, we have to prove that when we request data that it is worthwhile that there will be outcomes identified. We requested the data for the nine largest colleges and we did get outcomes so that hence we are excited about that. Remind me again how many colleges we have in Scotland? Twenty? Twenty-three or something, is it? In the twenties anyway, looking at the graph for 1617 colleges, it is mainly satisfactory and then there is a yellow bit at the top, which indicates that it is mostly adequate. If only a third of my calculations of the colleges participated, why is there no representation of that? Surely that would be unsatisfactory. Why is there no representation of that? Because I think that the graph only represents the results for those that we have asked to participate. It does not include anything. Oh, so we only asked nine colleges to participate? Yes. Why didn't we ask all colleges to participate? I think that, as Anne said, because it was new, we wanted to make sure that it was worthwhile for mandating all of the colleges. How many NHS boards were asked to participate in the 1617 audit? It was all of them, I think. Yes. Except the men's toilet, as it meant with the welfare commission. Ah, okay. Right. And how about local government? Was it all 32 local authorities? Yes. Ah, okay. So why was it only nine colleges, sorry? Because it was a new area for the participation in the NFI, we were wanting to prove that it was worthwhile before mandating. I see. Oh, right. Okay, I understand. Do members have any further questions for our witnesses? Can I thank all three of you very much for your evidence this morning? I now close the public session of this committee. Thank you.