 Mwneud eich cyfasif iawn o'r colli a'r gyllidio gwreithio at Linux-I Cymru yng Nghymru. Mwneud eich cyfasif iawn o'r colli a'r gyffredinfa swyddfaidd gwrthigol, a'r cyfriffeidio i'r mawr. Mwneud eich cyfriffeidio James Kelly, MSP, a gorfodd ar y moyniw. Item 1 is to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree? Thank you. Item 2, we will now take oral evidence on the Auditor General for Scotland's report entitled, I6, a review. I welcome to the meeting Caroline Gardner, Auditor General for Scotland, Mark Roberts, Senior Manager and Catherine Young, Audit Manager of Audit Scotland. Before I invite an opening statement from Caroline Gardner, I want to put today's evidence session into some context. At our last meeting, this committee took evidence from the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland on the SPA's 2015-2016 accounts. Challenges clearly remain in ensuring that the anticipated savings from police reform are actually generated. The report that we are considering today looks at I6, the national IT system that was intended to replace a number of IT systems used by the police. The report states clearly that failure of the I6 programme means that some of the benefits of police reform that should have arisen from implementing it have been at best delayed. Given what we know about the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland's finances, that is very concerning indeed. Today, we want to examine why that programme failed and whether it could have been avoided. The report does not cover IT developments in Police Scotland since the termination of the I6 contract, so we will focus on what lessons can be learned from this failure. I invite an opening statement from the Auditor General. In June 2013, the newly established Scottish Police Authority signed a contract for £46.1 million with Accenture to deliver a national IT system for Police Scotland. This system was known as I6. It was intended to replace over 130 IT and paper-based systems inherited from Police Scotland's predecessor forces and to transform how Police Scotland records, manages and analyses information. I6 was planned to go live in September 2014 with full national roll-out by August 2015. Three years after signing the contract, in July 2016, the Scottish Police Authority and Accenture mutually agreed to terminate the contract for the I6 programme. The contract was signed by the Scottish Police Authority, but day-to-day management rested with Police Scotland. The I6 programme failed because of a disagreement about the scope of the programme, the interpretation of the contract and the extent to which Police Scotland's requirements were met by Accenture's solution. This disagreement arose despite an 18-month procurement process, which we found did follow good practice and included intensive engagement with potential bidders. The disagreement surfaced almost immediately after the signing of the contract in June 2013 and permanently damaged trust, relationships and confidence between Police Scotland and Accenture. The signing of a contract variation agreement in April 2014 reset relationships and put the programme on a more positive footing, but that proved temporary. One of the factors that contributed to Accenture being awarded the contract was its past experience of delivering an IT system to the Guardia Thiville in Spain. Initially, it was believed that the majority of the I6 system could be based on this system. As time went on, it became clear that a significant amount of the system would have to be built from scratch. The approach to software development used in the I6 programme meant that Police Scotland finally received the I6 system for full user testing in June 2015. At this point, Police Scotland identified fundamental problems with the system. In August 2015, Accenture indicated to the I6 programme board that its confidence of meeting the revised go live date of December 2015 was at 91 per cent. Following an analysis exercise, Accenture revised its estimated go live date to April 2018. At this point, the Scottish Police Authority, Police Scotland and Accenture undertook an options appraisal exercise to agree the best way forward. Following that, the Scottish Police Authority and Accenture entered into negotiations and agreed to terminate the programme in July 2016. They agreed a settlement of £24.65 million. That figure included a refund of all the money paid to Accenture, a total of £11.09 million, plus an additional payment of £13.56 million. As you said in your opening remarks, convener, the failure of the I6 programme does mean that some of the benefits of police reform that should have come from it have been at best delayed, and there are also wider implications for the modernisation of the justice system. Our audit concentrated on the history of the I6 programme and the factors behind its failure. I have asked the auditors of the Scottish Police Authority to monitor ICT developments as part of the annual audit process, and this is particularly important given the emphasis placed on the use of technology in the recently published draft policing 2026 strategy. I also put on record my intention to publish a report on the lessons to be learned from this and other ICT projects that I have reported on in May this year. Convener, alongside me are Mark Robertson, Catherine Young, who have worked on the project, and, as always, we will do our best to answer the committee's questions. Thank you very much indeed. I am going to now open questioning from Colin Beattie. Oracle General, sadly we have become accustomed in the public sector to IT projects that do not deliver. Looking at this particular project, it would appear that the process for procuring a supplier for the I6 system followed recommended good practice. Oddly enough, Police Scotland does not seem to have done anything wrong here. It followed the recommended procedure and, at the end of the day, it did not work. Is there a problem with the procedure that is being followed? Is the recommended good practice not up to snuff? I will ask Mark to come in in a moment. I think that we would say that, absolutely in this case, Police Scotland did follow good practice and there were some real benefits from that, although the programme ultimately failed. The quality of the contract that they entered into did mean that, in this case, there was no direct loss to the public purse. Police Scotland were able to settle an extension in a way that recovered the payments that they have made, plus a significant sum in compensation. That reflects the benefit of a thorough procurement process, even though, as I say, it did not work through in this case. The public purse is actually facing an opportunity loss rather than a financial loss? The loss is absolutely the wider benefits that the system was intended to achieve, both in terms of savings to policing and operational benefits to police officers and police staff. We go on to say in the report that there was no single reason for its failure, but it is certainly clear that the procurement approach that Police Scotland took in this case was not one of the reasons for failure. Just looking at your report on page 6, paragraph 8, we have got here Deloitte, as external experts on procurement and managing commercial contracts, ever sheds as legal advisers and exception UK as technical advisers. That must have cost him quite a bit. Do we know how much these external consultants cost? I do not have the figure here that colleagues may do, or it may be something that you want to pursue with the Scottish Police Authority. You asked earlier about the good practice that is available, and that good practice does indicate that it is important for the client, in this case Police Scotland, to make sure that it has access to the professional skills that are needed. In this case, legal skills, procurement skills and IT skills were the right one. The committee might recall that one of the problems with the NHS24 system was that the contract itself did not stand up to challenge when things went wrong. In this case, that did not happen, and that is clearly a positive. But even with all this external support, it still did not work. Even following good practice, it did not work. It did not work. We say in the report that there was no single reason for that. I will ask Mark Griffin to talk you through what we think the underlying factors were in this case. I think that, as the Auditor General said, there were strenuous efforts made to bring in external expertise and to learn lessons from past experience during the procurement stage, and there was a large amount of engagement with potential bidders. This process really kicked off in 2011 with large-scale meetings with potential bidders, which gradually focused down to the preferred bidder, and a very intensive amount of discussion with potential bidders. I think that there were 160 dialogue workshops to discuss the technical requirements of the system. One of the other factors that we draw out in the report is the approach to the development of the system, the waterfall approach, which, although widely used at that time, what we have heard is very clearly that type of approach to software development and system development would not be recommended these days. There would be much more focus on an agile approach to development, so there was a methodological issue as well, which meant that it was quite hard for Police Scotland to see the scale of the challenges facing the programme until quite late in the overall timeline. Still looking at the external support here, paragraph 19 on page 10, we are talking about the Scottish Government's gateway team. Its external reviews suggested that delivery confidence was either amber or green throughout the course of the programme, and the recommendations that they made were adopted by Police Scotland. How could that be? Clearly, even at a relatively early stage, there were indications of some problems, although assurance was given by Accenture that they were being managed, but here we are again external party doing the necessary box-taking exercise, and it still did not work. As you can imagine, that is an issue that we looked at quite closely in this exercise, particularly given our experience of other large IT projects and the problems that they have encountered. I think our conclusion in this case was that Accenture was giving strongly positive assurances to the programme board about its ability to deliver I6 and the waterfall approach that Mark has just described, which means that you cannot test the system until the whole system is in place. It would have been difficult for the gateway reviews and the other reviews that were taking place to raise stronger concerns than they did. They did identify some areas for improvement that were acted on, again a positive by Police Scotland in this case, but it feels to us that the way that the system was designed to be delivered and the assurances that were being given by Accenture made it difficult for the reviews to conclude differently from the assurances that they were able to give. Are we saying here that no matter what we put in place, basically if a company like Accenture effectively lies that there is no protection against that at the end of the day? I cannot speculate about what underlay the assurances that Accenture was given to the programme board. I can tell you, and we say in the report that the programme board challenged very strongly the assurances that it was getting from Accenture through the process. I think the things that would likely be different in future are the approach to developing the system. We have talked about the agile approach, which means that you are testing as you go along, rather than a big wholesale development than being handed over for user testing at quite a late stage in the process. That should enable problems to be identified and tackled earlier than was the case in this one. Clearly, there is an issue with the internal resourcing and delivery capability of any large contractor, particularly in the case of IT assessments, which tend to be quite a black box, even to people with expertise in technology under the waterfall design approach. Looking at how this worked in the round, is there any aspect where we can learn from, where we can try to protect ourselves for the future? Is there something that we can do better to try to get an earlier warning that there is a problem? I will ask Mark to come in in a moment. I think that the one thing that I would flag is that we say in the report that this was happening at a time of a great deal of political and professional scrutiny of the establishment of Police Scotland. A number of things going on around the establishment of the SPA in Police Scotland itself, and I have reported on some of the disagreements and tensions that were in there. A previous failed IT performance management system before the establishment of IT, and some high profile challenges for policing around things such as stop and search, armed officers and control centres. I think that all of that probably had the effect of increasing the focus of both the SPA and Police Scotland on ensuring that the system worked. I think that that may have introduced that optimism bias that is often a factor of large projects like this. Mark, I think that it can give you a bit more flavour of what they have seen from inside the audit work. The programme board considered terminating the contract as early as October 2013, so that was the three months after the contract that they initially signed. That was fairly rigorously considered. What happened was an agreement between Police Scotland and Accenture to continue with the process and to try and make it work. As the Auditor General said, there was a great deal of determination on both sides. They both wanted to try and deliver the system, and that resulted in the signing of a contract variation agreement in early 2014. Within the first year of the programme, I think that there was willingness to consider that option of terminating, but again, the ultimate decision was that we want to carry on doing this. We are going to try and make this work. As with any major programme of work like this, there are likely to be difficulties and challenges. I think that they thought that they could overcome those, but some of the early problems and the impact that those had on relationships were things that flowed throughout the course of the whole programme. I will follow on from Colin Beattie's questions and keep looking at the start of the process. The report is fairly clear that Police Scotland appeared to have followed recommended good practice. If we accept that Accenture will not have gone into this contract to fail, it will have gone in good faith. I am interested in the role of the external experts who are advising, because within weeks things start to go wrong. First of all, does that suggest that the advisers bear some culpability on this? Deloitte's ever sheds an exception UK? Again, I think that I would go back to my response to Mr Beattie's question, which is that at the end of the process, the contract was robust enough to enable Police Scotland to recover not only the payments that they have made, but a significant sum in compensation as well. In my experience, that is exceptional in cases of this nature. Something clearly went badly wrong. We have identified a number of things that we think contributed towards it, but Police Scotland's contract was as strong as it could have been in protecting them from the direct consequences of that. There clearly is an opportunity cost in terms of the savings and the operational improvements that were intended to come from it, but the contract itself looked robust. I accept that it was robust in the sense of recouping indemnities if something went wrong, but in terms of its scope and all parties' understanding of what they were signing up to, it appears to have been significantly deficient, isn't that right? It is certainly true that there was a significant disagreement between the two parties about what the contract was intended to deliver. One of the factors that underlies that is Accenture's experience of delivering the system for the Guardia Civil in Spain, which they thought would provide a very strong basis for development for what I6 needed and which was a significant part of the decision to award them in the contract. In practice, some of the things that were set out in the contract and which contributed towards the ability to recoup the payments that have been made differ significantly from what was in the Spanish experience. What do you want to add to that? I think that the crux of the disagreement is actually focused on a very small part of the contract as a whole. The contract contained reference to the user requirements, which were what Police Scotland wanted the system to deliver. From Accenture's point of view, they had presented a solution that they thought was going to meet those user requirements. What emerged very quickly was that, despite, as the Auditor General said, an 18-month competitive dialogue process, there was a gap between those two things. There was another clause in the contract that said that the user requirements took precedence over the contractor's solution. Police Scotland reverted to that precedence clause to say that what we say in terms of our user requirements must take precedence, and we want you to deliver that. Accenture's position was very much that you've agreed what our proposed solution is going to be, and that's what we'll deliver. Does that not suggest that there was a significant degree of ambiguity in the contracts that were signed by the parties? I think that that's certainly what you could interpret it very much that way. When I was in professional practice, I was paid to make sure that there was no ambiguity in my client's contracts. Does that not suggest that the failing, or a failing, is with the professional advisers that have been engaged? I think that that would be something that we've not looked into in detail. I think that that would be something that you perhaps have to discuss with the Scottish Police Authority and Police Scotland. Right. Just staying with that, I just wonder, Colin Beattie quite rightly asked the question, how much was paid, and I accept your answer earlier on Mark Roberts, but how much was paid to them and was that recouped as part of the penalty from Accenture? I suspect not. We don't have a detailed breakdown of the costs that were paid to those external consultants by Police Scotland as part of their client team. As the Auditor General said, the settlement agreement contained an additional payment over and above the monies that have been paid direct to Accenture. That reflected some of the additional costs that have been incurred by Police Scotland. That includes Police Scotland's staff costs at an estimated level, hardware costs and software licences. I don't know whether any of that was any estimated costs of those third-party advisers. I wonder if that's something that should be investigated. I think that that's something that you could consider with the Scottish Police Authority. Thank you. Just moving on in time on this process, there was a contract variation. At the start, we can see that apparently there was an 18-month window where Police Scotland was getting a great deal of advice, potentially very expensive advice, and all parties I suspect tried to put in place something that worked. There is then a contract variation. That does not seem to have gone through the same rigor. Would that be fair to say? It certainly wasn't as in-depth process, but it was a variation of the existing contract. That would seem to be reasonable. Once they knew more about where the issues were, I think they were concentrating on where the attention needed to be paid. It wasn't like restarting the whole contract. Negotiations and establishment from scratch again, it was adjusting the existing contract. Certain things happened. For example, Police Scotland took on responsibility for data migration, which had previously been something that Accenture had been going to deliver. They were adjusting the existing contract at a relatively small level in trying to pick up some of the problems that existed. Who was doing that, Mark? That was being done between Police Scotland, advised by their external advisers, and in discussion with Accenture. Do you know who those external advisers were? They were the same ones who were involved from the start, as listed in paragraph 8 on page 6. Again, the contract variation does not work. That would tend to suggest that somebody has been poorly advised. I am not sure that I would follow that interpretation, Mark Ball, once I come in again in a moment. I think that the fact that the contract variation could be agreed, again, is an indication of the strength of the contract that Police Scotland had entered into. What it did was to embed in the revised contract the user requirements that Mark has described to you, filling the gaps between what Police Scotland interpreted as being the user requirements in the contract and what Accenture thought their solution would deliver, so that the gaps were filled, not changing the cost but changing the delivery milestones and the delivery date. It clarified that Police Scotland's user requirements were what was required from the contract at no additional cost. You are right, it did not work, but it was a best endeavours attempt to enforce Police Scotland's user requirements on the contract at that point. Again, the issue is the confidence and capability of Accenture to deliver that within the cost and the broad timescales that were agreed. Mark, is that a fair comment? I think that's a fair reflection of the situation. Final question then. Are you able to tell us, has anyone, has any person, has any group really been held to account for this, for these failures? I accept that you say there are a number of moving parts and a number of points the ball seems to have been dropped, but who has dropped the ball and what has happened to them? The formal solution was that the parties agreed to terminate the contract and Accenture made a significant payment, which refunded £11 million that they had received as milestone payments, together with £13.5 million of compensation for staff time and other costs that had been incurred. In that very direct sense, the penalty fell with Accenture. There have been, as the committee knows, a number of changes of personnel within Police Scotland and the SPA since it was established in 2013. I think that the broader questions might be better addressed to the SPA and Police Scotland, by the committee. You've said in some of the previous answers that the approach used was a waterfall approach, which basically involved going through all the phases of the system build, and then handing it over to Police Scotland to do the user testing. How many phases did that involve? What was the time scale between that start and then it had been handed to Police Scotland in June 2015? The phases that it went through kicked off very soon after the contract was signed with a high-level design phase. In broad terms, there are four further stages of detail design, functional design, product testing, which was done by Accenture and would be done by any contractor in such a programme management setup. Then it was only the final stage of user acceptance testing when it was handed over to Police Scotland for testing so that they could see what the system was doing. That happened in the summer of 2015, and you will recall from the Auditor General's previous answers that a go live for the system as a whole was initially expected to be September 2014. Police Scotland did not see the system until some nine months after the original go live date for the system as a whole. What had happened during the course of the programme was that dates had slipped. Some of those phases, which originally had been envisaged to be sequential—the waterfall methodology has one stage after another—had begun to be overlapped. That was an area of significant challenge by the I6 programme board to Accenture and said why these stages are having to be overlapped. This is generating additional risk and so forth. However, that was an attempt to try and keep the programme moving and keep it on track. I cannot, for a long time since I have worked in software development, but I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would sign up to an approach that involves the developer going through all the design stages, the build stages, which I assume involves their internal testing, and only once had that all been completed, handed out over. Has there been any questioning of Police Scotland or their external advisers as to why they accepted the waterfall approach? We certainly spoke to programme managers who were around at the time to say why that approach was adopted. It was very much seen that that was an approach that was used at that time and was accepted. Accenture provided demonstrations during the course of the programme to Police Scotland, but there was no full handover of the code so that Police Scotland could really get into the nitty gritty of it. I think that it is very clear. Indeed, the chair of the Scottish Police Authority has said publicly that they would not do it in this sort of way again, and it would always be a much more modular, more agile approach to development that would be adopted now. However, I think that at the time it was very clear that they were quite determined to use that waterfall approach. Did anybody query the use of that waterfall approach? I do not think that we are aware of anything in terms of challenge that we have seen in terms of people saying that there is an alternative development methodology. Not that we have seen in terms of board papers. Catherine will know more detail. There was some discussion at the latter part of the programme around some of the modules perhaps being done in an agile fashion, but again, as Mark said, there was no evidence that it was fully considered as they had already taken and agreed, and both parties had agreed to the waterfall approach. I think that around that era it was becoming, it was gaining popularity, but at the outset it was, waterfall was used at the time. So there was basically an acceptance that Accenture would outline. This is the approach that we are going to adopt when Police Scotland signed on to that. I think that it was an agreement between the two, that Police Scotland or the organisations that preceded Police Scotland, because all of this was going on prior to the establishment of Police Scotland. The original business case was agreed by the then Association of Chief Police Officers of Scotland. All the procurement phase predated the SPA and Police Scotland. What about the test in Accenture that we are doing internally before handing it over to Police Scotland? Is there any visibility or transparency around that? As I said, there were demonstrations given of what the system was doing, and certainly Police Scotland's programme management team visited Accenture's development centres in Newcastle and Mumbai, but there was not any kind of detailed handover of the code, as I have said. Do you know if Accenture was doing any proper testing? They did know that Accenture was doing testing, and one of the things that came out from the programme board was quite a lot of challenge about Accenture's methodology for testing, which the programme board felt was not reflecting industry standards. What Accenture was saying is that this is our testing methodology that we have used elsewhere in many cases, and that is what we are going to use. However, there was tension around how that approach was being done. With the exception of the system demonstrations, which involve getting people in the room like this and firing the stuff up on the screen, there was not any visibility of the actual results of the testing. Not as far as we are aware. Around the product test stage, there were a number of flaws identified, and there was a lot of disagreement between Accenture and Police Scotland around the level of critical these errors were. A lot of challenge, again, from board members about these errors, and when they moved into user acceptance stage, some of the errors that had been found—a product test stage—were on resolved. The methodology, again, was a lot of challenge around it not being standard industry practice. There was a new programme manager on Police Scotland's side who came on, who had had quite a significant IT background and who himself was able to get in and look at the coding around it. Again, from board minutes, there was a lot of discussion around the actual detail coding on it that did not meet industry standard practice. Right, okay. That does not sound all that satisfactory. In terms of moving forward, it is clear to me that that waterfall methodology has serious flaws with it. In terms of other IT projects in the public sector, what confidence do we have that that approach has not been used? A more robust approach has been used, which involves the product being handed over in phases to allow the users to test it more robustly as each phase is completed and to give more overall confidence to the users? As I said in my opening remarks, I am planning to publish in May a report that looks across the range of IT projects that I have reported on over the past few years. It is certainly true that an approach like the waterfall method that was widely used five or seven years ago is now much less commonly used with much more use of agile. In some of the reports that I have produced, we have had a concern that agile was being used by people who did not fully understand it or were not properly trained in it, but what I want to do in my May report is to pull all of that together and give some assurance to the committee about the current position. Ross Thomson Thank you, convener. Following on from some of the same sort of line of question that we have had, in your report, you talk about a year and a half, a year and a half worth of dialogue, we are still at the very end of the day. The functionality of Accenture's programme would never meet the requirements of what Police Scotland was looking for, which is fairly fundamental. In my head, I am trying to understand exactly how that came about, so were Police Scotland ever clear from the outset in terms of what technical requirements they needed from the system at such an early stage? Yes, again, I will ask Mark to come in, but I think that the user requirements that were specified in the contract were the basis of them being able to achieve the settlement that they did when the plug was pulled. Mark? Yes, Police Scotland were and I think probably are still confident that their user requirements set out exactly what they wanted it to do. Accenture responded with a solution which they felt met those requirements with some qualifications and believed that Police Scotland had agreed to that. What Accenture felt was that going beyond their solution, there being what they described as a continual elaboration of requirements, so what they think the scope was getting bigger and bigger was what they felt was going on. At the same time, Police Scotland were maintaining absolutely that we have not changed our user requirements and, as I said in answer to Mr Curr, there was this precedence clause within the contract which says that the user requirements are paramount and that is what they continually referred back to. What we feel is at the heart of the difference in terms of Police Scotland feeling that they had been clear about what they had been requiring, Accenture feeling that there was continual expansion of the scope of the programme. Thank you very much. That is really helpful. Police Scotland has been clear from the outset what their technical requirements were, what their expectations were. On page 8 of the report, you talked through the procurement process and the early design stage. It was in November 2012, paragraph 14. As part of that long process, we know procurement can take time, Accenture scored the highest against the technical and implementation criteria, not on cost but on that point. Has there been a failure in due diligence on the procurement side? What was made very clear to us when we were speaking to people was that the experience that Accenture had in delivering a system to the Spanish police force, albeit a more simple system, was a very important criteria. That is reflected in the weighting that was assigned in that procurement scoring exercise. At the same time, it was made very clear that, while cost was an important factor, the quality of the system that they got was what Police Scotland was really wanting to get to. That is why the technical and implementation criteria were very important in Accenture securing the bid. In terms of whether or not there has been a failure of due diligence, as we say in the report, as the Auditor General said, in terms of following best practice, we do think that the police did that. Obviously, as we have already discussed, that did not manifest itself in a successful outcome. The procurement process was robust. Going back to the point that Police Scotland had been clear following on from your answer there and following on from the points that Colin Beattie made earlier on, would it be fair to suggest that Accenture had been in any way misleading during that process in terms of their offer and in terms of what they were advising they could produce for Police Scotland? Given that, at the end of the day, the user requirements on what Police Scotland wanted were significantly different from what they got, would it be fair to suggest that Accenture had maybe misled them? I think that a fair reflection might have been that they underestimated the complexity of the system. There was a repeated theme throughout the challenge presented by the programme board in terms of the extent to which the actual people getting involved from the Accenture side, the extent of knowledge of policing and the specific requirements of the Scottish policing environment. That was an issue that was raised repeatedly by the programme board. The Auditor General in response to Colin Beattie, when he was again questioning around this particular subject, said that the SP board did provide challenge. My question is, what kind of challenge did they present at the time and how robust was that challenge to Accenture? It was the programme board that was providing the challenge and I will ask Catherine to talk you through it. She is the person who spent an awful lot of time reading the board minutes and talking to people about what happened at them. Around the initial stage where a gap was identified between the requirements and the contractor solution, there was a lot of discussion around how, when neither party had picked that up in the 160 dialogue sessions, it all came back to interpretation of requirements. The search function was quite a significant issue at that stage. The Accenture solution said that it would do one thing and the requirement was different. It was only at the very early design stages that that was picked up. Again, coming back to the contract, obviously because the requirements take precedence, that was Police Scotland's standpoint was that it must fulfil the requirements of the contract. Throughout the other stages of the programme, the challenge was around the quality of information it was receiving from Accenture, questions again around the test strategy and the methodology being implied. There was also another layer of governance in terms of the day-to-day contract management. I believe that at that point, again, there were more discussions around the detail of the issues there. There was also a lot of concern expressed about the timeliness of the documentation. There was a lot of material being provided to the programme board very last minute. As Catherine said, the quality of the documentation was another focus for the challenge as well. There was one final point for completeness to mention. After relationships had deteriorated quite early on, the programme board asked Accenture to express their confidence of delivery as a percentage rather than simply the red amber green flags. I think that the percentage ratings that were being expressed by Accenture were being challenged quite strongly by the programme board. On that point, that was another question. Very early on, as is highlighted in the report, there was a breakdown in trust from a very early stage. I also think that it says confidence as well in the report. If there was no trust and no confidence in the ability of Accenture to deliver at such an early stage, why did we keep continuing? Why wasn't something done earlier? That is not a workable relationship. How could that ever have been productive? I think that it is a very good question and it is one that we touched on earlier in our answers. There was a great deal riding on this programme for both the police in Scotland and for Accenture. Your right problems emerged very soon after the contracts had been signed. For Accenture, they were very concerned to deliver the system. It was seen as being important globally for them. For the police, there was a real concern to demonstrate that they could deliver an IT system that fulfilled its requirements, both as part of boosting confidence in the new policing arrangements in Scotland and because of its importance in achieving the financial savings and the operational benefits that were foreseen in the business case. I think that that is probably one of the areas where we think that there may be lessons to be learned about not allowing that pressure, that optimism to colour decision making that is being taken when problems start to arise. That does not mean that we think that the actions that Police Scotland took to try and bring the contract back on track were not appropriate, but there is a question about whether the plug could have been pulled sooner. That very neatly takes me on to my last question, convener, which is on page 11 of the report. It actually talks about, on paragraph 26, the failure of a previous ICT project in 2012, where you would have thought that lessons would have been learned, and it finishes that paragraph by saying that there may have been misplaced optimism about the prospects of success. For me, it sounds like throughout this process there has been this misplaced optimism. Would you say that it is fair to suggest that a lot of it has been done on a wing and a prayer with your eyes closed, hoping that it is going to get better? I do not think that that is fair. I think that there is an element of optimism in your right to point to exactly that paragraph and that sentence in the report. I think, though, that this was not naive optimism. Police Scotland and the programme board, the programme team, did what was required of them and did it thoroughly. Against a backdrop, of course, Mark has said, a complex but real disagreement between them and their contractor about what this system is going to deliver. I do think that it is unusual in the public sector for the client to not only recover what they have paid, but also a sum in compensation. I think that that reflects the fact that they followed good practice and procurement and the project was undermined by that difference of view about what the system should deliver. Alex Neil Can I go back to your estimate? This has been going on for four years. The original plan was to think that, by now, this would have saved about £200 million or over a period of time. Does the compensation element include compensation for not realising all or obviously not all, but part of the £200 million savings that would have been realised had this been handled properly and competently? First of all, it is good to see you back, Mr Neil. Secondly, it was £200 million of financial savings plus other operational benefits across a 10-year period. Appendix 1 sets out the phasing of that. The information that we have been able to obtain from the SPA is that the compensation payment was not for the benefits foregone, but instead for staff time and for other direct costs such as software licences and hardware maintenance that had been incurred. It was the result of a negotiation between the SPA and Accenture, rather than a precise figure, but the information that we have is that it covers those direct costs rather than benefits foregone. Should it have included benefits foregone? I think that that is the question that you have to ask the SPA. But, as the Auditor General, do you think that, in terms of the protection of public money, should it have included that element? That is clearly my main concern about this programme, as I have said in the report and in my opening remarks this morning. This was a central part of police reform in terms of both the savings that were intended to be achieved but, much more significantly, I think, over time improvements in the way that police officers and police staff carry out their work and the way in which the whole criminal justice system can operate. Those benefits have been at best delayed and there is not currently a plan for when and how they will be achieved. Whether it was ever feasible for SPA to negotiate compensation for that opportunity cost from Accenture, I am not in a position to say, but I think that that is the question about how we now go about achieving those benefits in future. Did the contract provide, or were there any restrictions in the contract that would have prevented when it broke down, claiming compensation for savings foregone? I would be surprised if there were restrictions of that sort in there. I think that the contract was about what will be delivered at what price rather than the compensation arrangements that would be in place if that was not delivered. Do we know if the SPA actually asked for any element of the compensation to cover the savings foregone or did they just forget about it or ignore it or not raise it or did Accenture say no way? It was a commercial negotiation and I think that you would need to ask the SPA about the content of it. And when do you think that Police Scotland is going to be in a position to put a plan in place to recover the situation and get into a position where they can get a computer system that does realise these savings? I've said in my report and on the record that it's urgent that they now do so. They have foregone having those benefits in place now as we speak based on the original delivery dates. The policing 2026 strategy that was published just a couple of weeks ago is absolutely centred on much better, much more flexible use of IT to help police officers be out and about doing their work on behalf of all of us across Scotland. And there currently isn't a plan for how those benefits will be achieved. There isn't a date for that and it's something that the committee may want to explore with the SPA. Definitely, that's something we want to follow. I can just finally ask you auditor general. You said that you're going to be publishing what you think are the lessons to be learned from this episode. Can I ask you A, when you're going to publish that? And B, can you give us any indication this morning of what the three or four main lessons are likely to be? The planned publication date at the moment is in May of this year and we're working towards that at the moment. As I said in response to an earlier question, I think from Mr Beattie, it's intended to pull together lessons learned from all of the IT projects that I've reported on during my time in this role. I would prefer to hold off until the report itself is published, but I think that many of them will be familiar to you as members of this committee. What was the Scottish Government's rule in all of this? As we previously discussed, the Scottish Government provided us at various points pre-award contracts and, in the early stages of the post-contract timeline, gateway reviews looking at certain aspects of the programme, for example governance arrangements and they made recommendations about governance. Within the first year of the programme, after award, the then deputy chief information officer joined the programme boards to provide additional support. That individual comes from a commercial and software development background and he supplemented the existing programme boards to provide external challenge and external expertise. We've seen this in the NHS as well as the Scottish Government sending in troubleshooters after problems arise, which is clearly the right thing to do. Can you tell me, did the Scottish Government have any formal responsibilities in this? Were they understood by both parties, both police and Accenture? The contract was signed between the Scottish Police Authority and Accenture and, while I'm sure that the Government was aware of what was going on, I don't think that over and above that membership of the programme board they had any direct involvement in the day-to-day management or the scrutiny of what was happening? Clearly, you've also outlined the political context for this and you're saying that there's no day-to-day role in the scrutiny of what was happening, but there was a lot of pressure on Government at that point to make a success of this. The legislation had not long passed through this Parliament. Is there any indication from the research that you have done from your audit that the Scottish Government could have taken a more proactive role in trying to facilitate a better relationship or a more profitable contract? I don't think that we've seen any evidence to say that that was explored in any great detail. I think that it was very much that this was going to be maintained that on a day-to-day basis programme management was handled within Police Scotland with ultimate oversight through the Scottish Police Authority and then from then even more indirectly on to ministers. Do you know how often reports went to ministers? I don't, I'm sorry. I mean, your report says at paragraph 20 that the I6 programme had difficulties almost immediately. I think that we've all been in the situation where you look back on a project's success and think that actually there were teething troubles with this right at the start. Maybe we should have called a halt to it or looked for an alternative at that point. Was there any indication in your audit that that had been considered? As I said in response to an earlier question, as early as October 2013, so within three months of awarding the contract, there was consideration about whether to terminate the contract at that point. Again, as we say in the report and we've said earlier, there was genuine determination I think on both sides to try and make this work and they recognised as you described teething problems were perhaps inevitable and they were going to try and resolve that ultimately and looking at it with hindsight that didn't happen. Whether they could have pulled the plug earlier than they ultimately did I think is a moot point, but that's within the context of this was a very, very important element of police reform and was going to significantly improve information management and analysis and information sharing across the national force. And that consideration of termination, was there any ministerial involvement in that? Not as far as I'm aware, I think that that was done at an SPA Police Scotland level. I mean obviously you've said already in your evidence this morning that the report makes clear that this project for Accenture was of global significance, a big company and a huge contract, so having looked to other countries, do other countries have perhaps a public sector body that can guarantee good practice in terms of IT that we're perhaps lacking here in Scotland? I'll kick off and Mark may want to come in. One of the things we've said in evidence to the committee before is that the UK Government digital service is doing some interesting things. It's too soon I think to be able to give assurance also the national audit office to give assurance that it is avoiding things going wrong and I guess that no approach will ever give you a blanket guarantee that things won't go wrong, but it has been investing in a centre of excellence that has up to date very high level digital skills, is investing in training people more widely across public services and is making sure that the most up-to-date approaches are being used. Now some of that thinking I think is being picked up with the Scottish Government's new approach to information systems and the chief information officer could tell you more about the approach that they're taking, but in a sense both are an attempt to tackle the conundrum that Mr Neil has identified in the past, that it can be very hard for government and for public sector bodies to attract the very scarce and very highly paid skills that are needed to make projects of this nature work very well. That's one example we've seen, I think, the report we're publishing and may give some other pointers to international good practice as well. Is any similar work happening—you just described what the UK Government's doing there—is any similar work to that happening in Scotland? Yes, you've heard from us and in evidence from the permanent secretary, the chief information officer and others about the approach that they're taking and we have said that we think that the approach being taken here in Scotland is a definite positive move. It is too soon for us to say that it's having the desired effect, that it's operating effectively and at the scale needed, particularly given the whole range of opportunities there is for using digital to transform the way public services are delivered and to reduce costs. There are moves there but it's too early to say that they are fully effective. To go back to the Scottish Government's role, do you know the last point at which the Government provided assurance on this project, public assurance? The final gateway review, I would prefer to check and put that in writing. I would have said it was during 2014 but I would need to confirm that. At various points, the Scottish Government said that delivery confidence was either amber or green. Given all the background disputes, why on your audit, on your evidence, why were they seeing that? We answered a question earlier about the value of the gateway reviews and the other external checks that were done. As we say in paragraphs 18 and 19, they identified some improvements but were broadly giving amber and green ratings of delivery confidence. That comes down to two things. One, the overall approach, the waterfall approach that was being taken, which made the floors impossible to see until it was handed over for user testing much later. Secondly, the levels of assurance that were being given by Accenture at that point and that's a common theme all the way through. Accenture was expressing its confidence very highly. The approach to producing the system meant that it couldn't be tested by the users independently of Accenture until later on. At that point, the reviews were focusing on the processes that were in place and relying on the assurances that were coming from Accenture. Would it be fair to say that the amber or green warnings were more about the Government's confidence in the two parties trying to sort out a problem rather than amber or green on delivery of the actual project? In one of the earlier health checks, they commented on, I think, was around the contract variation stage, so it would have been in April 2014. They do comment on the relationship challenges between the two parties, but it focused very much on the programme management side of things and contract management side of things, so it made recommendations around ensuring that Police Scotland retained, if it was the SPA or Police Scotland, who would oversee the contract management. The report recommended that it was Police Scotland, but it also built in an extra layer of governance having an IT scrutiny forum. That was one of the health checks that had an amber. At the next point, Police Scotland had taken on board that recommendation and put in place an IT scrutiny forum with representatives from the SPA and Police Scotland on it. It moved to green at that stage. I think that it was 2000 in August, which was one of the final checks, but I also think that there was a technical assurance done very late on when some of the issues were at that point. Obviously, the system was going to fail. That was the last one, which I do not have in my chronology, but we can double check that. It is probably worth just stressing, convener, that the Scottish Government's various reviews and health checks are technical processes. They are looking at the content of the contract and the way it is being delivered, rather than being the policy oversight of the establishment of the SPA and Police Scotland. Auditor General, John Foley of the Scottish Police Authority said that there was no detriment to the public purse as a result of the I6 programme. Is that an accurate statement? It is accurate in relation to the direct cash costs to the SPA and Police Scotland. They did recover the payments that they had made to Accenture and a significant sum larger than the payments that were made to compensate for staff time, software licenses and hardware maintenance. In those terms, bearing in mind that the negotiated sum was a negotiation and an estimate, there is no loss to the public purse. It is also absolutely true to say that the I6 programme was central to achieving many of the benefits of police reform in terms of both the savings that would help to close the funding gap that I have reported on to you previously and the operational benefits to enable police officers and staff to carry out their work more effectively. As Mr Neill said, it is the loss of the benefits to them. Gil Ross. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Auditor General. Accenture said that the user requirements were increasing, but Police Scotland said that they were staying the same. Who was telling the truth? I think that Mark has given you a very clear picture of the user requirements as set out in the contract being the element that took precedence within the contract. The contract variation embedded that in what Accenture had agreed to do. There were changes to the programme that went through the contract variation process, as you would expect in any area, but we do not think that the core of this is the police continually revising their requirements. Mark, do you want to add to that? There were changes. The original contract had a structure within it, a change control process, which allowed mutually agreed changes to be made. What Accenture was arguing to the programme board was, as I have described before, this elaboration of requirements. You are making it more complicated than you initially said, whereas Police Scotland was saying that nobody was very clear in our user requirements about what we expected this to do. As we have described before, that gap was never failed. Given the two differences of opinion, have they both accepted the findings of the report? Yes. As the committee knows, I agree the factual content of my reports with the people that I am reporting on. In formal terms, that relates to public bodies, Government, Police Scotland, SPA, in this case. However, as a matter of courtesy, I sent a copy to Accenture as well and asked for their comments on the factual accuracy of it. We touched on the fact that there has been no detriment to the public person and that the operational benefits have actually suffered as a result of that. Do you think that it has had any adverse effect on the staff? In terms of opportunity cost, there is no question that it has. I say in the report that police officers and police staff are still having to use 130 manual or IT processes, many of which come from the legacy forces before Police Scotland was established. There are problems with officers and staff having to enter the same data into multiple systems, having to search multiple systems to get information back out again, time wasted doing that, the risk of errors being introduced when data is being entered again, all of which makes police officers and staff jobs more difficult and reduces the time that they have available to spend providing policing services. Have there been any improvements to the IT system at all? There certainly have been. Police Scotland has invested in a new national network and in replacing outdated desktop computers, some of the hardwares. There are other projects that have been under way to deal with things such as managing custody, which is an important part of police business. All of that is good and is progress, but it is not a substitute for the benefits that I6 was intended to achieve. You mentioned before the policing 2026 document, and obviously it is quite ambitious in its use of technology going forward. Do you think that a single national IT system for policing is still viable? That is the question that you should ask the SPA in Police Scotland, but I think that their response to my report has been that they would not go about it this way again, that the experience has been quite salutary, whether it is around the way in which they would procure the IT that is needed or indeed the way that they plan it, that they would take a more incremental approach learning from this experience and from the way that things are done more widely in the technology world these days. You did say that there is no current timescale for any IT system coming forward. I suppose that this is a question for the police and the SPA. Are there any indications of them even thinking that far ahead at the moment? As the Auditor General said in her opening comments, we are going to follow up on that through our annual audit process. What we did hear about is that smaller components being taken forward, building on systems that have been used by other police forces either elsewhere in the UK or from the legacy Scottish forces, but it has been done very much on a bit-by-bit basis, so a very small component of it would be being rolled out and undeveloped. I think that what we are waiting to see is once the policing 2026 strategy has finally agreed what the implementation plan is underneath that, and a key to that will be your ICT strategy and how you are going to get to that vision that is outlined in 2026. Do you think that they will be ready to have that when the policing 2026 plan is finalised? I think that that is a question for the SPA and Police Scotland. On that 2026, you had an exhibit 1 on page 7 about the six areas that represent an 80 per cent of policing activity. Had the system worked, had it been set up and running, then it would have been designed to deal with those six areas. Given the police 2026, would it now already be obsolete? Again, I am sorry to be boring, but I think that that is a question for the SPA. What I can say with confidence is that I6 was intended to cover around 80 per cent of the information flows around policing. Lots of the case studies that are used in the 2026 strategy around police officers gathering information about somebody who is missing or is acting strangely would fall within the sorts of categories that you are seeing here, and that information would then be available to other people involved in the wider criminal justice system. Inevitably, it would need to continue evolving, as yours and my phones and tablets do, but the core of it, I think, was absolutely aligned with what policing 2026 is about. I can see Mark wants to add to that. I've got him before me. I was merely going to say that the vision of officers being based in police cars and using tablets as a way of recording information and sharing it, it would have been very hard to envisage that when, at the origins of the I6 programme, 2010-2011, but fundamentally the principles of information sharing and being able to do searches across the whole system, those principles remain very, very valid, I think. And just a final question that I think the public would like to know, which is that Accenture seems to have held their hands up on this and accepted a significant degree of responsibility. But it begs the question, do Accenture still tender for public contracts? And if so, do they still have the prospect of winning them? I'm sure Accenture are tendering for public contracts. We're not aware of whether they are actively involved in any, at the moment, in Scotland or whether they hold any in Scotland. I'm afraid we don't know. You'll be able to find that out, Mr Robertson, right to the committee, or is that commercially confidential? I suspect that probably a tendering of potential bids, I think, certainly would be commercially in confidence. Maybe that's a question for Accenture. Something that we can explore in Parliament. Can I ask, as a result of this failure, were there any operational errors that you identified? I think that it would be impossible to link any operational failings directly to the failure of this programme. Having said that, we're all aware of things that have gone wrong in policing around call handling and other aspects of operational policing, and this system was intended to make those things more reliable, more efficient and more effective directly for the police officers and staff involved, and more importantly for all of us around Scotland. Thank you very much for your evidence this morning. I'm now going to suspend committee until 10.15. We now move on to considering the Auditor General's report entitled Changing Models of Health and Social Care. We did not have time to consider that report at our meeting on 9 February, so I apologise for that. I thank the panel for coming back before us again today. I welcome to the meeting Paul Gray, director general health and social care and chief executive NHS Scotland. Shirley Rogers, director of health workforce and strategic change. Christine McLaughlin, director of health finance, and Fiona McQueen, chief nursing officer from the Scottish Government. Paul Gray does not wish to make an opening statement, so we will move straight to questions. The first of which is from Alex Neil. Since this is the first public session that I've been back at since my recent incident, I just put on record the excellent care from the Ambulance Service and the Cardiac Unit at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. It was second to none, so I put that in context given the bad publicity that the national health service gets very unfairly on a day-to-day basis. I think that it's worthwhile just recording that. I begin by asking a simple question. Obviously, the issue of health inequalities, as we know, is one of the major reasons why we have such a substantial health challenge in Scotland, but the plan does not seem to deal with health inequalities. Indeed, it barely mentions health inequalities. Why not? First of all, Mr Neil, I am very pleased that we were able to look after you. I am glad to see you back despite your question. The arrangements for the governance of the implementation of the delivery plan include a strand on population health improvement. I will ask Shirley Rogers in a moment to say a bit more about that, because we regard the improvement of the health of the population and the work that we do on prevention as being absolutely essential to the longer-term development of an engagement with the population that helps everyone to understand what they can do to develop and improve their own wellbeing, as well as what the services, not just the health service, can do. I will ask Shirley to say something about how we plan to integrate that with the overall delivery arrangements that are already in place. Thank you very much. It is very nice to see you looking so well. Public health population health improvement is one of a very small number of key themes of the delivery plan. You will see quite a lot of attention around primary care and all of the initiatives around public health improvement through that lens. We are also proposing in here to try and bring together a public health resource for Scotland to try and make sure that we have a cohesive and strategic approach to public health and population health. There are a number of strands of work that we are taking forward around alcohol, obesity, all of the social inclusion areas around health. We have spent a lot of time looking at investment around health visitors, for example, to try and put that process in place. All of the early years collaborative work that I know you are very familiar with around giving children the best possible start in Scotland. The programme takes into account all of those pieces of work and tries to bring them together into something that is comprehensive and can give us measured deliverables. That is really where we will be targeting the firepower of the delivery plan over the next four or five years, in trying to make sure that we have comprehensive plans in place across the piece and having some proper programme management to make sure that they are delivering the sorts of outcomes that we need to have. As you are very well aware, some of those ambitions go way beyond the lifetime of any Government. They go into the next 20, 30 years to try and improve population health in those ways. We are setting out in this the first of the delivery plans, the principles that we will be taking forward, with the view that over the next few years we will be able to learn, develop and put forward additional proposals that will improve that situation. I agree with all that and it would not object to any of it, but I do not see in the plan, let me give you an example. Very clearly the deep end practices have a major role to play in reducing inequalities and we need to get away from flat funding of GPs so that we positively discriminate in favour of those who need the additional resources in order to reduce inequalities to prevent some of the health problems that we face. There is nothing in here to tell me, for example, what additional resources are deep end practices going to get, what is the anticipated impact of additional resources, when are they going to get them, where are they going to get them etc. From a delivery plan, that is the kind of information that I would be looking for. The inverse care law has been with us since 1971 and we have never really tackled it. It seems to me that all the evidence mounts that we have really got to tackle that. The other wider point is, for example, the Government is introducing a child poverty bill to set targets for 2030 for reduction in child poverty. There is nothing in here that tells me what contribution health and social care is going to make to achieving those targets. I would have thought that, in a delivery plan, you would need to put that kind of strategy and plan in. Do you want to respond to that? Public health improvement is covered in pages 16 to 20 of the plan. We want to be clear that it is there and not just in passing. We are, as the committee will know, putting additional resources into primary care. There are contractual negotiations going on at the moment over the contractual basis of engagement with general practice. We are building our commitment to multidisciplinary teams in a hub-based approach. I take your point, Mr Neil, about deep-end practices. As the delivery board, which surely chairs, develops further the detail of its proposals, those things will inevitably come to the surface. There is already additional funding in place. We have a £128 million transformation fund set up, which was announced. I will bring Christine in in a moment to say a bit more about the components of that and the additional investment in primary care. I do not think that we are disagreeing on the point of the importance of primary care and its centrality to the shift in the balance of care, which underpins a great deal of what we do, which will help us to move more activity out of the acute sector and into primary and community settings, bearing in mind that we are speaking about that in the context of health and social care integration. However, if the committee would find it helpful, the finance director can say more about the detail of the funding. I think that we are all familiar with the overall funding figures, obviously. The issue in a delivery plan is the distribution of the funding. If we continue with the previous distribution of funding, the worried well, as Duncan McNeill used to call them, will continue to get massive unfair access to the health resource and social care resource, compared with the people who need it more and more. Obviously, things such as tobacco and dealing with tobacco will eventually get to implement minimum unit pricing. All that will help on public health and will help to reduce inequalities. However, it is about the NHS and social care resource. I do not see a strategy in here for dealing with the inverse care law any differently from how we have tried to deal with it over the past 30 years unsuccessfully. I will bring Christian in a second, but I would point out that the work that we are doing on the alcohol framework, the work that we are doing on delivering the maternal and infant nutrition framework, the work that we are doing on mental health strategy, supporting mental health and primary care, all of those things are intended to tackle that very clear position that if you live in a more deprived area, you will find services harder to access and you are more likely to be unwell. We are not at all disputing those facts. I believe that the components of what we are doing here are central to that. I think that the investment that we are making on physical activity, the work that we are doing on building success in schools, all of those things are intended to tackle that issue. I have taken your point about the importance of specificity in what we are going to do about things like deep end practices, but maybe Christian could say a little more. I guess that in terms of the funding, it is more implicit in everything that we are trying to do, rather than a ring-fenced component for tackling inequality. If you look at the spend in primary care, we have got the overall metrics about shift in 250 million in primary care and 500 million overall shifting from acute community services. It is something like deep end practice is a very specific area. The approach is more about trying to understand how you can enable things like GP clusters to have the impact that they need to have on the parts of the country, and using data through variation to understand why you have things like a high prevalence of certain conditions in particular parts of the country and how you deal with them. It is more about a whole-system data-driven approach. The way in which we are trying to approach the funding is to be more flexible and less mandatory at the centre of how that money is best applied locally. That would be the answer that I would give on the finances. It is there to call to where it needs to be directed to get the most benefit. I do not dispute any of that, all of which is absolutely right, but when you read this, it looks like a mixture of a statement of intent and a wish list rather than a delivery plan. If you look at the English business plan for the national health service that we have done on a national basis, it is much more detailed about likely impact assessment, where resources are going to be distributed and how they are going to be delivered. I will give you one example early on in the plan. I am not disagreeing with the aim here, but it says in page 8 that by 2018 we aim to reduce unscheduled bed days in hospital care by up to 10 per cent by reducing delayed discharges, avoidable admissions and inappropriately long stays in hospital. We have been doing that for ages for years, but how are you going to do it so that you achieve that? You tell me what the target is and what you want to do, but it does not tell me what you are doing differently to achieve the target. That is what I mean. That is riddled right through. It is not a delivery plan, it is a statement of intent and a wish list, with which I would not disagree, but it does not tell me how you are going to deliver it. It does not tell me the impact assessment of the various measures. It does not tell me the resource allocation. It does not tell me the things that I can see in the English plan that I cannot see in the Scottish plan. I am happy to part that and give you time to think about it. Well, I think that the best thing that I could do is to give you three pieces of assurance and then to offer you something in writing if that would help the committee. The first thing is that this plan relates to the budget that we have. It is formed in relation to the sum of money that health has, but also in relation to what is available in other budgets, including local government. Therefore, it is a funded, not an unfunded plan. Secondly, the level of detail that you are asking for is precisely what we are working through with the delivery board. That is why we have a delivery board, but this is not simply aspirational. We are confident that the sums of money that are available are sufficient to deliver what we have been asked to do. Thirdly, you have spoken effectively about risks to delivery. Of course, there are risks to delivery. Things change over time, but again that is why we have programme management arrangements and governance arrangements in place because that is what they are there to deal with. That is why you have governance and oversight, but if the committee would find it helpful I am more than happy to provide a more detailed breakdown of the components of the plan, how it will be delivered and at what cost. Can I just give an example, Paul? If it is a delivery plan, I would expect to see all the money figures in there, where they are being spent, when they are being spent, why they are being spent and the way they are being spent, what you are doing differently, that is going to make a difference. Secondly, I would expect to see some estimate of the impact that it is going to make on health inequalities, on achieving the targets and why it will be different. Clearly, and we need to wait and see what Harry Burnsey's review of targets says, but clearly the media concentrates all the time and when we miss our own targets, even though we are doing excessively better than the health service down south, you do not get credit for that, you only get abuse because you miss the targets. Therefore, the question that we have to ask is, how are you going to achieve the targets for A and E and all the rest of it in future, which very often at the moment we are not able, I mean the treatment time guarantees are a good example. That does not tell me how you are going to, between now and the end of the planned period, achieve the treatment time guarantee. That is what I mean. I think that you have to bring all this together so that somebody coming to this new and independently and neutrally can actually see the total picture. I do not see this as a plan, I see it as a worthwhile document but, essentially, it is a statement of intent and a wish list that is not a plan, as I would understand a plan. No, I think that Paul is offered to come back to us. I am happy to go further on this or to take other questions guided by you. However, I have committed to writing to the committee with more detail, as Mr Neil has asked for it, and I am happy to do that. If you could please, do you want to comment on the last bit that Mr Neil said, or do you just wish to write to us? I think that this is a plan for delivery. We have given specific dates by which we intend to do things. I have committed to writing in more detail about the underpinning finances and where they will go. I believe that it is a robust plan. It is underpinned by data and evidence and clinical advice. We are happy to share all that with the committee if they would find it helpful. I would describe it as a firm proposition, not as Mr Neil has described it. The one area that concerns me is the role of the IGB's integration of care at a very local level. One thing that is highlighted in the Auditor General's report is the poor progress in regard to that. Evidence suggests that the new partnerships with statutory responsibilities to coordinate integrated health and social care services integration authorities will not be in a position to make a major impact during 2016-17. That is a bit of a worry. Again, in the report on paragraph 30, a common issue with many of the new care models being introduced across Scotland is a lack of evidence about the impact, implementation costs, efficiency gains or cash savings, and outcomes for service users. It seems to be a big grey area, but it is such an important area and you do highlight it in your delivery plan here as being fairly essential. Can you give me some feel of what is happening there? The Audit Scotland report on changing models of health and social care was prepared by Audit Scotland in March 2016, before the first full year of operation, which we are now in, of integration. A number of developments have taken place in the course of the first full year of integration which gives me confidence that we are heading in the right direction. Not every partnership is at the same point on the trajectory. There is a degree of unevenness, but I have, and I promise not to go through them, 10 or 15 examples of areas where integration is working well and which can give us confidence. I will share those with the committee in my written response that I have already agreed to give to Mr Neil, but I will give you two. I was in Ayrshire and Arran health board meeting them and the integration partnerships a week past on Friday and I saw there the way in which they are changing the way, for example, that patients with COPD, cardiac obstructive pulmonary disease, falls heart failure and diabetes are managed in a much more effective way resulting in 49 per cent fewer emergency admissions and 36 per cent fewer bed days in the first six months for the caseload and, again, provide more detail on that. The Mfreson Galloway integrated hub has developed a single point of access for community health and social care services, so that is bringing together health and social care services called star short-term augmented response service and the third sector for people registered with two of the GP practices in Dumfries. Again, I can provide more detail on that, but that is reduced by up to 15 days. The referral time from GPs to care input put quicker inter-service handovers increased capacity, but it has also improved communication to staff morale and team working. I am now seeing evidence that these things are working. Do we see an effective transfer of budgets to make this happen? That was the key thing that seemed to be delaying it. Everybody had their own little theft and they would not give up what they had. How effective has it been and how has it been achieved? The first year of any operational delivery will be to use a non-technical word clunky. I think that we learned a lot in the first year on budget setting and there was a great deal of doing and froing and there was a great deal of debate and discussion and negotiation about budget transfers. I am not going to pretend otherwise. The evidence that I have suggests that having gone through that process it will be much smoother this year. I will bring Christine in in a second. I think that we are, as you always do, learning from what you have done and improving as you go along. I think that that is the right process. I am not claiming that such a transformational change as the integration of health and social care will go from nothing to perfection in two years, nothing of that scale will or would, but I have now before me clear evidence of progress in local areas. The issues that I think have been worked through are around governance, leadership and trust. Those are essential precursors to effectiveness, but what I am now seeing is actual delivery on the ground that is making a difference. If the committee would find it helpful, the finance director will say a bit about the budget process. I would be interested. Paul's right. The first year there was due diligence in advance, but what you saw was that, through the year, people were really understanding what the resources they had were able to buy and where there were levers and pressures in it. What we see now as partnerships planned for next financial year 2017-18 is a much greater level of engagement all around between integration authorities, NHS boards and local authorities. That does not mean that everybody agrees all the time and there are still issues in some parts of the country about signing off on the resources to deliver the plans in place. What there is much more of is the sharing of the information. You see integration authorities and chief officers being part of the discussions about how resources are used on a much more of a day-to-day basis. Starting to get into shared risk and shared ownership in some places in relation to things such as delayed discharge performance, how you share investment in some new services that are looking to be planned. There is definitely evidence of a more mature start to the relationships in budgets. It is not until you get into the bigger component of how that impacts on things such as the acute sector that you will really start to see, some of the traction metrics but certainly on delayed discharges. We are really starting to see some good work and real progress on the number of people delayed. Looking at page 9 of the delivery plan, you are saying that shifting resources to the community by 2021, spending on primary care increased at 11 per cent of the front line NHS Scotland budget. Is that an arbitrary figure? What is it based on? Based on our assessment of the right relative share to get the shift that the evidence suggests that we need to have. No, it is not an arbitrary figure. It is also part of a negotiation between the Government and the representative bodies. All of those things are effectively the subject of negotiation, but there is clear evidence that by putting that extra capacity into out-of-hospital care, there is the opportunity to transform and also to deliver better outcomes. Gail Ross, you talked just now about governance, leadership and trust, and that is a massive change in the NHS in Scotland from acute care to community care. As we know and we have heard in previous sessions, members of the public are attached to buildings, they see hospitals as the main places to provide that care. In a lot of senses, they are suspicious and slightly wary of change when it happens on this scale. What is the Scottish Government doing to engage with the public to raise awareness of the policy to shift the balance of care and discussions with them, consultation and public engagement as to why services need to change? I suppose that I use shifting the balance of care as shorthand and the public would not engage particularly well with that as a phrase. What I think is helpful to the public is concrete examples of what would be different and better for them. For example, in West Lothian, there is the react team that visits people in their own homes and provides multidisciplinary care. The way in which people learn about it and come to appreciate it is by experiencing it. I think that that is hugely important. I think that abstract statements of what might happen are very hard for people to grasp on to. What we are doing is working with the health boards and the integration authorities to ensure that, in terms of the health boards, there is the appropriate level of engagement as defined by the Scottish Health Council. Through the integration authorities, the great benefit of the integration authorities is that they engage local authority, elected members and local authorities have already, I believe it because I have seen it, very well developed approaches to engagement with the public, which I think we benefit from and learn from. Through what is established, we are ensuring that there is appropriate engagement. I think that the issue is to make that specific, and I was going to say concrete, but that might bring us back to buildings. Specific and real, rather than generalised propositions about shifting the balance of care. Instead of starting with the sentence in the wrong place, which is, we have this building and we are going to knock it down, that always gets people nervous and rightly so, starting the conversation with, here are the developments in healthcare that would allow us to provide you with a better service. Here is how that could be delivered. Here is how you can be engaged in deciding and agreeing what your care should be. That is a much better conversation. It does not just come through the fora of health boards directly or integration partnerships directly, but, for example, the conversations that are going on in the context of the national clinical strategy, in particular realistic medicine, are about having discussions between clinicians and individuals about what would be the best care for them. Most often, if people are engaged in decisions about their care, the outcomes are better for them, and most often people prefer not to be overtreated. The chief nursing officer could say more about that, if that was helpful to the committee. As Paul has said, people are anxious about buildings and you have said yourself. I think that that relationship between clinicians and the public is incredibly important. We know that they trust them in terms of the decision making and helping them to understand that what you used to go to hospital for, you now can actually have better treatment, better outcomes at home or in a more localised setting. I suspect that the care that Mr Neil received is a slightly more acute version of that in terms of the rapid transfer perhaps not to the nearest hospital and a much shorter length of stay and home. The community always appreciates the good outcomes when they experience it and the whole strand of realistic medicine and moving things forward with the national clinical strategy, where we can have that dialogue with people is something that we are taking forward with. We are all involved with reassuring members of the public that they are going to receive the best care absolutely and local authorities and NHS boards. What do you think is the best way for NHS boards to engage with the public? That is a very big question. The short answer is that it depends what it is about. Let me tell you some things that are not good ways of engaging with the public. Sending out letters, you cannot ask a letter a question. Engaging with the public has to really involve engagement of people with people. If I was just giving one fundamental answer to your question, that would be it. Other ways that do and don't work, what does work is giving people something to see. If you are describing a facility, as soon as you can give folk an idea of what it would be, where it would be located, what it would look like. If you are describing a new care pathway, in other words a new way of treating people, get someone to talk it through, describe it, give a case study of a patient in a clinician having a conversation rather than a dry document that says, here is a new care pathway for this condition and asking people in a sense to work out what it would mean for them. I much prefer to give people something to look at and something to hear and something to see and above all the opportunity to ask questions. We shouldn't be afraid of being challenged. The public has some really good ideas about what would be best for them. Certainly, in a lot of big organisations, when there is massive change taking place, some of the best advocates of that change are the staff themselves. Are your staff fully informed and on board with the changes and able to talk in the general public about what they are and what they mean? I will bring in the point, because it is hugely important. I am going to start by saying that I do not think that we always get that right. I do not think that we always get it right. We have partnership arrangements, which work well and are well regarded. However, if we are talking about investing in talking to people, we need to treat our staff well and the public well. That is absolutely essential. The very best part of my job is going and talking to people, whether it be staff or patients. That is where I learn the most. I believe that leaders in any health and care system ought to devote a significant proportion of their time of speaking to the people who deliver the services and speaking to the people who receive them. That is how you will learn if it is working, but Shirley and Fiona will both have things to say about that. If I can pick up a couple of themes and address that one specifically. Going back to Mr Neil's observations about what is different, part of the planning processes and delivery processes that are signalled in this plan give a huge and, I think, very welcome prominence around national, regional, local, community and individual. I think that we miss a trick if we lose sight of that, so the kind of prioritisation that Mr Neil was talking about, whether it is in GP practices or in particular areas of need, I have specifically addressed that it was not determining a national level, but allowing those local communities, allowing those local IJBs to prioritise particular actions. That is really important for a number of reasons, not least the communications point that you are making. It is important because it means that communities get what they need, but it also means that communities are themselves advocating for the things that they want, the changes that they need to see, and I think that is really, really important. We are creating national narrative, but we are also making sure that we have, so if I think about what I have been doing personally for the last three months since we published it. That would be great. I will do my best. We have spent a lot of time talking to all of the communities around health, so we have not just talked to chief execs and chairs, we have talked to nurses and HR people and OD people and all the rest of it, so that they can do precisely what you are talking about. We have spent a lot of time talking to staff. The focus of this NHS event is exactly in that space about people making change happen, so that we can do precisely the kinds of things that you are talking about where we have not 10 or 12 people, but 156,000 people talking to their communities that they are part of about the sorts of changes that are proposed. Thank you very much, convener. I want to follow on from the question that was started by Alex Neil round about the NHS in Scotland 2016 report's recommendations for financial flexibility for NHS boards, and I appreciate the answer that he gave to him about that aspiration. We have drilled in a bit more in the detail about what steps have been taken to follow up on those recommendations and what financial plans are being prepared to be put in place. There is a narrow point about how boards achieve financial balance in individual years, and there is a wider point about living within new means generally and having sustainability. On a narrow point about flexibility, our position on that is, I hope, quite clear, which is that we provide services for boards to have a level of flexibility between one year and another. Largely, that is something that we can plan for. If it is something like a major new project or a new hospital, we can plan over a number of years. Sometimes, as you know, with a particular number of boards, there are issues about financial sustainability, and we will provide financial assistance that we looked to have repaid. I will recall that from the discussions that we had last time around on NHS Tayside. The work that we are doing just now with boards is about looking at their five-year plan that underpins the work for the delivery plan. Boards right now will be giving us their local delivery plans by the end of this month, which will focus in detail on 2017-18. I have them at an individual board level, and we are asking boards now, as part of the delivery plan, to start to work regionally, and I expect us to move into a position where we look to have regional resource envelopes that can be provided so that it gives another level of flexibility one layer down, if you like, which is regional flexibility and how resources are deployed. For instance, if money becomes a barrier to moving a service or to sharing a service, we want to try to take away some of those barriers. There is a position in which the portfolio needs to be able to balance overall, and Scottish Government balance overall. Within those parameters, we are doing everything that we can to provide that flexibility. In return, what we ask the boards for is to be able to look far enough ahead to understand the longer-term position and to plan as much as they can for the knowns and the unknowns and to be really clear on the risk assessment within that. I want to follow on very nicely from that. If you could tell me the work that you are actually doing with the boards to drill down on a more local level to ensure that there is sufficient resource and investment in the community to meet the objective of shifting that balance of care from hospital to the community. It is just to understand what you are doing with them to ensure that support is going to be there. Okay. The initial thing that we have done as part of the funding settlement for next financial year is to put some very clear criteria in place, some of which is to say that we expect the total sum of money to be spent on non-acute areas to be maintained. That is only one sentence in a letter, but it is a real shift in our clarity of the direction that we seek from the resources that are spent in the NHS. We have been very clear that we expect spend on integration authorities to be maintained. That is about £8.2 billion that we expect to spend on primary care and mental health as a minimum to be maintained. The additional investment that we are putting in, the £70 million in primary care, the additional money in mental health, should all be over and above those core, recurring funding levels. I have asked for assurance from boards that that has been delivered. That is quite a crude measure, but it means that we expect the best use of the resources that are maintained in that area. We will see in the local delivery plans at the end of the month the assurance that we get from the boards and the descriptions that they give us of how they are doing that. Following on from that and how we ensure that funding levels are maintained, it touches on the point that Colin Beattie asked, which is that within the delivery plan it states that it will, and I will quote from it, ensure that health and social care partnerships increase spending on primary care services so that spending on primary care increases to 11 per cent of the front-line NHS Scotland budget. Given that, in a previous answer that we talked about, it is subject to negotiation and looking for assurances, what can you do to ensure that that level is met? Where is the detail and the plan to back that up so that we can then monitor whether that is being achieved? I will answer very briefly, and I also want to ask me the convener a question. When I said that it was subject to negotiation, I am not suggesting that the 11 per cent is subject to negotiation, but what happens with it is. You have other business today, I know. Can you give me guidance on how long you would like to allow for this session, and we will try and tailor our answers to that appropriate length? We have time, Mr Gray, so please, I am not so concerned as I was a few minutes ago, so please say what you need to say. I will hand you back to Christine, but I want to make that point. I am not suggesting that we will negotiate the 11 per cent in some different direction, but what happens to it must necessarily be the subject of negotiation. One thing that I was going to suggest is that we had written back to the health and support committee in some detail on this point to give that clarity, because there are a number of metrics and 11 per cent, but the bigger point is the shift of the £500 million by the end of this parliamentary term. The modelling that we have done suggests that that should be a realistic projection over the lifetime. In fact, if you cannot achieve a sum of that level, then there is not going to be a shift on the ground in services. The assurance comes not so much just from the money and those overall conditions that we set, but it comes from being able to see a service that was provided in an acute hospital being provided in a different way in the community. What we now need to do is build up the detail of those individual types of changes on the ground to understand how that comes together. I can give you that detail on our assumptions, but if you think about the fact that by the end of the parliamentary term, there should be more than £14 billion in health care, then that additional cash investment needs to get directed to the areas that we need it to get directed to. Because we have a level of planning assumptions in there about health funding and cash terms over the period, it allows us to have a bit more certainty about whether that was to continue then how we would see that directed. On that basis, getting to position of £500 million does not seem unreasonable to me. Mr Gray, in terms of social care, based on the evidence, what is better in terms of care and the public purse, private providers or local authority directly employed carers? Generally speaking, continuity of care is important. If you bring in providers from time to time, that is much less likely to be a good outcome for people. It is not that it can't be, but you would want to be sure that what you were doing was using an approach that provided continuity of care. The standards of quality that would be expected where we occasionally to use the private sector are the same. There is no difference, but I believe that having care provided by the national health service, which I will speak for specifically, is the right thing. I have a set of standards, a set of behaviours and an expectation about integrity that I, as the leader of the national health service, am able to put in place and to have systems and processes in place to ensure that that happens through things such as high-matter and through our engagement with the partnerships. Therefore, I believe that that is the approach that is most likely to yield good care. That is directly employed by the IDBs? Directly employed by the NHS. Similarly, local government has directly employed staff. They are subject, obviously, to their standards and to their guidelines. Again, I would focus my answer on the continuity of care and on the ethical standards of the public sector. That is perhaps more a question for the Auditor General, but we know, for instance, in the health service, that to employ an agency nurse costs the public purse three times as much as it does for a contracted nurse, and we have discussed that before. Do you know the difference in terms of social carers going into people's homes directly employed by the NHS or the IDB and the private companies such as Avenue and other care providers? I do not have that level of detail, convener. It could easily be got for you, but the problem is that it will vary from area to area, so I am perfectly happy to provide it to the extent that it is available. Could you please? That would be very useful. I will make the same request of the Auditor General. On page 18 of the delivery plan, there is a reference to consult on a new strategy on diet and obesity. If I am right in thinking, but I know that you will know this, Mr Gray, there is an obesity strategy due out from the Government any day now. Is that referring to the same thing? As far as I am aware, yes. This is the approach that we are taking to have a consultation, and this is an area that we believe needs to be given further impetus, and that is why we are doing it. If the obesity plan is due out every day, why is there another strategy, consult on a new strategy? We are putting out a plan for consultation. I see. Right. That clears that up. Can I turn to the final page, page 21 of the GERFEC paragraph 36? Yes. In addition to actions included in the main components of the work above, we will drive this agenda through continued implementation, in particular the named person and child's plan. I read from that that implementation of named person and child's plan is continuing. Has that changed since John Swinney's statement a couple of weeks ago? I am genuinely not entirely sure what question you are repeating to me. Okay. On page 21, paragraph 36 of the GERFEC, it says quite clearly that actions from this plan are continued implementation of the named person scheme. Is that continuing to be implemented, or has that implementation halted since the Supreme Court ruling? We will, as the civil service, proceed in line with what the Deputy First Minister has said. That would be the answer to that question. My interpretation of what he said was that there was to be a pause. I take it that your civil servants will be pausing this implementation. Is that right? That was published in December 2016, when the situation was as it was then. If ministers subsequently introduce a pause, we operate in line with the Government and the Parliament to agree. You know that civil servants and NHS boards have paused the implementation of the named person scheme. Is that right? I know that we react exactly as ministers would expect us to do what they say, to see an oaken. As part of this, there was a commitment to 500 additional health visitors. Part of the work that we did in terms of looking at supporting young people and early intervention to reduce inequalities would be to introduce what we call a universal health visiting pathway. To standardise how our health visitors support families from pre-birth to school age children. Some of that at times can be conflated with the named person. The named person has duties and responsibilities that clearly have paused and are being reviewed. At the same time, we are continuing in terms of getting it right for every child to implement the universal health visiting pathway, which is additional home visits for families by a qualified health visitor. We are continuing with that element that would support implementation of the named person in terms of data sharing and responsibility. As Paul said, the legislative process has been paused, but the benefits of having additional health visitors to support families in a more comprehensive way are continuing, but being mindful and cognisant of the legislative issues. It is now three years since we decided to increase the number of health visitors by 500. How many of the 500 have been appointed? I can send the specific numbers, so we have trained over 398. On top of that, the 16 and 17, we are training an additional 163 health visitors. We are moving to be on target for that implementation of having the health visitors in training, if not qualified by that time, but we are making steady and good progress. When do you reckon that we will have 500 additional health visitors working? That is a moving feast, and I can give more accurate projections and trajectory in writing for you for that. Unless members have any further questions, I thank you all very much for your evidence this morning. I now move the committee into private session and suspend for two minutes.